Heroes premiered tonight in German television. Overall a good show, but there were one or two things I didn’t like. I mean, young people who suddenly discover special powers that set them apart from the rest of humanity? I heard something like this before, only I guess when the idea was originally conceived in the 1960s it propably made more sense.

At the beginning of the show there is a professor blathering away how evolution will bring forth special powers like telekinesis or teleportation. Hell, no. We live in 2007, and everybody knows (or should know) that there is no plausible or even possible mechanism for psychic powers – it is much more likely that the woman of the future grows a botox gland, or even that men will aquire the missing take-the-trash-out gene (after all this would possibly help their chances with reproduction). I do not as such have a problem with reel science but frankly I had hopes that such a highly acclaimed show would come up with some new ideas. But then I hope that they used a weak idea to get the show started and won’t get back to the mutant thing as the plot develops, especially since the show has some good characters (“Super-Hiro !”, naturally).

In other news, I worked all afternoon to trim my proposal for an essay in a planned SF anthology down to the requested maximum of 750 characters before I realized that I had misread the specs and that they were really asking for 750 words. This is a little embarassing, and usually I would consider it a waste of time, but to bring down a full page to a super-condensed three-liner was in a way a brilliant excercise and so I’m not too sorry. Overall the restored proposal may be too big on words and too weak on theory, so I might have made a fool of myself, but then I loose nothing by trying.