Or, Just Hand me the Clicker

The world you live in is different from the world I live in, or more precisely, the world you grew up in is different from the world I grew up in, with a resulting difference in world view. You look at something and say it was bad, while I look at it and say it wasn’t good. We do not disagree, but we see it differently because of our conflicting intellectual heritages. In a word, our expectations are different. Here’s why.

The godfathers of science fiction are, unquestionably, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. You can make various cases for one over the other being the real egg, but they both were the earliest people to successfully study the themes we regularly see in sf today in a recognizably modern way. Certainly the chronologically more contemporary Wells provides not only themes to the modern arena but still, literally, plots. In the last decade alone, for instance, Hollywood has filmed The War of the Worlds pretty much as is twice (with Tom Cruise and with Will Smith [Independence Day]). Blending humans and animals (“Are we not men?”), invisibility, time travel—that’s a lot of the contemporary gamut, introduced to us by Herbert George. One might suggest that, without actually writing space operas, Verne is more the father of that sort of work, as his novels tend to be adventure romances with exotic scientific touches, as compared to germinating from purely scientific-speculative concepts. In any case, with these two gentlemen, mainstream speculative literature is born.

And immediately stops.

For whatever reasons, speculative fiction did not become a mainstream branch of literature after its invention. I’m not quite sure why, but the story of the mystery genre has certain analogies to sf—which abbreviation nicely serves for both science fiction and speculative fiction; woe to the person that calls it “sci fi” in front of its practitioners, which is like calling IE people Speechies to their faces and which is why herein they are referred to as Speecho-Americans—but unlike sf, mysteries quickly became mainstream. Plenty of critics held mysteries at arm’s length (“That’s not writing, that’s typing”) but the general public found literate practitioners and made big sellers out of them. This did not happen with sf. But one thing similar for both sf and mysteries was the creation of a pulp fiction tradition. The point here is that, with sf, that’s all there was.

Pulp fiction has its own long history, going back to the penny dreadfuls (and probably going back thence hundreds of years to the Morality Plays) and dime novels (the price keeps going up) to the pulp magazines of the 20s and 30s up to the first cheap paperbacks of the 50s, especially those which used lurid covers to sell themselves to the reading public. This is cheap reading entertainment, not particularly demanding and usually in short form, perhaps melodramatic, and often concentrating on areas of subject not quite ready for prime time. Nowadays every TV show on the air seems to revel in forensic criminology, but once upon a time such things were not considered polite, cultured fare. These were boys’ stories, or mens’ stories, depending on the quantity and quality of its distressed damsels.

So, unlike the mystery genre, sf didn’t go mainstream, but it did live a thriving life in the pulp magazines. Mostly this was an era of BEMs and the like, but somewhere along the line the so-called Golden Age began. The stories elevated themselves above the level of cheap melodrama to truly interesting speculation, and good writing. The early giants of the genre began to appear, authors like Isaac Asimov, for instance. And by the time you get to the 50s, there’s an awful lot of good, readable stuff out there, much of it now available in book form. Hardcover books. In libraries. Yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but once upon a time libraries actually had books in them, and not much else. Incroyable, eh?

The baby boomers like me came up reading those books, those collections of stories, the early classic sf novels that shortly followed. Obviously, I read other stuff too, but on my menu of favored books was a healthy dose of sf. I was reading this stuff at a point where people recognized that it really was representative of a golden age, although I was too young to be one of those people. I just enjoyed the material for what it was.

Just as there was little sf in mainstream publishing, there was little sf in mainstream cinema. Essentially no mainstream entertainment medium paid much attention to sf except at a cheap pulpish level. Edgar Rice Burroughs novels. The occasional sf-ish film, like Things to Come (check out that cast) in 1936. Monster and horror films, of course. One could, I guess, call King Kong an sf film; that would be stretching things, but it probably did hang on the same appeal as sf to some extent. There were the old Flash Gordon serials. There was, at the high point of pulp, a serial where Gene Autry visits Murania (The Phantom Empire). Dismal times for fans, eh?

The 50s were a period of bustling sf film activity, however. 1951 saw the mainstream The Day the Earth Stood Still, which holds up nicely 50 years later. But that movie was an exception. Most of the 50s movies were BEMs of one sort or another; the more intellectual of them were informed by fear of nuclear holocaust, but they were all mostly one monster or another out to get you, although sometimes the monster had a heart (but, hell, even King Kong had a heart). We had plenty of fun stuff in there: George Pal (if you need a crash course, then let there be lips: listen to “Science Fiction/Double Feature” from the Rocky Horror Show), Forbidden Planet, various Verne pictures, all sorts of things crawling up from under Japanese rocks—quite an assortment. As a matter of fact, there were enough of these pictures to entertain the baby boomers with great regularity. We really would head off to double features of the things, kiddy matinees where our parents would drop us off with a quarter for the movies and another quarter for snacks, and pick us up 4 hours later with our brains filled with monsters jumping out from behind rocks. Some of these pictures were pretty good. Most, however, were schlock. By the time the 60s rolled around, they had filtered down almost entirely to schlock. And, more importantly, we had been pretty much abandoned by the mainstream. This kind of movie was double-feature kid stuff unsuitable for intelligent adults. For all practical purposes, there was no good sf in the movies.

But we knew there could be good sf. “The Twilight Zone” proved that, at least as far as television was concerned. Other shows tried as well in the genre, but TZ was the gold standard. We sampled all the shows—“The Outer Limits,” “Way Out” (hosted by Roald Dahl, no less)—but usually we were disappointed. And let’s face it, even by 1966, when you have “Star Trek,” it’s not really all that good. I mean, everyone watched it but no one confused Lord Olivier with William Shatner. Not even once.

If you read the backstory on 2001: A Space Odyssey, you’ll pretty quickly discover one of the chief goals of its creators, Kubrick and Clark, which was to make the “proverbial intelligent science fiction movie.” That was literally one of their stated goals—smart sf. They were well aware that there was plenty of smart sf out there in the literature, but it wasn’t on the big screen. They believed that the mass audience was ready for it. Regardless of whether that belief was true, there was no question that the sf world was ready for it. All those people who read or had read sf, who had seen movies that danced around what the cinema could do in this area, longed for the proverbial intelligent science fiction movie. Spend a gazillion dollars in making it, and film it in Cinerama so that the screen wraps around the viewer? Even better. Throw in that this was now the height of the psychedelic 60s, and you get the bonus of all those hippies who were satisfied as long as enough bright lights were going off around them. Sounds like the recipe for a big hit.

The problem with “2001,” of course, is that it was not particularly accessible to the general market. It’s a slow-moving rhapsodic love affair with cosmology. Even diehard sf fans were known to fall asleep in the middle of it, wake up during “it’s full of stars” and stumble out totally confused. Nevertheless, like the movie or not like it, you can’t discount that it was the proverbial intelligent sf movie (even if you thought that intelligence was stupid).

I loved it. I still do.

So what you have now is a generation of baby boomers who have sat through endless pulp tv shows and films, and who have finally gotten one movie that they might embrace as the real thing. Maybe they have one or two more hidden gems (I loved Enemy from Space, but I’m afraid to watch it again for fear that it won’t hold up), but mostly they’ve got Twilight Zone and Star Trek on TV, and 2001 in the movies. Their formative years have been spent waiting for and checking out each new sf show or film in the hope, the desperate and small hope, that it might be good. Almost without fail, they were disappointed. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good.

In 1977 there was a little film called Star Wars. I saw it the day it opened; they gave me a “May the Force be with you” button. I was getting on in years at this point, and I was certainly no longer in the formative stage. That day in June changed the entire picture of sf in the movies. The bucks started rolling in, there was a generation of boomers who had been brought up on the old pulp stuff and the good stories and novels who were just rarin’ to go as filmmakers, there were kids out there who showed that they would go to these movies again and again and again… The floodgates opened, and since then, it would be unthinkable to suggest that someone needs to make the proverbial intelligent sf film (although I, for one, wish that someone had read the story of “The Minority Report” before filming some movie that, mirabile dictu, had no minority report). It would be unthinkable to suggest that sf is not mainstream (or at least mass market). The world, in a world, has changed.

And that, my dear, is the world you were born into. You have never lived in a world where there wasn’t Star Wars and CE3K and ET, etc., etc., etc. A world without the Borg? You’ve got 7 of 9, while all we ever had was Ernest Borgnine. There are sf titles regularly on the bestseller lists. Type in Neal in Google and Stephenson is number 2; type in Neil and Gaiman is number 1. And everything is always available. Watch the videos. Watch the reruns. Watch it on YouTube.

I, on the other hand, carry the baggage of my youth. The expectation that, whatever it is, it probably won’t be any good, but the hope, ever burning, that maybe this time it will be different.

So, when you watch Farscape, you say, This sucks, and you move along. When I watched Farscape, I kept saying, well, it’s not that good, but maybe it will get better next time. Or next time. Or next time.

I am of the conditioning where I spend too much hope counting on next times. The triumph of optimism over experience, I guess.

In any case, you did have to like the Muppets on the show, and the concept of the organic ship. (But don’t get me started on the Muppets!)