Oolite Bulletins

Exciting, but nervous that my rose-tinted childhood memories are smashed by the remake!

My initial reaction was "Oh dear god no" ... I watched the show avidly as a kid but trying to watch it again in full possession of my critical faculties (or at least, less easily distracted by blinking lights), it turns out it was one of the most boring dramas ever shown on TV. But then I reconsidered: the Eagles alone are worth bringing back, and I confess to having the same initial feelings about the remake of Battlestar Galactica, and they proved me wrong there. They'd have to come up with a better schtick than the moon being "blasted out of orbit", though ... maybe set it in some Outland-esque high frontier: claim-jumpers among the asteroids, religious maniacs among the moons of Saturn, weird oddities lurking in the Kuiper Belt, a hint of posthuman potential bubbling under on Earth, that sort of thing. No aliens in glam-rock makeup and latex lumps: something grimy and grungy and dangerous and human, instead.

Does anybody else remember this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088613/

I think I must be one of the few people who 1) watched it 2) like it...

DaddyHoggy wrote:

Does anybody else remember this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088613/

I think I must be one of the few people who 1) watched it 2) like it...

I remember the show – I remember seeing it, anyway, but I don't really remember anything about it. I think ultimately it suffered from the fatal flaw of the BBC when doing anything that doesn't involve bonnets: they don't commit. If you want a show set 150 years ago, money is no object; but if you want to make a show set 150 years in the future, though, here's your bubble-wrap and swarfega, now off you go and build us a world. In a quarry. (Admittedly this might have changed now, post- the new Dr Who.)

Disembodied wrote:

They'd have to come up with a better schtick than the moon being "blasted out of orbit", though ... maybe set it in some Outland-esque high frontier: claim-jumpers among the asteroids, religious maniacs among the moons of Saturn, weird oddities lurking in the Kuiper Belt, a hint of posthuman potential bubbling under on Earth, that sort of thing.

Firefly: 2099? :-)

I’d watch it.

Space: 1999? That was all about everyone looking meaningfully at everyone else wasn't it?

Seriously though, could it be any worse than the original?

!m!

Ahruman wrote:

Firefly: 2099?

I’d watch it.

That kind of thing, yes, but with a bit more angst – a sort of "humanity in danger of losing itself when confronting the vastnesses of space" angle. Something with a proper sense of scale would be interesting: ships, characters, all human effort reduced to minute dots against e.g. the rings of Saturn (as opposed to the wildly out-of-scale ringed planet from the opening sequence of Voyager, say). Although to be honest I'd be happy enough if they just made more Firefly and left out the 2099 ...

It seems to me science fact has not kept pace with science fiction. That is not so unusual, but in these times the gap seems to be increasing. Just last night I watched 'Blade Runner', an excellent film made 30 years ago and set in the year 2017. We are no where near the technology portrayed in that movie.

As a child I'd imagined the future to be wondrous, bases and factories on the moon, asteroid mining, artificial intelligence and all that sort of thing. In it's place we have bases in Afghanistan, factory closures, austerity measures and artificial stupidity.

We have personal communicators that would blow the minds of Kirk and Spock, but generally this so-called "future" is a big disappointment. In the 1970s I fully expected to be on Mars by now, or at least the moon ... This is a problem faced by many SF buffs of a certain age, and it stems from thinking that better technology makes people better, and that it is used to lift humanity towards the stars – the old, Golden Age view of progress. Instead, we have children toiling down mines to extract the rare earths required for our touchscreen goodies, which we use to download cheap yuks at ever-higher resolutions and ever-faster speeds. The advanced technologies might be there, but the human element remains resolutely retro.

In some ways it's a relief to find I'm not the only one less than satisfied with our technological present, but it's also disturbing to have one's view confirmed with eloquence.

That's the way of it. The tech sort of follows people and what they want. Most people don't give a hoot about moonbases, they would much rather post some inconsequential drivel instantly to the whole world.

I remember watching 2001: A Space Odyssey back in '69 and thinking... 'Yes! We're already on the moon, and we're bound to have a lunar base within thirty years!' Hey-ho!