Cynical Article & Interview

Next month, 'Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda' will premiere throughout the United States. When the show starts, several established Star Trek reviewers will also start writing commentaries of Andromeda, including Julia Houston at SlisptreamWeb, Jamahl Epsicokhan at Star Trek: Hypertext and David E. Sluss at the Cynics Corner. Over at SlipstreamWeb, we've started a short series of articles and interviews on each of these reviewers, beginning this week with David Sluss.

Serving as an introduction to the Cynic's Andromeda reviews is an article called A Cynics Corner Preview of Andromeda, in which Sluss talks about how he first learned about Andromeda, and what format his reviews will be in. In addition, and a bit longer, there's an interview with the Cynic, in which he talks about his reviewing background, his expectations of Andromeda and some recent news items on the show. Here's a snippet:

SSW: What made you decide to start doing reviews?

DS: I've been active in Star Trek and other SF newsgroups for several years, and so I was commenting on 'Voyager,' 'DS9' and 'Babylon 5' for quite some time before becoming an "official reviewer." It so happened that a post I wrote regarding Voyager's fourth season premiere, 'Scorpion II' turned rather lengthy and cynical, and I decided to post it as a "capital-R" review. I rearranged it into the now-famous "...of the week" format, called it a Cynics Corner Review, and the rest, as they say, is history.

SSW: Have you done any other writing besides the reviews? In particular, did you ever have the ambition to also write for film/television?

DS: I've written a lot of stuff over the years, but have never been published, in part because I only ever submitted one piece for publication. I have sitting on my shelf a 200-page graphic novel that I spent about five years on and off writing and drawing. Someday, I'd love to have that material see the light of day, though it would require a bit of revision story-wise and new artwork by someone with actual artistic talent. I have always wanted to write for television (did you hear that, Mr. Wolfe?), and have had a number of ideas for 'Star Trek' that I think are respectable. The strange thing is there's been about a half-dozen times that one of my ideas wound up getting done by 'Trek' or in a couple of instances, 'Babylon 5,' even though I told literally no one about them. I still have a good idea or two in my pocket, so who knows?

Discuss this news item at Trek BBS!
 Add TrekToday RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!