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Post by Sara on Apr 17, 2009 8:27:06 GMT -5
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Post by Anne, Old S'cubie Cat on Sept 20, 2009 12:23:20 GMT -5
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Post by Lola m on Sept 23, 2009 21:30:49 GMT -5
It's about time! And well deserved for the true innovation of Dr Horrible.
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Post by Sue on Nov 6, 2009 10:03:21 GMT -5
From the most recent issue of Newsweek. A serious article on how culture and fiction have nurtured American's advances into space. Interesting article. I've quoted a bit below. Underlining, italics and color all added by me. www.newsweek.com/id/220438Our achievements in space have been nudged or nurtured by our culture since long before Alan Shepard reached orbit in his glorified tin can. As Craig Nelson points out in Rocket Men, his recent history of the Apollo program, fiction helped to prime 20th-century scientists' imaginations. "Novelists can rarely be credited with inspiring wholly new avenues of science and technology," he writes of one of Jules Verne's books, "yet all three of rocketry's founding fathers read From the Earth to the Moon, and it changed the course of their lives." Artists also personalize and make comprehensible a cosmos that is unimaginably remote. From the ancient mythmakers who gave us the zodiac to the kids who will sing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" before bedtime tonight, culture has projected contemporary meaning on the blackness of space. It's no accident that the original Star Trek series aired during the three most frenetic years of the Apollo program, both reflecting and helping to shape the New Frontier aspirations of NASA. Closer to home, I wouldn't be writing this essay—and maybe you wouldn't be reading it—without the formative influence at a malleable age of several hundred viewings of The Empire Strikes Back. But what has culture done to fuel our interstellar dreams lately? A survey of the popular fictional work in this decade turns up grim results. Over the summer, ABC produced Impact, a miniseries that capped its bad acting and cliché plots by splitting the poor old moon in two—a gratuitous act of interplanetary violence. J. J. Abrams's big-screen Star Trek reboot was a better-than-average summer popcorn flick, but lost in all its exciting fight scenes was the aura of wonder and camaraderie that might explain why the young Barry Obama (as he later put it) "grew up on" the original series. Battlestar Galactica earned some snob approval for sci-fi a few years back, using its setup (the last survivors of the annihilation of humanity on the run) to explore such issues as cloning and civilian-military ties. But the relationships never seemed all that compelling, and the production design somehow made even the distant cosmos look like a Canadian soundstage. Most egregious of all are the Star Wars prequels, which are interesting mainly for the chance to watch George Lucas ignore so completely the message of his own films—embracing soulless technology over such human concerns as story and character, ineluctably giving in to his own Dark Side.An exception to this trend is Joss Whedon's swashbuckling series Firefly and follow-up movie Serenity. In its offhand, off-kilter way—imagine a Western in space, starring the A-Team—it made me laugh and held my interest. It's the only mainstream sci-fi lately that made me dream even briefly of zipping through space, or feel more willing to cough up tax dollars so somebody else could do the same.
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Post by Sara on Dec 3, 2009 12:35:14 GMT -5
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