OMNI May 1981

First Word, by Ben Bova
     Until very recently librarians and teachers have felt rather uncomfortable about science fiction.  Until the advent of Omni, most science-fiction magazines were small in size and circulation...  There is a middle range of stories that deal with future societies, the frontiers of modern knowledge, extrasensory perceptions, and the politics and moralities of tomorrow.

Film/The Arts, by Mitch Tuchman
     "Some part of me would love to make a movie of William Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch'."  Viewers familiar with...Canadian writer-director David...Cronenberg's stylish and increasingly taut science fiction/horror films know...experiments in whistle-clean corporate institutes...  Cronenberg's doctors and their institutions and victims - drooling, puking, rotting, and screwing - people the Bosch-like canvas of Burroughs work as well.  "For me," Cronenberg says, "...a person who is not satisfied with things as they are and is trying by force of intellect to change them."

Universal Casting/The Arts, by Sal Manna
     Good-bye casting couch.  Hello computer.  Impersonal as it sounds, casting by computer is well under way in the movie business.  ...sometime in 1981 computer-generated animation will make its debut.  ...high start-up costs discourage acquiring the hardware.  "the computer could come in handy for us sometimes...but I'm not sure the frequency of use would offset the costs."  ...director of Universal Studios' computer operations...disagrees, contending that in the end the computer pays for itself.

Interview/Olaf Helmer
     Some people just want to make a quick buck, and they don't see it in solar energy but in the OPEC countries, so they've been exploiting the situation.  ...war in the conventional sense might be completely obsolete...  It is possible that the new form of war will be terrorism, and I fear that we are inadequately prepared to deal with that kind of warfare.  We were held up by the Iranians with the threat that some harm would come to the hostages...  It doesn't take a lot of imagination to picture other variations on that theme, involving perhaps whole cities immobilized...  Then what would the President do?
     Omni: You've suggested that we establish an apolitical goals institute to work up a list of national priorities.
     We need some reconsideration of our national values, of our preferences as a nation.  Maybe by the year 2000 we will be able to straighten ourselves out, but the Eighties look bad in many respects.

Speckle Search/Stars by Allan Hendry
     Are there planets around other stars?  The answer depends on which astronomer you ask.  ...one fifth to one sixth of the 123 solar-type stars...studied probably have planets.  ...if new techniques fail to produce evidence of other worlds...  We will be forced to reconsider the nineteenth-century idea...Earth...produced by some rare...process - and prepare...to redefine the meaning of loneliness.