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From the New York Times:

Getting a $150 million movie to succeed “is akin to having 12 Bulgarian jugglers land on 12 Bulgarian jugglers,” said Peter Guber, the chief executive of Mandalay Entertainment Group and the former head of Columbia and Sony Pictures.

Happy 88th to Ray Bradbury.

I may have to go re-read “Boys! Grow Giant Mushrooms in Your Basement!” In the meantime, via Jeff Ford, here’s a Soviet-era animated version of Bradbury’s story “There Will Come Soft Rains.”

• Spammers are getting craftier. Tell me you wouldn’t be curious about an e-mail labeled “Stephen Hawking defends Paris Hilton sex allegations”.
• Speaking of spam, Basil Fawlty just sent me some: “Don’t mention the war!” it warned.
• Wear your favorite film on your eyeglasses. I think my favorite part is when the optician and designer, Zakarias Tipton, says he “began testing all sorts of plastic until I found my father’s record collection, and then I started recycling those without his knowledge”. I’m sure dear old dad was pleased with that. (Unless this is the first time he’s reading about it. Oh, but wouldn’t it be ironic if his father couldn’t read about it because he didn’t have glasses?) The frames themselves are a little boxy and thick for my own personal taste.
• Keith Phipps wonders, “What does it mean when our dystopian fantasies have gotten even more pessimistic since the malaise-driven ’70s?” Whereas his colleague Nathan Rabin writes, “Satirists seemingly can’t go wrong by predicting that the world will grow ever more stupid and cynical, that it will plunge lower and lower in its zeal to reach the lowest common denominator. Hope and optimism inevitably look foolish and myopic, not their opposites.”
• You’ve probably seen this all over elsewhere — I have — but it’s really very funny: Selections from H.P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler Copywriter. “You must not think me mad when I tell you what I found below the thin shell of chocolate used to disguise this bonbon’s true face.”
• Ellen Datlow on proper manuscript formatting. It’s actually an interesting discussion (if you care about that sort of thing), and in the comments Datlow succinctly explains just why formatting submissions is an issue: “Why would a writer do something that COULD be misunderstood instead of something that couldn’t be misunderstood?”
• It’s funny: see a head mirror on a cartoon character, even a modern one, and we think “doctor.” But when’s the last time you saw an actual doctor wear one? [via]
• Hmm. Wifi while you fly? It’s unlikely to be available when I fly to Los Angeles next week — which is probably just as well. [via]
• “Barbie has always been on the tarty side and this is taking it too far.” The S&M look is apparently unintentional, as the character is based on DC’s Black Canary. Her S&M look, however, looks to be entirely intentional. [via]
• Making decisions tires your brain. Which suggests that, maybe, we should consider making those really important, life-altering decisions not too long after we wake up in the morning. But I’m not sure how much I trust any decision made that early. [via]
• Deep Hurting! “SCI FI Channel announced a slate of 36 new original action movies–up from 2008’s total of 24–slated for its SCI FI Saturday timeslot and a new Sunday-evening movie slot, beginning next year.” I wonder how late in the day they signed off on this…
• And finally, could we please declare a moratorium on the phrase “It’s not really science fiction“?

Hot on the heels of canceling Stargate Atlantis, Sci-Fi has announced they’re picking up the new Stargate: Voyager…er, Universe:

It’s the “more space-based action” part that worries me. It sounds like Sci-Fi is looking to turn this into a Battlestar Galactica replacement.

Closing out today’s science fiction-heavy posts, first here’s an in-depth re-evaluation (in two parts, via Gerry Canavan) of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which suggests that ultimately the show must be understood as a creative failure:

Again, though, in order to find something interesting to say about the characters, the writers had to go out of their way to concoct Rube Goldberg plot machines that would allow for emotional arcs without messing with the precious status quo. If you start looking, you can find a lot of episodes that go to the same well: there’s always something to trigger or mitigate unusual behavior, something to excuse the characters from acting like real people as soon as they put on those damn Starfleet unitards.

I don’t agree completely with everything he says here, but it’s hard not to see the show as deeply flawed in its slavish devotion to its status quo. Even Deep Space Nine, which I think was ultimately the better show in almost every way — admittedly, in part, because TNG helped pave the way for it and it also became a very different show — had this problem. I’ve always felt that my two very favorite episodes of each (“The Inner Light” on TNG and “The Visitor” on DS9 would have worked better if they weren’t Trek episodes, if in the end they didn’t have to return to business as usual.

This is what I loved about Farscape, and what the cast and crew talk about time and again in their DVD commentaries for the show: there was no reset button. Because really, only a show with a reset button could air an episode like “Conspiracy” and never return to it.

And next, Cinema Blend argues that Star Wars killed Babylon 5.

And you know, I don’t buy the argument at all. Babylon 5 had a five-year plan, and it was on the air for five years. Even for that final year, when the quality was really starting to slip. It even had spinoffs, in which the quality was sometimes not even present. To claim that the show would have taken off in year five and become some kind of huge cultural touchstone in the geek community if only it hadn’t been for that meddlesome George Lucas (and his mangy droid)…well, it’s beyond silly.

And this?

Farscape blew the minds of the few who bothered to see it, before being quietly cancelled and forgotten by all but the most hardcore fans.

Quietly? Really? There was a huge fan campaign that got Ben Browder, albeit briefly, interviewed on CNN about the show and a Sci-Fi miniseries made. There are still webisodes and comics planned.

And don’t get me started on the “Farscape, Firefly and Serenity are all crap” folks commenting there. They’re entitled to their opinions, but these ones are pretty ill-informed. (If Firefly had 20 episodes, please direct me towards those last five. I’ve never seen ’em. I don’t think anyone inside this universe has.)

Are any of these shows as big a hit as Star Wars? No, even if they arguably should be. For a lot of people, science fiction is Star Wars, or Star Trek, of their like. And that’s unfortunate…but I think it would also be unfortunate if Babylon 5 was the series by which you judged everything else. I think you lose out on a lot great stuff if you restrict your focus in either way.