More Prisoners of Gravity. Way more.

Wow, over the last week or so a whole lot of Prisoners of Gravity eps have appeared on Youtube. So, I'll do my usual link thing. Probably a couple/few a week till I catch up. I know my flist doesn't care about it, but I love this stuff and the interviews with SF authors on SF topics, so nyah.

Time Travel (December 1992)
Part One: Host Introductions and brief history of Time Travel in fiction, Interviews with L. Sprague deCamp (on Lest Darkness Fall, and inspirations for writing it, and problems in time travel of dealing with/understanding earlier versions of one's own tongue), Michael Moorcock ("Behold the Man", on why Time Travel's so compelling, and his novella/novel), John Gribbin (on the scientific plausibility of Time Travel)
Part Two: Gregory Benford (on his novel Timescape and time-reversibility of scientific equations, paradoxes), Geoffrey Landis (on drawing on Dirac's theories of time in his story Ripples in the Dirac Sea), Robert Silverberg (Ugly Little Boy/Up the Line, on the narrative choice to not go into much detail on the science, and his favorite time travel stories), Spider Robinson (on Heinlein's story "All You Zombies", full spoilers)
Part Three: Joe Haldeman (on his nebula award winning story The Hemmingway Hoax), Connie Willis (on Firewatch and Doomsday Book, and why her time travellers mess with the past, and on the perspective of future compared to the presence, plus a bit of talking about her not-at-that-point-released book To Say Nothing of the Dog)

Shared Worlds: (December 1992)
Part One: Interviews with James Morrow (on his objections to 'fiction to order' and shared worlds as literature by committee being anti-art, and yet his own contributions), C.J. Cherryh (on the shared world as a new literary form, and how the process tends to work), George R.R. Martin (on Wild Cards, and advantages/disadvantages of shared world setup and how multiple authors points of view can avoid making the author's moral views 'succeed')
Part Two: Neil Gaiman (on pitfalls of shared worlds to avoid, and how Sandman, one of his most famous works, is a shared world character he doesn't own, so how does he protect it), Fabian Nicieza (on how the X-books all fit together into one continuity. he also gets spit on), John Byrne (on keeping characters 'pure' in a shared world and correcting things you don't like in other works "right now" as opposed to waiting till they're gone, and Next Men, benefits of owning your own characters vs working on company characters), Walt Simonson (on playing in others sandboxes in comics)
Part Three: Peter David (on attractions of writing in shared worlds - Marvel, Trek, compared to the problems of being restricted in what you can do with the characters), J.M. Dillard (working on Star Trek novels, and how working with established characters is something of a 'free ride', but also restrictions), Judith and Garfield Reeve-Stevens (on writing Prime Directive, on how you maintain suspense when you know that the characters can't really be in any danger, and how you approach writing 'famous' characters), Harlan Ellison (on how he abhors shared worlds and that anyone who gets involved with them serves the devil)

Medea/Murasaki (Shared Worlds Part II) (December 1992)
Continuation of last episode: A look at two specific shared world concepts, one developed by Harlan Ellison himself, the second designed as Medea's "heir".

Part One: Origins of Medea in 1975, and the worldbuilding specs of the world, designed by the likes of Poul Anderson, Hal Clement, Larry Niven, Frederick Pohl, and others. Interviews with Harlan Ellison (on how it all started), Robert Silverberg (on receiving the specs and discussing them over dinner, and the seminar), notes about the biology of the Fuxes.
Part Two: Frank Kelly Freas (who did paintings and illustrations for the project, on the Fuxes unique life-cycle, Harlan Ellison (on choosing the last two writers after the seminar, and why only one female author was included), Kate Wilhelm (on her story for the book), Jack Williamson (on coming in late), Robert Silverberg (on writing the second-last story in the book, and forcing Harlan to write the last), Harlan Ellison (on what he thinks of Medea increasing the popularity of shared worlds). Introduction to Murasaki, designed as a fundraising effort, and some of the specs (by Pohl and Poul)
Part Three: Interviews with Frederick Pohl (on the different approaches to worldbuilding in Medea and Murasaki), David Brin (on how he got involved), Gregory Benford (on whether Murasaki is different/groundbreaking enough to warrant the effort, his arguments against the 'anti-art' argument, and failures of Murasaki), Nancy Kress (on being the only female author in Murasaki, and working with someone else's aliens), Robert Silverberg (on whether he things Murasaki lived up to Medea, and why Medea's out of print)

(Man, I wish we still had Prisoners of Gravity around).