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From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: How to fix bad sci-fi
Message-ID: <294@looking.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 20-Jun-85 00:00:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: looking.294
Posted: Thu Jun 20 00:00:00 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 21-Jun-85 00:12:05 EDT
References: <419@carina.noao.UUCP>
Organization: Looking Glass Software, Waterloo, Ont
Lines: 53

Now this is an interesting problem.  Several shows have come out with
reasonable acting, drama, comedy, effects, production and REALLY STUPID
SCRIPTS.  What I would like to know is how to communicate to producers
like Glen Larson et al how to fix their series so they become classics
instead of turkeys.

Here are some ideas

V:  This is one of the easiest to fix.  When I watched the original
2 part mini-series, I thought, "Wow, this is great!"  Then suddenly,
in the second episode, they turned out to be lizards in human suits
coming to eat us and steal our water.

To me, the series would have been greatly improved if they had been
humans (cousins of us, as in Chariots of the Gods) come here to take
us as slaves.  There's only one commodity a highly advanced race would
travel light-years to take by force, and that's slaves.  It certainly
isn't water.

Also lose the girl "Elizabeth."


Galactica:
  Harder to fix, but vaguely reminiscint of the Saberhagen Berserker
stories.  Remember, at the start the Cylons were robots built by
a living race who turned on their masters and then went out to
subjugate and destroy life.   A good premise as any Berserker fan will
know.   In these stories, man is the only race agressive enough to
defeat the unliving enemy.   So in Galactica, you could have had
a defeated society tricked by the cylons on a trek through the galaxy
for the only other known advanced civilization - a future Earth.

They would probably know where Earth is, but it might be a dozen years
away at superlight velocity, so there has been no commerce and little
communication.

Change the fleet into something more reasonable, include some full
sized colonizing ships that escaped the war, and you could get a
much better setting.


Space 1999:
  Hardest of all to fix, because you just can't by a flying moon,
except perhaps with spindizzies, and they wouldn't be that out of
control.   The fact remains that if you are going to have an
interstellar adventure show, you have just got to have FTL drives.

Starlost:
  The premise was fine, the execution was terrible on this one.
There have been lots of good "lost ark in space" novels, so they
have no excuses.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473