Month: October 2005

The subject header on the spam below says, “Economy is much better now,” but I don’t know about that:

Wall Street finished a lackluster session with modest gains Friday as stronger-than-expected economic data helped investors rebound slightly from their disappointment with the Federal Reserve’s latest policy statement. The major indexes finished the week narrowly higher.

Kootenai County Sheriff Rocky Watson said Monday that “possible” human remains had been found at a site in western Montana, and would be sent to the FBI crime lab in Virginia for DNA analysis. That is expected to take three days.

Looks like it took a pretty morbid turn for the worse there, if you ask me.

For maybe a week, I would occasionally see, out of the corner of my eye, a small shape dart across the floor of the office across the hall at work. I wasn’t sure what it was, or even that it wasn’t just a trick of the light, but I thought maybe if anything it was a small mouse.

I’m not sure I’m glad to learn I wasn’t imagining it.

Is there anything we can call science fiction?

There’s an article in yesterday’s New York Times about the new CBS drama Threshold (which is about a team of experts investigating an ongoing alien invasion). The Times is very quick to point out, however, that despite its science fiction trappings, Threshold really isn’t sci-fi:

Sure enough, the extraterrestrial being pursued by the “Threshold” team isn’t a bug-eyed little green man, but rather a mysterious signal that propagates itself through everyday technology – radios, computers, MP3 players – and creates chaos wherever it turns up. Were it stripped of this one otherworldly component, “Threshold,” with its emphasis on forensic investigations and the interpersonal dynamics of its cast, could pass for another spinoff of “CSI.”

Yeah, because bug-eyed little green men are the only aliens you’d ever see talked about in that dirty backwater called science fiction. It’s just this dark and lonely place where geeks sometimes “get together…[to] to debate whether a particular red-caped superhero could best a certain green-skinned goliath in combat.” Nothing intelligent ever happens there. What the article seems to be saying, essentially, is that science fiction is by its nature stupid and immature and the province mainly of geekdom; what makes Threshold interesting is that it isn’t any of these things; it’s smart and real, and therefore it just can’t be sci-fi.

It’s an old argument and, in all fairness to the show (which I happen to like), not one that its creators necessarily seem to agree with. If anything, I think they’re pushing the “we’re not really sci-fi” angle simply to attract viewers and advertising. (Because The New York Times aren’t the only ones who think that science fiction is only for geeks.) But it is a pretty specious argument nonetheless.

Maybe the reason why Threshold works isn’t because it’s busy upending genre conventions, but because it’s part of that genre. Maybe the science fiction that’s stupid and immature is the bad science fiction, and there’s plenty of the good stuff that does precisely the sort of thing that all these so-called non-sci-fi shows claim to do already.