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I Have Seen the Geek, and He is Us
Slashdot linked up this article, in which mainstream media suddenly figures out (again) the weird kids who got beat up a lot in high school seem to be running the show nowadays. This is one revolution I can say I've witnessed first hand. When I was, oh, say, 7 years old, all we had for science fiction or fantasy was Star Trek re-runs. No, really, that was it, and the occasional really freaky six-show series (Space 1999).
Now I look around and see it everywhere. Better still, what I use to see it is often at least as sci-fi. Today you can have the entire collected works of whatever composer, director, or even TV producer taking up the space of one bookshelf, in a format that will never ever wear out. If that's not science fiction I don't know what is.
Unfortunately the article devolves into typical elitist "but why do they have to be so weird? It's unhealthy!" pap. Which just goes to prove those who self-identify as geeks don't always deserve the title.
I got to watch the original run of Star Trek, Then there was Lost In Space and Land of the Giants (in which the only sci-fi part was that the people landed in a world of big people, or maybe there was a horrible accident in which they were shrunk, from what I recall). Then there was a very dry spell for that genre.
That is probably why I became such a big reader and not a television watcher.
Posted by: bogie on April 13, 2004 03:15 PMI actually commented on this article on my own livejournal, to some extent, back in march....
http://www.livejournal.com/users/rhjunior/2004/03/14/
if you care to check out my frothing-mouthed response to the column....
Posted by: RHJunior on April 13, 2004 08:47 PMoh, but some of us DO deserve the title and we're damned proud to be so weird, thank you very much!
on a side-note: I haven't been around here much lately, since they blocked your site (for some asinine, unexplained reason)at work... how does that make you feel??
Posted by: Jim S on April 14, 2004 11:27 PMSpace 1999 was on for 2 full seasons, so it wasn't a "really freaky six-show series"
Quark would be that series
http://users.snowcrest.net/fox/quark/index.htm