I watched the 8 episodes of Prophets Of Science Fiction that were run on the Science Channel a couple of years ago. It was produced by Ridley Scott and 22 of his other producer friends. The library had dvds of the whole series but you can see them on YouTube. The episodes are 42 minutes long and each one is put out on it's own dvdr. They must not have thought there was enough of a market to bother mastering a real dvd. I don't see them for sale on Amazon, they have the streaming version, and useless to me here, a region 4 dvd of one of the episodes. Weird, huh. I wonder if the dvdr copies I got from the library were strictly for the library market. Maybe for schools too. No mater. Each episode follows a bit of a pattern, there's a few short bits about the featured author's life, some bits about their works and ideas, then a whole lof of bits about the science results of their ideas, mixed in with that are clips from movies that were made from the writers books. All those bits are intercut with talking head segments featuring a good number of scientists, science fiction writers and film makers who comment on the episode's featured writer. Michico Kaku, David Brin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jerry Pournelle, Paul Verhoven, Akiva Goldsmith, Harrison Ford, Harlan Ellison are the ones that I had heard of and there are several more that I didn't recognize. Sometimes they had something interesting to say. The dramitizations of the author's life which weren't too bad. I found I was less interested in the modern application segments. I wanted more about the writers and their work. As you can see by the crowded episode there just wasn't much time for that.
I don't think I wasted my time but I did watch them at 1.5 speed. That's kind of like time travel, right. I was thinking I would be done in 42 minutes but it turned out to be only 28 minutes later. Where did that 14 minutes go? I don't know. It's a mystery. Here's the episodes on YouTube. Mary Shelley, Phillip K Dick, HG Wells, Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, Robert Heinlein, and George Lucas. An interesting choice of writers and all of them were writers that I had read some of their books. I was a big Heinlein fan when I was in my late teens and some of my twenties. I still have a stack of his books in the basement that I should dig out and read sometime. See if I still like him. I read almost all of Phil Dick in the early 90's but haven't gotten back to reading him some more. Almost always some new shiny story coming along.
Comments