Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II: Some Thoughts

Sitting down and properly watching the Gene Roddenberry scripted and produced made-for-television film (and would-be series pilot) Genesis II I was not only pleasantly surprised by the quality of the production, but struck by how consistent with the pattern of Star Trek it was, not only in its humane values, but in the character of the conception. Just as Star Trek was a blend of action-adventure science fiction straight out of the American magazines of the pulp era with the more cerebral stuff of the British tradition of H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon (scientifically informed, socially critical, persuaded of the need for fundamental changes in humanity's way of living, Patrick Parrinder called this the "scientific world-view"), so was it the case here. With Star Trek, obviously, the pulpier tradition on which Roddenberry drew was the space opera. Here it is Buck Rogers--today remembered as a space opera hero himself, but originally the protagonist of a post-apocalyptic adventure tale in his original appearance in Philip Francis Nowlan's novella "Armageddon 2419 A.D." in the milestone August 1928 issue of old Hugo Gernsback's foundational Amazing Stories. Like Rogers, the Dylan Hunt who is the protagonist of Genesis II is an engineer put into suspended animation underground by an accident who awakens centuries later to find himself in a much-changed America, and caught up in its conflicts as different forces contend for power, with his scientific skills playing their part in the struggle. In Nowlan's tale the battle was simply a matter of nationalistic-racial resistance by Americans against the "Han" who had conquered the continent in a futuristic version of the then-popular "Yellow Peril" stories that inverted the reality of a China brutally colonized by the imperial powers into a tale of an imperial China colonizing the world (alas, a tradition far from dead even today). By contrast in Genesis II the struggle is between the militaristic slave society of the genetically altered Tyranians, and an organization called PAX--the heirs of the very scientists that Hunt worked with in his own day determined to preserve the best of the past and, if one may borrow the phrase, "build back better."

Comparing the movie with that reworking of its elements that was the TV show Andromeda I am struck by the differences even more than I am the similarities that initially had Genesis II getting my attention when I just chanced across it on what was probably still called the Sci-Fi Channel an eternity ago. The choice of a fallen intergalactic civilization rather than post-apocalyptic Earth as the setting for Hunt's adventure probably derived from an attempt to capitalize on Roddenberry's principal legacy being the creation of Star Trek--the more in as the 1990s were boom years for the small-screen space opera (with its continuations of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Stargate: SG-1, Farscape and much else drawing audiences). Meanwhile going with a military man rather than an engineer or a scientist as the new incarnation of Dylan Hunt seemed consistent with a tilt toward flashy action-adventure over ideas--and a broadly more conservative bent politically, to be seen in Hunt's aspiration to "restoring the Commonwealth" (the monarchical Commonwealth, even in its heyday far from the rationality of the Federation, appearing a shining ideal amid a new Dark Age), as against the PAX organization's more radical mission, so reminiscent of Wells' Air and Sea Control in The Shape of Things to Come. Also in line with this difference of political vision Andromeda treated the war-like Nietzscheans with far more respect than Genesis II did those proto-Nietzscheans, the Tyranians--its Hunt, if initially taken in by the beneficent face the Tyranians presented him, soon enough seeing their brutality for what it was, and coming over to the PAX, the good guys here up against the bad guys the Tyranians clearly are, cultural relativism (and the indulgence of the far rightist, the reactionary, the privileged jealous of their rights to abuse and exploit behind a facade of broad-minded respect for tradition that this relativism usually is at bottom) be damned.

Indeed, after the viewing I was left that much more convinced that Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda was really just Andromeda, and the posthumous attachment of Roddenberry's name to it another case of cynical exploitation of a past success by invoking a "brand" without any understanding of how it became a success, or respect for what it had ever been about. At the same time looking at this particular tale of a post-apocalyptic Earth I found myself comparing it to the post-apocalyptic drama we have had in this century, with their misanthropic emphasis on reptile-brained survivalism in a world where the viewer is encouraged to see everyone who is not them as a brain-eating zombie--to all evidences the Wellsian impulse not at all a part of the political imaginary of contemporary Hollywood, with all that says about the age in which we live.