Seven answers on 7Q (also known as the FAQs of life.)				Interviewed by Tom Mangan Paul Riddell, Sci-fi guy. To get the full Riddell treatment, go to The Healing Power of Obnoxiousness.		AUTHORS Michael Fuchs Elizabeth Hilts Paul Riddell Gary Rivlin Jim Motavalli Barbara Shafferman Jules Siegel Keith Snyder ARTISTS/POETS/ PHILOSOPHERS Jon C. Allen Will Baker Mike Leung Jon Sarkin COOL SITE KEEPERS Mike Cash Scott O'Neal Colf Godfrey Daniels Cliff Davis, DDS Tammy Hocking Wes Modes Frank Rogan DIARISTS Ralph Becker J. D. Bruns Linda DeVault Mike Reed Moira Richardson Jessamyn West FILMMAKERS Ben Kufrin Dean Mermell JOURNALISTS Bernie Mary Cooley-Jones Lindsay Crysler Jamie Dupree M.O.A.T.M.A.I. David Moll Robert Niles John Orr Steven Ovadia Pierce Presley Mack Reed Rip Rense Curtis Ross Neal Ross John Scalzi Catherine Seipp David Sheets Dwight Silverman Matt Welch MOVIE MAVENS MaryAnn Johanson Brian Koller HUMORISTS Debbie Farmer Mike Jasper Madeleine Begun Kane Patrick Keller Bob Sassone Valerie Sprague Ken Swarmer Ian Wolff SOLDIERS Maj. Jon Anderson, USAF TEACHERS John Warner TECHIES Chris Adamson Mike Gunderloy Michael Ivey Greg Knauss Floyd Maxwell Ellen McDonough Mike Pingleton Wayne Thume John Worth TEENS Gary Baum Marty Beckerman UNDECLARED Bev Gibbs Beth Reid WEBLOGGERS Jason Kottke Jish Mukerji
ONE				Why are there so many good science fiction books/stories but so few good science fiction movies? That’s easy: novels, short stories, and novellas only require a supply of clean typing paper, a writing implement, and a reasonably flexible imagination. Science fiction writers can get away with, say, suggesting a day on a Dyson sphere, with quadrillions of people living on what’s essentially a pingpong ball with a star in the center, because they don’t have a special effects budget to deal with. Considering that publishing a book is still incredibly cheaper than making a movie, we get more books than movies. It’s not so much that we have a better proportion of good SF novels compared to films, but that bad SF novels generally don’t get republished (with the exception of Terry Brooks and Piers Anthony), while we’re stuck with crap like “Star Wars: Episode One” and “Men In Black” as the sole SF films out at a particular time. Or, to put it another way, look at the layers of business majors involved with every step of film approval in Hollywood today, and consider that most of them haven’t read anything tougher than Cliff’s Notes and “Hustler” centerfolds in their lives. If we just required mandatory spaying and neutering for every MBA in the US, whether native or imported labor, we’d start to see intelligent films within a generation.
TWO				Something I've wondered lately: If the people in a sci-fi story are plotting to send people though a time machine to change history and remove certain inconvenient future personages -- a la "The Terminator" -- doesn't the fact that they're doing this imply the mission will fail (because if the mission succeeds they'd never have to do this to begin with)? Not necessarily, if you consider that time can go on alternate tracks, and nobody would remember any of the changes if the mission succeeded on that alternate track. The instigators wouldn’t necessarily know that the mission happened in the first place, but they can rest assured that if the mission succeeded, their world would be the way they intended. My big question about time travel concerns temporal artifacts: those items given to a character at the beginning of a story that get passed on to his/her previous self, and you never see them get made. We saw this with the watch in “Somewhere In Time”, the pendant in “Time Rider”, and even with an alien artifact in an episode of “Babylon 5”: so will the time loop thus formed collapse when these items wear out? You can only keep a pocket watch for so many centuries before it falls apart, after all...
THREE				I read almost everything Robert A. Heinlein wrote, but that was in the early 80s and I haven't read much sci-fi since then. For those of us who've fallen away from the church, who's the Heinlein of the '90s? Considering how the science fiction field has diversified, splintered, and mutated, that’s like looking at rock music today and asking “Who’s the Elvis of the Nineties?” I’m not even going to touch this one, if only because trying to cram the incredible number of interesting SF writers under one criterion is like trying to judge all of rock and roll, from Britney Spears and Kurt Cobain to G.G. Allin and Turner Van Blarcum, on the basis of what Elvis first did. Presley and Heinlein were two of the first in their chosen professions, and everyone else evolved from them, but a critic can’t judge everyone else by their contributions no more than a dining critic can get away with judging everything in fine cuisine on the basis of how well the entrees copy the taste of mother’s milk.
FOUR				Describe your strangest experience at a sci-fi convention. My strangest experience came at a convention last summer, when I discovered people who actually traveled all the way to Boston just to see me. That scared the crap out of me. Finding people who wanted to scalp me for some of my articles didn’t bother me in the slightest, but finding people who actually liked my work was just too weird.
FIVE				Say you were appointed to develop the next "Star Trek" series. Where would you take it? Firstly, I’d hire a slew of writers who actually knew something about science fiction, instead of “high-grading” story ideas from fan scripts the way Paramount currently does things. (Ever notice that the quality of all three TV franchises only improved, albeit slightly in the case of “Voyager”, by the end of the second season, after the staff writers had enough unsolicited fan scripts to rip off?) Then I’d put Michael Westmore, the current head makeup artist, back on welfare where he belongs and hire someone who can make alien aliens, like Rob Bottin or Tom Savini. Then I’d tell the fanboys who memorize the numbers stenciled on bulkhead walls or write for “Cinescape” to pound sand up their asses and prepare for a show that wasn’t insulting to the intelligence of science fiction fans or for those who normally detest science fiction. It’s been done before: just look at “Babylon 5”, “Farscape”, and “The X-Files”.
SIX				What's something you keep meaning to write about but never get around to it? Oh, I have several books that I want to write one of these days, but essays and articles keep getting in the way. Otherwise, besides a complete Ph.D thesis on the dinosaurs of Australia and New Zealand, which requires that I get my Bachelor's in vertebrate paleontology before I start working on my Ph.D, I’m actually reasonably caught up. I keep playing around with a movie script on the great “bone wars” of the 1870s in the American West between Yale paleontologist Othniel Marsh and Harvard palaeontologist Edward Cope, and a couple of comics projects, but I’ll burn those projects as I get to them.
SEVEN				Most of the time it's a disappointment to meet a writer whose work you admire. Ever have an experience that confirms and/or contradicts this? Well, I just got back from a convention in New Orleans where someone commented that they didn’t expect me to look like a burned-out halfback from Oklahoma State. That close enough?
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