On Saturday Neil Gaiman blogged about Prisoners of Gravity, one of my favourite TV shows when I was a kid and now. I had been rewatching the show for a couple months on YouTube, where you can find many of the episodes, and I was thrilled to see it brought to attention again. It surprises me how few people I know watched the best interview show about speculative fiction to ever grace the TV screen.

I grew up in a home rich in speculative fiction; my parents named me after a Battlestar Galactica character and the writer Isaac Asimov, afterall. It was Prisoners of Gravity, however, that brought the intellectual, thoughtful and stimulating dimensions of speculative fiction to the fore for me. The fascinating discussions about comics, science fiction, fantasy, horror, mysteries, films and video games brought to light the real substance behind the best of speculative fiction and was inspiring to a young spec. fic. geek.

Prisoners of Gravity was the most thoughtful and creative television program ever produced anywhere in the world about the literature of science fiction, and it was a substantial Canadian success story. In first-run, it was one of the most popular series on its originating network, TVOntario, lasting for five seasons and 139 installments; it also ran on several PBS stations. ~award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer

What made the show great were two features: excellent guests and fascinating topics. Topics included sexism, feminism, medicine, nanotechnology, memory, artificial intelligence, evolution, ecology, racism, utopianism, immortality, sex, madness, genetuc engineering, censorship, politics, religion and AIDS while guests included Los Bros Hernandez, Robert J. Sawyer, Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, Tanya Huff, Denys Cowan, Will Eisner, Bob Kane, Frank Miller, Larry Niven, George R.R. Martin, Harlan Ellison, Charles Vess, Harlan Ellison, Spider and Jeanne Robinson, Jack Vance, Clive Barker, Jim Baen, Guy Gavriel Kay, Neil Peart, Danny Elfman, Harlan Ellison, Anne Rice, Alan Moore, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, James Cameron and Gene Roddenberry.

Signal Loss, a fan-run Prisoners of Gravity site, has a listing of many episodes available to stream on YouTube.


http://video.google.ca/googleplayer.swf?docid=4326317346301825073&hl=en&fs=true

You might recognize the host, Rick Green, for his significant roles on Red Green and History Bites.

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