Science Fiction

I devoured much written-word sf in my youth (Heinlein was a formative influence, for example). These days I don't have time to read it very often, but Rosemary still does quite regularly.

I've also been a Trekker since birth, or at least as long as I can remember, having been born a couple of weeks after the original series premiered.

Rosemary and I host a regular get-together for our friends on Saturday night at which I show tapes of the good sf TV shows of the past week (not to mention eat, drink, and generally be boisterous). Actually, to be fair, a lot of the shows we screen are fantasy, not SF (depending on how strict your definition of SF is, they may all be fantasy!).

Current ongoing shows we have screened in the not too distant past are:

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (ending soon, waah!) and its companion show, Angel,
• Smallville, a reexamination of the Superman legend which has much the same "alien weirdness in the heartland" vibe as Roswell used to,
• Futurama, like The Simpsons but for sci-fi geeks, doomed by a worthless timeslot and constant preemptions that give it the regularity of a spastic colon,
• Tremors : The Series, which is trying (with some success) to duplicate the movies' ethos of goofy, tongue-in-cheek fun with a bit more intelligence than one would expect,
• Stargate SG-1, soon to go into its seventh season with the return of Daniel Jackson (yay!),
• Enterprise, which has tried to avoid some of Voyager's flaws but is repeating more of them,
• UPN's latest incarnation of The Twilight Zone, which sincerely tries (and sometimes succeeds) at recapturing the old Rod Serling sensawunda,
• Farscape, the cliche-busting balls-out outer-space adventure with the wild visual imagination (from the Henson folks), also recently canceled (waah! again),
• Miracles, a take on the X-Files format with a turn toward the supernatural/mystic rather than SFnal, also recently canceled just as an arc was starting to develop (waah! yet again),
• Firefly, Joss Whedon's take on a spaceship-based SF show (a cross between standard SF and a western), tragically nipped in the bud just as the arc was starting to develop (are you sensing a theme, here?),
• Babylon 5 (the best!)--technically, not a current show anymore, but it's being seen in a widescreen on the Sci-Fi Channel, plus it's in the process of coming out on DVD, and finally
• Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, which had potential to do some epic stuff on a galactic scale, but since the departure of driving force Robert Hewitt Wolfe has taken a real nosedive. It's not Earth: Final Conflict bad, but it's not good.