Another week, another televisual corpse to dissect. This time, I’ll stick the scalpel in the fascinating, frustrating world of Earth2, a show that—with a little more luck and a few different choices—could have been big time. I mean that sincerely. Earth2 had a whole lot going for it—cool concepts, writing, good budget. It’s one of science fiction TV’s more unfortunate casualties. It lasted a single season, fall of 1994.
As the rewatch-in-one series continues, I find that in almost every show I review I think of Battlestar Galactica and Lost, two recent shows that got things epically right and epically wrong. Earth2 has more than a little in common with both. As with those shows, there’s a large central cast in a hostile environment, survival hangs in the balance, and there’s a mix of sci-fi and mystical fantasy woven into the plot. In fact it becomes less science and more fantasy as the show goes on. Earth2 even has a few future Losties are in the cast.
Imagine this meeting. Screenwriters 
Whenever a story pits an individual against an amorphous authority, it’s bound to be described as Orwellian or Kafkaesque. Seldom, however, does the intelligence of the work in question really merit these designations. The Prisoner is one of the few cases wherein the comparisons are definitely worthy. And for that matter, few shows since could fairly be considered “Prisoneresque.”
I wonder if a few years ago, when Tor.com first launched, the folks who put the site together knew that rereads and rewatches would be such a big part of the experience.
I hold a special fondness for poems and stories that bridge oral tradition and literature. I think it was in that switch, from oral to written, that fantasy as a literary form was born. Such works — the Panchatantra, Epic of Gilgamesh, Odyssey and the Mabinogion to name a few — are the ancestors of contemporary fantasy. The Kalevala is another such bridge.
In Voltaire’s 
Akira Kurosawa, Japan’s preeminent film director, has influenced just about every genre of film making in the west, especially westerns and action films in general (though some of Kurosawa best movies, I believe, are slower and more personal, such as Ikiru and Dodes-Kaden). Everyone from Sergio Leone to George Lucas to John Lassiter has drawn on his work.
Neville Longbottom doesn’t have Ron’s loving family, Hermione’s brains and talent, or Harry’s prophecy, lightning bolt scar, money, athleticism or celebrity status. He’s not the center of the story. There will never be a book called Neville Longbottom and the Misplaced Toad. But none of that changes the fact that Neville, the Not-Quite-Chosen One, is the bravest and best hero of the Harry Potter series.
Just in time for the Apocalypse, the ever-charming singer/songwriter Jill Tracy is offering (temporarily, which, if the world is coming to an end, goes without saying) 
Henri Parisot translated Jabberwocky into French three times. The translations are similar but for a few details, most important among them being the name of the eponymonster itself. He chose 
Over the past year or so, the presence of Doctor Who in the Tor.com offices has grown massively. New writers have come in with a pre-existing love for the show and others have discovered just what it was they were missing. The end result being an office that will talk at length about anything Who-related.
I dreamed that I was at San Diego Comic-Con.* I spotted 
The Tor brothers, Linus and Wilhelm, were born in Mazdaberg, Switzerland, a small Zoroastrian town near Bern. Intrepid and inventive, the brothers were known as risk takers, adventurers and raconteurs of wild tales. As youth they traveled from town to town spinning yarns for whomever might pay them a gilder or florin or whatever currency Swiss folks used back then.
Why aren’t werewolves as popular as vampires?
