the mother of the matrix

I haven't done much blogging on Afro-futurism lately, even though I imagined it being a bigger part of Planet Grenada in the beginning. But apparently there has been a new development in the case of Sophia Stewart which makes me want to touch on the subject again.

If you haven't heard already, Stewart is a Black woman who was suing the Wachowski Brothers and Time-Warner on the grounds that she wrote a story called "The Third Eye" which both The Terminator and The Matrix were based on. (The connection is that unborn John Connor who grows up to heroically lead the humans against the machines in the Terminator films, is supposed to be Neo, or "the One" of the Matrix films.)

A recent development was reported in the LA Times in a story called The Billion-dollar Myth. Sadly, the case has been dismissed for lack of evidence, but the LA Times goes on to make some interesting points about how the case relates to other areas where blacks and whites seem to have very different perceptions of the same events.

To be honest, when I first saw the Matrix in the theater I keep thinking over and over again "hey I've seen this before". More than most films, there were many elements of the plot and the setting which I had seen in other works of sci-fi. So from a certain perspective, it wasn't surprising someone would accuse them of plagarism.

In the case of the Terminator, talk of plagarism is much older (in fact James Cameron had already settled with Harlan Ellison over such accusations)

An interview with Sophia Stewart talking about her work

The Mother of the Matrix: Sophia Stewart a website with more background on the case

Story from Salt Lake Community College paper which incorrectly reported that Stewart had already won.