My, but I love a good skewering! Derivative works need panache and at least some originality. Otherwise they are nothing but bad copies. [The Age of the Conglomerates] seems to be one of the bad copies. At the other end of the scale, authors like Lois McMaster Bujold show how you can take very old ideas that are anything but original (the tropes of space opera) and turn them into high art (so did George Lucas once upon a time). I speak, of course, of the Vorkosigan Saga, which on the face of it is as bland as they come. "Crippled scion of great family in militaristic society recently reintegrated into galactic communications makes name for himself." Doesn't sound so great, does it? But in McMaster Bujold's hands, it is a pure visceral pleasure to read. Note to aspiring authors: Never forget to entertain your reader. The vast majority of us don't get paid to read.

Paul [Di Filippo] remains my favorite SCI FI Weekly reviewer (the rest of you are good, too, though!) because he has that subtle sense of irony pervading his articles.

Save Stargate Atlantis! SCI FI Channel and MGM can take their new creation, Stargate Universe, and cancel it now. What's the point of being a loyal fan if the show is canceled when it's so loved?! I won't be watching new spinoffs since that would only encourage the cancellation of future shows that are quite young.

But then, what does SCI FI and MGM care about me when I am not in their demographic? I'm old at 33. And while Samantha Carter may be able to do anything a man can do, even though her reproductive organs are on the inside, I cannot. I'm just a girl. Maybe Golden Girls is on.

I have to agree with Barbara Goldstein's letter ("Remakes Are Unnecessary"). Enough with the remakes. There are too many good works of sci-fi out there to be bothered with remaking something that is in itself excellent already. How about a nice little gem by Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove called The Two Georges? Hell, Richard should play Col. Bushell.

So much good science fiction to pick from, from Cherryh to McCaffrey, Adams to Zahn. Please let's try working on some more diverse works. Also, please, I don't know who convinced the people at the SCI FI Channel that Freddy, Jason, Michael, Chucky and other odd assorted pieces of the horror genre were science fiction, but it isn't and doesn't belong on the SCI FI Channel. Let it get its own channel, (The Hairy Monster & Horror Channel).

Thanks for the opportunity to vent a little.

I can understand Barbara Goldstein's trepidation of such classics as The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Prisoner. I am particularly nervous amout the remaking of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

And yet, sometimes a remake or reimaging does work. If we just look at the list of items nominated for a Hugo in the category of best dramatic presentation, short form, two are for the revival of Doctor Who, one is for the reimage of Battlestar Galactica, one is for a fan-produced Star Trek reimage, and the last is for Torchwood, an offshot of Doctor Who. These are good works, and I consider one of the episodes of Doctor Who, "Blink," to be one of the top SF TV episodes that I have ever seen.

Further, we have also seen other important revivals and reimagings, such as Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Buffy.

So perhaps Klaatu will fall flat on his feet and Number 6 will be swallowed by the big ball, but then again, perhaps one will turn out to be a new classic.

I had another problem with Dark Knight, in addition to the one cited by Art Ramos ("Bat-grade Is Spot-On").

The Two-Face makeup is very over the top, to the point of being poorly done. Yes, I know Two-Face is supposed to be grotesque, but if you can see facial muscles, you should also be able to see them move when he talks! If they are as frozen as they appear, then his speech should be affected. Yet we see and hear Two-Face talking quite clearly, and the "good" side of his face moves quite naturally, while the "bad" side never moves at all. Honestly, I think this makeup could have been dialed back about 10 to 15 percent without detracting from the horror at all. And the prosthesis needed to move with his speech, or his speech needed to be slurred.

I am a nurse, and I have actually seen someone whose lower jaw was in that condition due to skin cancer ... the muscles visibly moved (visible when his dressing was being changed) if he talked. And that would have been plenty gross enough for anyone!

While 90 percent of Dark Knight was perfect, there were some things wrong with the movie that downgraded it from an A+ to an A-.

[Warning: Bat-spoilers follow.]

For instance, after Rachel is dropped out of Bruce Wayne's penthouse and Batman saves her, he doesn't go back up to save the other guests! What happened to them? Joker just left? The movie didn't explain what happened! Next, the movie should have ended with the capture of the Joker. The whole scene with the kidnapping of Commissioner Gordon's family and the death of Two-Face should have been cut. Two-Face and the discrediting of Batman should have been saved for the next movie. So, to all who were "disgusted" with the review did not really review the movie well.

I can look at [the constroversy of Buzz Aldrin's recent comments] with a perspective that's denied to someone who wasn't an excited 9-year-old boy the year that Star Trek the original series closed down, presumably for good, and Buzz Aldrin along with Neil Armstrong actually did what William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy pretended to do on that black-and-white screen (it would be years before my family actually had a color set), walk on an alien world. The transmissions were awful, quality-wise, but that didn't matter.

The time of Apollo and of Trek, the Space Age, the Atomic Age ... the fact that we used terms like that were signs of the endless optimism of mainstream America of the time. Sure, there were problems, there was the growing discontent about Vietnam, the gulf between generations that somehow showed more strongly then and now. But in those days we ate science ficition in megadoses, television shows like Trek, Outer Limits and, yes, Lost in Space were just the toppings of the main course that had been served in periodicals with names like Astounding! and Galaxy! In those days with the hokiness of SF special effects most of the wonder of SF was something to be discovered between the lines of the written world and filled in and colored by the reader's imagination.

Today, however, despite the higher technology we are living [with] in the post-Space Age, the failed promises and harsh realities of the atom have made this the post-Atomic Age as well. We are looking at a present which does not fulfill the promise of the past, and we fearfully glimpse the spectres of a future which promises not better, and quite probably not even as good as we are now, as the pressures of population, cultural friction, and resource depletion threathen to crush the last remnnants of any reason to hold on to the optimism of those decades past. And the real logistics of space travel pretty much ensure that if there is a solution from our present round of crises, while the science missions of NASA may yield us valuable tools for Earth managment, salvation will not be found by a man walking on Mars.

Uncomfortable as Aldrin's words may be, they reflect a real truth, but only partially so. The immediacy of mass communication, the super-sophisticated special effects, and the high drama do have their effect on the perception of our present endeavours, but especially reflect on the realities of the space program. The most sophisticated spacecraft ever created, the Space Shuttle, falls far short of those of a mere Enterprise shuttlecraft, a ship small enough to hide in a garage. Real-life space travel, for all the barnstorming of Spaceship One looks to be something forever out of reach of individual accomplishment; the advancements of science and the realities of physics make it clear that ships like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon will for our lifetime and the lifetime of generations uncountable be merely dreams, if they can ever exist at all.

Or as it was said on Babylon 5. "The future has arrived ... batteries not included."

I must confess my natural confusion to Buzz Aldrin's chastising of science fiction, considering his past compliments for Star Trek ... especially his attending the 30th Anniversary Tribute to Trek. We may have come a long way since the glory days of sci-fi with films like Forbidden Planet and 2001, whose portrayals of the space age inspired our first journeys beyond Earth. But we are each entitled to our own opinions.

I must also confess that as optimistic as I've struggled to be where cinema art is concerned, I can empathize with Michael Cassutt's prediction that cinemas won't survive as long as they did in the past century. I expect IMAX documentaries to endure for the sake of our children's scientific education. I have become more comfortable at home with wide-screen TV entertainment. And, even though there are some new and recent films that I occasionally enjoy, I'm more of a retro lover of films these days, and I wish most channels today would show more of them. In fact, showing more old TV shows wouldn't hurt either.

As Torchwood's Capt. Jack Harkness has commented, this is the century where everything changes. Let's hope that somehow it can all change for the better. I agree science fiction and science reality owe each other that much.

I just finished reading SCI FI Wire, and the number of remakes outnumbered fresh concept material 5:2. You name it, and it's being remade: The Day the Earth Stood Still, Nightmare on Elm Street, Prisoner. What stagnation! There surely can't be a lack of fresh ideas, just barriers. The irony is the vast majority of remakes and reimaginings don't do well, not even with a younger generation who never saw the original.

What makes a great series or movie is a combination of a lot of factors, the writing, the casting, the director's vision and most importantly the characters and the particular people who were cast, all coming together to create a successful gestalt. All the factors coming together is the part that's hard to re-create. It might even explain why reimaginings do better than remakes overall: They have more latitude to do something new.

In particular, I'm irked by the the idea to remake The Prisoner. Some things should just not be remade. Trying to re-create something that complex and layered, something so nuanced that people are still arguing the meaning of the original, seems likely to raise fan ire more than anything else. I hope I'm wrong.

What the hell is someone named Staci Layne Wilson doing reviewing perhaps the cornerstone film within the franchise of science fiction we have all come to embrace so closely as our own, The X-Files, when she openly admits in her piece to being "a casual X-Files fan when it was airing"? That's like trusting your favorite child with a pedophile, for God's sake!

Excuse me for being a dyed-in-the-wool X-filer, but this latest movie, I Want To Believe, had all the elements of the classic X-Files episode, plus it had more. It had Mulder and Scully finally (if you stayed through to the end of the credits) going off together ... or so we are left to assume, in true X-Files fashion. I found the movie to be thoroughly enjoyable, just as enjoyable as last week's sit through Dark Knight.

Is she really upset that she never got the inside references? Well, neither did I. You see, I had a stroke, and those references are lost in my memories somewhere. But the X-Files didn't alienate me because I didn't get 'em. What I find inexcusable, especially for this publication, is a review as transparently weak as Ms. Wilson's, built as it is upon a foundation of passionless writing. Shame on you!