As noted here last month, the Internet Review of Science Fiction's February 2010 edition will be its last.
Here it is.
As one might expect, this last issue is especially packed, with fifteen articles instead of the usual ten. Highlights include:
* Brent Kellmer's interview with the Schlock Mercenary webcomic's Howard Trayler.
* The final editions of the publication's columns, including Nicholas Kauffman's horror column "Dead Air," Corey Rixle's "Gamenivore" (not the only gaming-themed piece here, Dotar Sojat also offering a piece on Starfrontiersman Magazine), and of course, Lois Tilton's always-worthwhile short fiction round-up-heftier than usual, with the inclusion of an introduction about the gap between the big-name, established magazines with their big-name, established authors, and the newer online venues. (Like most pieces which touch on the fortunes of authors, especially those who are up-and-coming or at least aspiring, this one quickly kicked up a lively debate in the forum, also worth checking out if you're in that position, or just generally interested in what it's like to be on the edge of the business.)
* A piece by Hugo-winning writer David Levine on "How the Future Predicts Science Fiction." (Incidentally, the science fiction-isn't-futurism theme also came up at Charlie's Diary over the weekend.)
* Bill Lengemann on "The History of Matter Transmission" in the genre.
* Micharl Andre-Drussi on the anime Paranoia Agent (just one of several pieces he's written about Japanese animation, accessible at this listing of his articles at the site).
* Anna Cates on Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
* Gary Westfahl, in his fourth "What Science Fiction Leaves Out of the Future" piece, on pets in science fiction.
* Joe Nazare on Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, a half century later.
Once again, IROSF will be missed.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Rise and Decline of the Military Techno-Thriller (Continued)
After the Peak
The end of the Cold War, and its receding into the imaginative distance, predictably took a lot of the wind out of the genre's sails. Like the spy story, the techno-thriller grew out of a context of international, "great power" conflict to which the post-Cold War era has no equivalent, without which it necessarily suffers--indeed, to an even greater degree than spy tales do.39 Nonetheless, the attempts by techno-thriller writers to keep the genre going as the world changed around them merit some attention.
In Search of Monsters to Destroy
First and foremost, techno-thriller writers (among others) strove mightily to find a substitute among the usual suspects for the status of "next" LPC (Large Peer Competitor), another power capable of confronting the U.S. with a large-scale, high-tech military challenge. A Russia under Vladimir Zhirinovsky-like nationalists and China going on the warpath were both popular choices, as in Dale Brown's Sky Masters (1991), Chains of Command (1993) and Fatal Terrain (1997), or Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon (2000).
However, as Russia's economic and military power continued to wither through the 1990s, and Boris Yeltsin held onto the Russian presidency (ultimately handing it over to Vladimir Putin), the idea of hard-liners turning back the clock seemed increasingly passé. This did not eliminate the prospect of Western conflict with Russia, but the most extravagant scenarios fell by the wayside.
China was also problematic, not only because of the limits of its military capabilities, but American ambivalence about viewing the country (the booming of which is often presented as a validation of "the American way") as an enemy. Reflecting this outlook, the protagonists in China-centered thrillers were as likely to be intervening in the middle of a Chinese civil war on behalf of the Communist Party's opponents as combating Chinese aggression, as they do in Richard Herman's Dark Wing (1994) or James H. Cobb's Sea Strike (1998).
A number of writers also explored the possibility that U.S. allies would, in line with the neo-mercantilism fashionable at the time, turn into enemies. Americans battled Germany (or German-led alliances) in Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin's Cauldron (1993), Harold Coyle's The Ten Thousand (1994) and Joe Buff's Deep Sound Channel (2000); and Japan in Peters's War in 2020 (1991), Clancy's Debt of Honor (1994), Michael DiMercurio's Barrucada, Final Bearing (1996) and Coonts's Fortunes of War (1998).40 As worries about political spillover from economic competition inside the industrialized world faded amid the hosannas surrounding globalization (and the resurgence of American triumphalism) during the late 1990s, these fears faded almost completely.
In any case, such villains as they were able to create were usually good for only so much, their "enemyness" a more conditional, tenuous thing than the half-century competition with the Soviet Union.41 Certainly where Germany and Japan were concerned (and to a lesser extent, this was also the case with the more threatening versions of Russia and China writers invented), the aggressive behavior tended to be a brief, temporary aberration, their takeover by Really Bad Guys usually short-lived and running its course by the end of a limited, one-book conflict.42
As a result, writers increasingly turned their attention to smaller fry: "rogue" states like North Korea, Iran and pre-2003 Iraq; and non-state actors like terrorists and crime syndicates.43 However, rogue states appeared very limited opponents in the wake of the brief and one-sided 1991 Gulf War, and the margin of superiority American forces seemed likely to enjoy over any likely adversary afterward (the non-combat of 2005's Jarhead the ultimate commentary on the subject).44 Terrorists and drug lords were even less able to put up an interesting fight, given their tighter budgets and accustomed methods of operation.45
Accordingly, techno-thriller authors often tried to create a more level playing field, usually through the use of three devices.46 The first was to beef up the enemy's capabilities (often using leftover Soviet assets), as in Dale Brown's Shadows of Steel (1996), in which Iran acquires not just Backfire bombers, but a nuclear missile-equipped aircraft carrier.47
The second was to combine crises so as to threaten the U.S. with overstretch, as in Clancy's Executive Orders (1996), in which China and India get together with a united Iran-Iraq in a common plot.
The third was to find ever more ways to tie their heroes' hands politically-which usually meant developing the goings-on in Washington D.C. more fully.48 The interest in "Military Operations Other Than War" during that decade suggested an obvious option, placing their fictional soldiers in politically delicate peacekeeping missions where the "liberal establishment" could be an even bigger nuisance than usual.49
The Bust
Nonetheless, these devices only went so far, and the strain showed. Readers looking for high-tech military action would frequently get spies-and-commandos stuff only occasionally enlivened by a piece of new hardware, as in Larry Bond's The Enemy Within (1994) and Day of Wrath (1998); Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Red Rabbit (2002) and The Teeth of the Tiger (2003); and Stephen Coonts's later work, as in "Tommy Carmellini" novels like Liars & Thieves (2004)-or worse, large doses of flat, dull D.C. hijinks.50 There was also a tendency toward repetitiveness, Coonts alone devoting three of his Jake Grafton novels to the "Arab villain get nukes" theme-Final Flight (1986), The Red Horseman (1993) and Liberty (2003).
The "War on Terror" may actually have contributed to this process, by focusing public attention on forms of military conflict in which the kind of high-tech action and intrigue the techno-thriller centered on was marginal.51 Additionally, it soon became clear that there was little audience for films and television presenting events in the Middle East as entertainment, the Hollywood talent agency AEI listing "Middle East-Iraq stories" squarely in the WHAT'S NOT side of its market trends sheet at the time of this writing.52
It may also be that the costly, protracted and highly divisive conflict diminished the appeal of military adventure in general--just as it would seem to have played against the nostalgia for the Second World War so evident in the late 1990s.53
In any case, many of the most prominent techno-thriller writers stopped producing new material entirely in this period. Tom Clancy, who produced a major book every year or two for almost two decades, has not published a new novel since The Teeth of the Tiger six years ago; and even the series other writers have been publishing under his name (Op-Center, etc.) generally sputtered to a halt around 2006, the novelizations of his successful video game series excepted. Richard Herman's last book, The Last Phoenix (2003), likewise appeared that year. After 1999's Traitor, Ralph Peters (who became a prominent critic of much of the investment in high-tech, "heavy metal" weaponry) turned away entirely from contemporary military thrillers to writing the Civil War era "Abel Jones" mysteries under the name of "Owen Parry."54
The newer writers who came along in the mid- and late 1990s-like James H. Cobb and Patrick Robinson-were not in a position to have the impact of their predecessors, though many of them continued to publish and some did appear on the bestseller lists, Robinson in particular. Richard Clarke's The Scorpion's Gate (2005) attracted attention, but more because of his earlier place in the National Security Council, and his public criticism of the Bush administration in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, than anything actually in the book.55
If anything, the change has been more complete outside of print. While video games remain a robust market for these tales (partly because of their lesser dependence on credible plots) the fading of the military techno-thriller from television and film roughly tracked the course taken by the novels, up to their even more complete disappearance. The successful JAG spin-off NCIS (2003-) features a mostly civilian cast of characters (including a very un-military Goth in Abby Sciuto) quite unlike the dress uniformed protagonists of the earlier show, and a pop-oriented soundtrack light years away from the military brass band opening theme of its predecessor.56 In line with the fashion in police drama over the last decade, it also favors forensics over military hardware. (NCIS's own spin-off, the new NCIS: Los Angeles, seems to be continuing in this direction.)
The military techno-thriller has also been relegated to the straight-to-video end of the film market, along with many of the action heroes who once starred in movies of the type.57 Large-scale battles in feature films during the last decade were much more likely to involve warriors armed with cold steel in historical and fantasy epics (a tide itself now ebbing) than engagements with modern weaponry. When the "heavy metal" hardware did come out, it was mainly to battle extraterrestrial, robotic or super-powered opponents, and the encounters are much more H.G. Wells than Tom Clancy, the soldiers in them typically being outmatched by a more sophisticated foe (like Starscream in his battle with a flight of F-22s in The Transformers).58
Legacies
The downward trend seems likely only to continue, given the genre's diminished and still-diminishing saliency. Contrary to the aggressive expectations of some futurists, two decades have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall without a U.S. clash with another major power, or even reason to think such a clash is much more likely in the near future.
Another is that the continued automation of military operations may only further diminish the scope for that sort of fiction, a point already being reflected in film (as in 2008's remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, where a pair of MQ-9 Reaper drones make a run on GORT).
Still, it would be a mistake to think the techno-thriller did not make a mark on fiction in general and science fiction in particular--just as the Victorian-era invasion story and Edisonade left their marks long after they disappeared or became unrecognizable.
One point of connection is the transitioning of many techno-thriller writers to fiction with a more conspicuous speculative element, like Payne Harrison in his Roswell-themed Forbidden Summit (1997) and Stephen Coonts in his similarly-themed Saucer (2002, sequel 2004), or Harold Coyle in Dead Hand (2002), in which an asteroid strike is central to the plot.
If anything, the relative latecomers seemed even more prone to doing so, like James H. Cobb in Cibola (2004); R.J. Pineiro in Havoc (2005) and Spyware (2007); and Richard Clarke in Breakpoint (2007). Dan Brown, whose early novels included 1998's Digital Fortress and 2001's Deception Point, may also be reasonably included in this group of techno-thriller writers who went on to other things.
Additionally, some writers went in the opposite direction, established science fiction writers delving into the techno-thriller genre. Dean Ing, whose long list of credits include the completion of a number of Mack Reynolds' manuscripts, as well as collaborations with Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling, penned novels like The Ransom of Black Stealth One (1989). John Shirley's Eclipse trilogy (1985, 1987, 1989) about rebels fighting a takeover of Western Europe by neo-fascists, has a reasonable claim to being a techno-thriller in its own right-and is notable in being written from the point of view of the political left, a genre rarity. More recently, Bruce Sterling produced what may be the closest thing to a parody of the '80s-style techno-thriller to date, in 2004's Zenith Angle.59 (Indeed, it was in cyberpunk more than anywhere else that writers showed some proclivity to stand the techno-thriller on its head the way H.G. Wells did with the invasion stories of his own time.)
More broadly, the style of the military techno-thriller, in particular its close detailing of the functioning of complex military equipment on the battlefield and the use of multiple viewpoints to extend the depiction of the action, has impacted other science fiction as well. Harry Turtledove's Worldwar and "Timeline-191" cycles, for instance, frequently read like period versions of the 1980s-style future war story. Similarly, David Weber's highly successful Honor Harrington series gives the impression of a Tom Clancy novel adapted for a context of interstellar warfare.
John Birmingham's recent novels too reflect such an influence, as with his "Axis of Time" trilogy (2004's Weapons of Choice, 2005's Designated Targets and 2007's Final Impact), in which an American-allied naval task force travels back in time from 2021 to World War II; or his more recent Without Warning (2009), in which the U.S. simply vanishes in March 2003.
Another Australian writer, Matthew Reilly, similarly combines high-tech military action with more extravagant science fiction elements in novels like Temple (1999) and the Jack West series (2005, 2007 and 2009). Reilly has perhaps drawn more attention for his prose style than any other aspect of his work, but his combination of three-way military battles with alien artifacts, cryptozoology, exotic technologies ancient and futuristic, and archaeological mysteries that make Dan Brown's speculations look positively tame, helped to make him one of the most noteworthy action writers of the last decade. As much as anything else, the work of authors like Reilly suggests our imaginary battles are only becoming more so.
1 There were some exceptions, however, like Stephen Coonts's Vietnam-era The Flight of the Intruder (1986), and Ralph Peters The War in 2020 (1991), which went three decades into the future.
2 Of course, when the MacGuffin was a piece of American technology, the job of the heroes was reversed: to stop the Soviets from capturing or destroying it.
3 Barrett Tillman also merits notice, though prior to his success as a techno-thriller writer he was (and remains) a popular military and aviation historian.
4 "Grisham Ranks as Top-Selling Author of the Decade," CNN.com, Dec. 31, 1999. Accessed at http://archives.cnn.com/1999/books/news/12/31/1990.sellers/index.html.
5 Besides the books actually written by Clancy, there were four series of novels (Op-Center, Net Force, Net Force Explorers and Power Plays), and two series of nonfiction books (one of guided tours of U.S. military units, the other biographies of prominent American military figures), produced by other writers under his name.
6 By contrast, the earlier installments in the series avoided such elements. A noteworthy example is the early script for The Spy Who Loved Me, in which real-lifeworld terrorists used nuclear missiles to threaten the world's oil fields, rejected as "too political."
7 Clancy's empire made a mark here as well in miniseries based on the Op-Center (1995) and Net Force (1999) books.
8 There is, of course, another alternative, the bleaker, harder, more critical view most often identified with novels by John le Carré like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963)--a subtler reflection of this more fragmented reality.
9 Political thrillers like Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's Fail-Safe (1962) and Anthony Gray's The Penetrators (1965) likewise anticipated the feel of the techno-thriller in their detailed descriptions of weapons and communications systems, organizations, and their broad depictions of large-scale, high-technology military crises.
10 Raise the Titanic! is particularly significant in this regard, its plot centering on the pursuit of "byzanium" fuel for an American missile defense scheme, and saw Soviet attempts to interfere with the project-only the first of several Cussler novels to contain a significant Cold War element. Later Cussler novels like Dragon (1990) and Sahara (1992) move even further in the "techno-thriller" direction in their plots and depictions of military action.
11 The diffusion may also be partly due to the novels being military thrillers as well as spy thrillers, war stories historically being more prone to the use of such large casts of characters; and publishers' demand for larger books, the older style of spy novel typically resulting in a relatively slim narrative. (Ian Fleming's Bond books, typically 60-70,000 words in length, are so short as to be nearly unpublishable today.)
12 In The Hunt for Red October, the scenes containing Ryan come to 148 pages out of 468 in the paperback edition (New York: Berkeley, 1985). The proportion of the text devoted to his thoughts and actions trends downward from there, to a mere 207 of Debt of Honor's 990 pages (New York: Berkeley, 1995). Obviously, the film versions presented a more conventional story structure.
13 Nonetheless, Clancy included his fair share of implausible coincidences getting Ryan into a shoot-out with a GRU agent aboard the titular submarine in The Hunt For Red October, IRA terrorists in Patriot Games (1987) and the rescue mission (during which he manned a mini-gun) in Clear and Present Danger (1989). The supporting characters of John Clark and Domingo Chavez were also a closer fit with the traditional image of the globe-trotting spy.
14 Karen Hinckley and Barbara Hinckley, American Bestsellers: A Reader's Guide to Popular Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 212.
15 To give one example, Erskine Childers's 1903 The Riddle of the Sands, in which a British Foreign Office employee on holiday happens upon German preparations to invade Britain, is considered an important work in both those genres: both part of the stream of invasion stories that started in the 1870s, and an early example of the new spy novel that would strongly influence that genre's development as well.
16 The best-known scholar of the invasion story is I.F. Clarke, who offers a history of it in his book Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-1984, later updated as Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3794. He also wrote two articles on the subject for the journal Science Fiction Studies which are available online, "Before and After The Battle of Dorking," Science Fiction Studies 24.1 (Mar. 1997). Accessed at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/71/clarke71art.htm; and "Future War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871-1900," Science Fiction Studies 24.3 (Nov. 1997). Accessed at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/clarkeess.htm. Also see Nader Elhefnawy, "Revisiting the Victorian Techno-thriller," Strange Horizons, Feb. 23, 2009.
17 A notable, post-World War I example is Hector Charles Bywater's 1925 The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933.
18 Interestingly, this was despite Heinlein's recognition of the devastating power of nuclear weaponry quite early on, evident in essays like "The Last Days of the United States." This can be found in Heinlein, Expanded Universe (New York: Ace, 1980), pp. 145-162.
19 See Martha A. Barrter, "The Hidden Agenda." In George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, eds. Fights of Fancy (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), pp. 155-169. Indeed, as H. Bruce Franklin argues, "Almost without exception, movies that dealt openly with atomic weapons from 1952 through 1958 were Cold War propaganda tracts," like the Jimmy Stewart movie Strategic Air Command (1955). H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, Revised and Expanded Edition (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), p. 182.
20 Clarke, p. 201. That went even for the limited "hot" conflicts the U.S. planned for and actually fought at this time (as in Korea and Southeast Asia). The absence is not even mentioned in Arne Axelsson's survey of early Cold War literature, Restrained Response: American Novels of the Cold War and Korea, 1945-1962 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990). It might be pointed out, however, that Gray's 1965 novel The Penetrators was an argument for the necessity of a conventional military option (specifically, the continued value of bomber aircraft in the missile age).
21 Not all of the writers who took this position were defense "hawks." Arthur C. Clarke depicted just such a version of a Third World War in July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century (New York: Macmillan, 1986). The idea of a World War III limited enough to leave high-tech civilization intact also frequently appeared in 1980s cyberpunk, as with William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (1984, 1986, 1988), John Shirley's Eclipse trilogy (1985, 1987, 1989) and Victor Milan's Cybernetic Samurai (1986).
22 Much of the literature that followed explicitly reflected the interest in these possibilities. Laser-based missile defenses and space battles became popular subjects, as in Craig Thomas's later Mitchell Gant adventure, Winter Hawk (1987); Dale Brown's The Flight of the Old Dog (1987) and Silver Tower (1988); Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988); and Payne Harrison's Storming Intrepid (1989). Then-novel stealth aircraft were also popular as a focus, as in the novels by Brown and Harrison, Coonts's Minotaur (1989) and Timothy Rizzi's Nightstalker (1992).
23 This may have been due to Britain's decline as a military power after World War II, making it difficult for writers to put it at the center of this sort of story. This reality may also account for the outpouring of fiction about the Special Air Service at this time which-by focusing on an area where smaller, less affluent powers can be competitive-filled that gap in British popular fiction. (Tellingly, when Frederick Forsythe retold the story of Desert Storm as a Clancy-style techno-thriller in 1994's The Fist of God, it centered on the adventure of an SAS officer.) John Newsinger analyzes the phenomenon at length in Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1997).
24 Besides Clancy's Red Storm, Brown's Silver Tower and Harrison's Thunder of Erebus (1991), there were Harold Coyle's Team Yankee (1987) (which retold Hackett's 1978 tale from the viewpoint of an American tank crew) and Sword Point (1989); Ralph Peters's Red Army (1989); and Barrett Tillman's The Sixth Battle (1992).
25 In Clancy's Red Storm, the Soviet escalation of the conflict to the tactical nuclear level is narrowly averted by a coup in Moscow. Such plots were sometimes criticized as wishful thinking, historian Martin Van Creveld referring to Red Storm Rising in his annotated bibliography as the story of how World War III "will not happen." See Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free Press, 1991).
26 Nader Elhefnawy, "Of Alternate Nineteenth Centuries," The Internet Review of Science Fiction (Jul. 2009). Accessed at http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10562.
27 Robert Lekachman, "Virtuous Men and Perfect Weapons," New York Times, Jul. 27, 1986. Accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/27/books/virtuous-men-and-perfect-weapons.html.
28 Clancy in particular would be celebrated and denigrated as the "minstrel of the military-industrial complex." See Walter Shapiro, "Of Arms and the Man," Time, Aug. 21, 1989. Accessed at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,958400-1,00.html. Andrew Bacevich offers a more critical examination in The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 116-117.
29 John Clute, "Yore is Us," The Infinite Matrix, Nov. 29, 2001. Accessed at http://www.infinitematrix.net/columns/clute/clute1.html. Roughly analogous, and much more famous, are some of Jules Verne's works, particularly Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), in which Captain Nemo uses his submarine Nautilus to exact revenge on the British Empire.
30 In the genre-defining British tale The Battle of Dorking, the German conquest is made feasible by the country's seizure of strategic North European coastlines and its clever use of deception against an overstretched and underprepared British Empire, new technologies playing only a supporting role (with the most notable the Germans' use of vaguely described "engines" to sink a part of the Royal Navy). By contrast, Stanley Waterloo's 1898 Armageddon-typical of the type-the airship Wild Goose enables the U.S. and its allies win a world war.
31 Franklin, pp. 131-134. In addition to the pre-World War I stories, this was also often the case in the early Cold War period when the U.S. had a monopoly on nuclear weaponry, though rare in the 1980s techno-thriller, where conflict (and its consequences) tended to be more constrained. Franklin, p. 52.
32 Jeff Nevins, "Introduction: The 19th Century Roots of Steampunk." In Ann & Jeff Vandermeer, Steampunk (San Fransisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2008), p. 10.
33 Tom Clancy in particular was given to never passing up an opportunity to insult the Soviets, in Red October even going so far as to denigrate the attractiveness of the models in the pornography Soviet sailors had in their lockers. Clancy, Red October, p. 420.
34 Dale Brown, The Flight of the Old Dog (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1987), p. 26. As anyone who has so much as glanced at a serious study of the Soviet economy realizes, this is a grossly oversimplistic picture, but the view had no shortage of adherents.
35 One such exception is Ralph Peters's 1989 Red Army, in which a divided Western alliance accedes to the Soviet conquest of West Germany rather than escalate the fight.
36 Anti-war space stories like Joe Haldeman's 1974 The Forever War; and low-tech space war stories, like Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai novels (starting with 1959's Dorsai!), which posit technological advances canceling each other out so that warfare still came down to close combat between small groups of men with small arms; would seem less relevant to this particular tradition.
37 George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 378-379.
38 Franklin discusses this extensively in War Stars, pp. 200-205.
39 A quick glance at the bestseller lists of the 2000s (and even the 1990s) shows no spy story writer enjoying the prominence of Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsythe, Ken Follett and John le Carré in the 1970s and 1980s, Clancy excepted--as well as a lower profile for the genre in general. (One can access a large archive of the New York Times's bestseller lists dating back to the 1940s at the web site of Hawes Publications, http://www.hawes.com/.)
40 These concerns were not totally confined to fiction. George Friedman and Meredith LeBard published a nonfiction book making the case for the likelihood of such a conflict, The Coming War With Japan (New York: St. Martin's), 1991. Friedman recently attempted to rehabilitate this prediction in The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
41 For a discussion of "enemyness" see Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, revised edition (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). This was already a problem even before the Cold War's end, as demonstrated by the climactic battle in Top Gun, where the Tomcat pilots engage anonymous black jets in a skirmish with a background underwritten to the point of absurdity.
42 Joe Buff is unique in having extended his saga of a Third World War fought between an Anglo-American alliance and a continentally dominant Germany across a half dozen books.
43 Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay were particularly popular villains before his regime's overthrow, as in R.J. Pineiro's Ultimatum (1994) and Chris Stewart's Kill Box (1998).
44 This was also because many of these states had earlier been Soviet client states, now making do without their old friend or sponsor; and because the Cold War context that made local actions appear more globally significant had vanished.
45 It is worth noting that the lack of really big enemies for the U.S. military to face had become something of a joke, as in Michael Moore's political satire Canadian Bacon (1994).
46 Contemporary readers may be surprised to know that Chesney used these various techniques in The Battle of Dorking to make the danger of a German invasion of Britain appear more plausible. See the discussion in Elhefnawy, "Revisiting the Victorian Techno-thriller."
47 On a more modest scale, this was even done with criminal syndicates, as in Brown's Hammerheads (1990), where the villainous drug smuggler amasses a small air force complete with fighter jets (an idea also seen in film, notably 1990's Fire Birds and 1992's Aces: Iron Eagle III).
48 Richard Herman was particularly prone to invent situations in which small U.S. forces (often making do with less than the best equipment) were stuck battling a foe that ordinarily would be no match for American military power. In The Warbirds, only an American wing of F-4 Phantoms stands between a Soviet-backed Iran and the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. In Iron Gate (1995), U.S. forces are compelled to try and keep the peace in South Africa with just a handful of A-10s.
49 Nonetheless, the level of interest in such situations was low because the conflicts did not affect "U.S. national interest" as commonly construed, or fit into familiar narratives of heroes, villains and victims offering readers "instant drama." (Indeed, many potential situations, like the war in the Congo, were virtually ignored by the American media.) Still, a few books were written about relatively unfamiliar situations. Jim DeFelice's War Breaker concerned large-scale fighting between India and Pakistan, while James H. Cobb's Sea Fighter (2000) is set in West Africa.
50 Space warfare in particular became rare, given its place at the high end of the technological spectrum. Nonetheless, a number of novels treating the theme did appear, including Hagberg's By Dawn's Early Light (2003) and Dale Brown's Strike Force (2007) and Shadow Command (2008). Still, it may be that the more limited scale and context of most of these conflicts (and perhaps the passing of the Cold War's memory) made writers more likely to depict tactical nuclear war-fighting, as in the novels of Joe Buff and Dale Brown (particularly the latter's 2004 Plan of Attack).
51 It might also be noted that with Saddam Hussein overthrown in Iraq, a friendly regime installed in Afghanistan, Libya downgraded considerably as an adversary and China, Russia and Pakistan combating a common enemy along with the U.S.; and the prevailing piety being that the "War on Terror" trumped all other concerns in international politics; the list of potential enemies seemed shorter still to those given to thinking in these terms.
52 The market trends sheet can be found at the agency's web site, http://www.aeionline.com/. Of course, the situation was similar during the Vietnam War, which saw the release of only one Hollywood film about the subject during its course--the controversial The Green Berets (1968). Nonetheless, there were exceptions. The controversial television series 24 did well, and JAG did see a ratings spike in its last years, while the David Mamet-created The Unit (2006-), which began as a mid-season replacement, was also a hit.
53 Indeed, the absence of really successful films of this type may be one reason why the film version of Frank Miller's 300 (2007) was so quickly accepted as a metaphor for the conflict.
54 For the latter half of the 1990s, Harold Coyle also stopped writing techno-thrillers, instead producing a trio of historical novels, comprised of a two book Civil War saga-Look Away (1995) and Until the End (1996)-and the French and Indian War story, Savage Wilderness (1997).
55 Indeed, weak as the spy genre presently is, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor and Ted Bell have made more of a splash than these authors, while Cobb's most recent writing has been for the Robert Ludlum franchise's "Covert One" imprint.
56 In fact, the show's use of music has garnered it considerable attention. See Phil Gallo, "CBS Finds New Way to Use Tunes," Variety, Feb. 2, 2009. Accessed at http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117999433.html?categoryid=2857&cs=1.
57 Examples of these movies include Wesley Snipes's The Marksman (2005), Steven Seagal's Submerged (2005) and Flight of Fury (2007) and Jean-Claude Van Damme's Second in Command (2006). This was even the case with the sequels to the relatively successful Behind Enemy Lines, appearing in direct-to-video format in 2006 and 2009 (without Owen Wilson).
58 Already in 1996 Independence Day was a bigger hit than any movie in which American servicemen tackled a real-world opponent, and as of 2009, far and away the most commercially successful film about the "War on Terror" is Iron Man (2008), which simply scratched the Communists from the original Stan Lee plot and replaced them with Islamic fundamentalists. See Nader Elhefnawy, "Science Fiction and the Post-Cold War," Internet Review of Science Fiction, Jan. 2009. Accessed at http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10498.
59 In that novel, set against the backdrop of the War on Terror's earliest days, an American businessman offers a laser weapon for sale on the international market, which he uses to disrupt the workings of an American reconnaissance satellite in a demonstration of its power. His prospective buyers, representatives of the Chinese and Indian governments, however, prove spectacularly uninterested in the product.
Back.
The end of the Cold War, and its receding into the imaginative distance, predictably took a lot of the wind out of the genre's sails. Like the spy story, the techno-thriller grew out of a context of international, "great power" conflict to which the post-Cold War era has no equivalent, without which it necessarily suffers--indeed, to an even greater degree than spy tales do.39 Nonetheless, the attempts by techno-thriller writers to keep the genre going as the world changed around them merit some attention.
In Search of Monsters to Destroy
First and foremost, techno-thriller writers (among others) strove mightily to find a substitute among the usual suspects for the status of "next" LPC (Large Peer Competitor), another power capable of confronting the U.S. with a large-scale, high-tech military challenge. A Russia under Vladimir Zhirinovsky-like nationalists and China going on the warpath were both popular choices, as in Dale Brown's Sky Masters (1991), Chains of Command (1993) and Fatal Terrain (1997), or Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon (2000).
However, as Russia's economic and military power continued to wither through the 1990s, and Boris Yeltsin held onto the Russian presidency (ultimately handing it over to Vladimir Putin), the idea of hard-liners turning back the clock seemed increasingly passé. This did not eliminate the prospect of Western conflict with Russia, but the most extravagant scenarios fell by the wayside.
China was also problematic, not only because of the limits of its military capabilities, but American ambivalence about viewing the country (the booming of which is often presented as a validation of "the American way") as an enemy. Reflecting this outlook, the protagonists in China-centered thrillers were as likely to be intervening in the middle of a Chinese civil war on behalf of the Communist Party's opponents as combating Chinese aggression, as they do in Richard Herman's Dark Wing (1994) or James H. Cobb's Sea Strike (1998).
A number of writers also explored the possibility that U.S. allies would, in line with the neo-mercantilism fashionable at the time, turn into enemies. Americans battled Germany (or German-led alliances) in Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin's Cauldron (1993), Harold Coyle's The Ten Thousand (1994) and Joe Buff's Deep Sound Channel (2000); and Japan in Peters's War in 2020 (1991), Clancy's Debt of Honor (1994), Michael DiMercurio's Barrucada, Final Bearing (1996) and Coonts's Fortunes of War (1998).40 As worries about political spillover from economic competition inside the industrialized world faded amid the hosannas surrounding globalization (and the resurgence of American triumphalism) during the late 1990s, these fears faded almost completely.
In any case, such villains as they were able to create were usually good for only so much, their "enemyness" a more conditional, tenuous thing than the half-century competition with the Soviet Union.41 Certainly where Germany and Japan were concerned (and to a lesser extent, this was also the case with the more threatening versions of Russia and China writers invented), the aggressive behavior tended to be a brief, temporary aberration, their takeover by Really Bad Guys usually short-lived and running its course by the end of a limited, one-book conflict.42
As a result, writers increasingly turned their attention to smaller fry: "rogue" states like North Korea, Iran and pre-2003 Iraq; and non-state actors like terrorists and crime syndicates.43 However, rogue states appeared very limited opponents in the wake of the brief and one-sided 1991 Gulf War, and the margin of superiority American forces seemed likely to enjoy over any likely adversary afterward (the non-combat of 2005's Jarhead the ultimate commentary on the subject).44 Terrorists and drug lords were even less able to put up an interesting fight, given their tighter budgets and accustomed methods of operation.45
Accordingly, techno-thriller authors often tried to create a more level playing field, usually through the use of three devices.46 The first was to beef up the enemy's capabilities (often using leftover Soviet assets), as in Dale Brown's Shadows of Steel (1996), in which Iran acquires not just Backfire bombers, but a nuclear missile-equipped aircraft carrier.47
The second was to combine crises so as to threaten the U.S. with overstretch, as in Clancy's Executive Orders (1996), in which China and India get together with a united Iran-Iraq in a common plot.
The third was to find ever more ways to tie their heroes' hands politically-which usually meant developing the goings-on in Washington D.C. more fully.48 The interest in "Military Operations Other Than War" during that decade suggested an obvious option, placing their fictional soldiers in politically delicate peacekeeping missions where the "liberal establishment" could be an even bigger nuisance than usual.49
The Bust
Nonetheless, these devices only went so far, and the strain showed. Readers looking for high-tech military action would frequently get spies-and-commandos stuff only occasionally enlivened by a piece of new hardware, as in Larry Bond's The Enemy Within (1994) and Day of Wrath (1998); Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Red Rabbit (2002) and The Teeth of the Tiger (2003); and Stephen Coonts's later work, as in "Tommy Carmellini" novels like Liars & Thieves (2004)-or worse, large doses of flat, dull D.C. hijinks.50 There was also a tendency toward repetitiveness, Coonts alone devoting three of his Jake Grafton novels to the "Arab villain get nukes" theme-Final Flight (1986), The Red Horseman (1993) and Liberty (2003).
The "War on Terror" may actually have contributed to this process, by focusing public attention on forms of military conflict in which the kind of high-tech action and intrigue the techno-thriller centered on was marginal.51 Additionally, it soon became clear that there was little audience for films and television presenting events in the Middle East as entertainment, the Hollywood talent agency AEI listing "Middle East-Iraq stories" squarely in the WHAT'S NOT side of its market trends sheet at the time of this writing.52
It may also be that the costly, protracted and highly divisive conflict diminished the appeal of military adventure in general--just as it would seem to have played against the nostalgia for the Second World War so evident in the late 1990s.53
In any case, many of the most prominent techno-thriller writers stopped producing new material entirely in this period. Tom Clancy, who produced a major book every year or two for almost two decades, has not published a new novel since The Teeth of the Tiger six years ago; and even the series other writers have been publishing under his name (Op-Center, etc.) generally sputtered to a halt around 2006, the novelizations of his successful video game series excepted. Richard Herman's last book, The Last Phoenix (2003), likewise appeared that year. After 1999's Traitor, Ralph Peters (who became a prominent critic of much of the investment in high-tech, "heavy metal" weaponry) turned away entirely from contemporary military thrillers to writing the Civil War era "Abel Jones" mysteries under the name of "Owen Parry."54
The newer writers who came along in the mid- and late 1990s-like James H. Cobb and Patrick Robinson-were not in a position to have the impact of their predecessors, though many of them continued to publish and some did appear on the bestseller lists, Robinson in particular. Richard Clarke's The Scorpion's Gate (2005) attracted attention, but more because of his earlier place in the National Security Council, and his public criticism of the Bush administration in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, than anything actually in the book.55
If anything, the change has been more complete outside of print. While video games remain a robust market for these tales (partly because of their lesser dependence on credible plots) the fading of the military techno-thriller from television and film roughly tracked the course taken by the novels, up to their even more complete disappearance. The successful JAG spin-off NCIS (2003-) features a mostly civilian cast of characters (including a very un-military Goth in Abby Sciuto) quite unlike the dress uniformed protagonists of the earlier show, and a pop-oriented soundtrack light years away from the military brass band opening theme of its predecessor.56 In line with the fashion in police drama over the last decade, it also favors forensics over military hardware. (NCIS's own spin-off, the new NCIS: Los Angeles, seems to be continuing in this direction.)
The military techno-thriller has also been relegated to the straight-to-video end of the film market, along with many of the action heroes who once starred in movies of the type.57 Large-scale battles in feature films during the last decade were much more likely to involve warriors armed with cold steel in historical and fantasy epics (a tide itself now ebbing) than engagements with modern weaponry. When the "heavy metal" hardware did come out, it was mainly to battle extraterrestrial, robotic or super-powered opponents, and the encounters are much more H.G. Wells than Tom Clancy, the soldiers in them typically being outmatched by a more sophisticated foe (like Starscream in his battle with a flight of F-22s in The Transformers).58
Legacies
The downward trend seems likely only to continue, given the genre's diminished and still-diminishing saliency. Contrary to the aggressive expectations of some futurists, two decades have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall without a U.S. clash with another major power, or even reason to think such a clash is much more likely in the near future.
Another is that the continued automation of military operations may only further diminish the scope for that sort of fiction, a point already being reflected in film (as in 2008's remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, where a pair of MQ-9 Reaper drones make a run on GORT).
Still, it would be a mistake to think the techno-thriller did not make a mark on fiction in general and science fiction in particular--just as the Victorian-era invasion story and Edisonade left their marks long after they disappeared or became unrecognizable.
One point of connection is the transitioning of many techno-thriller writers to fiction with a more conspicuous speculative element, like Payne Harrison in his Roswell-themed Forbidden Summit (1997) and Stephen Coonts in his similarly-themed Saucer (2002, sequel 2004), or Harold Coyle in Dead Hand (2002), in which an asteroid strike is central to the plot.
If anything, the relative latecomers seemed even more prone to doing so, like James H. Cobb in Cibola (2004); R.J. Pineiro in Havoc (2005) and Spyware (2007); and Richard Clarke in Breakpoint (2007). Dan Brown, whose early novels included 1998's Digital Fortress and 2001's Deception Point, may also be reasonably included in this group of techno-thriller writers who went on to other things.
Additionally, some writers went in the opposite direction, established science fiction writers delving into the techno-thriller genre. Dean Ing, whose long list of credits include the completion of a number of Mack Reynolds' manuscripts, as well as collaborations with Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling, penned novels like The Ransom of Black Stealth One (1989). John Shirley's Eclipse trilogy (1985, 1987, 1989) about rebels fighting a takeover of Western Europe by neo-fascists, has a reasonable claim to being a techno-thriller in its own right-and is notable in being written from the point of view of the political left, a genre rarity. More recently, Bruce Sterling produced what may be the closest thing to a parody of the '80s-style techno-thriller to date, in 2004's Zenith Angle.59 (Indeed, it was in cyberpunk more than anywhere else that writers showed some proclivity to stand the techno-thriller on its head the way H.G. Wells did with the invasion stories of his own time.)
More broadly, the style of the military techno-thriller, in particular its close detailing of the functioning of complex military equipment on the battlefield and the use of multiple viewpoints to extend the depiction of the action, has impacted other science fiction as well. Harry Turtledove's Worldwar and "Timeline-191" cycles, for instance, frequently read like period versions of the 1980s-style future war story. Similarly, David Weber's highly successful Honor Harrington series gives the impression of a Tom Clancy novel adapted for a context of interstellar warfare.
John Birmingham's recent novels too reflect such an influence, as with his "Axis of Time" trilogy (2004's Weapons of Choice, 2005's Designated Targets and 2007's Final Impact), in which an American-allied naval task force travels back in time from 2021 to World War II; or his more recent Without Warning (2009), in which the U.S. simply vanishes in March 2003.
Another Australian writer, Matthew Reilly, similarly combines high-tech military action with more extravagant science fiction elements in novels like Temple (1999) and the Jack West series (2005, 2007 and 2009). Reilly has perhaps drawn more attention for his prose style than any other aspect of his work, but his combination of three-way military battles with alien artifacts, cryptozoology, exotic technologies ancient and futuristic, and archaeological mysteries that make Dan Brown's speculations look positively tame, helped to make him one of the most noteworthy action writers of the last decade. As much as anything else, the work of authors like Reilly suggests our imaginary battles are only becoming more so.
1 There were some exceptions, however, like Stephen Coonts's Vietnam-era The Flight of the Intruder (1986), and Ralph Peters The War in 2020 (1991), which went three decades into the future.
2 Of course, when the MacGuffin was a piece of American technology, the job of the heroes was reversed: to stop the Soviets from capturing or destroying it.
3 Barrett Tillman also merits notice, though prior to his success as a techno-thriller writer he was (and remains) a popular military and aviation historian.
4 "Grisham Ranks as Top-Selling Author of the Decade," CNN.com, Dec. 31, 1999. Accessed at http://archives.cnn.com/1999/books/news/12/31/1990.sellers/index.html.
5 Besides the books actually written by Clancy, there were four series of novels (Op-Center, Net Force, Net Force Explorers and Power Plays), and two series of nonfiction books (one of guided tours of U.S. military units, the other biographies of prominent American military figures), produced by other writers under his name.
6 By contrast, the earlier installments in the series avoided such elements. A noteworthy example is the early script for The Spy Who Loved Me, in which real-lifeworld terrorists used nuclear missiles to threaten the world's oil fields, rejected as "too political."
7 Clancy's empire made a mark here as well in miniseries based on the Op-Center (1995) and Net Force (1999) books.
8 There is, of course, another alternative, the bleaker, harder, more critical view most often identified with novels by John le Carré like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963)--a subtler reflection of this more fragmented reality.
9 Political thrillers like Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's Fail-Safe (1962) and Anthony Gray's The Penetrators (1965) likewise anticipated the feel of the techno-thriller in their detailed descriptions of weapons and communications systems, organizations, and their broad depictions of large-scale, high-technology military crises.
10 Raise the Titanic! is particularly significant in this regard, its plot centering on the pursuit of "byzanium" fuel for an American missile defense scheme, and saw Soviet attempts to interfere with the project-only the first of several Cussler novels to contain a significant Cold War element. Later Cussler novels like Dragon (1990) and Sahara (1992) move even further in the "techno-thriller" direction in their plots and depictions of military action.
11 The diffusion may also be partly due to the novels being military thrillers as well as spy thrillers, war stories historically being more prone to the use of such large casts of characters; and publishers' demand for larger books, the older style of spy novel typically resulting in a relatively slim narrative. (Ian Fleming's Bond books, typically 60-70,000 words in length, are so short as to be nearly unpublishable today.)
12 In The Hunt for Red October, the scenes containing Ryan come to 148 pages out of 468 in the paperback edition (New York: Berkeley, 1985). The proportion of the text devoted to his thoughts and actions trends downward from there, to a mere 207 of Debt of Honor's 990 pages (New York: Berkeley, 1995). Obviously, the film versions presented a more conventional story structure.
13 Nonetheless, Clancy included his fair share of implausible coincidences getting Ryan into a shoot-out with a GRU agent aboard the titular submarine in The Hunt For Red October, IRA terrorists in Patriot Games (1987) and the rescue mission (during which he manned a mini-gun) in Clear and Present Danger (1989). The supporting characters of John Clark and Domingo Chavez were also a closer fit with the traditional image of the globe-trotting spy.
14 Karen Hinckley and Barbara Hinckley, American Bestsellers: A Reader's Guide to Popular Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 212.
15 To give one example, Erskine Childers's 1903 The Riddle of the Sands, in which a British Foreign Office employee on holiday happens upon German preparations to invade Britain, is considered an important work in both those genres: both part of the stream of invasion stories that started in the 1870s, and an early example of the new spy novel that would strongly influence that genre's development as well.
16 The best-known scholar of the invasion story is I.F. Clarke, who offers a history of it in his book Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-1984, later updated as Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars 1763-3794. He also wrote two articles on the subject for the journal Science Fiction Studies which are available online, "Before and After The Battle of Dorking," Science Fiction Studies 24.1 (Mar. 1997). Accessed at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/71/clarke71art.htm; and "Future War Fiction: The First Main Phase, 1871-1900," Science Fiction Studies 24.3 (Nov. 1997). Accessed at http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/clarkeess.htm. Also see Nader Elhefnawy, "Revisiting the Victorian Techno-thriller," Strange Horizons, Feb. 23, 2009.
17 A notable, post-World War I example is Hector Charles Bywater's 1925 The Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-1933.
18 Interestingly, this was despite Heinlein's recognition of the devastating power of nuclear weaponry quite early on, evident in essays like "The Last Days of the United States." This can be found in Heinlein, Expanded Universe (New York: Ace, 1980), pp. 145-162.
19 See Martha A. Barrter, "The Hidden Agenda." In George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, eds. Fights of Fancy (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993), pp. 155-169. Indeed, as H. Bruce Franklin argues, "Almost without exception, movies that dealt openly with atomic weapons from 1952 through 1958 were Cold War propaganda tracts," like the Jimmy Stewart movie Strategic Air Command (1955). H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, Revised and Expanded Edition (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), p. 182.
20 Clarke, p. 201. That went even for the limited "hot" conflicts the U.S. planned for and actually fought at this time (as in Korea and Southeast Asia). The absence is not even mentioned in Arne Axelsson's survey of early Cold War literature, Restrained Response: American Novels of the Cold War and Korea, 1945-1962 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990). It might be pointed out, however, that Gray's 1965 novel The Penetrators was an argument for the necessity of a conventional military option (specifically, the continued value of bomber aircraft in the missile age).
21 Not all of the writers who took this position were defense "hawks." Arthur C. Clarke depicted just such a version of a Third World War in July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century (New York: Macmillan, 1986). The idea of a World War III limited enough to leave high-tech civilization intact also frequently appeared in 1980s cyberpunk, as with William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (1984, 1986, 1988), John Shirley's Eclipse trilogy (1985, 1987, 1989) and Victor Milan's Cybernetic Samurai (1986).
22 Much of the literature that followed explicitly reflected the interest in these possibilities. Laser-based missile defenses and space battles became popular subjects, as in Craig Thomas's later Mitchell Gant adventure, Winter Hawk (1987); Dale Brown's The Flight of the Old Dog (1987) and Silver Tower (1988); Tom Clancy's The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988); and Payne Harrison's Storming Intrepid (1989). Then-novel stealth aircraft were also popular as a focus, as in the novels by Brown and Harrison, Coonts's Minotaur (1989) and Timothy Rizzi's Nightstalker (1992).
23 This may have been due to Britain's decline as a military power after World War II, making it difficult for writers to put it at the center of this sort of story. This reality may also account for the outpouring of fiction about the Special Air Service at this time which-by focusing on an area where smaller, less affluent powers can be competitive-filled that gap in British popular fiction. (Tellingly, when Frederick Forsythe retold the story of Desert Storm as a Clancy-style techno-thriller in 1994's The Fist of God, it centered on the adventure of an SAS officer.) John Newsinger analyzes the phenomenon at length in Dangerous Men: The SAS and Popular Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1997).
24 Besides Clancy's Red Storm, Brown's Silver Tower and Harrison's Thunder of Erebus (1991), there were Harold Coyle's Team Yankee (1987) (which retold Hackett's 1978 tale from the viewpoint of an American tank crew) and Sword Point (1989); Ralph Peters's Red Army (1989); and Barrett Tillman's The Sixth Battle (1992).
25 In Clancy's Red Storm, the Soviet escalation of the conflict to the tactical nuclear level is narrowly averted by a coup in Moscow. Such plots were sometimes criticized as wishful thinking, historian Martin Van Creveld referring to Red Storm Rising in his annotated bibliography as the story of how World War III "will not happen." See Martin Van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free Press, 1991).
26 Nader Elhefnawy, "Of Alternate Nineteenth Centuries," The Internet Review of Science Fiction (Jul. 2009). Accessed at http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10562.
27 Robert Lekachman, "Virtuous Men and Perfect Weapons," New York Times, Jul. 27, 1986. Accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/27/books/virtuous-men-and-perfect-weapons.html.
28 Clancy in particular would be celebrated and denigrated as the "minstrel of the military-industrial complex." See Walter Shapiro, "Of Arms and the Man," Time, Aug. 21, 1989. Accessed at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,958400-1,00.html. Andrew Bacevich offers a more critical examination in The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 116-117.
29 John Clute, "Yore is Us," The Infinite Matrix, Nov. 29, 2001. Accessed at http://www.infinitematrix.net/columns/clute/clute1.html. Roughly analogous, and much more famous, are some of Jules Verne's works, particularly Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), in which Captain Nemo uses his submarine Nautilus to exact revenge on the British Empire.
30 In the genre-defining British tale The Battle of Dorking, the German conquest is made feasible by the country's seizure of strategic North European coastlines and its clever use of deception against an overstretched and underprepared British Empire, new technologies playing only a supporting role (with the most notable the Germans' use of vaguely described "engines" to sink a part of the Royal Navy). By contrast, Stanley Waterloo's 1898 Armageddon-typical of the type-the airship Wild Goose enables the U.S. and its allies win a world war.
31 Franklin, pp. 131-134. In addition to the pre-World War I stories, this was also often the case in the early Cold War period when the U.S. had a monopoly on nuclear weaponry, though rare in the 1980s techno-thriller, where conflict (and its consequences) tended to be more constrained. Franklin, p. 52.
32 Jeff Nevins, "Introduction: The 19th Century Roots of Steampunk." In Ann & Jeff Vandermeer, Steampunk (San Fransisco, CA: Tachyon Publications, 2008), p. 10.
33 Tom Clancy in particular was given to never passing up an opportunity to insult the Soviets, in Red October even going so far as to denigrate the attractiveness of the models in the pornography Soviet sailors had in their lockers. Clancy, Red October, p. 420.
34 Dale Brown, The Flight of the Old Dog (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1987), p. 26. As anyone who has so much as glanced at a serious study of the Soviet economy realizes, this is a grossly oversimplistic picture, but the view had no shortage of adherents.
35 One such exception is Ralph Peters's 1989 Red Army, in which a divided Western alliance accedes to the Soviet conquest of West Germany rather than escalate the fight.
36 Anti-war space stories like Joe Haldeman's 1974 The Forever War; and low-tech space war stories, like Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai novels (starting with 1959's Dorsai!), which posit technological advances canceling each other out so that warfare still came down to close combat between small groups of men with small arms; would seem less relevant to this particular tradition.
37 George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 378-379.
38 Franklin discusses this extensively in War Stars, pp. 200-205.
39 A quick glance at the bestseller lists of the 2000s (and even the 1990s) shows no spy story writer enjoying the prominence of Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsythe, Ken Follett and John le Carré in the 1970s and 1980s, Clancy excepted--as well as a lower profile for the genre in general. (One can access a large archive of the New York Times's bestseller lists dating back to the 1940s at the web site of Hawes Publications, http://www.hawes.com/.)
40 These concerns were not totally confined to fiction. George Friedman and Meredith LeBard published a nonfiction book making the case for the likelihood of such a conflict, The Coming War With Japan (New York: St. Martin's), 1991. Friedman recently attempted to rehabilitate this prediction in The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
41 For a discussion of "enemyness" see Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, revised edition (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007). This was already a problem even before the Cold War's end, as demonstrated by the climactic battle in Top Gun, where the Tomcat pilots engage anonymous black jets in a skirmish with a background underwritten to the point of absurdity.
42 Joe Buff is unique in having extended his saga of a Third World War fought between an Anglo-American alliance and a continentally dominant Germany across a half dozen books.
43 Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay were particularly popular villains before his regime's overthrow, as in R.J. Pineiro's Ultimatum (1994) and Chris Stewart's Kill Box (1998).
44 This was also because many of these states had earlier been Soviet client states, now making do without their old friend or sponsor; and because the Cold War context that made local actions appear more globally significant had vanished.
45 It is worth noting that the lack of really big enemies for the U.S. military to face had become something of a joke, as in Michael Moore's political satire Canadian Bacon (1994).
46 Contemporary readers may be surprised to know that Chesney used these various techniques in The Battle of Dorking to make the danger of a German invasion of Britain appear more plausible. See the discussion in Elhefnawy, "Revisiting the Victorian Techno-thriller."
47 On a more modest scale, this was even done with criminal syndicates, as in Brown's Hammerheads (1990), where the villainous drug smuggler amasses a small air force complete with fighter jets (an idea also seen in film, notably 1990's Fire Birds and 1992's Aces: Iron Eagle III).
48 Richard Herman was particularly prone to invent situations in which small U.S. forces (often making do with less than the best equipment) were stuck battling a foe that ordinarily would be no match for American military power. In The Warbirds, only an American wing of F-4 Phantoms stands between a Soviet-backed Iran and the oil fields of the Persian Gulf. In Iron Gate (1995), U.S. forces are compelled to try and keep the peace in South Africa with just a handful of A-10s.
49 Nonetheless, the level of interest in such situations was low because the conflicts did not affect "U.S. national interest" as commonly construed, or fit into familiar narratives of heroes, villains and victims offering readers "instant drama." (Indeed, many potential situations, like the war in the Congo, were virtually ignored by the American media.) Still, a few books were written about relatively unfamiliar situations. Jim DeFelice's War Breaker concerned large-scale fighting between India and Pakistan, while James H. Cobb's Sea Fighter (2000) is set in West Africa.
50 Space warfare in particular became rare, given its place at the high end of the technological spectrum. Nonetheless, a number of novels treating the theme did appear, including Hagberg's By Dawn's Early Light (2003) and Dale Brown's Strike Force (2007) and Shadow Command (2008). Still, it may be that the more limited scale and context of most of these conflicts (and perhaps the passing of the Cold War's memory) made writers more likely to depict tactical nuclear war-fighting, as in the novels of Joe Buff and Dale Brown (particularly the latter's 2004 Plan of Attack).
51 It might also be noted that with Saddam Hussein overthrown in Iraq, a friendly regime installed in Afghanistan, Libya downgraded considerably as an adversary and China, Russia and Pakistan combating a common enemy along with the U.S.; and the prevailing piety being that the "War on Terror" trumped all other concerns in international politics; the list of potential enemies seemed shorter still to those given to thinking in these terms.
52 The market trends sheet can be found at the agency's web site, http://www.aeionline.com/. Of course, the situation was similar during the Vietnam War, which saw the release of only one Hollywood film about the subject during its course--the controversial The Green Berets (1968). Nonetheless, there were exceptions. The controversial television series 24 did well, and JAG did see a ratings spike in its last years, while the David Mamet-created The Unit (2006-), which began as a mid-season replacement, was also a hit.
53 Indeed, the absence of really successful films of this type may be one reason why the film version of Frank Miller's 300 (2007) was so quickly accepted as a metaphor for the conflict.
54 For the latter half of the 1990s, Harold Coyle also stopped writing techno-thrillers, instead producing a trio of historical novels, comprised of a two book Civil War saga-Look Away (1995) and Until the End (1996)-and the French and Indian War story, Savage Wilderness (1997).
55 Indeed, weak as the spy genre presently is, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor and Ted Bell have made more of a splash than these authors, while Cobb's most recent writing has been for the Robert Ludlum franchise's "Covert One" imprint.
56 In fact, the show's use of music has garnered it considerable attention. See Phil Gallo, "CBS Finds New Way to Use Tunes," Variety, Feb. 2, 2009. Accessed at http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117999433.html?categoryid=2857&cs=1.
57 Examples of these movies include Wesley Snipes's The Marksman (2005), Steven Seagal's Submerged (2005) and Flight of Fury (2007) and Jean-Claude Van Damme's Second in Command (2006). This was even the case with the sequels to the relatively successful Behind Enemy Lines, appearing in direct-to-video format in 2006 and 2009 (without Owen Wilson).
58 Already in 1996 Independence Day was a bigger hit than any movie in which American servicemen tackled a real-world opponent, and as of 2009, far and away the most commercially successful film about the "War on Terror" is Iron Man (2008), which simply scratched the Communists from the original Stan Lee plot and replaced them with Islamic fundamentalists. See Nader Elhefnawy, "Science Fiction and the Post-Cold War," Internet Review of Science Fiction, Jan. 2009. Accessed at http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10498.
59 In that novel, set against the backdrop of the War on Terror's earliest days, an American businessman offers a laser weapon for sale on the international market, which he uses to disrupt the workings of an American reconnaissance satellite in a demonstration of its power. His prospective buyers, representatives of the Chinese and Indian governments, however, prove spectacularly uninterested in the product.
Back.
The Rise and Decline of the Military Techno-Thriller
Originally published (as "The Rise and Fall of the Military Techno-Thriller") in THE INTERNET REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, November 2009
By Nader Elhefnawy
Arguably the most widely read science fiction of the 1980s, though rarely recognized as such, were the military techno-thrillers that topped the bestseller lists in that decade--novels like those written by Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts, Dale Brown, Payne Harrison and Ralph Peters. The genre attracted little attention from serious critics in its heyday, and with the decline in its popularity it has received less attention of all kinds. Nonetheless, the place of these novels in a much longer history of such writing, and its connections with the science fiction tradition more broadly, are both well worth a look.
The Military Techno-Thriller: An Overview
As the "techno-thriller" label makes clear, these were thrillers in which the "techno" was central, in particular high-technology military weapons systems that were either very new recent, or believed likely to be available in the near term (as with the stealth bomber in the 1980s). The "thriller" aspect came from the weapon(s) being at the heart of an international crisis (again, supposed to be plausible in the foreseeable future), giving the machines and their operators the chance to do their thing.1
There were two basic plot structures, both epitomized by Tom Clancy's early writing. In the first, one side or the other in the conflict at the heart of the plot develops a key technology, which its rival wants to capture or neutralize-as in 1984's The Hunt for Red October, where Soviet naval captain Marko Ramius defects to the West with his country's latest ballistic missile submarine, instigating an international crisis.2 In the second type, an aggressive move by the Bad Guys forces the Good to wage large-scale combat to stop them, as in 1986's Red Storm Rising, where NATO battles a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
In both cases the focus was on the development of the crisis, and the detailing of the military action. Given that the books' plausibility was key to their interest, there was a considerable emphasis on verisimilitude, routinely extending as far as the inclusion of earnest author's notes about the real-world relevance of their tales; lists of acknowledgements of technical advisors; research bibliographies; glossaries of the terminology used; and particularly in Dale Brown's case, the opening of novels with excerpts from real-world news sources pointing the way to the unfolding of the tale.
The authors' biographies also tended to emphasize their authority on the subject, pointing up their credentials as military veterans (like Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown), or at least, familial connections to the armed forces or membership in military associations. Some authors, capitalizing on their fiction, acquired a measure of status as "public intellectuals" on defense matters, including Tom Clancy and Ralph Peters.3
Across The Media Spectrum
These novels constituted one of the major publishing phenomena of the 1980s, of which Tom Clancy was perhaps the outstanding publishing success. His 1988 book The Cardinal of the Kremlin was the biggest selling novel in the United States its year, and Clear and Present Danger the biggest seller not just of 1989, but the whole decade.
Through the 1990s four of his books were the second-highest sellers in the American market in their years (1991's The Sum of All Fears, 1994's Debt of Honor, 1996's Executive Orders and 1998's Rainbow Six), while Without Remorse ended up in the number four slot for 1993 on Publisher's Weekly's annual list. This made him the fifth highest-selling author of that decade, after only John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steele and Michael Crichton (all of whom, excepting Crichton, wrote many more books than Clancy did), while the three novels he published in the 2000s hit similar highs.4 All this enabled Clancy to "franchise" his brand name to an unprecedented extent.5
No other author came close, but many others enjoyed long, lucrative careers, particularly Dale Brown and Stephen Coonts, who likewise franchised their names (in the Dreamland and Deep Black series respectively).
The genre's impact was not limited to print. Hollywood's output of military-themed films during these years included quite a few starring high-tech machines. The high point of the trend was 1986's #1 box office hit, Top Gun, but there were also the Iron Eagle series (1986, 1988, 1992, 1995), Fire Birds (1990), Under Siege (1992, sequel 1995), Crimson Tide (1995), Broken Arrow (1996), Executive Decision (1996), and Behind Enemy Lines (2001, sequels 2006 and 2009)-as well as the films based on the Jack Ryan novels (1990, 1992, 1994, 2002), and Coonts's Flight of the Intruder (1991).
Spy films like The Peacemaker (1997) and the newer Bond films likewise reflected the trend, the Timothy Dalton-Pierce Brosnan era movies displaying an abundance of "ripped from the headlines" plot points and real-world military hardware.6 Goldeneye (1995) not only included post-Soviet power struggles, loose nukes and Russian Mafiosi in its storyline, but incorporated a Tiger helicopter, a flight of MiG-29s and a T-55 battle tank into the action, and even had Bond himself getting an important clue from a spy satellite's feed.
Television got in on the game, too, with a slew of naval aviation-themed dramas including CBS's Emerald Point N.A.S. (1983-1983), ABC's Supercarrier (1988), the syndicated Pensacola: Wings of Gold (1997-2000), and of course, NBC and CBS's JAG (1995-2005).7 Something of the approach was also evident in an array of other programs ranging from spy shows like 24 (2001-), to the presidential dramas The West Wing (1999-2006) and Commander in Chief (2005-2006), to science fiction shows like the UPN series Seven Days (1998-2001), in which military techno-thriller-type crises and weapons inspired the plots of roughly a third of the episodes.
Given that strategy games, tactical shooters and combat vehicle simulators have been an important part of video gaming from the beginning, the stuff of the techno-thriller was an obvious subject for it, and it may be here that the output was largest. Many video games using these themes were original titles, like Sega's After Burner (1987) and its sequels, or the Command & Conquer franchise, but others were based on successful films-and in some cases, successful books as well, Clancy again being particularly influential. His Red Storm Rising became the basis for a video game in 1988, but he made a deeper mark by cofounding Red Storm Entertainment in 1996, which launched the popular Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon series.
Inspirations and Precedents
The military techno-thriller did not appear out of nowhere, but rather had numerous precedents and sources of inspiration, some going all the way back to that wellspring of our imaginative fiction, the nineteenth century; and looking back at them provides powerful lenses for understanding the phenomenon.
Spy Novel 2.0
It is common to regard the techno-thriller as a development of the spy novel, and there are some grounds for viewing it as an update of the genre, in line with the changes in intelligence gathering during a twentieth century dominated by world wars and cold wars, and the technological metamorphosis of modern life. In place of the ad hoc operations and amateur operatives of an earlier time, intelligence became the purview of large, permanent (often multiple) bureaucracies staffed by salaried employees (only a very few of them "spies" in the traditional sense), in control of giant budgets and ultra-sophisticated equipment (like networks of listening posts and spy satellites), and which were typically involved in very slow, very long, very complex campaigns--a very far cry from the Bondian stereotype of lone supermen who single-handedly do all the legwork and black bag stuff and puzzle-solving and fighting needed to take down vast conspiracies and criminal empires in days.8
Perception lagged reality, of course, and the older image remains alive and well today. Nonetheless, spy fiction reflected the transformation of intelligence (and national security generally) into the territory of big, high-tech "alphabet soup" organizations from quite early on. This goes even for Ian Fleming's work-as in his careful detailing of the Soviet counterintelligence organization SMERSH in From Russia With Love (1957) (which opens with an author's note about the subject), or the "Vindicator" bomber's hijacking in Thunderball (1961). Martin Woodhouse's Giles Yeoman novels, like Tree Frog (1965), were also notable in centering on the adventures of a scientist involved in technical analysis.9
As all this was going on, Michael Crichton began a lucrative career telling stories starring the science instead of the people, and flaunting their research in ways that make fiction seem almost factual, as in his bestselling The Andromeda Strain (1969). While less rigorous in their handling of such details, Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels (like 1976's Raise the Titanic!) are often identified as examples of this direction.10 If anything, this broader shift in fiction reinforced that trend, and there were two obvious responses to the increasingly inescapable change.
The first was to present lone protagonists in the most obvious way that they could be such: a situation compelling them to work outside (and often against) "the system" as a hapless outsider sucked into the intrigue, or an insider forced to go rogue-as in the novels of Robert Ludlum, Trevanian and James Grady.
The alternative was to embrace the new reality, Craig Thomas pushing the envelope with his "espionage adventure" Firefox (book 1977, film 1982) in which MI6 sends airman Mitchell Gant into the Soviet Union to steal a prototype "MiG-31." The result has been widely hailed as the first '80s-style techno-thriller but the approach was exemplified by Clancy, his books notable in their presenting not the story of a single character or group of characters, but a sweeping, intricate, even "epic" picture of the human and technical machinery of the American (and Soviet) national security state(s).
Rather than having his protagonist Jack Ryan conveniently turning up in the right place at the right time, every time, so as to dominate the narrative, the story's action is widely diffused among a large number of organizationally and geographically dispersed viewpoint characters.11 This includes a large number of minor ones, whose sole connection to one another is their playing some small part in the evolution of a common crisis; and whose sole function in the story is to provide a higher-resolution view of some particularly interesting bit of the larger situation.
As a result, the space given any one character tends to be limited. In The Hunt For Red October, for instance, scenes in which Ryan is even present comprise less than a third of the text.12 Near the middle, Ryan even disappears for a fifth of the book, these parts devoted instead to the intricate dance between U.S. and Soviet ships and aircraft in the North Atlantic, and giving great attention to incidents only loosely connected to the sub chase, like a skirmish between U.S. and Soviet fighter pilots.
Instead Ryan's centrality owes to his being bureaucratically positioned to see the situation only glimpsed in parts by the other "dramatis personae" as a comparative whole.13 Consequently, as one assessment of Clancy's Red Storm Rising puts it, not individuals but whole countries often come across as the really relevant "characters."14
The Return of the Invasion Story
It is worth noting that the modern spy story started to take shape as a genre in the years prior to World War I, often in connection with a different genre that also flourished at that time, and which was also influential on the '80s-era military techno-thriller: the "invasion story."15
George Chesney's 1871 novella The Battle of Dorking got the field started with its depiction of a German invasion of England in a combination of futuristic war drama with political propagandizing.16 The stories that followed in its footsteps flourished until World War I, the destructiveness of that war (and the still greater destructiveness expected of any war that followed given its precedent, and the maturing of air power and chemical weapons during its course) badly damaging the traditional view that war could be heroic, profitable or even justifiable.
This is not to say the invasion story vanished altogether.17 However, it was much rarer, while the view that modern technology made another major war likely to destroy civilization-a position H.G. Wells had already taken in pre-war works like The War in the Air (1907) and The World Set Free (1914)-was gaining wide acceptance. Taking their cue from Wells rather than Chesney writers depicting future armed conflicts increasingly presented images of irredeemable global catastrophe, as in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937).
The tendency was reinforced by the Second World War and the arrival of the nuclear (and missile) age. Some authors apparently expected modern civilization to survive a nuclear war, Robert Heinlein often writing them into the background in 1950s-era novels like The Puppet Masters (1951) or The Door Into Summer (1957).18 While presenting more traumatized cultures as an outcome of such a situation, the same might also be said of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
However, the vision of modernity's complete collapse, or even the annihilation of the species, as presented by Aldous Huxley in Ape and Essence (1948), trumped them by the end of the 1950s, a thrust exemplified by the success of novels like Nevil Shute's On The Beach (1957), Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), and Mordechai Roshwald's Level 7 (1959). Some of these tales used the image of a shattered civilization as an argument for preparedness (or emphasized the danger of enemy triumph rather than nuclear war as such), but even the more militaristic images tended to "celebrate deterrence" rather than depict old style victories in the manner of Chesney and his imitators.19 Commenting on that absence in 1966 I.F. Clarke said that in the post-atomic age, "the tale of imaginary warfare as it used to be has vanished almost completely"-perhaps never to return.20
Yet that was exactly what happened a decade later. The more aggressive foreign policies of the Reagan-Thatcher era struck some observers as echoing politics in the heyday of Chesney, and not unrelated was the attention given the possibility of waging large-scale war in a pre-nuclear fashion. The early 1980s were a high point for the anti-nuclear movement, but the period also saw strategists reviewing the possibility that a major war might be fought without escalating to the level of a large-scale nuclear exchange.21 Some of the anticipations of this sort were specifically technological, the theorists picturing ballistic missile defenses checking strategic nuclear arsenals, while "smart" weapons replaced nuclear weapons in key roles-though others pictured new political and military strategies causing the scenarios to play out in these ways.22
Whichever the case, British authors led the way once again, with General John Hackett's The Third World War: August 1985 (1978), a full-blown war story of the kind not seen in decades, complete with large-scale air, land and sea battles. However, the books were to be a predominantly American phenomenon, particularly after the U.S. Naval Institute put Clancy's Red October into print in 1984.23
Still, while depictions of large-scale conventional fighting between Americans and Soviets were more common than before, they had to accommodate nuclear-age realities in a way pre-World War I invasion story writers never dreamed of (a fact which may have portended the tenuousness of the genre's revival).24 The danger of nuclear escalation was never far from the characters' minds, and the conflict tended to be carefully delimited by the author, the fight either ending after a very limited exchange (as in Hackett's scenario), or a breakdown of political will on the part of one of the belligerents.25
Additionally, many of the conflicts played out on a scale well below the level of even limited great power war, typically in one of two ways. This was simpler, obviously, in the case of stories revolving around the acquisition or neutralization of a technological development as discussed above, since these typically centered on small-scale, covert actions, like in Brown's Flight, Harrison's Storming Intrepid or Timothy Rizzi's Nightstalker (1992). There was also the option of staging the conflict between the U.S. and a militarily much weaker opponent, like a Soviet proxy or other "rogue state," as Stephen Coonts did with Libya in Final Flight (1986), Richard Herman did with Iran in The Warbirds (1989) and Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin did with North Korea and South Africa in Red Phoenix (1989) and Vortex (1991), respectively.
A Modern Day Edisonade
The hawkish foreign policies that characterized the late 1970s and 1980s were just one aspect of a broader conservative turn in that period, one that can fairly be read as "neo-Victorian," and the techno-thriller genre frequently reflected this.26 Robert Lekachman noted in his review of Red Storm Rising that Clancy's "characterizations are on a Victorian boys' book level," in that
This support of "traditional" values often extended to economic values as well, the 1970s and after seeing a rightward turn in economic thinking, the ideal of which was epitomized in the Thomas Edison-style inventor-entrepreneur-and the "Edisonade" celebrating him. As described by John Clute these stories (beginning with Edward J. Ellis's 1868 The Huge Hunter, or the Steam Man of the Prairies) typically center on
* More central to the story than in its European counterpart.30
* The work of a lone American genius.
* A device for enabling the U.S. to create a happier world order, whereas in the European tales (for instance, Wells's The War in the Air) the implications tended to be darker and more pessimistic.31
The discussion of the more recent echoes of the Edisonade tradition often view them as working subversively, critiquing or inverting the capitalistic, nationalistic and other values implicit in the stories, with steampunk in particular "a genre aware of its own loss of innocence" as Jeff Nevins put it in the introduction to last year's Steampunk anthology.32 However, this does not go for all of science fiction, the military techno-thriller certainly embracing the core idea in its tales of "Heroic Engineers."
Of course, in the late twentieth century it was not so simple a thing for a lone inventor to build a modern weapons system and use it at their discretion. Technological research and development is a less individualistic a matter than it once was, especially where high-tech weapons are concerned-one reason why such programs have long since been the preserve of vast national security states. Nonetheless, it was common for techno-thriller protagonists to help develop the weapons with which they fight, Dale Brown going furthest in this direction. Several of his characters, including Patrick McLanahan and his colleagues Wendy Tork, John Ormack, David Luger and Brad Elliott, are such warrior-engineers, as is Dr. Anne Page in Silver Tower, while millionaire whiz kid Jon Masters comes across as an even more direct update of the Edisonade protagonist.
Additionally, even while in government service, McLanahan demonstrates a strong possessiveness toward the systems he works on, using them at his own initiative so that even while wearing an Air Force uniform he is frequently all but autonomous. After retiring from the Air Force to start up his own company at the end of Shadow Command (2008), McLanahan actually departs with many of those weapons so that when he appears again in Rogue Forces (2009), he is making use of them as a private military entrepreneur.
It is also worth noting that even where a McLanahan-like figure is absent, the economic and technological values underlying the Edisonade remain present, not least a celebration of American technological ingenuity, American capitalism, and the relationship between the two (so that from the "country-as-a-character" perspective, plucky young America is readable as an Edison-style heroic inventor). This was especially the case in comparisons of it with the Soviet system, authors generally regarding it contemptuously, and capable of competing militarily with the capitalist West only because of its freedom from democratic constraints and humane impulses.33 As Dale Brown put it in The Flight of the Old Dog,
Children of Starship Troopers
While the three genres discussed above--the spy novel, the invasion story, and the Edisonade--were all set in something like the real world, the fourth and last of the genres being discussed here was conspicuously set outside of it: "hard" military science fiction of the sort commonly set in the far future, or in outer space.
This style of story (seen by some as a continuation of the invasion story in safer, more distant territory) is at least as old as space opera, human beings participating in high-tech battles on other planets at least as early as E.E. Smith's The Skylark of Space (1928), where Richard Seaton and his companions find themselves and their starship in the middle of the war between Kondal and Mardonale on the planet Osnome.
The output of such fiction in the years that followed was prolific, and understandably so; space is big enough, and the future technologically and politically distant enough, that a writer could imagine nuclear-age constraints not applying. Of course, the absence of those constraints could be, and were, used to just about every conceivable end to which a war story could be put.
The really relevant one for the techno-thriller was the combination of a martial (or even militaristic) outlook with relatively rigorous technological extrapolation. Again the tradition goes back at least to Smith (particularly in the Lensman novels), but is arguably exemplified by Robert Heinlein's classic Starship Troopers (1959). In this, and in the book's devotion of considerable swaths of the text to detailed descriptions of the recruitment, training, organization, staffing and equipment of the Terran Mobile Infantry, Troopers comes across as a "spiritual ancestor" for the books by Clancy, Brown and others in the 1980s and after.36
This also goes for some of the innovations Heinlein presented in that novel, in particular the "powered armor" used by Terran Mobile Infantrymen like his protagonist Juan Rico. This has not only been widely imitated in other science fiction, but also widely taken as a source of inspiration by military thinkers speculating about the next big thing in land warfare, frequently picturing the future infantryman inside an armored, high-tech exoskeleton, and often referring to the CAP troopers of Heinlein's novel in making its point.37 Not surprisingly, it has itself appeared in many a techno-thriller, as with many of the Dale Brown novels from The Tin Man (1998) on.
Sometimes, however, there was an even more direct influence. Throughout his career Heinlein took a strong interest in real-world defense policy, and the same goes for other military science fiction writers (and editors) like Jerry Pournelle, David Drake, Ben Bova and Jim Baen, who advocated a hard line in the Cold War and a heavy investment in military technology to support it. They were particularly vocal in the 1970s and early 1980s regarding initiatives later prominent in techno-thriller writing, like missile defense, with Pournelle himself even being credited with the "Rods From God" concept for a space-based weapon.38
Continued.
By Nader Elhefnawy
Arguably the most widely read science fiction of the 1980s, though rarely recognized as such, were the military techno-thrillers that topped the bestseller lists in that decade--novels like those written by Tom Clancy, Stephen Coonts, Dale Brown, Payne Harrison and Ralph Peters. The genre attracted little attention from serious critics in its heyday, and with the decline in its popularity it has received less attention of all kinds. Nonetheless, the place of these novels in a much longer history of such writing, and its connections with the science fiction tradition more broadly, are both well worth a look.
The Military Techno-Thriller: An Overview
As the "techno-thriller" label makes clear, these were thrillers in which the "techno" was central, in particular high-technology military weapons systems that were either very new recent, or believed likely to be available in the near term (as with the stealth bomber in the 1980s). The "thriller" aspect came from the weapon(s) being at the heart of an international crisis (again, supposed to be plausible in the foreseeable future), giving the machines and their operators the chance to do their thing.1
There were two basic plot structures, both epitomized by Tom Clancy's early writing. In the first, one side or the other in the conflict at the heart of the plot develops a key technology, which its rival wants to capture or neutralize-as in 1984's The Hunt for Red October, where Soviet naval captain Marko Ramius defects to the West with his country's latest ballistic missile submarine, instigating an international crisis.2 In the second type, an aggressive move by the Bad Guys forces the Good to wage large-scale combat to stop them, as in 1986's Red Storm Rising, where NATO battles a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
In both cases the focus was on the development of the crisis, and the detailing of the military action. Given that the books' plausibility was key to their interest, there was a considerable emphasis on verisimilitude, routinely extending as far as the inclusion of earnest author's notes about the real-world relevance of their tales; lists of acknowledgements of technical advisors; research bibliographies; glossaries of the terminology used; and particularly in Dale Brown's case, the opening of novels with excerpts from real-world news sources pointing the way to the unfolding of the tale.
The authors' biographies also tended to emphasize their authority on the subject, pointing up their credentials as military veterans (like Stephen Coonts and Dale Brown), or at least, familial connections to the armed forces or membership in military associations. Some authors, capitalizing on their fiction, acquired a measure of status as "public intellectuals" on defense matters, including Tom Clancy and Ralph Peters.3
Across The Media Spectrum
These novels constituted one of the major publishing phenomena of the 1980s, of which Tom Clancy was perhaps the outstanding publishing success. His 1988 book The Cardinal of the Kremlin was the biggest selling novel in the United States its year, and Clear and Present Danger the biggest seller not just of 1989, but the whole decade.
Through the 1990s four of his books were the second-highest sellers in the American market in their years (1991's The Sum of All Fears, 1994's Debt of Honor, 1996's Executive Orders and 1998's Rainbow Six), while Without Remorse ended up in the number four slot for 1993 on Publisher's Weekly's annual list. This made him the fifth highest-selling author of that decade, after only John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steele and Michael Crichton (all of whom, excepting Crichton, wrote many more books than Clancy did), while the three novels he published in the 2000s hit similar highs.4 All this enabled Clancy to "franchise" his brand name to an unprecedented extent.5
No other author came close, but many others enjoyed long, lucrative careers, particularly Dale Brown and Stephen Coonts, who likewise franchised their names (in the Dreamland and Deep Black series respectively).
The genre's impact was not limited to print. Hollywood's output of military-themed films during these years included quite a few starring high-tech machines. The high point of the trend was 1986's #1 box office hit, Top Gun, but there were also the Iron Eagle series (1986, 1988, 1992, 1995), Fire Birds (1990), Under Siege (1992, sequel 1995), Crimson Tide (1995), Broken Arrow (1996), Executive Decision (1996), and Behind Enemy Lines (2001, sequels 2006 and 2009)-as well as the films based on the Jack Ryan novels (1990, 1992, 1994, 2002), and Coonts's Flight of the Intruder (1991).
Spy films like The Peacemaker (1997) and the newer Bond films likewise reflected the trend, the Timothy Dalton-Pierce Brosnan era movies displaying an abundance of "ripped from the headlines" plot points and real-world military hardware.6 Goldeneye (1995) not only included post-Soviet power struggles, loose nukes and Russian Mafiosi in its storyline, but incorporated a Tiger helicopter, a flight of MiG-29s and a T-55 battle tank into the action, and even had Bond himself getting an important clue from a spy satellite's feed.
Television got in on the game, too, with a slew of naval aviation-themed dramas including CBS's Emerald Point N.A.S. (1983-1983), ABC's Supercarrier (1988), the syndicated Pensacola: Wings of Gold (1997-2000), and of course, NBC and CBS's JAG (1995-2005).7 Something of the approach was also evident in an array of other programs ranging from spy shows like 24 (2001-), to the presidential dramas The West Wing (1999-2006) and Commander in Chief (2005-2006), to science fiction shows like the UPN series Seven Days (1998-2001), in which military techno-thriller-type crises and weapons inspired the plots of roughly a third of the episodes.
Given that strategy games, tactical shooters and combat vehicle simulators have been an important part of video gaming from the beginning, the stuff of the techno-thriller was an obvious subject for it, and it may be here that the output was largest. Many video games using these themes were original titles, like Sega's After Burner (1987) and its sequels, or the Command & Conquer franchise, but others were based on successful films-and in some cases, successful books as well, Clancy again being particularly influential. His Red Storm Rising became the basis for a video game in 1988, but he made a deeper mark by cofounding Red Storm Entertainment in 1996, which launched the popular Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon series.
Inspirations and Precedents
The military techno-thriller did not appear out of nowhere, but rather had numerous precedents and sources of inspiration, some going all the way back to that wellspring of our imaginative fiction, the nineteenth century; and looking back at them provides powerful lenses for understanding the phenomenon.
Spy Novel 2.0
It is common to regard the techno-thriller as a development of the spy novel, and there are some grounds for viewing it as an update of the genre, in line with the changes in intelligence gathering during a twentieth century dominated by world wars and cold wars, and the technological metamorphosis of modern life. In place of the ad hoc operations and amateur operatives of an earlier time, intelligence became the purview of large, permanent (often multiple) bureaucracies staffed by salaried employees (only a very few of them "spies" in the traditional sense), in control of giant budgets and ultra-sophisticated equipment (like networks of listening posts and spy satellites), and which were typically involved in very slow, very long, very complex campaigns--a very far cry from the Bondian stereotype of lone supermen who single-handedly do all the legwork and black bag stuff and puzzle-solving and fighting needed to take down vast conspiracies and criminal empires in days.8
Perception lagged reality, of course, and the older image remains alive and well today. Nonetheless, spy fiction reflected the transformation of intelligence (and national security generally) into the territory of big, high-tech "alphabet soup" organizations from quite early on. This goes even for Ian Fleming's work-as in his careful detailing of the Soviet counterintelligence organization SMERSH in From Russia With Love (1957) (which opens with an author's note about the subject), or the "Vindicator" bomber's hijacking in Thunderball (1961). Martin Woodhouse's Giles Yeoman novels, like Tree Frog (1965), were also notable in centering on the adventures of a scientist involved in technical analysis.9
As all this was going on, Michael Crichton began a lucrative career telling stories starring the science instead of the people, and flaunting their research in ways that make fiction seem almost factual, as in his bestselling The Andromeda Strain (1969). While less rigorous in their handling of such details, Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels (like 1976's Raise the Titanic!) are often identified as examples of this direction.10 If anything, this broader shift in fiction reinforced that trend, and there were two obvious responses to the increasingly inescapable change.
The first was to present lone protagonists in the most obvious way that they could be such: a situation compelling them to work outside (and often against) "the system" as a hapless outsider sucked into the intrigue, or an insider forced to go rogue-as in the novels of Robert Ludlum, Trevanian and James Grady.
The alternative was to embrace the new reality, Craig Thomas pushing the envelope with his "espionage adventure" Firefox (book 1977, film 1982) in which MI6 sends airman Mitchell Gant into the Soviet Union to steal a prototype "MiG-31." The result has been widely hailed as the first '80s-style techno-thriller but the approach was exemplified by Clancy, his books notable in their presenting not the story of a single character or group of characters, but a sweeping, intricate, even "epic" picture of the human and technical machinery of the American (and Soviet) national security state(s).
Rather than having his protagonist Jack Ryan conveniently turning up in the right place at the right time, every time, so as to dominate the narrative, the story's action is widely diffused among a large number of organizationally and geographically dispersed viewpoint characters.11 This includes a large number of minor ones, whose sole connection to one another is their playing some small part in the evolution of a common crisis; and whose sole function in the story is to provide a higher-resolution view of some particularly interesting bit of the larger situation.
As a result, the space given any one character tends to be limited. In The Hunt For Red October, for instance, scenes in which Ryan is even present comprise less than a third of the text.12 Near the middle, Ryan even disappears for a fifth of the book, these parts devoted instead to the intricate dance between U.S. and Soviet ships and aircraft in the North Atlantic, and giving great attention to incidents only loosely connected to the sub chase, like a skirmish between U.S. and Soviet fighter pilots.
Instead Ryan's centrality owes to his being bureaucratically positioned to see the situation only glimpsed in parts by the other "dramatis personae" as a comparative whole.13 Consequently, as one assessment of Clancy's Red Storm Rising puts it, not individuals but whole countries often come across as the really relevant "characters."14
The Return of the Invasion Story
It is worth noting that the modern spy story started to take shape as a genre in the years prior to World War I, often in connection with a different genre that also flourished at that time, and which was also influential on the '80s-era military techno-thriller: the "invasion story."15
George Chesney's 1871 novella The Battle of Dorking got the field started with its depiction of a German invasion of England in a combination of futuristic war drama with political propagandizing.16 The stories that followed in its footsteps flourished until World War I, the destructiveness of that war (and the still greater destructiveness expected of any war that followed given its precedent, and the maturing of air power and chemical weapons during its course) badly damaging the traditional view that war could be heroic, profitable or even justifiable.
This is not to say the invasion story vanished altogether.17 However, it was much rarer, while the view that modern technology made another major war likely to destroy civilization-a position H.G. Wells had already taken in pre-war works like The War in the Air (1907) and The World Set Free (1914)-was gaining wide acceptance. Taking their cue from Wells rather than Chesney writers depicting future armed conflicts increasingly presented images of irredeemable global catastrophe, as in Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937).
The tendency was reinforced by the Second World War and the arrival of the nuclear (and missile) age. Some authors apparently expected modern civilization to survive a nuclear war, Robert Heinlein often writing them into the background in 1950s-era novels like The Puppet Masters (1951) or The Door Into Summer (1957).18 While presenting more traumatized cultures as an outcome of such a situation, the same might also be said of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
However, the vision of modernity's complete collapse, or even the annihilation of the species, as presented by Aldous Huxley in Ape and Essence (1948), trumped them by the end of the 1950s, a thrust exemplified by the success of novels like Nevil Shute's On The Beach (1957), Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), and Mordechai Roshwald's Level 7 (1959). Some of these tales used the image of a shattered civilization as an argument for preparedness (or emphasized the danger of enemy triumph rather than nuclear war as such), but even the more militaristic images tended to "celebrate deterrence" rather than depict old style victories in the manner of Chesney and his imitators.19 Commenting on that absence in 1966 I.F. Clarke said that in the post-atomic age, "the tale of imaginary warfare as it used to be has vanished almost completely"-perhaps never to return.20
Yet that was exactly what happened a decade later. The more aggressive foreign policies of the Reagan-Thatcher era struck some observers as echoing politics in the heyday of Chesney, and not unrelated was the attention given the possibility of waging large-scale war in a pre-nuclear fashion. The early 1980s were a high point for the anti-nuclear movement, but the period also saw strategists reviewing the possibility that a major war might be fought without escalating to the level of a large-scale nuclear exchange.21 Some of the anticipations of this sort were specifically technological, the theorists picturing ballistic missile defenses checking strategic nuclear arsenals, while "smart" weapons replaced nuclear weapons in key roles-though others pictured new political and military strategies causing the scenarios to play out in these ways.22
Whichever the case, British authors led the way once again, with General John Hackett's The Third World War: August 1985 (1978), a full-blown war story of the kind not seen in decades, complete with large-scale air, land and sea battles. However, the books were to be a predominantly American phenomenon, particularly after the U.S. Naval Institute put Clancy's Red October into print in 1984.23
Still, while depictions of large-scale conventional fighting between Americans and Soviets were more common than before, they had to accommodate nuclear-age realities in a way pre-World War I invasion story writers never dreamed of (a fact which may have portended the tenuousness of the genre's revival).24 The danger of nuclear escalation was never far from the characters' minds, and the conflict tended to be carefully delimited by the author, the fight either ending after a very limited exchange (as in Hackett's scenario), or a breakdown of political will on the part of one of the belligerents.25
Additionally, many of the conflicts played out on a scale well below the level of even limited great power war, typically in one of two ways. This was simpler, obviously, in the case of stories revolving around the acquisition or neutralization of a technological development as discussed above, since these typically centered on small-scale, covert actions, like in Brown's Flight, Harrison's Storming Intrepid or Timothy Rizzi's Nightstalker (1992). There was also the option of staging the conflict between the U.S. and a militarily much weaker opponent, like a Soviet proxy or other "rogue state," as Stephen Coonts did with Libya in Final Flight (1986), Richard Herman did with Iran in The Warbirds (1989) and Larry Bond and Patrick Larkin did with North Korea and South Africa in Red Phoenix (1989) and Vortex (1991), respectively.
A Modern Day Edisonade
The hawkish foreign policies that characterized the late 1970s and 1980s were just one aspect of a broader conservative turn in that period, one that can fairly be read as "neo-Victorian," and the techno-thriller genre frequently reflected this.26 Robert Lekachman noted in his review of Red Storm Rising that Clancy's "characterizations are on a Victorian boys' book level," in that
All the Americans are paragons of courage, endurance and devotion to service and country. Their officers are uniformly competent and occasionally inspired. Men of all ranks are faithful husbands and devoted fathers.27Minor as the role of character in such fiction was, comforting affirmations of traditional values were apparently a factor in their appeal for many readers, and their cultural impact. Indeed, many an observer has argued that they helped facilitate the political "rehabilitation" of the public image of the U.S. military (and indeed, of the resort to force) after Vietnam.28
This support of "traditional" values often extended to economic values as well, the 1970s and after seeing a rightward turn in economic thinking, the ideal of which was epitomized in the Thomas Edison-style inventor-entrepreneur-and the "Edisonade" celebrating him. As described by John Clute these stories (beginning with Edward J. Ellis's 1868 The Huge Hunter, or the Steam Man of the Prairies) typically center on
a brave young inventor [who] creates a tool or a weapon (or both) that enables him to save the girl and his nation (America) and the world from some menace, whether it be foreigners or evil scientists or aliens; and gets the girl; and gets rich.29Given such a plot structure, these stories unsurprisingly overlapped with the American version of the invasion story, which, as H. Bruce Franklin argues in War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, tended to be
* More central to the story than in its European counterpart.30
* The work of a lone American genius.
* A device for enabling the U.S. to create a happier world order, whereas in the European tales (for instance, Wells's The War in the Air) the implications tended to be darker and more pessimistic.31
The discussion of the more recent echoes of the Edisonade tradition often view them as working subversively, critiquing or inverting the capitalistic, nationalistic and other values implicit in the stories, with steampunk in particular "a genre aware of its own loss of innocence" as Jeff Nevins put it in the introduction to last year's Steampunk anthology.32 However, this does not go for all of science fiction, the military techno-thriller certainly embracing the core idea in its tales of "Heroic Engineers."
Of course, in the late twentieth century it was not so simple a thing for a lone inventor to build a modern weapons system and use it at their discretion. Technological research and development is a less individualistic a matter than it once was, especially where high-tech weapons are concerned-one reason why such programs have long since been the preserve of vast national security states. Nonetheless, it was common for techno-thriller protagonists to help develop the weapons with which they fight, Dale Brown going furthest in this direction. Several of his characters, including Patrick McLanahan and his colleagues Wendy Tork, John Ormack, David Luger and Brad Elliott, are such warrior-engineers, as is Dr. Anne Page in Silver Tower, while millionaire whiz kid Jon Masters comes across as an even more direct update of the Edisonade protagonist.
Additionally, even while in government service, McLanahan demonstrates a strong possessiveness toward the systems he works on, using them at his own initiative so that even while wearing an Air Force uniform he is frequently all but autonomous. After retiring from the Air Force to start up his own company at the end of Shadow Command (2008), McLanahan actually departs with many of those weapons so that when he appears again in Rogue Forces (2009), he is making use of them as a private military entrepreneur.
It is also worth noting that even where a McLanahan-like figure is absent, the economic and technological values underlying the Edisonade remain present, not least a celebration of American technological ingenuity, American capitalism, and the relationship between the two (so that from the "country-as-a-character" perspective, plucky young America is readable as an Edison-style heroic inventor). This was especially the case in comparisons of it with the Soviet system, authors generally regarding it contemptuously, and capable of competing militarily with the capitalist West only because of its freedom from democratic constraints and humane impulses.33 As Dale Brown put it in The Flight of the Old Dog,
The Russians play by a whole different set of rules than we do. They don't answer to Congress, the press, the public, or the world . . . If they want a laser defense system now, they build one. If they need more money, they buy twenty percent less meat and thirty percent less toilet paper and to hell with public opinion.34Of course, the outcome was rarely in doubt were the U.S. to play its cards right-never a certainty, with writers routinely presenting their protagonists as bedeviled by the kind of hostile media and skeptical legislators liberals only wish existed, and unreliable foreign allies. However, their heroes almost always won the day in spite of them.35
Children of Starship Troopers
While the three genres discussed above--the spy novel, the invasion story, and the Edisonade--were all set in something like the real world, the fourth and last of the genres being discussed here was conspicuously set outside of it: "hard" military science fiction of the sort commonly set in the far future, or in outer space.
This style of story (seen by some as a continuation of the invasion story in safer, more distant territory) is at least as old as space opera, human beings participating in high-tech battles on other planets at least as early as E.E. Smith's The Skylark of Space (1928), where Richard Seaton and his companions find themselves and their starship in the middle of the war between Kondal and Mardonale on the planet Osnome.
The output of such fiction in the years that followed was prolific, and understandably so; space is big enough, and the future technologically and politically distant enough, that a writer could imagine nuclear-age constraints not applying. Of course, the absence of those constraints could be, and were, used to just about every conceivable end to which a war story could be put.
The really relevant one for the techno-thriller was the combination of a martial (or even militaristic) outlook with relatively rigorous technological extrapolation. Again the tradition goes back at least to Smith (particularly in the Lensman novels), but is arguably exemplified by Robert Heinlein's classic Starship Troopers (1959). In this, and in the book's devotion of considerable swaths of the text to detailed descriptions of the recruitment, training, organization, staffing and equipment of the Terran Mobile Infantry, Troopers comes across as a "spiritual ancestor" for the books by Clancy, Brown and others in the 1980s and after.36
This also goes for some of the innovations Heinlein presented in that novel, in particular the "powered armor" used by Terran Mobile Infantrymen like his protagonist Juan Rico. This has not only been widely imitated in other science fiction, but also widely taken as a source of inspiration by military thinkers speculating about the next big thing in land warfare, frequently picturing the future infantryman inside an armored, high-tech exoskeleton, and often referring to the CAP troopers of Heinlein's novel in making its point.37 Not surprisingly, it has itself appeared in many a techno-thriller, as with many of the Dale Brown novels from The Tin Man (1998) on.
Sometimes, however, there was an even more direct influence. Throughout his career Heinlein took a strong interest in real-world defense policy, and the same goes for other military science fiction writers (and editors) like Jerry Pournelle, David Drake, Ben Bova and Jim Baen, who advocated a hard line in the Cold War and a heavy investment in military technology to support it. They were particularly vocal in the 1970s and early 1980s regarding initiatives later prominent in techno-thriller writing, like missile defense, with Pournelle himself even being credited with the "Rods From God" concept for a space-based weapon.38
Continued.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Science Fiction From Beyond the English-Speaking World
In the English-speaking world, and in particular, the United States, we are far more accustomed to exporting culture than importing it, and this certainly holds true for writing in the science fiction and fantasy genres.
During the past few weeks Strange Horizons offered Kari Sperring's review of acclaimed French writer Pierre Pevel's The Cardinal's Blades and L'Alchimiste des Ombres; and Andy Sawyer's piece on editor Lavie Tidhar's The Apex Book of World SF (the international nature of which is reflected in the page devoted to it by the publisher).
Those interested in Tidhar's anthology may also want to check out the review of it that went up at Tor.com yesterday, and (as reported on Niall Harrison's Torque Control blog) the PDF files of four of the stories that editor Tidhair has made available online-specifically Guy Hasson's "The Levantine Experiments," Han Song's "The Wheel of Samsara," Yang Ping's "Wizard World" and Nir Yaniv's "Cinderers."
A final note in this vein: I have just added The World SF News Blog, a source well worth checking out for its more global perspective on the subject, to the blog list at the right side of this page.
During the past few weeks Strange Horizons offered Kari Sperring's review of acclaimed French writer Pierre Pevel's The Cardinal's Blades and L'Alchimiste des Ombres; and Andy Sawyer's piece on editor Lavie Tidhar's The Apex Book of World SF (the international nature of which is reflected in the page devoted to it by the publisher).
Those interested in Tidhar's anthology may also want to check out the review of it that went up at Tor.com yesterday, and (as reported on Niall Harrison's Torque Control blog) the PDF files of four of the stories that editor Tidhair has made available online-specifically Guy Hasson's "The Levantine Experiments," Han Song's "The Wheel of Samsara," Yang Ping's "Wizard World" and Nir Yaniv's "Cinderers."
A final note in this vein: I have just added The World SF News Blog, a source well worth checking out for its more global perspective on the subject, to the blog list at the right side of this page.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
IROSF Ceasing Operations
The Internet Review of Science Fiction, about which I have been blogging monthly lately, and where I published ten pieces in the last three years, is, according to an announcement by publisher Blunt Jackson (which you can read here), ceasing operations after February 2010.
IROSF will be missed-the publication produced an abundance of worthwhile content. (Indeed, I strongly suggest those who don't know it very well check out the Archives, packed with interesting pieces going back to January 2004.)
However, this is by no means the end of the publication's purpose. As Jackson informs us in the note, his plan is to use the experience accumulated in this project in turning to "new challenges related to the economy and logistics of Internet publishing"-still in a very developmental stage, arguably-"to create the kind of environment that would have empowered the editors to achieve the success that IROSF's superb content always deserved."
IROSF will be missed-the publication produced an abundance of worthwhile content. (Indeed, I strongly suggest those who don't know it very well check out the Archives, packed with interesting pieces going back to January 2004.)
However, this is by no means the end of the publication's purpose. As Jackson informs us in the note, his plan is to use the experience accumulated in this project in turning to "new challenges related to the economy and logistics of Internet publishing"-still in a very developmental stage, arguably-"to create the kind of environment that would have empowered the editors to achieve the success that IROSF's superb content always deserved."
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
The Network Science Fiction Television Boom-And Bust(?)
By Nader Elhefnawy
Originally published in the INTERNET REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, June 2009
Collected in AFTER THE NEW WAVE: SCIENCE FICTION TODAY.
Where during the last few years the press covering science fiction television has told a story of boom on the "Big Four" U.S. networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX). J. J. Abrams's Lost (2004-) was widely credited with reviving their interest, and promptly followed by a comparative flood of new shows. (The fall 2007 television season saw no fewer than seven genre shows hit the air there, and the fall 2008 saw a similar number arrive on their schedules, along with several mid-season replacements.)
In recent months, however, the story has become one of falling ratings and cancellations. Of course, a number of new science fiction shows are expected to make their debuts in the fall of 2009, including one based on Robert J. Sawyer's novel Flash Forward, but it seems likely the trend has passed its peak; and it is already possible to say something about the course that the boom took during its brief life.
The Previous Boom, in Brief
For purposes of comparison, it is probably best to start off with what science fiction television was like before that boom (usually dated to about 2004). In my article "The Golden Age of Science Fiction Television" last June, I argued that the 1990s (or more precisely, the decade from about 1993 to the early 2000s) represented a "golden age" of North American live-action science fiction television.1 By this I meant that the period saw an exceptional quantity of production in this area, as well as some genuinely ground-breaking programming.
I also noted that these shows appeared mainly through the venues of
* Syndicated original drama, which boomed in the wake of the successes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), Highlander (1992-1998) and Hercules (1995-2000) (and of course, Baywatch).
* The appearance of two networks which to the end of carving out a niche for themselves, invested heavily in science fiction and fantasy-the United Paramount Network (UPN) and Warner Brothers (WB).
* The explosion in the production of original programming for cable television, with USA-and in particular, its subsidiary Sci-Fi Channel-as well as the premium cable channel Showtime-making the heaviest investments in genre-related shows.
The major U.S. networks (the "Big Four," consisting of ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX), meanwhile, played a comparatively minor role.2 However, circumstances had changed by the early 2000s. The syndicated original drama has largely vanished from television (though in 2008 Hercules and Xena producer Sam Raimi took another crack at it with his new series, The Legend of the Seeker, based on novelist Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" novels).
Neither UPN nor the WB actually exist anymore, both merged inside the CW, which has retained WB legacies Smallville (2001-) and Supernatural (2005-) and is airing the second season of Reaper (2007-) but overall is less invested in such programming.
The same has gone for original science fiction on American cable. USA canned the last of its shows like the The 4400 (2004-2007) and The Dead Zone (2002-2007) back in 2007, and today concentrates on crime-themed programming like Psych, Burn Notice and In Plain Sight (as well as Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the new episodes of which air there first). TNT, which aired the final season of Babylon 5 (1994-1998), its spin-off Crusade (1999) and two seasons of Witchblade (2001-2002), is now more recognizable as the home of The Closer. (This is even the case where reruns are concerned. Where various Star Trek series once comprised much of the content of Spike TV, their place has largely been taken by the CSI franchise-and of course, the Ultimate Fighting Championship.3)
Showtime, too, has largely abandoned that focus, concentrating instead on shows like Brotherhood and Weeds (though the upcoming Camelot and Syns hint at a partial revival of interest in that area).4
Even the Sci-Fi Channel (soon to be the "SyFy Channel") does not have quite its old flair, apparently preferring hidden camera shows, game shows and pseudo-science documentaries to other content. Its scripted offerings these last few years have met with comparatively little success (2006's Eureka and 2008's Sanctuary are the only ones to rate so much as a second season), so that its future as a source for original dramatic series seems to rest heavily on its continued milking of the Stargate and Battlestar Galactica franchises it took over early in the decade.5 (Stargate: Universe and Caprica-the pilot to which was released on DVD in April this year-are coming soon to that channel.)
There are many who are reading the rebranding of the channel as "Syfy" as an indication that the channel (the biggest draw on which is now ECW Wrestling!) is shifting away from its core concept and audience in the hopes of winning higher ratings (as many channels have done before it).6 (Even the channel's upcoming scripted shows, such as Caprica-which is being marketed as a dynastic soap opera like Dallas-and Warehouse 13-which has been compared to Moonlighting by network executives-appear to be aimed at a more mainstream audience.7)
Put bluntly, Sci-Fi looks to be leaving the "geeks" out in the cold in search of larger and more lucrative demographics, just as G4TV (a network originally devoted to video games) did before it.8
The Network Boom
Just as the science fiction output of syndicated and cable television was winding down, network television was being hailed as the source of striking new genre product in the wake of Lost's success. Arguably, however, it was not just the ratings the show drew that encouraged ABC and other networks to press on in this direction, but the kind of science fiction Lost happened to be which shaped the boom.
To a considerable degree, Lost plays like a "realist" drama, particularly in the earlier episodes. The show spent a great deal of time on soap opera (e.g., will Kate choose Jack or Sawyer?). The lengthy flashbacks detailing the lives of its characters prior to their arrival on the island include much of the stuff of conventional medical, legal and police drama. (Jack was a surgeon, Dawson was in a custody battle, Ana was a cop, etc.). And the speculative touches, rarely conspicuous, often came across as weird more than anything else (like the presence of a polar bear on their tropical island). Rather than science fiction as the term is usually used, the first couple of seasons of the show could be taken for simply "slipstream" or "postmodern," like a darker, more dangerous Northern Exposure.9
As one might guess from this model, the executives generally played it safe (despite which they were often quick to pull the plug when they didn't see the unrealistic results they hoped for). Apart from NBC's brief experiment with airing Battlestar Galactica in prime time, the networks generally steered clear of space, and also of conspicuously fantastic, futuristic or historical settings of the kinds prominent in the 1990s-era boom. They also avoided taking radically different or new approaches to the material (excepting the increased emphasis on story arcs).
Instead there was a preference on the part of the networks for contemporary settings and familiar concepts. There was, for instance, a tendency to incorporate speculative elements into staple television genres like the cop drama, as in the time-loop story Day Break (2006-2007), or the procedurals Life on Mars (2008-2009) and New Amsterdam (2008). A bit less conventionally, NBC's My Own Worst Enemy (2008) wrote electronic personality switches into a spy story, while Kings (2009) offered a twist on the dynastic drama by retelling the Biblical Book of Kings in an alternate-modern setting, where Shiloh looks like New York.
There is also a small speculative touch in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother (2005-), which is told from the future year of 2030; the defunct legal "dramedy" Eli Stone (2008), in which the protagonist suffers hallucinations that may actually be something more; and the relationship-themed dramedy The Ex List (2008), where a psychic played a key role in events.
Paranormal-themed shows were another obvious direction to go in. These included the psychic dramas Ghost Whisperer (2005-) and Medium (2005-).10 There was also yet another series about a much-older-than-he-looks vampire detective pounding the pavement at night, and the short-lived Moonlight (2007-2008). CBS's The Eleventh Hour (2008-2009) and FOX's Fringe (2008-) both returned to X-Files territory, with government investigators looking into assorted extraordinary phenomena outside the bounds of the scientific mainstream. 2007's Journeyman treaded the same path as the old Quantum Leap series (1989-1993) (though it had considerably more polish and a better-developed story arc during its thirteen episode run than Leap).
The fall of 2005 also saw a pair of shows based on the alien invasion theme: CBS's Threshold and ABC's Invasion.11 Both were written as present-day stories about infiltration by (generally) unseen enemies, with Threshold in particular shamelessly exploiting the post-9/11 situation (while the press unfairly made much of Invasion's setting in the wake of a devastating hurricane).
Additionally, great effort was made to exploit already well-established brand names and intellectual properties. Certainly in the earlier, syndication and cable-driven boom Star Trek: The Next Generation led the way, and the spin-offs from the Highlander film series (1986, sequels 1991, 1994 and 2000), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Stargate (1994) were not only among the biggest hits in the 1990s, but each of the resulting series spawned a spin-off of their own (in the cases of Buffy and Stargate, rather long-running ones, each finishing that magic number of seasons, five).12
However, the networks displayed a propensity for this approach that was at least equally strong, given the scale of investment. NBC, apparently inspired by the limited success of Galactica, launched high-profile remakes of old shows—specifically-The Bionic Woman (2007) and Knight Rider (2008-2009)-two years running.13
They predictably failed at it. Both concepts were thin to begin with, and not much was added to them in their reinventions. They also suffered from annoying characters and ultra-generic writing that fell far short of the revolutionary, "You've never seen anything like this!" promises made by their very aggressive publicity campaigns-which unintentionally had me laughing long before they actually hit the air.
ABC did the same thing with Kolchak the Night Stalker in 2005, with the same lack of success.
Meanwhile, FOX launched a show based on one of the biggest-ever science fiction film franchises, Terminator, in January 2008, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. ABC's Life on Mars was a remake of the highly regarded British original, as was CBS's Eleventh Hour, while 2008's The Ex List was a remake of an Israeli show.
J.J. Abrams, who had preceded Lost with Alias, followed up Lost with Invasion and Fringe, and became a brand name all by himself. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly creator Joss Whedon also has something of that status, and Dollhouse arrived in February this year bearing his label.14
Noteworthy Efforts
The shows that followed Lost (which, incidentally, never approached the viewership of a show like CBS's CSI: Crime Scene Investigations) rarely came close to its audience share, and rarely held such audiences as they did capture for very long. (This was the case with Heroes, which initially did quite well before it began its ratings nosedive.) Truly devoted cults were few, though the following for Jericho was apparently strong enough to (briefly) bring it back from the dead after its cancellation. And really broad, enthusiastic critical adulation was rare, though Pushing Daisies was very well received.
Still, not only was it the case that at least a few of the shows in this group were worth watching, but some of them also took conceptual risks deserving of mention here. Despite the conventionality, and even blandness of the small-town setting, Jericho (2006-2008) was certainly one, given its post-apocalyptic scenariosetting, its relatively elaborate conception of the aftermath's "big picture" (complete with a much-changed United States), and despite the imperfections of the writing (including some really questionable plot twists), the political nerves it touches in its characters' probing of how the situation came to be.
Heroes (2006-) was not totally unprecedented, hour-long dramas having been centered on superheroes before, including Wonder Woman (1975-1979), The Incredible Hulk (1978-1982), Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997), and more recently, Smallville (2001-)-as well as TNT's Witchblade, which was shut down due not to a lack of audience interest, but the personal problems of its star. However, it did not have the asset of a recognizable classic character like Superman, Wonder Woman or the Incredible Hulk. It was also intended from the outset to reflect the newer, more character-driven approach to the material toward which superhero-themed film has tended since the success of the first X-Men movie in 2000 kicked our current period of big screen versions of comic books into high gear.
While The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a spin-off from a well-known IP, it took a real risk in its handling of material which was intrinsically downbeat and prominently featured unambiguously speculative visuals (as well as its periodic forays into the hellish post-Judgment Day future).
Dollhouse, with which it was paired on Friday nights earlier this year, similarly steps outside the networks' usual comfort zone with its disturbing central concept and a cast of characters almost entirely divided between "pimps and killers" who have made careers out of posthuman slavery, and the slaves themselves, who happen to be blank slates reprogrammed with new personalities in just about every episode.
The same goes for the promising but short-lived ABC anthology series, Masters of Science Fiction (2007), which based every episode on a classic science fiction short story, and did not confine itself to the soft stuff. (The handful of episodes that did make it to air were based on John Kessel's "A Clean Escape," Howard Fast's "The General Zapped An Angel," Robert Heinlein's "Jerry Was a Man," and Harlan Ellison's "The Discarded," respectively.)
Chuck (2007-), while far from being ground-breaking science fiction, also rates some points in this regard. This newest take on the old theme of geek-transformed-into-superhero-by-technological-accident is an unconventional hybrid of homage to the 60s-style espionage adventure epitomized by the pre-reboot James Bond, and the angsty geek-slacker comic-romantic odyssey through the world of low-paid service work in the tradition independent filmmakers like Kevin Smith helped to define, with a heavy dose of early '80s nostalgia thrown in.15
Along with all of the other shows mentioned above that are still on the air now, Chuck's prospects for renewal for the fall 2009 season were very shaky when I first sat down to write this article. It has since secured a third season-but only barely, with a mere thirteen episode commitment and a lower budget-while Dollhouse and Heroes have also recently secured their own return in the fall.16
The Bust
In retrospect, it is less surprising that the boom is winding down than that it happened at all. In the United States speculative-fiction-based television has always been very hard-pressed in competition against more "realist" programming. The reason is that the "hardcore" audience for science fiction television is too limited to command much attention from the major networks.17 The "break-out" hits that draw larger numbers have been rare and short-lived.18
Heroes certainly exemplifies that pattern, but the short, tenuous runs of the most well-known science fiction shows even before the fragmentation of the television market by cable (and the upsurge in competition from video, gaming and the Internet) make the point even more thoroughly. While the original Twilight Zone produced a respectable 156 episodes over five years (1959-1964), this pales next to contemporaneous shows like the original Dragnet (1951-1959), Perry Mason (1957-1966) or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-1966), and very few American science fiction shows had a run on a major network anywhere near as long as the original TZ.19 The 1960s-era Outer Limits got just two seasons (1963-1965). The original Star Trek never completed its five-year voyage, the plug pulled just three seasons in (1966-1969), and Lost in Space had a similarly short life (1965-1968). Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-1975) and Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979), for all their pop cultural impact, each lasted a mere season. And so on and so forth.
The impression made by Lost's early success now long faded, and the disappointments piling up, it is only to be expected that network policy will shift away from this direction. The deteriorating ratings for these shows virtually across the board do not help either the shows currently airing, or the genre's general standing in the industry.
The recent worsening of budgetary pressures in this age of perpetual economic crisis too is a factor in bringing us back there, especially given the production budgets needed to make these shows look credible to their more sophisticated and demanding core audience, and the broader viewing public reluctant to engage with this kind of television to begin with.20 The continued flourishing of low-cost (and low-taste) reality television has only made matters more difficult, and it is well worth remembering that since 2004, it is not Lost or Heroes (or even CSI), but American Idol that has been queen of the ratings.
In short, much more than in the 1990s, a "bubble" mentality seems to have been at work in the network boom, and that bubble is bursting at the time of this writing. That said, science fiction and fantasy are unlikely to vanish from the major networks anytime soon-just as they never entirely vanished from it in the past, despite definite ups and downs.21 However, should North American genre television see another really impressive burst of activity, network TV is a very unlikely place for it to happen, and the current environment on cable does not seem much more promising. Rather, because of the niche market status of science fiction television in the U.S., media with lower-cost production and distribution seem a better bet.22 While there is a long history of frustration on the part of storytellers of all sorts in their attempts to make the web pay, the history of Sci-Fi's new Sanctuary (which began as a web-based series) may point to the direction science fiction television will take in getting to the air.23
1 Nader Elhefnawy, "The Golden Age of Science Fiction Television," Internet Review of Science Fiction (June 2008), http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10421. An updated version of the article can also be found at http://raritania.blogspot.com/2008/10/golden-age-of-science-fiction.html.
2 Nonetheless FOX (the most youthful of the "Big Four," which at the time had a reputation for risk-taking) offered, among other things, The X-Files (1993-2002) and (briefly) the cult hit Firefly (2002).
3 And of course, Spike has not repeated its sole attempt at a live-action genre show, 2006's Blade: The Series.
4 HBO, which has as of late made its mark with more conventional dramatic series like The Sopranos, and generally just dabbled in genre television-the short-lived Carnivale (2003-2005) represented its most serious effort in that area for many years-has also shown more interest with the launch of its vampire drama True Blood (2008-) and the upcoming Game of Thrones.
5 British imports also have a more prominent place on the channel, which airs new episodes of Doctor Who even before BBC America, and is also currently airing Primeval (2007-).
6 There is no shortage of examples. AMC, of course, no longer confines itself to airing classic American film; Bravo gave up arthouse cinema and high culture-themed programming in favor of reality television and reruns of NBC programs; and of course, "Remember when MTV had music?" is by this point a very old joke.
7 I find myself comparing these shows with how Paul Donovan described his intentions regarding Lexx (which aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2002) in an interview two years ago: "I never wanted to make something mainstream-with a moderate appeal for a wide audience-I wanted to make something that had a deep appeal for the sick-minded people like me." Nader Elhefnawy, "Lexx at Ten," Strange Horizons, Jul. 9, 2007, http://www.strangehorizons.com/2007/20070709/lexx_at_ten-a.shtml. This sort of approach would seem to have far less opportunity in today's environment.
8 It may be noted that a few other cable channels did newly invest in genre television during this. ABC Family aired Kyle XY (2006-2009), and 2008's The Middleman-an article on which appeared in the January edition of this publication. (See Michael Underwood, "The Middleman-Review of Season One," Internet Review of Science Fiction, Jan. 2009, http://irosf.com/q/zine/article/10495.) More recently, Comedy Central launched the fantasy-themed sitcom Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (2009-). However, these are comparative rarities.
9 It is also noteworthy that the show's audience declined sharply as the speculative elements became more prominent, falling from a robust 17 million at the start of the fourth season to a weak 10 million (and sometimes below) in the fifth, though admittedly there may be other explanations. See Henry Jenkins, "Lost's Ratings Steadily Fall, Even as the Series Remains the Top Show on the Net," BuddyTV.com, Apr. 13, 2009, http://www.buddytv.com/articles/lost/losts-ratings-steadily-fall-ev-27726.aspx.
10 And of course, there was also "fake psychic drama," CBS's The Mentalist (2008-) which inserted its particular fake psychic into a police procedural. Of course, it has been widely noted that CBS was only following in the footsteps of USA's earlier and quirkier take on the concept, Psych(2006-).
11 NBC's Surface, which was initially characterized as an alien invasion story in the press, was actually more concerned with biotechnology run amok, combining the conspiracy thriller with the disaster movie by the end of its fifteen-episode run.
12 There were also shows based on Robocop, Total Recall (1999's Total Recall 2070), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's routinely-filmed The Lost World, Robert Howard's Conan, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan (actually the subject of three live-action television series between 1991 and 2003), Sheena, and Andre Norton's Beastmaster (which reflected the sword and sorcery approach of the 1982 film, rather than the more science fiction-themed novel), while Xena: Warrior Princess was itself a spin-off of only the most recent retelling of the story of Hercules. There were also some nods to comic books in Smallville, the short-lived Birds of Prey (2002-2003), TNT's Witchblade and Showtime's Jeremiah (admittedly, a property not well known in the U.S., though by this point creator J. Michael Straczynski had become a name in his own right because of Babylon 5); and in the case of the Mortal Kombat: Conquest (1998-1999), to video games as well. Besides that, Battlestar Galactica was a remake of an old series.
There were also subtler exploitations of "brand names." Two original series-Earth: Final Conflict (1997-2002) and Andromeda (2000-2005)-were marketed as posthumous developments of the concepts of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. (The script for the first episode of EFC was credited to Roddenberry himself, and "Dylan Hunt" actually appeared in two television movies in the 1970s-1973's Genesis II and 1974's Planet Earth, which featured a protagonist by that name flung centuries ahead in time to a post-apocalyptic future.) And Mutant X (2001-2004), despite being unrelated to the comic book by that name, benefited from a tenuous association with it, and somewhat more distantly, the success of the X-Men on film.
13 Given that Knight Rider was one of the choices for a remake, the attempt to follow in the footsteps of Battlestar Galactica seems astonishingly close. The original Knight Rider (1982-1986), like Galactica, was a show created by Glen Larson, starring an artificial intelligence with a red light scanner; and almost as if hoping he would bring them luck, the producers cast Paul Campbell (who played Billy Keikeya in the reimagined Galactica) as part of the new Knight Rider's core cast.
14 The association with the "Buffyverse" also extended to the casting, the show starring Eliza Dushku and including Amy Acker as a recurring character.
15 Notably, the show is far superior in that regard to the handling of a similar theme by Reaper, actually created by Kevin Smith.
16 Cynthia Littleton, "'Chuck' Back, But On Tighter Budget," Variety May 17, 2009, http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118003850.html?categoryid=1417&cs=1.
17 Syndication, cable and the other outlets which were so prominent in the genre TV boom of the 1990s, however, were quite prepared to target niche markets, like science fiction fans. However, as the case of SyFy makes clear, even cable seems decreasingly prepared to do this, with cable channels going after slices of the biggest pies instead.
18 While not all demographics are equally coveted, or time slots equally competitive, a minimum of 10 million viewers is generally needed to keep a show on the air in network prime time. My rough guess is that the core audience for genre television in the U.S. is at most in the range of 10-15 million, making it vital that a show draw a substantial audience well beyond them.
19 The performance of the American shows named here also pales next to that of many of the shows that aired on British science fiction television, like the BBC's Dr. Who, which had an uninterrupted run from 1963 to 1984 before coming back for another three years in 1986, and the six season, 161 episode run of ITV's The Avengers (1961-1969).
20 That the bar has consistently been raised is not irrelevant. The new Battlestar Galactica may have been mediocre science fiction in many ways, but it generally looked great doing it.
21 The early 1970s, and the very late 1980s and first couple of years of the 1990s, for instance, were periods when their offerings were exceptionally few in number.
22 The single great exception to the treatment of science fiction as a niche by media executives is film, as from the 1990s on, "action movies became ever more the province of science fiction and fantasy." See Nader Elhefnawy, "Science Fiction and the Post-Cold War," Internet Review of Science Fiction, Jan. 2009, http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10498.
23 The implications of Sanctuary should not be exaggerated. The initial eight "webisodes" of the low budget series still cost $4 million, and Sci-Fi's interest was crucial to paying that bill. Nonetheless, there is at least the hint of a different business model taking shape. See Jenna Wortham, "Sci-Fi Sanctuary Makes Leap From Web to TV," Underwire, Oct. 3, 2008, http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/10/sci-fi-show-san.html.
Originally published in the INTERNET REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, June 2009
Collected in AFTER THE NEW WAVE: SCIENCE FICTION TODAY.
Where during the last few years the press covering science fiction television has told a story of boom on the "Big Four" U.S. networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX). J. J. Abrams's Lost (2004-) was widely credited with reviving their interest, and promptly followed by a comparative flood of new shows. (The fall 2007 television season saw no fewer than seven genre shows hit the air there, and the fall 2008 saw a similar number arrive on their schedules, along with several mid-season replacements.)
In recent months, however, the story has become one of falling ratings and cancellations. Of course, a number of new science fiction shows are expected to make their debuts in the fall of 2009, including one based on Robert J. Sawyer's novel Flash Forward, but it seems likely the trend has passed its peak; and it is already possible to say something about the course that the boom took during its brief life.
The Previous Boom, in Brief
For purposes of comparison, it is probably best to start off with what science fiction television was like before that boom (usually dated to about 2004). In my article "The Golden Age of Science Fiction Television" last June, I argued that the 1990s (or more precisely, the decade from about 1993 to the early 2000s) represented a "golden age" of North American live-action science fiction television.1 By this I meant that the period saw an exceptional quantity of production in this area, as well as some genuinely ground-breaking programming.
I also noted that these shows appeared mainly through the venues of
* Syndicated original drama, which boomed in the wake of the successes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), Highlander (1992-1998) and Hercules (1995-2000) (and of course, Baywatch).
* The appearance of two networks which to the end of carving out a niche for themselves, invested heavily in science fiction and fantasy-the United Paramount Network (UPN) and Warner Brothers (WB).
* The explosion in the production of original programming for cable television, with USA-and in particular, its subsidiary Sci-Fi Channel-as well as the premium cable channel Showtime-making the heaviest investments in genre-related shows.
The major U.S. networks (the "Big Four," consisting of ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX), meanwhile, played a comparatively minor role.2 However, circumstances had changed by the early 2000s. The syndicated original drama has largely vanished from television (though in 2008 Hercules and Xena producer Sam Raimi took another crack at it with his new series, The Legend of the Seeker, based on novelist Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth" novels).
Neither UPN nor the WB actually exist anymore, both merged inside the CW, which has retained WB legacies Smallville (2001-) and Supernatural (2005-) and is airing the second season of Reaper (2007-) but overall is less invested in such programming.
The same has gone for original science fiction on American cable. USA canned the last of its shows like the The 4400 (2004-2007) and The Dead Zone (2002-2007) back in 2007, and today concentrates on crime-themed programming like Psych, Burn Notice and In Plain Sight (as well as Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the new episodes of which air there first). TNT, which aired the final season of Babylon 5 (1994-1998), its spin-off Crusade (1999) and two seasons of Witchblade (2001-2002), is now more recognizable as the home of The Closer. (This is even the case where reruns are concerned. Where various Star Trek series once comprised much of the content of Spike TV, their place has largely been taken by the CSI franchise-and of course, the Ultimate Fighting Championship.3)
Showtime, too, has largely abandoned that focus, concentrating instead on shows like Brotherhood and Weeds (though the upcoming Camelot and Syns hint at a partial revival of interest in that area).4
Even the Sci-Fi Channel (soon to be the "SyFy Channel") does not have quite its old flair, apparently preferring hidden camera shows, game shows and pseudo-science documentaries to other content. Its scripted offerings these last few years have met with comparatively little success (2006's Eureka and 2008's Sanctuary are the only ones to rate so much as a second season), so that its future as a source for original dramatic series seems to rest heavily on its continued milking of the Stargate and Battlestar Galactica franchises it took over early in the decade.5 (Stargate: Universe and Caprica-the pilot to which was released on DVD in April this year-are coming soon to that channel.)
There are many who are reading the rebranding of the channel as "Syfy" as an indication that the channel (the biggest draw on which is now ECW Wrestling!) is shifting away from its core concept and audience in the hopes of winning higher ratings (as many channels have done before it).6 (Even the channel's upcoming scripted shows, such as Caprica-which is being marketed as a dynastic soap opera like Dallas-and Warehouse 13-which has been compared to Moonlighting by network executives-appear to be aimed at a more mainstream audience.7)
Put bluntly, Sci-Fi looks to be leaving the "geeks" out in the cold in search of larger and more lucrative demographics, just as G4TV (a network originally devoted to video games) did before it.8
The Network Boom
Just as the science fiction output of syndicated and cable television was winding down, network television was being hailed as the source of striking new genre product in the wake of Lost's success. Arguably, however, it was not just the ratings the show drew that encouraged ABC and other networks to press on in this direction, but the kind of science fiction Lost happened to be which shaped the boom.
To a considerable degree, Lost plays like a "realist" drama, particularly in the earlier episodes. The show spent a great deal of time on soap opera (e.g., will Kate choose Jack or Sawyer?). The lengthy flashbacks detailing the lives of its characters prior to their arrival on the island include much of the stuff of conventional medical, legal and police drama. (Jack was a surgeon, Dawson was in a custody battle, Ana was a cop, etc.). And the speculative touches, rarely conspicuous, often came across as weird more than anything else (like the presence of a polar bear on their tropical island). Rather than science fiction as the term is usually used, the first couple of seasons of the show could be taken for simply "slipstream" or "postmodern," like a darker, more dangerous Northern Exposure.9
As one might guess from this model, the executives generally played it safe (despite which they were often quick to pull the plug when they didn't see the unrealistic results they hoped for). Apart from NBC's brief experiment with airing Battlestar Galactica in prime time, the networks generally steered clear of space, and also of conspicuously fantastic, futuristic or historical settings of the kinds prominent in the 1990s-era boom. They also avoided taking radically different or new approaches to the material (excepting the increased emphasis on story arcs).
Instead there was a preference on the part of the networks for contemporary settings and familiar concepts. There was, for instance, a tendency to incorporate speculative elements into staple television genres like the cop drama, as in the time-loop story Day Break (2006-2007), or the procedurals Life on Mars (2008-2009) and New Amsterdam (2008). A bit less conventionally, NBC's My Own Worst Enemy (2008) wrote electronic personality switches into a spy story, while Kings (2009) offered a twist on the dynastic drama by retelling the Biblical Book of Kings in an alternate-modern setting, where Shiloh looks like New York.
There is also a small speculative touch in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother (2005-), which is told from the future year of 2030; the defunct legal "dramedy" Eli Stone (2008), in which the protagonist suffers hallucinations that may actually be something more; and the relationship-themed dramedy The Ex List (2008), where a psychic played a key role in events.
Paranormal-themed shows were another obvious direction to go in. These included the psychic dramas Ghost Whisperer (2005-) and Medium (2005-).10 There was also yet another series about a much-older-than-he-looks vampire detective pounding the pavement at night, and the short-lived Moonlight (2007-2008). CBS's The Eleventh Hour (2008-2009) and FOX's Fringe (2008-) both returned to X-Files territory, with government investigators looking into assorted extraordinary phenomena outside the bounds of the scientific mainstream. 2007's Journeyman treaded the same path as the old Quantum Leap series (1989-1993) (though it had considerably more polish and a better-developed story arc during its thirteen episode run than Leap).
The fall of 2005 also saw a pair of shows based on the alien invasion theme: CBS's Threshold and ABC's Invasion.11 Both were written as present-day stories about infiltration by (generally) unseen enemies, with Threshold in particular shamelessly exploiting the post-9/11 situation (while the press unfairly made much of Invasion's setting in the wake of a devastating hurricane).
Additionally, great effort was made to exploit already well-established brand names and intellectual properties. Certainly in the earlier, syndication and cable-driven boom Star Trek: The Next Generation led the way, and the spin-offs from the Highlander film series (1986, sequels 1991, 1994 and 2000), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Stargate (1994) were not only among the biggest hits in the 1990s, but each of the resulting series spawned a spin-off of their own (in the cases of Buffy and Stargate, rather long-running ones, each finishing that magic number of seasons, five).12
However, the networks displayed a propensity for this approach that was at least equally strong, given the scale of investment. NBC, apparently inspired by the limited success of Galactica, launched high-profile remakes of old shows—specifically-The Bionic Woman (2007) and Knight Rider (2008-2009)-two years running.13
They predictably failed at it. Both concepts were thin to begin with, and not much was added to them in their reinventions. They also suffered from annoying characters and ultra-generic writing that fell far short of the revolutionary, "You've never seen anything like this!" promises made by their very aggressive publicity campaigns-which unintentionally had me laughing long before they actually hit the air.
ABC did the same thing with Kolchak the Night Stalker in 2005, with the same lack of success.
Meanwhile, FOX launched a show based on one of the biggest-ever science fiction film franchises, Terminator, in January 2008, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. ABC's Life on Mars was a remake of the highly regarded British original, as was CBS's Eleventh Hour, while 2008's The Ex List was a remake of an Israeli show.
J.J. Abrams, who had preceded Lost with Alias, followed up Lost with Invasion and Fringe, and became a brand name all by himself. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly creator Joss Whedon also has something of that status, and Dollhouse arrived in February this year bearing his label.14
Noteworthy Efforts
The shows that followed Lost (which, incidentally, never approached the viewership of a show like CBS's CSI: Crime Scene Investigations) rarely came close to its audience share, and rarely held such audiences as they did capture for very long. (This was the case with Heroes, which initially did quite well before it began its ratings nosedive.) Truly devoted cults were few, though the following for Jericho was apparently strong enough to (briefly) bring it back from the dead after its cancellation. And really broad, enthusiastic critical adulation was rare, though Pushing Daisies was very well received.
Still, not only was it the case that at least a few of the shows in this group were worth watching, but some of them also took conceptual risks deserving of mention here. Despite the conventionality, and even blandness of the small-town setting, Jericho (2006-2008) was certainly one, given its post-apocalyptic scenariosetting, its relatively elaborate conception of the aftermath's "big picture" (complete with a much-changed United States), and despite the imperfections of the writing (including some really questionable plot twists), the political nerves it touches in its characters' probing of how the situation came to be.
Heroes (2006-) was not totally unprecedented, hour-long dramas having been centered on superheroes before, including Wonder Woman (1975-1979), The Incredible Hulk (1978-1982), Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-1997), and more recently, Smallville (2001-)-as well as TNT's Witchblade, which was shut down due not to a lack of audience interest, but the personal problems of its star. However, it did not have the asset of a recognizable classic character like Superman, Wonder Woman or the Incredible Hulk. It was also intended from the outset to reflect the newer, more character-driven approach to the material toward which superhero-themed film has tended since the success of the first X-Men movie in 2000 kicked our current period of big screen versions of comic books into high gear.
While The Sarah Connor Chronicles was a spin-off from a well-known IP, it took a real risk in its handling of material which was intrinsically downbeat and prominently featured unambiguously speculative visuals (as well as its periodic forays into the hellish post-Judgment Day future).
Dollhouse, with which it was paired on Friday nights earlier this year, similarly steps outside the networks' usual comfort zone with its disturbing central concept and a cast of characters almost entirely divided between "pimps and killers" who have made careers out of posthuman slavery, and the slaves themselves, who happen to be blank slates reprogrammed with new personalities in just about every episode.
The same goes for the promising but short-lived ABC anthology series, Masters of Science Fiction (2007), which based every episode on a classic science fiction short story, and did not confine itself to the soft stuff. (The handful of episodes that did make it to air were based on John Kessel's "A Clean Escape," Howard Fast's "The General Zapped An Angel," Robert Heinlein's "Jerry Was a Man," and Harlan Ellison's "The Discarded," respectively.)
Chuck (2007-), while far from being ground-breaking science fiction, also rates some points in this regard. This newest take on the old theme of geek-transformed-into-superhero-by-technological-accident is an unconventional hybrid of homage to the 60s-style espionage adventure epitomized by the pre-reboot James Bond, and the angsty geek-slacker comic-romantic odyssey through the world of low-paid service work in the tradition independent filmmakers like Kevin Smith helped to define, with a heavy dose of early '80s nostalgia thrown in.15
Along with all of the other shows mentioned above that are still on the air now, Chuck's prospects for renewal for the fall 2009 season were very shaky when I first sat down to write this article. It has since secured a third season-but only barely, with a mere thirteen episode commitment and a lower budget-while Dollhouse and Heroes have also recently secured their own return in the fall.16
The Bust
In retrospect, it is less surprising that the boom is winding down than that it happened at all. In the United States speculative-fiction-based television has always been very hard-pressed in competition against more "realist" programming. The reason is that the "hardcore" audience for science fiction television is too limited to command much attention from the major networks.17 The "break-out" hits that draw larger numbers have been rare and short-lived.18
Heroes certainly exemplifies that pattern, but the short, tenuous runs of the most well-known science fiction shows even before the fragmentation of the television market by cable (and the upsurge in competition from video, gaming and the Internet) make the point even more thoroughly. While the original Twilight Zone produced a respectable 156 episodes over five years (1959-1964), this pales next to contemporaneous shows like the original Dragnet (1951-1959), Perry Mason (1957-1966) or The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-1966), and very few American science fiction shows had a run on a major network anywhere near as long as the original TZ.19 The 1960s-era Outer Limits got just two seasons (1963-1965). The original Star Trek never completed its five-year voyage, the plug pulled just three seasons in (1966-1969), and Lost in Space had a similarly short life (1965-1968). Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-1975) and Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979), for all their pop cultural impact, each lasted a mere season. And so on and so forth.
The impression made by Lost's early success now long faded, and the disappointments piling up, it is only to be expected that network policy will shift away from this direction. The deteriorating ratings for these shows virtually across the board do not help either the shows currently airing, or the genre's general standing in the industry.
The recent worsening of budgetary pressures in this age of perpetual economic crisis too is a factor in bringing us back there, especially given the production budgets needed to make these shows look credible to their more sophisticated and demanding core audience, and the broader viewing public reluctant to engage with this kind of television to begin with.20 The continued flourishing of low-cost (and low-taste) reality television has only made matters more difficult, and it is well worth remembering that since 2004, it is not Lost or Heroes (or even CSI), but American Idol that has been queen of the ratings.
In short, much more than in the 1990s, a "bubble" mentality seems to have been at work in the network boom, and that bubble is bursting at the time of this writing. That said, science fiction and fantasy are unlikely to vanish from the major networks anytime soon-just as they never entirely vanished from it in the past, despite definite ups and downs.21 However, should North American genre television see another really impressive burst of activity, network TV is a very unlikely place for it to happen, and the current environment on cable does not seem much more promising. Rather, because of the niche market status of science fiction television in the U.S., media with lower-cost production and distribution seem a better bet.22 While there is a long history of frustration on the part of storytellers of all sorts in their attempts to make the web pay, the history of Sci-Fi's new Sanctuary (which began as a web-based series) may point to the direction science fiction television will take in getting to the air.23
1 Nader Elhefnawy, "The Golden Age of Science Fiction Television," Internet Review of Science Fiction (June 2008), http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10421. An updated version of the article can also be found at http://raritania.blogspot.com/2008/10/golden-age-of-science-fiction.html.
2 Nonetheless FOX (the most youthful of the "Big Four," which at the time had a reputation for risk-taking) offered, among other things, The X-Files (1993-2002) and (briefly) the cult hit Firefly (2002).
3 And of course, Spike has not repeated its sole attempt at a live-action genre show, 2006's Blade: The Series.
4 HBO, which has as of late made its mark with more conventional dramatic series like The Sopranos, and generally just dabbled in genre television-the short-lived Carnivale (2003-2005) represented its most serious effort in that area for many years-has also shown more interest with the launch of its vampire drama True Blood (2008-) and the upcoming Game of Thrones.
5 British imports also have a more prominent place on the channel, which airs new episodes of Doctor Who even before BBC America, and is also currently airing Primeval (2007-).
6 There is no shortage of examples. AMC, of course, no longer confines itself to airing classic American film; Bravo gave up arthouse cinema and high culture-themed programming in favor of reality television and reruns of NBC programs; and of course, "Remember when MTV had music?" is by this point a very old joke.
7 I find myself comparing these shows with how Paul Donovan described his intentions regarding Lexx (which aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, 2000-2002) in an interview two years ago: "I never wanted to make something mainstream-with a moderate appeal for a wide audience-I wanted to make something that had a deep appeal for the sick-minded people like me." Nader Elhefnawy, "Lexx at Ten," Strange Horizons, Jul. 9, 2007, http://www.strangehorizons.com/2007/20070709/lexx_at_ten-a.shtml. This sort of approach would seem to have far less opportunity in today's environment.
8 It may be noted that a few other cable channels did newly invest in genre television during this. ABC Family aired Kyle XY (2006-2009), and 2008's The Middleman-an article on which appeared in the January edition of this publication. (See Michael Underwood, "The Middleman-Review of Season One," Internet Review of Science Fiction, Jan. 2009, http://irosf.com/q/zine/article/10495.) More recently, Comedy Central launched the fantasy-themed sitcom Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire (2009-). However, these are comparative rarities.
9 It is also noteworthy that the show's audience declined sharply as the speculative elements became more prominent, falling from a robust 17 million at the start of the fourth season to a weak 10 million (and sometimes below) in the fifth, though admittedly there may be other explanations. See Henry Jenkins, "Lost's Ratings Steadily Fall, Even as the Series Remains the Top Show on the Net," BuddyTV.com, Apr. 13, 2009, http://www.buddytv.com/articles/lost/losts-ratings-steadily-fall-ev-27726.aspx.
10 And of course, there was also "fake psychic drama," CBS's The Mentalist (2008-) which inserted its particular fake psychic into a police procedural. Of course, it has been widely noted that CBS was only following in the footsteps of USA's earlier and quirkier take on the concept, Psych(2006-).
11 NBC's Surface, which was initially characterized as an alien invasion story in the press, was actually more concerned with biotechnology run amok, combining the conspiracy thriller with the disaster movie by the end of its fifteen-episode run.
12 There were also shows based on Robocop, Total Recall (1999's Total Recall 2070), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's routinely-filmed The Lost World, Robert Howard's Conan, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan (actually the subject of three live-action television series between 1991 and 2003), Sheena, and Andre Norton's Beastmaster (which reflected the sword and sorcery approach of the 1982 film, rather than the more science fiction-themed novel), while Xena: Warrior Princess was itself a spin-off of only the most recent retelling of the story of Hercules. There were also some nods to comic books in Smallville, the short-lived Birds of Prey (2002-2003), TNT's Witchblade and Showtime's Jeremiah (admittedly, a property not well known in the U.S., though by this point creator J. Michael Straczynski had become a name in his own right because of Babylon 5); and in the case of the Mortal Kombat: Conquest (1998-1999), to video games as well. Besides that, Battlestar Galactica was a remake of an old series.
There were also subtler exploitations of "brand names." Two original series-Earth: Final Conflict (1997-2002) and Andromeda (2000-2005)-were marketed as posthumous developments of the concepts of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. (The script for the first episode of EFC was credited to Roddenberry himself, and "Dylan Hunt" actually appeared in two television movies in the 1970s-1973's Genesis II and 1974's Planet Earth, which featured a protagonist by that name flung centuries ahead in time to a post-apocalyptic future.) And Mutant X (2001-2004), despite being unrelated to the comic book by that name, benefited from a tenuous association with it, and somewhat more distantly, the success of the X-Men on film.
13 Given that Knight Rider was one of the choices for a remake, the attempt to follow in the footsteps of Battlestar Galactica seems astonishingly close. The original Knight Rider (1982-1986), like Galactica, was a show created by Glen Larson, starring an artificial intelligence with a red light scanner; and almost as if hoping he would bring them luck, the producers cast Paul Campbell (who played Billy Keikeya in the reimagined Galactica) as part of the new Knight Rider's core cast.
14 The association with the "Buffyverse" also extended to the casting, the show starring Eliza Dushku and including Amy Acker as a recurring character.
15 Notably, the show is far superior in that regard to the handling of a similar theme by Reaper, actually created by Kevin Smith.
16 Cynthia Littleton, "'Chuck' Back, But On Tighter Budget," Variety May 17, 2009, http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118003850.html?categoryid=1417&cs=1.
17 Syndication, cable and the other outlets which were so prominent in the genre TV boom of the 1990s, however, were quite prepared to target niche markets, like science fiction fans. However, as the case of SyFy makes clear, even cable seems decreasingly prepared to do this, with cable channels going after slices of the biggest pies instead.
18 While not all demographics are equally coveted, or time slots equally competitive, a minimum of 10 million viewers is generally needed to keep a show on the air in network prime time. My rough guess is that the core audience for genre television in the U.S. is at most in the range of 10-15 million, making it vital that a show draw a substantial audience well beyond them.
19 The performance of the American shows named here also pales next to that of many of the shows that aired on British science fiction television, like the BBC's Dr. Who, which had an uninterrupted run from 1963 to 1984 before coming back for another three years in 1986, and the six season, 161 episode run of ITV's The Avengers (1961-1969).
20 That the bar has consistently been raised is not irrelevant. The new Battlestar Galactica may have been mediocre science fiction in many ways, but it generally looked great doing it.
21 The early 1970s, and the very late 1980s and first couple of years of the 1990s, for instance, were periods when their offerings were exceptionally few in number.
22 The single great exception to the treatment of science fiction as a niche by media executives is film, as from the 1990s on, "action movies became ever more the province of science fiction and fantasy." See Nader Elhefnawy, "Science Fiction and the Post-Cold War," Internet Review of Science Fiction, Jan. 2009, http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10498.
23 The implications of Sanctuary should not be exaggerated. The initial eight "webisodes" of the low budget series still cost $4 million, and Sci-Fi's interest was crucial to paying that bill. Nonetheless, there is at least the hint of a different business model taking shape. See Jenna Wortham, "Sci-Fi Sanctuary Makes Leap From Web to TV," Underwire, Oct. 3, 2008, http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/10/sci-fi-show-san.html.
Monday, December 7, 2009
This Week on SyFy (Outer Space Astronauts, Annihilation: Earth)
SyFy goes the animated comedic route again with Outer Space Astronauts, premiering at 9:30 P.M. EST tomorrow (December 8).
I have a soft spot for science fiction-based (and especially space-set) comedy like Red Dwarf and of course, Lexx. And at this point it's also nice to see something-anything-besides the tiresome parade of reality shows added to the prime time line-up. However, this is also the sort of thing that is very, very easy to botch, which is what happens more often than not, the audience getting stuck with not much more than lame parody and cheap gross-out humor (as was, for instance, too often the case with Tripping the Rift as the series continued).
On a related note: there was a more than usual amount of buzz surrounding a Sci-Fi movie-of-the-week titled Doomsday because it was associated in some minds with the theatrically released film from 2008 (no classic, but it certainly has its following), and had some speculating (incorrectly) about a TV series version of the concept. This Doomsday also attracted the notice of some Lexx fans because of the casting of series star Xenia Seeberg in it, in what is probably her most visible role on American television screens since the end of that series.
As predicted by the film's writer Rafael Jordan (who's made a career off of Sci-Fi/SyFy's Saturday night fare, a couple of better-than-average entries included) when commenting on the confusion regarding the move's name, the title has been changed to Annihilation: Earth-which airs this Saturday (December 12) at nine P.M., EST.
I have a soft spot for science fiction-based (and especially space-set) comedy like Red Dwarf and of course, Lexx. And at this point it's also nice to see something-anything-besides the tiresome parade of reality shows added to the prime time line-up. However, this is also the sort of thing that is very, very easy to botch, which is what happens more often than not, the audience getting stuck with not much more than lame parody and cheap gross-out humor (as was, for instance, too often the case with Tripping the Rift as the series continued).
On a related note: there was a more than usual amount of buzz surrounding a Sci-Fi movie-of-the-week titled Doomsday because it was associated in some minds with the theatrically released film from 2008 (no classic, but it certainly has its following), and had some speculating (incorrectly) about a TV series version of the concept. This Doomsday also attracted the notice of some Lexx fans because of the casting of series star Xenia Seeberg in it, in what is probably her most visible role on American television screens since the end of that series.
As predicted by the film's writer Rafael Jordan (who's made a career off of Sci-Fi/SyFy's Saturday night fare, a couple of better-than-average entries included) when commenting on the confusion regarding the move's name, the title has been changed to Annihilation: Earth-which airs this Saturday (December 12) at nine P.M., EST.
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