What I find fascinating in this whole discussion is that, whenever a
novel comes out, people don't generally go through page by page and say,
s"Oh, I think Niven was ripping off/drawing from "Lensman" when he did this
part." They generally only do this to TV people...because it's assumed
that TV people don't have an original idea in their head, and can ony
(only) borrow from other people.

Though I may sometimes nod to one or another landmark of SF, I'm not
doing the Prisoner, Lord of the Rings, Childhood's End, MacBeth, the
Illiad, The Mountains of Madness, or any of the thirty other works that
I'm supposed to be doing, all mutually contradictory. I'm telling this
story, my story, and though it's nice to be compared to such other works,
it does become bothersome after a while when everybody tries to pin down
which work I'm supposed to be "doing" when they NEVER do this to novelists,
because this is TV. C'mon, people, I've written published novels, and
short stories, and plays, and radio dramas, and I *do* have a brain in my
head to maybe make up something on my own, y'know.

(And yes, my server is back up again, though I think it doesn't have
anything from the days in which I wasn't online, and just picked up from
today.)

jms