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Typhon Station is a very fastpaced PBeM RPG with skilled, experienced players and a warm sense of bonding and community. We play at the turn-of-the-century, 2400, and are located in the Typhon Expanses, bordering the Neutral Zone, proximate to the Romulan Empire, and near the Iconian Digs, and are on the first warning route of the original Borg Incursion. We have three stations to post from, SB 185, USS Odyssey, and USS Wraith. They all have general and particular storylines and all interact. This game is not for the faint of heart! The writing is superb and comes hot and heavy. We have some open spots and also we will consider character suggestions. So, longtime RPGers and novices, check us out. See if you want to make Typhon Station your home away from home. (0 comments | Add)

Posted: 16:18:22 on September 01 2002
By: GustavoLeao
Dept: General Genre/SciFi

The latest issue of Cult Times magazine, just out in the UK, features an exclusive interview with Michael Piller, in which the former VOYAGER and DEEP SPACE NINE executive producer gives the magazine the lowdown on his latest genre show, the new hit USA Network TV series, The Dead Zone, based on the Stephen King novel and feature film of the same name. Here are some excerpts :

"I went out and bought Stephen King's book, read it, and then watched the movie," Piller told Cult Times. "In it I saw the potential to do something that I think every writer wants to - certainly those in the field of genre programming - which is explore themselves and the universe in which they live. With The Dead Zone we have a circumstance where an everyman, Johnny Smith, is basically thrown into a chaotic situation. He's stripped of everything he knows and loves and turned into something he doesn't quite understand. It's just an extraordinary canvas on which King has given us to work."

"That said, we still needed to convince The Powers That Be that this concept could succeed as a TV series," he continues. "Everybody loved the pilot script as well as the pilot itself. My philosophy was one of 'We need to satisfy the Stephen King fans first and foremost. To do that we need to give them Stephen King'. I wanted to use the novel as a tentpole for the first season. We talked about doing a slightly more serialized type of show. However, the TV business changed during the project's evolution - you see very few serialized dramas because they don't re-run well. So we switched gears and wrote the stories as more self-contained while making sure the character arcs grew. The challenge remained, though, to explain to the network executives what the series would be every week."

"Give them a cop how or one about doctors or lawyers and they understand how that works. However, Johnny Smith isn't a cop or any of those people, so how does he fight his battles every week ? My argument was his powers are his franchise. We can use them to go anywhere and tell all kinds of stories. That, to me, is much more interesting to a genre audience, which is a specific type of audience that I've come to know very well over the years.They're extraordinarily smart, demanding and they respond to thought-provoking programming. I also think they are impatient. They aren't willing to settle for formula TV. These people want to be surprised and shocked, and I wanted to do all that and more with this series..."

The original article can be found here.

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