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Show I ~ Ill~ ""' FOcu·s: CONVOCATION - THE UNIVERSIT Y JOURNAL • SOUTHERN UTAH U NIVERSITY • MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1996 By JOE SHARP OF THE suu SCIENCE FACULTY C AMPUS EDITOR Glimpses in to t he future will be offered by Gentry Lee, producer of Cosmos, the m ost widely watched scien ce project in American television history, at the opening Southern Utah University Convocation series presen tation Sept. 26. "The Challenge of t he 2 1st Century" is the topic fo r Lee who has been involved in planetary exploration for over 25 years. T he free Convocation lecture will start at 11 a. m . in the SUU Auditorium . The public is invit ed t o attend all Convocations during the year. "In addition t o being the producer of Cosmos Gen try Lee is a novelist, a space systems engineer, a computer game designer, and an incurable knowledge junkie," Lana Johnson, SUU director of lectures/special projects, said. "From 1988 until 1994, he spent most of his tim e writing science fiction novels. And now, for the next three years, he will be the chief designer for a suite of Sierra On -Line personal computer adventure games based on some of those novels," she said. Four collaborative novels written with Arthur C . Clark and known as the Rama series, were all New York Tim es bestsellers and h ave been translat ed into 21 foreign languages. It is upon those novels that his computer games will be based. Lee's first novel, Bright Messengers, published in 1995, was a national science fiction bestseller, and has been translated into four languages. It will be followed in the fall of 1997 by a sequel, Double Full Moon Light. In speaking of the future Lee has said he believes to build products with a decomposition process that will render them harmless. Lee said he believes t hat the future is more than just the next year away, or the next presidential election, it is at least 100 years away. It will be six or seven generations before people will be living on Mars, he added. However, he said, that to make way for all the future holds, we must leave roads for opportunities to arise. He said we should be a sink of information and try not to specialize our minds when there are l CONVOCATION I ~ ll~I Gentry Lee, our first Convocation speaker, is a distinguished novelist, a superb spacecraft e ngineer, a creative artist and a man who has taken a special interest in how education m us t change to meet the profound challenges of our rapidly-evolving world. We are, indeed, fortunate to have this outstanding and experienced man visit our campus for a second time. Lee's accomplishments are many and varied. He has collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke in writing four best-selling science fiction novels as well as writing his own unique Q works. In television, he played a O central role in creating and producing, along with Carl Sagan, the most popular documentary television series ever. Their COSMOS series successfully brought to the general public, complex and intriguing scientific knowledge I' about the universe we live in. It was participating in the production of this series that led to his current interests in education. In addition to this, Lee has had extensive speaking engagements (both national and international ) on subjects such as "Our Solar System" and "The Challenge of the Twenty-first Century " to "Ext raterrestrials in Fact and Fiction." Lee is also currently working with Sierra OnLine to develop some new adventure games. These games will be based upon his RAMA novels and will be both entertaining and educational. I first came into contact with Lee when he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA. I was working where we were building and testing the instruments designed t o detect life in Martian soils. Our instruments were to be part of the Viking landers and Lee's job was to help ensure that all instruments aboard the landers worked properly. When our crafts arrived at Mars and soft landed on the surface, no t once, bu t twice, the instruments worked as planned. Later, my gro up was building the probe to enter and then measure the atmospheric conditions and constituents of Jupiter. The probe was to be carried aboard the Galileo spacecraft, a craft for which Lee was the chief engineer. Just 11 months ago, Galileo delivered us to the vicinity of Jupiter and deployed our probe as planned. tO The Galileo spacecraft continues today to explore Jupiter and to make extensive measurements of some of its moons: Callisto, Ganymede, 1 Europa and Io. Both of these activit ies, Viking and Galileo, were technical successes; the scientific comm unity owes much to Lee fo r those successes. Lee is one of those rare individuals who has experienced the realities of the demanding world of spacecraft engineering, who has overcome the frustrations of creating widely appealing art, who has successfully combined television, science and entertainment and who is now trying to help improve the means and direction of education. He is a man to hold in high esteem and to one who's messages we should listen. I am sure all attending his presentation at the Convocation will find his ideas profound, interesting and challenging. 'Lee is man to h Jd in high d esteem an one WhO'S messages We Gentry Lee, producer of Cosmos will offer Convogoers a glimpse into the future Thursday that the future holds new options for the h uman species. N o longer will there be birth defects, he said. He has suggested this scenario. Assume your granddaughter, in the year 2025, becomes pregnant. Within five or six days of conception, he said, doctors could determine not only the sex of the fetus, but the color of its eyes and hair, as well as its proclivity to cancer and 20,000 other features. Lee has also said that he believes that several jobs will be available for environmental engineers, people who look at new ways to preserve the environment, such as working with m anufacturers I FOCUS: Lee hailed as accomplished artist Distinguished novelist, engineer, artist slated for Convocation By JIM ROBINSON THE U~IVERSITY JOURNAL • SOUTHERNUTAH UNI VERSITY • MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 1996 . ShOUJd ll.Sfen, said Toe S1iarp, profeSSOr of science at suu. new ideas and ways to do things. Lee's space system s engineering experience included serving at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory between 198 1 and 1988. However, he has been involved in the exploration of planets for more t han 25 years. While there he was chief engineer of the Galileo spacecraft that encoun tered Jupiter in December 1995 and is now in orbit around that planet conducting a m ission to map the Galilean moons of Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. On Galileo, Lee was responsible for integration and coordination of all technical aspects of the spacecraft. Earlier, he held a variety of leadership positions on t he Viking space mission which landed two spacecraft on the surface of Mars in 1976. He is still an active consultant for NASA, spending several weeks a year reviewing critical engineering issues for different missions. From 1978 through 1981, Lee and Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan developed and produced the Cosmos documentary television series which was seen in m ore than 60 countries and has won many awards including three Emmys and the Peabody. Lee received a B.A., Summa Cu m Laude, from the University of Texas at Austin in January, 1963, and an M.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in June 1964. He also attended the University of Glasgow on a Marshall Fellowship for one year. Lee lectures to a wide variety of national and international audiences, particularly on space and futuristic topics. He has a special interest in the ways that education must be altered to accommodate our rapidly changing world. foe Sharp, professor of science at SUU Readers embark on voyage through space in RAMA series Clarke an d Lee's RAMA series to appear this fall as a new CD-ROM scien ce-fiction adventure game By JENNIFER DURCAN SENIOR STAFF WRITER In 1989, Gentry Lee teamed up with science-fiction author Arthur Clarke for a second time to collaborate on the sequel to Clarke's 1973 Rendezvous With Rama. In the original novel, set in the year 2130, an enormous spaceship shaped like a hollow cylinder entered the solar system. All attempts to communicate with it were unsuccessful, yet the spaceship (Rama) allowed itself to be boarded by a group of human explorers. T he explorers discovered the many wonders of bioengineering inside but found no sign of the Ramans, the advanced beings who presumably built the craft. Sixteen years later, Clarke followed up with the sequel, Rama II, which is co-authored by Lee. The new novel picks up the story that began in Reqdezvous with Rama, 90 years from the ending date of the last novel. Rama II begins when another Rama enters the solar system . In the words of the authors, "Mankind had a second appointment with destiny." The issues raised in the sequel are identical to those raised in the first novel. What is this big thing doing here? Does it have a purpose? If so, what does it have to do with me? Since these are the sort of 'meaning-of-life' questions that one might ask of the universe as a whole, the allegorical subtext is apparent. Discussions of destiny are kept to a minimum and the exploration of Rama II proceeds with due caution. Before anyone sets foot on the ship, the authors take nearly a fourth of the book to explain the fine points of celestial mechanics and introducing us to several Y~it\ members of the exploration team. Two of the most interesting characters are Francesca Sabatini, a video journalist who will stop at nothing to get her story, and Nicole des Jardins, the halfFrench, half-African life science officer who places her faith in hard data and chemicallyassisted intuition. Even when the machinations of these well-matched adversaries lead to tragic consequences, nothing is allowed to interfere with the mission. There is one surprise after another in Rama II, some deadly. There are life forms inside, both friendly and hostile, but the real Ramans refuse to stand up. Just when it appears that the story is about to turn into a reprise of Alien, the powers-that-be on Earth decide that the alien ship represents a danger to humanity and must be destroyed. After the dust settles, the puzzle of the Ramans remain unsolved, and Clarke and Lee try to unravel the Raman m ystery and answer some of the same questions in their next two Raman collaborations, The Garden of Rama in 1991 and Rama Revealed in 1994. In November of this year, Clarke and Lee's popular scifi Rama series will be the basis for a full CD-ROM adventure game from Sierra. The game follows the general plot sequence of the series, bu t the player takes the role of a replacemen t astronaut and joins the mission in progress. Rama, the resulting product, joins puzzle-solving with deep fiction to create a long adventure game. Full-motion video, an original soundtrack, animation and rendered art form the basis of the multimedia experience. Clarke will appear in video clips during the game , which is being designed by Lee. The game will be compatible for PCs and Macs, and will be available in English, French and German. The Rama series as a CD-ROM game will be, according to Sierra, "a milestone in the history of multimedia." With sales of the series at over seven million copies, the CD-ROM product is sure to be a success as well. |