If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed in a reader or by email (see the box to the left). Thanks for visiting!

Hi there dear Yesteryear’s Future reader,

This will be my last post until sometime in December. You see, I’m moving to Phoenix at the end of the month and really need to focus on closing out my client’s open projects, getting packed, moving and then unpacking.

But never fear — I will be back!

Hey, while you’re here, would you do me a favor and jot down your thoughts, comments and ideas for what you  would like to get out of reading Yesteryear’s Future? Would you like a forum? Are there products, services or resources you wish you could find here? Let me know in a comment to this post.

Each Fall I eagerly await the new slate of TV shows. Which ones will I enjoy and keep up with? Which ones will I enjoy and they’ll get cut anyway? Which ones will I pass on in disgust, only to discover they are a big hit?

With each passing year, I’ve noticed an increasing number of science fiction and other genre-themed TV shows. But I’ve also noticed another trend — the “mundaning” of science fiction. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Lost and Heros, but I also noticed that they are fairly stripped of their SF trimmings. They are science fiction for the mundane.

Is this a bad thing? I don’t rightly know. To some degree it is a good thing, because it introduces SF to a wider audience, some of whom may then go on to explore the real thing.

But then the really good quality SFTV is getting to fewer and farther between. For example, I am a big fan of Babylon 5, and in my opinion it is one of the best SF TV shows ever. It made #5 in Boston.com’s Top 50 Science Fiction TV Shows of All Time. But that show had a struggle because it wasn’t as accessible to the average Joe as a show such as Journey Man has.

Now that I’ve written this all down, I’m not really sure where I’m going with it. But I have this feeling in my gut that as reality catches up to SF, SF needs to keep pushing forward to maintain its edge — the edge that made me fall in love with it when I was 5 years old and has held me for the decades since.

Do any of you have those feelings? I know some people share my angst, for articles such as Mike Treder’s article, “Post-Millennial Malaise in SF?“, are still being written.

The concept of time travel has always fascinated me, but not necessarily for the obvious reasons. I’m not terribly interested in going back in time to change things — I’m quite satisfied with the way my life has been going and is going. But I would love to be a fly on the wall — heck, forget that, I’d like to make friends with the amazing people I’d admire throughout history.

Can you imagine what it might have been like to chum around with Abraham Lincoln? Budha? St. Mary? What if I could attend the very first World Con and meet my favorite authors before they became famous. How cool would that be?

Anyway, time travel has fascinated people for a long time. In his article, “A brief history of time travel, David Sapsted says, “for more than a century, the possibility has captivated both boffins and fiction writers - since H.G. Wells introduced the idea of a time machine in The Chronic Argonauts in 1888, and since Einstein’s theories gave the notion an awful lot of academic clout early last century.”

So I thought I’ll collect a list of links about time travel and present them to you here:

NOVA on Time Travel
HowStuffWorks.com’s How Time Travel Will Work
Time Travel for Beginners
The Time Travel Fund
The Time Travel Science Blog

Guest Writer: Sunil Tanna

Alternate histories are stories or scenarios which consider the question of what if the events of the past had turned out differently. For example, what if the Confederacy had won the American Civil War, what if the Germans had won World War II, what if Al Gore had won the 2000 US Presidential Election, or what if Michael Portillo had become the British Prime Minister.

In most (but not all) alternate histories, these history is generally assumed to have gone the same way as our actual history, until some specific point (known as the “Point of Divergence”) when a particular event has a different outcome. Sometimes the event may be important, and seen as such as the time, (for example, a battle going to other way), whereas in other alternative history stories, even subtle changes can result in profound changes to history because of the butterfly effect. Read more »

Guest Writer: Eoghann Irving

Isaac Asimov is one of the best known science fiction writers of all time. In part that is probably due to the sheer volume of material which he wrote, but it is also due to the scale of his imaginative vision.

Over the course of 50 years, Asimov wrote over 500 books, essays and short stories. He won four Hugo Awards and one Nebular Award along with countless other lesser known awards.

Biography

Isaac Asimov was more than simply a science fiction writer. A biochemist with a Ph.D. to his name, Asimov also wrote a number of popularized science books which explain many scientific concepts in a historical way. A long time member of Mensa (whom he described as intellectually combative), he was more proud of being president of the American Humanist Association. Read more »

Guest Writer: Groshan Fabiola

In 1977, Star Wars reintroduced the world to the serialized space opera with groundbreaking results both creatively and financially. In the wake of this paradigm shift came a gaggle of embarrassing me-too projects both for film and television. Then there was Battlestar Galactica.

Battlestar Galactica was the brain-child of producer/writer/director Glen Larson. It was both a pastiche of the Star Wars formula, and a bizarre melding of wagon train and Egyptian mythology. The series chronicled the adventures of a “Rag Tag Fleet” running from the Cylons, a mechanized horde of robots lead by a human traitor; their destination is a mythical world called “Earth”. Battlestar Galactica was a success both theatrically and on the television. Despite it’s campy acting and plot lines there was an endearing element in the quest of these characters. Battlestar Galactica never made any apologies for borrowing the character archetypes made so popular in Star Wars. Apollo is a dark haired Luke Skywalker, Sheba the strong female cut from the Princess Leia strand, and Starbuck as the charismatic scoundrel that Han Solo would surely approve of. Despite these obvious pastiches, Battlestar Galactica got away with it. Read more »

“Because, to most people, it seemed lurid, fantastic and nonsensical trash, science fiction’s fans have tended to be a bit defensive in their attitude.”
– John W. Campbell, Jr., “Concerning Science Fiction”

I know that within my lifetime, the popular view of science fiction has changed for a lot of people. These days, TV Guide dedicates an entire issue to the new and returning genre shows — there are that many.

So, do science fiction fans still need to be defensive? Is SF still seen as “lurid, fantastic and nonsensical trash”? My answer would be, it depends on who you talk to.

I think overall, more people are open to science fiction, in part because so much of what used to be science fiction is science fact. Also, I think it some cases the quality of science fiction has improved a great deal from the early years, in part to Campbell’s work as editor of Astounding Science Fiction.

But to this day, I still meet people who are turned off by the term science fiction and use it to mean “junk.” I still meet people who won’t watch a TV show like Stargate SG-1 or Lost or Heros because it smacks too much of science fiction.

However, it seems clear that TV and movie executives are totally OK with SF if it has a strong plot.

But what of literature? I don’t see a lot of SF novels on the best seller list these days. Fantasy and horror sometimes make it, but rarely SF. Then again, I could be wrong. It’s not like I have my finger on the pulse of publishing or anything.

No matter how you look at it, I don’t feel the need to be defensive about my passion for science fiction. I wear it proudly.

What about you?