Flash, aaa-aaaaaaaaaaah!

[lampbane]

Finally got around to reading Flashforward. I've wanted to read the book ever since before the show came out, and the producers (Goyer and Braga) said they were changing the period of time of the Flashforward from 20 years to 6 months, because with 20 years you're dealing with the future and spaceships and aliens and other science fiction-y stuff

Comments

[glowing_fish]

Another example of this, and written by someone who is a very famous writer, is Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game, which is a near-fiction science fiction book that was actually socially and technologically regressive from the time he wrote it. Some of which might be justified, but some might just be because, well, Hesse.

[pseudohistorian]

I can see where Goyer and Braga are coming from, especially Braga--the Star Trek model of televised science fiction isn't particularly popular in North America now. Even recent series which deal with space travel have a lot of "cheats" to avoid the tropes of space opera. (Firefly: A future with no aliens! BSG: Cylons look like humans! The list goes on.)

Sawyer is an old-fashioned SF writer, so it doesn't surprise me that his writing comes across that way. (Despite the fact that he's in Winnipeg all the time, however, I've never read any of his novels.) To be fair, most predictions about the future will miss something obvious in retrospect--and even Back to the Future (where Zemeckis and Gale spent a year consulting with futurists about what 2015 would be like) wanted to throw flying cars in there.

As a Canadian author, though, he really should've known better about what causes something like a pothole.