A friend of mine stated that Marvel comics should stagger the number of characters that come out on film so that they appear a few years apart. The purpose is to prevent people from quickly getting tired of seeing so much [of] its property on film. I do not agree. I am happy of the successes, both commercial and critical, that comic books are enjoying on film and that Hollywood is paying attention to this genre. However, comic-book companies and/or creators need to never forget to never sacrifice substance for style.

Science fiction is an art form, and like any other, great works are rare. But what makes a work great is not a string of sterling reviews or boffo box office or a shelf full of gaudy awards, but the impact it has on others—the inspiration it injects, not to imitate or to equal it, but to surpass it.

Great works of art, whatever the medium, not only step up, but step out, boldly going where no one else has gone before. While all works are in some way derivative, great works acknowledge the past yet push beyond it, past the present and into the future.

One morning, half a century ago, a young boy waited impatiently outside the local music store. As soon as the shop opened its doors, the boy rushed in to purchase a newly arrived 45 rpm record (one song on each side). From there he ran to his friend's house and the two of them listened to it over and over.

"It was magical," said one of the boys later. "We were hearing the future and it urged us to be a part of it."

"Our world opened up at that moment," said the other boy. "And it would never be the same again."

The record was Elvis Presley singing "Heartbreak Hotel." The two boys were John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Will that ever happen with today's science fiction? Are there no young writers, artists or filmmakers with the ambition and the passion and the courage to take science fiction to a new place with new ideas and new concepts to confront new conflicts? Are there no SF fans angry at being told and retold their parents' and grandparents' stories over and over again?

We have been bombarded with remakes, re-imaginings, retreads, sequels and spinoffs and we always will be because the time-tested past is a much safer investment than the untried future.

Do not interpret this as a quality issue. It is not that this endless parade of tales already told are poorly written or ineptly made, but that because they are so firmly rooted in the past they lower expectations and spread a complacency, a conformity upon science fiction which strikes at the very heart of what science fiction is supposed to be.

Or have we gotten to the point where nobody out there knows or cares what I'm writing about?

My dad is a die-hard Doctor Who fan. Needless to say, he was thrilled when the new series came to the SCI FI Channel.

What surprised me was how much I ended up loving it as well. I thought the main characters of the Doctor and Rose were wonderful. I've always known about Doctor Who, but I was never a fan—until the first episode of this series! I guess you could say that this is the Doctor Who for my generation.

My mother, not a big fan of most sci-fi series, was also impressed by the show.

We all want you to know how much we enjoyed Doctor Who and hope you will bring us another season soon. We watched every episode and pre-ordered the DVD right away (a rarity in this household).

This is just a note to let you know there are three very loyal fans in this household, hoping for more Doctor Who. Our ages have a gap of close to 40 years, so your show reaches a wide demographic, at least in this household!

No! No! A thousand times no! Not wrestling. If there is anything that is inimical to the thought of SF, then wrestling would be it. I realize that many people will disagree. One correspondent recently did, although I think he was stretching and may well have had his tongue in cheek.

This is just like the Cartoon Network showing live-action shows. I understand some of the financial reasons for these actions, but don't like the results. SCI FI might as well be USA Network II if it abandons its roots. TNN became Spike TV; networks change their focus occasionally.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that there is a continum and that SF is in the eye of the beholder. Do you lose your right to include sci-fi in your name if your SF content falls below 50 percent, 75 percent, 90 percent? Obviously, the channel belongs to the people that pay for the bandwidth and content, and you can call it what you want, but it might lose legitimacy. Does legitimacy matter to cable networks?

I'll still keep on watching Doctor Who, Galactica, Stargate and will check out the new series that are introduced, but please, no more wrestling and keep the psychic stuff to a minimum. I won't be watching them.

I hope that I'm not the only one that feels this way. Only the ratings and letters column will tell.

I'm just saying ...

Speaking as a research laboratory technician, I would extend Scott Edelman's commentary ("Erasing the Smell of Sci-Fi") on "hiding" the science fiction in science fiction to how mass media treats anything to do with science in general. My personal experiences with your average American adult run from slight bafflement to disbelief that I think science (and science fiction) can be interesting, challenging and downright fun. Unfortunately, most of the mass media mirrors this attitude. That's why I'm perpetually amazed and grateful that people like David Eick and Ron Moore of Battlestar Galactica can rise above the usual stereotyping and create programming that is absolutely riveting.

I also had to laugh when Scott Edelman quoted producers and writers who talked about the "human" side of their shows and how good writing will usually create a successful show. I'm old enough to remember watching the original Star Trek as a teenager, and I read all the reviews then that exclaimed over the show's "relevant plots" and "humanity." Wouldn't it be great if these same "lessons learned" stuck around for a while?

Wow. It's such a shame that everyone can't free their minds, enjoy a little make-believe and not be ashamed to tell others that they enjoy it. I found Simon Tam's and others' quotes from "Erasing the Smell of Sci-Fi" a bit sad. I pity those that feel the inclination to deny affiliation with so rich a genre. It's not all about robots with death rays, starships with FTL propulsion and alien-looking visitors. Sometimes it's more subtle and closer to home. Why are other folks so afraid of watching and embracing the very thing that they secretly want, and sometimes not so secretly?

Domestic engineers wish for appliances that would make their chores easier or eliminate the need for them to be done altogether. Sometime in the 1800s, Catharine Beecher, called laundry "the American housekeeper's hardest problem." Lo and behold, the first washing machines were patented in the United States in 1846. The earliest models imitated the motion of the human hand on the washboard—it was basically a robot. It continues to change and simplify to this day—now basically a box that we drop our clothes in, dry and dirty, then take out, damp and clean. I think in Japan they have displayed one that will even fold and seal-wrap your laundry for you. For men—instead of pulling up tall grass by hand, the sickle was invented, then the push mower, then the gas and electric mower, now a riding mower. Imagine that, riding on a vehicle that cuts and bags the grass itself. It's not too far-fetched to have one that can be radio-controlled. Sometime in the future maybe there will be a beam of light (laser) between two wheels that will follow a programmed path around your house—not even grass clippings to worry about. Wishful thinking, a sci-fi story or just the way life is evolving? To borrow a phrase from the Rock, "Can you SMELL what I'm cooking?"

Aside from being set on a remote mining colony located on one of Jupiter's moons, and some genre catch names, Outland, starring Sean Connery was just a murder mystery. A few other Earth-based movies come to mind—Z.P.G. with Oliver Reed, Soylent Green with Charlton Heston and Logan's Run with Michael York all dealt with overpopulation, and Rollerball with James Caan dealt with war and sports. No spaceships in the bunch and no alien planets. Sci-fi is nothing to be ashamed of. It could be the future and continues to become the present with our robot planes, talking cars and computers, automatic doors, moving floors and stairwells, flip phones and PDAs. Those ideas came from somewhere ... was it out of necessity or good reading that stuck in some inventor's mind? It would be nice not to have to hitch up the horses every day just to get to work, wouldn't it? Sure wish we could get across the ocean without having to rely on wind in our sails all the time. Man, dipping this quill gets tiresome. I wish I had something that would hold the ink a lot longer.

We are living sci-fi without shame. Why can't we write it, produce it, act in it, read it or watch it without shame? Free your mind.

I won't claim that The Lake House is great cinema, but having now seen the movie, I'd say that [reviewer Mike] Szymanski's review is a bit "under the bottom" with a D- rating. D- would mean: poorly written, poorly directed, poorly acted, poorly edited and poorly filmed; in other words, a loser of a film.

If Mr. Szymanski doesn't like the way the story is told or the plot is developed, that's fine; but a more representational grade would probably be B- or C, just to be fair to review readers who might enjoy the film for other reasons.

While I've always been a huge fan of F&SF (literally since before I knew it was its own genre—or even what "genre" meant), sometimes it does concern me a little that it might encourage in some people a belief in the objectivity of what is actually a subjective or virtual reality, aka a story; therefore, while I'm glad [Wil McCarthy is] bringing up the fight against unreason in general, I'm especially glad that you're bringing it up in this setting [in his column "The Intelligent Designers"]. I have no reason to believe that F&SF fans are any more prone to delusions than anybody else, but in my opinion F&SF stories can be particularly enthralling.

(That was kind of an aside—I'm not proposing that religion is a fiction!)

Returning to point and preaching to the choir: ID proponents promote their theories as "another way of viewing scientific evidence," but the truth is that ID is an ad hominem argument (in the sense of appealing to an individualistic, very human need for purpose and personal value) for the existence of a deity and that deity's role in history. If you believe in a deity, that's fine—there's nothing wrong with believing that God created the heavens and earth for His divine purposes. Just don't try to explain the way things work as "God's will," then close your hands, eyes and mind in prayer and try to bar others (including your kids) from exploring the details of that Creation or what's happened since it.

If God created an already-old universe 5,000-some years ago, then what's the problem with exploring the nature of its oldness? Science makes no claims about what would happen if you traveled in a time machine back 6,000 years, only what we can interpret based on the evidence—and the evidence says the universe is a whole lot older than 5,000 years.

If thousands or millions of years ago, God reached in and tweaked a chromosome that caused male robins' chests to be red, how does that help us understand multiple alleles and a feather's chromogenic microstructure? ID tries to make a (possible) cause into an explanation, while science tries to understand what and how, not why. Science class should be about objective fact, testable theories and the scientific method, not about religious causes that substitute God's will for all of the above.

The Bible was communicated to people who simply wouldn't have understood the facts we're now discovering and theories we're now formulating. If Genesis discussed the big bang, planetary formation and human evolution in anything approximating the terms and detail we now use, it never would have been passed down to succeeding generations.

The truths in the Bible were revealed over the course of thousands of years—why shouldn't we expect to continue discovering new ones? To expect otherwise almost sounds like "God is dead" to me.

In the quest for truth—physical or spiritual—you must be willing to at least provisionally accept that which your senses receive and your sense extracts, or the quest has no meaning. Likewise it negates the quest if you abandon the most logical, promising paths of inquiry because they look like they might be heading somewhere you don't want to go. Only by using the brain and senses God gave you—and intended you to use to their fullest—and by trusting that the truth is God's truth and will set you free, can you honor your responsibilities as a child of God ... or as a human being, however you want to phrase it.

Once I saw the shows Charmed and Hex, I have begun to like shows about witchcraft. I think that there aren't enough out there. Also, most witchcraft shows are based around women. I would really love to see a witchcraft show that stars a male lead. Now, I don't know if SCI FI is interested in developing a "SCI FI Original Series," but I think that I would be great. I hate having to rely on ABC and all of those networks for my weekly supernatural fix. They just don't cut it. SCI FI Channel, please HELP!

P.S. It would be cool to get some "SCI FI People" feedback on whether or not the channel could do a new original series.

Keanu Reeves has had the pleasure of working more than once with some of his leading ladies (including Carrie-Anne Moss, Charlize Theron, Rachel Weisz and soon Winona Ryder in A Scanner Darkly). But his reunion with his Speed co-star, Sandra Bullock in The Lake House, is his most successful. For a familiar love story that takes a common sci-fi twist and makes it rewarding enough for this generation, The Lake House is truly as rewarding as it deserves to be.

The happy ending is by no means out of place. I especially agreed with the decision to leave the reason for the "time mailbox" unexplained. That truly benefited The Lake House. This kind of miracle that grants you such a happy ending should simply be appreciated, not wasted by wondering why the order of the universe has seen fit to bend time in your favor. Alex (Reeves) and Kate (Bullock) are deserving of their love story, and that is all that they and we need to know.

The character of Alex's troubled father, with another splendid performance by Christopher Plummer, also benefits the story of these perfectly matched lovers. Shohreh Aghdashloo (after The Exorcism of Emily Rose and X-Men: The Last Stand) is again proving her competence in these genres. The best contributions to this movie are Reeves' durability as a sci-fi hero and Bullock's complex talents for such demanding roles.

The Lake House earns an A for truly winning our hearts.