4 September 2013

Copyright 1997 PTN Consortium

Birthdays
John DiMaggio b. 1968 (Futurama, Princess Mononoke, Adventure Time)
Wes Bentley b. 1978 (The Hunger Games)
Patricia Tallman b. 1957 (Babylon 5)
Dick York b. 1928 died 20 February 1992 (Bewitched, Twilight Zone)

I sometimes do not include voice actors on the birthday list, especially actors who have never appeared in a live action genre film but have given voice to an animated character. (Ray Romano in Ice Age is an example.) But John DiMaggio's career is almost entirely as a voice actor with many important roles in genre, the best known of which is probably Bender on Futurama.

The Picture Slot goes to Patricia Tallman as the psychic Lyta Alexander on Babylon 5, which isn't on the air anywhere on cable or even streamable on Netflix or Hulu. This is a damn shame, because it's become famous for being obscure (at least that's the gag that is used on The Big Bang Theory) and it is every bit as watchable as the Star Trek franchises that were its contemporaries, Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.

Many happy returns to the living. 
 

Prediction: We have no conception of means by which the cold depths of interplanetary space may be traversed. Even if we allow imagination, untrammelled by the most evident necessities of the case, to suggest a speed of transport computable only by astronomical analogies, we still lag behind anything which could serve this purpose, unless we concurrently believe that human life shall, by that time, be lengthened into centuries. Otherwise, however recklessly we may conceive of speed in interplanetary travel, man would almost require to live for many centuries in order to reach and return from any destination which would not inevitably destroy him by fire or cold when he arrived at it. Most likely man is for ever destined to accept the bounds of his own planet, and to be limited by its resources.

Predictor: T. Baron Russell in A Hundred Years Hence, published 1905


Reality: Many science fiction fans would give Russell a big strikeout for this one, but I think he deserves a little credit. He's writing only a few years after the Wright Brothers fly at Kitty Hawk, so the technological advances to get to space craft are still decades away and that path of progress is very hard to see. More than that, he sees the problems that a lot of sci-fi writers gloss over, the incredible distances and the time it would take to traverse them. (To their credit, both Heinlein and Blish wrote stories about prolonging human life to make space travel possible.)

I'm going to give him half marks here. Since we made it to the moon, he's wrong about space travel, but his caveats about the difficulty explain why we aren't on Mars. Guys like Heinlein assumed we'd already be on Pluto by now.

Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!

Yet another prediction from a film based on Richard Matheson's most filmed story.

Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!