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."
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
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.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Stargate: Universe (A Reaction)
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.
Picture this: a mixed group of military and civilian personnel (including a senior politician from back home) brought together for a highly ceremonial occasion leap into the unknown depths of space to escape a devastating, planet-destroying surprise attack from orbit. They subsequently find themselves aboard a clunker of a spaceship, engaged in a desperate struggle to survive in which they are dependent on a British-accented scientist of doubtful reliability (who appears to be getting a message from Beyond); the civilians argue over control of the group with the military officers (one of which happens to be played by a three-named actor who was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Independent Spirit award for his performance in 1988's Stand and Deliver); said people also fight over whether to focus on getting home or cope with the situation at hand; and a crisis arises in which someone must be sacrificed to seal off part of the ship and thereby save the rest-all at the start of a trip which will hopefully get them to Earth.
It sounds astonishingly like the early hours of Battlestar Galactica (even before one gets to the pseudo-documentary style used for much of the camera work, or the heavy reliance on flashback, throughout the series), but it's pretty much what happened in the pilot of Stargate: Universe, which aired on the Sc-Fi (excuse me, SyFy) Channel this Friday, and is being aired again on it right now.
That there were similarities is hardly a surprise. When I first read about the show my first thought was of Star Trek: Voyager (and there is something of it here), but from the start the commercials hinted at this other direction, with their dark, tense, flashy look and feel (indeed, sitting at this computer with the TV on I'd hear someone shout "This ship is falling apart!" and expect to see Edward James Olmos's Commander Bill Adama, and then be surprised to find Lou Diamond Phillips's Colonel David Telford on the screen instead), and later, the promise of a good many baggage-heavy characters people will find it hard to like. (There is also somewhat more sex than previous entries in the Stargate franchise featured.) Even the acronym continuously flashed-SGU, just one letter away from being BSG-seemed to be exploiting a vague association with Galactica.
Still, that the new show went this far in following BSG's lead in the development of its premise and style (which show is being reinvented again?) did surprise me, and it makes me wonder: does this mean that BSG is now the template for future television space opera (at least, in the live-action North American market)?
I should make it clear that I didn't dislike this pilot (though I was surprised that we didn't find out anything about characters, locations, plot elements likely to figure in later episodes outside the little group of lost humans at the story's center), and expect to keep tuning in, at least for a while. However, given that BSG was a triumph of style (and cheap button-pushing) over substance (a point I'm not going to belabor here, having talked about it at length in the past), I don't think that bodes particularly well for the genre's vitality in the coming years, and this makes me wonder about the longer-term viability of even this series, which is in danger of just ending up BSG "Lite."
Picture this: a mixed group of military and civilian personnel (including a senior politician from back home) brought together for a highly ceremonial occasion leap into the unknown depths of space to escape a devastating, planet-destroying surprise attack from orbit. They subsequently find themselves aboard a clunker of a spaceship, engaged in a desperate struggle to survive in which they are dependent on a British-accented scientist of doubtful reliability (who appears to be getting a message from Beyond); the civilians argue over control of the group with the military officers (one of which happens to be played by a three-named actor who was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Independent Spirit award for his performance in 1988's Stand and Deliver); said people also fight over whether to focus on getting home or cope with the situation at hand; and a crisis arises in which someone must be sacrificed to seal off part of the ship and thereby save the rest-all at the start of a trip which will hopefully get them to Earth.
It sounds astonishingly like the early hours of Battlestar Galactica (even before one gets to the pseudo-documentary style used for much of the camera work, or the heavy reliance on flashback, throughout the series), but it's pretty much what happened in the pilot of Stargate: Universe, which aired on the Sc-Fi (excuse me, SyFy) Channel this Friday, and is being aired again on it right now.
That there were similarities is hardly a surprise. When I first read about the show my first thought was of Star Trek: Voyager (and there is something of it here), but from the start the commercials hinted at this other direction, with their dark, tense, flashy look and feel (indeed, sitting at this computer with the TV on I'd hear someone shout "This ship is falling apart!" and expect to see Edward James Olmos's Commander Bill Adama, and then be surprised to find Lou Diamond Phillips's Colonel David Telford on the screen instead), and later, the promise of a good many baggage-heavy characters people will find it hard to like. (There is also somewhat more sex than previous entries in the Stargate franchise featured.) Even the acronym continuously flashed-SGU, just one letter away from being BSG-seemed to be exploiting a vague association with Galactica.
Still, that the new show went this far in following BSG's lead in the development of its premise and style (which show is being reinvented again?) did surprise me, and it makes me wonder: does this mean that BSG is now the template for future television space opera (at least, in the live-action North American market)?
I should make it clear that I didn't dislike this pilot (though I was surprised that we didn't find out anything about characters, locations, plot elements likely to figure in later episodes outside the little group of lost humans at the story's center), and expect to keep tuning in, at least for a while. However, given that BSG was a triumph of style (and cheap button-pushing) over substance (a point I'm not going to belabor here, having talked about it at length in the past), I don't think that bodes particularly well for the genre's vitality in the coming years, and this makes me wonder about the longer-term viability of even this series, which is in danger of just ending up BSG "Lite."
Thursday, August 27, 2009
The Problem of Belonging in Robert A. Heinlein’s Friday
By Nader Elhefnawy
Originally published in FOUNDATION: THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, Summer 2006, pp. 34-46.
While Robert Heinlein's work has received a great deal of critical attention over the years, Friday, one of his last works, has been little commented upon, least of all as a work of cultural criticism.1 A number of reasons for this exist, the most important of which may be the widespread view that Heinlein's later works merely repeated earlier ideas, preoccupations and themes that he had better explored on previous occasions. Another is that the novel is frequently attacked as sexist. While that charge is leveled against Heinlein's work time and again, the outcry is never so loud as when Heinlein tells the story from the standpoint of a female character, as in the oft-maligned I Will Fear No Evil, and the book presently at hand.2 However, while Friday echoes earlier works in its approach to questions of cultural and societal decay, freedom, community and the frontier, Heinlein's title character grapples with them in the fundamentally different context created by post-industrial society-placing a Heinlein heroine in (and confronting the Heinlein ethos with) a quasi-cyberpunk milieu.3 Belonging, explicitly and repeatedly declared by Friday to be her greatest desire and the quest unifying her various misadventures is problematic not because of anything so coherent or discrete as a repressive world government, but the diffuseness of contemporary life, and its recklessly accelerating pace. In Friday's America, the pressures of the present erode a sense of the future-and therefore the common future implicit in the notion of belonging-while driving unanswerable questions of identity-which concern who one was in the past-to the center of experience.4
Since it is a result of a different problem, the inability to fit in and the escape to the frontier take on new shades of meaning, while remaining consistent with ideas Heinlein had developed earlier. Consequently, while the novel covers new ground it is well worth touching on these ideas before continuing.5 Like so many of Heinlein's earlier works, Friday is partly an exploration of two contradictory ideas that H. Bruce Franklin has observed "branching" throughout his work.6 The first is a monadic individualism which critics like George E. Slusser see as rooted in Calvinistic-Emersonian ideas of "self-reliance" and individual salvation, which has frequently been termed "libertarian."7 The other, less commonly discussed, is Heinlein's understanding of morality as founded on the principle of group survival, a "sense of the individual as part of a human collective, organically joined to a death-defying timeless racial identity"8, a sensibility that other readers have sometimes termed "fascistic"9. Franklin observes quite correctly that this contradiction is never resolved, but the conradiction is dynamic nonetheless, the two ideas intertwined in a dialectical interplay branching throughout the author's career. That process drives Heinlein's characters to the outer limits of human possibility, from the communalism of Smith's water brothers to the solipsism of Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, impregnating female clones of himself, making love to a mother who is a mirror image of himself and at the end of it all learning that there was never anyone or anything in his universe but himself.10
For the most part the extremes do not work well in his fiction. Heinlein is ever alert to the danger of the community trampling on the rights of the individual, an idea reflected in his succession of works from the 1940s on depicting heroic rebels against repressive governments. He is equally alert to the sterility as well as the temptations of solipsism. Bob Wilson in "By His Bootstraps" believes at the end that his had been a "good life, a grand life . . . [which] beat anything the ancient past had to offer," but is nonetheless cosmically lonely.11 While the lone, self-created "Heinlein Individual" is one who can pull themselves up "by their bootstraps," so to speak, alternatives to participation in society, like withdrawing from it or taking it over and bending it to one's own will, are usually characterised in Heinlein's work as unethical, unrealistic or untenable.12
Solipsism thus has the quality of a cosmic joke, as with Wilson's time loop, or the "Solipsistic Tournaments" that are a favorite pastime in heaven as described in Stranger, an approach to life possible for angels but not human beings. The same goes for communalism, attainable for Michael Valentine Smith's water brothers, but equally impractical as a societal-level solution. In what Slusser has characterised as this "fallen" world, ethical engagement with other human beings is necessary for fulfillment, but humans within it must be free to realise themselves in order for that community to have meaning.13
A synthesis of these antitheses is consequently a necessity, and Heinlein typically finds this in a community comprised of free individuals coming together to create a society where authentic human development is possible.14 Starship Troopers, in which the people of an "Earth that works" embrace collective survival as the foundation of their morality, yet provide for their defense through a radically volitional military force in the Terran Mobile Infantry, is one attempt by Heinlein to imagine such a community. Friday likewise concerns the quest for such a synthesis, one which is unattainable on Earth.
The state of Western civilization in Friday is characterised by Heinlein as fundamentally unhealthy and less a new phase or type of civilization than civilization's collapse. Moreover the novel's response is not acceptance but resistance, the question how to "restore health to the sickness devitalising this sweet land of liberty."15 In Starship Troopers, the establishment of a quasi-military government was adequate to arrest this process, but he appeared to conclude by the late 1960s that America's "moral, political, environmental, social, and economic" sickness was a "terminal" case16, which "not even special organizations"-or the heroine's actions-"can reverse."17 Nevertheless, the spirit of resistance to civilization's decline is never broken, and when collapse is recognised as inevitable there is a looking-ahead to a future rebirth. Recognising that Western civilization is beyond salvage, Boss in Friday decides that "we must now prepare the monasteries for the coming Dark Age. Electronic records are too fragile; we must again have books, of stable inks and resistant paper" (235). Equally important, Friday is not reconciled to her lot until she finds a lot with which she can genuinely be content-and this is found only on the frontier planet of Botany Bay, where she is at last able to build a life for herself with other people, in her own word, "belonging."
FRIDAY'S TRAVELS
As is commonly the case with works of cultural criticism, the title character and narrator claims the advantage of an outsider's viewpoint. Nonetheless, this claim has to be taken with a grain of salt. Her claim to being an outsider lies specifically in her lacking "the human viewpoint" (203) on the grounds that she is an Artificial Person. However, this begs questions about what exactly constitutes a human, and why such a definition should exclude Artificial Persons.
Heinlein has dealt with the issue of Artificial Persons before, as with the twinned female clones of Lazarus Long and the flesh and blood avatar of the computer Minerva in Time Enough for Love, all of whom represent even more exotic creations than Friday. The humanity of all of these was never in question, and the same goes for Friday no such definition of humanity forthcoming, though it is clear that some "posthuman" entities are not human, like self-aware computers and the humanoid robots that these computers make possible (96). These being baldly non-human are wracked by a "psychological crisis" which cripples and destroys them. While Friday's agonising over the question of her humanity might be said to be similar, it does not affect her in the same way as a crashed supercomputer. Indeed, Boss regards her preoccupation as being more along the lines of "neurotic weakness" than anything comparable to a computer's psychological crisis. In the eyes of George's Perreault, a designer of living artifacts, Friday's "human essence" is undiluted by the manner in which her human genetic material was assembled (129), and the same goes for Boss, who declares her to be "as human as mother Eve."
Those who would disagree can scarcely articulate a position, the line typically drawn by "ignorant laymen" rather than on the basis of a provable fact. The mere identification of artificial persons is close to impossible, not only for the average person, but for those who would presumably know better. This includes not only the geneticist Georges, but Friday herself, who has a difficult time making those she wishes to know believe her when she chooses to reveal the fact (69), and fails to recognise Trevor as another AP (201-202). Even if Friday's DNA features an array of modifications ranging from an immunity to cancer to the manual dexterity necessary to pick a fly out of the air with thumb and forefinger, these are not characteristics that are immediately obvious (44).
Biology aside, no mental or psychological difference between Artificial People and "woman-born" humans is suggested, either; no basis is ever even suggested for an equivalent of the Voight-Kampf empathy test from Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The lack of a soul alleged by the churches is an unprovable theological point rather than a scientific one. The commodification of Artificial Persons and their corresponding lack of citizenship (which results in Friday's marriage contract being declared null and void in New Zealand) is not a demonstration of their lack of humanity, but rather a refusal to recognise their humanity.
Indeed, for all of her anxiety over whether or not she actually is human Friday's own words give away the reality of the situation, that the distinction between human and non-human in the case of Artificial Persons is arbitrary: humans just "decided" that her "sort are not human and therefore not entitled to equal treatment and equal justice" (70). Friday's position in this regard is compared to that of a member of a human ethnic group being prejudiced against, a point emphasised when she blows her cover, so to speak, in an argument over a family member's marriage to a Tongan.
While that may suggest an alternative source of belonging for her there are difficulties. Artificial people are custom-tailored for their functions, so that they do not necessarily share much in the way of common genetics or common experiences. While many artificial people are indistinguishable from human beings, others are plainly visible as artificial creations, as with a "man creature with four arms or a kobold dwarf" (44). Friday is able to choose to "pass." The lack of group loyalty makes that choice more probable, and that lack has been constructed. Friday explains, that while she's "heard that Frenchmen will die for La Belle France . . . can you imagine anyone fighting and dying for Homunculi Unlimited, Pty., South Jersey Section?" (58).
Nevertheless, despite the practical impossibility of providing a rigorous definition of humanity that excludes Friday, making her claim to outsider status ambiguous, real anxieties over belonging do exist for her that may appear to be less an issue for ordinary human beings. The fact that she is a biological artifact deprives her of many of the ways in which human beings not necessarily know themselves to be human, but by which they identify themselves within the human community. While others may come from families that are non-traditional to say the least, she can only say that "'My mother was a test tube, my father a knife'" (34). She was not conceived and born but was rather "designed in Tri-University Life Engineering Laboratory, Detroit" and her "inception formulated" by Mendelian Associates, Zurich (32). Friday, moreover, is quite conscious of the fact: "Wonderful small talk, that!" she quips. "You'll never hear it; it doesn't stand up well against ancestors on the Mayflower or in the Domesday Book" (32).
Even where the contributor of the genes used to manufacture her are concerned, her strongest link is to a deceased "Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Green" to whom she is "something between a granddaughter and a great-granddaughter." She cannot claim to be a member of a racial or ethnic group on the basis of her genes any more than she can claim a national or religious one since these were derived from persons of virtually every conceivable background, from Finnish to Korean to Hindu to Swazi (243). Boss may have been her adoptive father, but because of his secretiveness about his own background he can scarcely give her one, and she is apprised of these facts only after his death. Friday's occupation, that of an intelligence operative whose commander is also her father, invites a parallel between Friday and The Puppet Masters, though the comparison only reflects the fundamental differences between the two works. Boss's paternity is a highly qualified one, the validity of which in the story only demonstrates just how much more complex human relationships had become in Friday's world than in Sam/Elihu Niven's, where fatherhood can more or less be taken for granted. That the Old Man is Sam's father comes only as a surprise to the reader, not to Sam, who had apparently always taken this fact for granted.18 Certainly calling the Old Man "dad" twice in one month is a bit much for him, but even the fact of estrangement is a reminder that the character of their relationship was never in doubt.19
The choice of nickname is no less telling. Old Man can be a term of affection, one commonly synonymous with paternity, unlike "Boss", which has a more functional, work-related connotation; as the Old Man observes in The Puppet Masters, "a boss is the man who does the bossing."20 Anybody can be the "Boss," but not anybody can be the "Old Man." Perhaps more important is the meaning of this relationship for the protagonist. Sam never finds his sense of who he is questioned; the danger to him is that he will lose his well-established sense of self to a puppet master. Friday, on the other hand, has yet to find herself, to have something that she can lose in a sense.
There are striking parallels between the two characters in that neither of them ever knew their mother, though Sam (whose given name "Elihu" was his maternal grandfather's, giving him at least that connection) seems to have had an otherwise normal upbringing. However, Friday was raised "in a creche," so that aside from not knowing her parents, everyday matters of human experience, "a million little things that are the difference between being reared as a human child and being raised as an animal" (36) are alien to her. As Friday reports, she was an adult before she ever saw a pregnant woman (45) or used a fork (64), finds herself at sea when she lands in situations where there are "no established protocols" (31) and claims to be befuddled by human sexual taboos. Rather than having acquired such cultural idiosyncracies organically-which she sometimes confuses with being human rather than a member of a specific human culture (206)-she finds that she must take pains to memorise them (205).21 Because she lacks the connections with blood or soil implied in nativity, she can not consider herself a "native" of any place. Consequently, she can not claim an affiliation with any group on the basis of culture.
Even so, what is for Friday a personal crisis is a universal problem in her milieu. Were she a traditional womb-born human she would still lack the sense of belonging she desires so strongly, this being imperiled in general in a world where human relationships are so short-lived.22 Urbanization had already changed the experience of intimate contact with a small number of persons to one of contacts with a far larger number of individuals, contacts which are necessarily briefer and more superficial because of their greater number.23 The number and superficiality of such contacts is accelerated still further by the compression of time and space.24 Can anyone be truly said to belong to a group when they are continually shifting from one group to another? In a world where the rate of change is overwhelming, belonging may be the last thing that a human being can do, since nothing lasts long enough for anyone to belong to it properly speaking.
While Artificial Persons like Friday may be unique in having no mother or father to speak of, traditional notions about sex, heredity and family had fundamentally changed so that Friday's ignorance of or disconnection from them would appear to matter much less. The earlier medical advances that delinked sex and reproduction, like contraceptives, have been surpassed by developments like in vitro fertilization, allowing a woman to carry a fetus to which she has not contributed anything genetically to term (which became a reality shortly after the book's publication). To Friday, natural birth means having babies "like a cat", rather than going through an essentially human experience. It is also inconceivable to her that sex could be a motivation for marriage, since, for all the troublesome taboos, "sex is readily available everywhere" (40), and the implicit divorce between sex and reproduction, genetics and parentage has acquired explicit legal and social recognition. The nuclear and extended families have been replaced by the "S-family" and the "group marriage" underpinning it, children in such arrangements typically having some parents with whom they have no biological connection.
At first glance, something like the S-family may appear to be a common enough feature of Heinlein's writing. However, the context of the novel makes them something more. In The Puppet Masters for instance, Sam and Mary have their choice of marital arrangements: "Term, renewable, or lifetime . . . either party, mutual consent, or binding."25 In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, group marriages represent an adaptation to demographic realities, men outnumbering women two-to-one in Luna City.26 To the extent that the relations of Valentine Michael Smith with his "water brothers" can be considered a group marriage, the sexual relations in Stranger in a Strange Land are simply an extension of communalism to that sphere.
In any of these cases, the sense is not that the function of marriage has changed, only that it has been somewhat modified for the convenience or desires of those who choose to wed, or adapted to the circumstances posited in his stories. Such a position is made explicit by Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, in which he openly and forcefully espouses the position that the specific marital arrangement is far less important than the institution of marriage itself. Regardless of whether it is "monogamy, polyandry, polygyny, plural and extended marriages with various frills," what makes it marriage is that "the arrangement both provides for children and compensates the adults [with] companionship, partnership, mutual reassurance, someone to laugh with and grieve with, loyalty that accepts foibles, someone to touch, someone to hold your hand."27
In Friday, group marriages have a fundamentally different character. The artificial quality is emphasised: "S" actually stands not for security, siblings, sociability, sanctuary, succor, safety or sex as is widely supposed to be the case, but "synthetic" (40), a term which would not seem applicable to an institution which, driven by "the blind forces of evolution", came to exist "among human beings everywhere . . . long before it was codified by church or state."28 Indeed, marriages have taken on a nakedly contractual character, with S-families acquiring and spinning off members the way conglomerates do subsidiaries, consistent with a world where the "irresponsible, antisocial brand of self-interest" Heinlein condemned seems to prevail above all other values.29 While it can be argued that marriage has always had a financial or economic aspect, an S-family is explicitly defined as as something that one "buys into" (39). Purchasing a share in a family as a stockholder purchases a share in a public corporation, and the contract is negotiated much like any other business deal (46-48).30
In the case of Friday's first marriage, she had made her rather disproportionate financial contribution in order to experience belonging, an experience which is shattered when she is let go upon being found out as an Artificial Person (73). Anita, the S-family's matriarch and herself a prime example of antisocial self-interest, used the breach of contract represented by the truth of Friday's origins as an excuse to strip her of her share, and that is the last she ever sees of her former "family," the children she had helped to raise no longer hers; legal loopholes trumped emotional connections. Some families appear more hospitable and caring than others, but the fundamentals of the S-family arrangement are the same. By contrast, money was never even mentioned when the O'Kellys of Luna City voted new members into their family, and familial bonds were almost unbreakable, virtually every spouse having to vote in favor of a divorce.31
Occupational groups are similarly problematic as a basis for belonging. Friday is, again, a special case. Her profession was that of undercover courier, one which by definition requires her to keep her work a secret (in short, to conceal her true affiliations, whatever they may be). Moreover, because of the arcane character of her skills, she does not have marketable skills that will allow her to earn a living in civil society; there is, as she observes, little demand for supermen. Nevertheless, her problem reflects a larger problem in the information age: work had become so abstract and specialised that people had jobs instead of trades, so that they were identified with their position rather than by their activity.32
The same economic dynamics mean that jobs will be changed frequently enough, with still more corrosive effects on belonging. Occupations arise and pass quickly out of existence, sometimes before they can be properly named, and Friday has this problem at one point when she becomes what is later termed a "staff intuitive analyst." It is Friday, incidentally, who asks that her occupation be named, rather than receiving the label with the job, which causes Boss to quip that she is developing a bureaucratic mind (223). The explosion of temporary employment, the higher rate of job change and consequent relocation, increase the difficulty of maintaining human contacts, and for all practical purposes, render it impossible in a great many cases.
Insofar as citizenship is concerned, one school of thought in political science holds that states per se are in decline. Present-day nation-states, proponents of this idea believe, are divesting themselves of responsibilities, fragmenting and combining to create new political arrangements, perhaps akin to the Christendom of the Middle Ages. Such predictions appear to have materialised in Friday. At least three-quarters of the four hundred nation-states represented in the United Nations are "ciphers, aboard only for quarters and rations" (160), entities with more past than future, Germany and the Soviet Union long since reverted to being a mutually hostile Prussia and Russia (37).
As such developments suggest both nation-states and the national cultures that they were supposed to shelter and develop were both in decline. States had lost both their capacity to manage their own affairs, and the loyalty of their citizens. The "income and outgo [of national governments] get out of balance and stay that way" (249) in far too much of the world, and legislation has long passed a point of diminishing returns, weighting down the law books while only creating unenforceable, counterproductive regulations.” (249-250)
Even as states grow more oppressive, turning to "conscription and slavery and arbitrary compulsion of all sorts" (250), they lose the capacity even to maintain simple law and order, "little incidents of violence" like mugging, sniping, arson, riots, bombing and other sorts of terrorism "pecking away at people day after day" (250). Moreover, "particularism", which is defined by Friday as the cessation of identification with the country and instead with "A racial group . . . a religion . . . a language. Anything, so long as it isn't the whole population" (249) is rampant. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that these groups acquiring their own states will produce political entities more viable than those they left behind, that it is a relatively simple matter of redrawing borders. State failure aside the hold of local or "particularist" cultures-implicitly a negative phenomenon – was itself weakening in the face of a "worldwide culture" (251) that transcends such lines, and the broader decline of "gentle manners" (251).
Consequently, the diversity of the world's cultures may make Friday's sex life more complicated, but they scarcely seem sufficient to confer a sense of belonging and the nation-state, as a place where people can strive to belong allows nothing of the kind. Not surprisingly in such an environment, multinational corporations like "Interworld" having equal weight with nations, fighting wars and nuking cities. If anything, they may be even more powerful, given that the dispersion of their assets through the territory of hundreds of states makes them virtually invulnerable to counter-attack (40-1). Friday herself is employed by a private intelligence outfit, rather than a country's secret service, and when Boss, a professional above all else who had recently become dedicated to the salvation of civilization seeks a new basis for world order, he looks not to any Great Power, or any other sort of human community, but to the Shipstone corporate empire. The Old Man in The Puppet Masters, by comparison, is a government official who wears his patriotism on his sleeve.
This may suggest that "corporate loyalty" is newly endowed with meaning, but short of the Shipstone corporation bringing the world together, something which never does happen, this would appear to be merely another unstable particularism, especially given the transience of employment in general. Moreover, the structure of a corporation like the Shipstone company is by no means transparent, making it difficult to tell exactly who owns what or works for whom and thus to know where the loyalties lie. Shipstone may be a single company, but it looks on paper like twenty-eight separate companies (230).
Implicit in the decline of citizenship and states more generally is the death of politics. The Balkanised America through which Friday must make her way includes a myriad of political forms democratic and undemocratic, with many places reverting to monarchy even when they had never had it before, such as the Chicago Imperium. Political ideology, which assumes a coherent vision of the world and a basis for acting correctly in it (something necessarily contrary to the fragmentation of time into blips), has become the purview of cranks and fanatics like those who claim responsibility for the terrorism of Red Thursday: theocratic "witchburners,"
FLIGHT TO THE FRONTIER
Certainly, many of Friday's personal obstacles to the attainment of an identity do not disappear. She remains, as ever, an artificial person without a lineage, a past to speak of. Nor does she find a new occupational niche: she is a housewife, something that she had tried before. Nevertheless, the principal problem, the transience which has had such a savaging effect on belonging, disappears. Botany Bay is about as far from Earth as a human being can get in Friday's future, a staggering one hundred and forty light years, and just as disconnected from Earth's relentless pace of change (343-344). Where communication between any two points on Earth was virtually instant, it takes four to eight months for mail to make the round trip between Botany Bay and Earth. Additionally, Botany Bay is very much a frontier planet, thinly populated and lawless, and Earth's decrepit institutions conspicuously absent so that much of what had earlier distressed her has ceased to matter.
Out on this frontier, Friday begins to build a life for herself. The distance from Earth and its problems aside, no reference is made to the flight to the frontier as a culling process which weeds out the baser human stock and leaves an improved product behind, a major point in many of his works, like Time Enough for Love. In keeping with the role played by corporations in this novel, for instance, the pioneers do little more on a planet like Eden than prepare it for old, wealthy retirees from Earth (293). What gives the experience value is something different, if not entirely separable. Where one came from does not matter out on the frontier, and Friday no longer thinks about her "odd and sometime shameful origin", the past no longer privileged at the expense of the present and future.
As it was for Lazarus Long when he was trying to make his longevity a non-issue, the frontier is a place where Friday and her companions "could quit pretending . . . ignore the difference, forget it and be happy."33 "Neighbors have never asked snoopy questions about parentage" (341), the frontier is a place as free from sexual taboos as governmental restrictions.34 "Nobody cares here, babies are welcome on Botany Bay; it will be many centuries before anyone speaks of 'population pressure' or 'ZeePeeGee'" (341). She lives in an 8-group family, but informally; there are few laws regarding marriage on Botany Bay, and unlike with her family back on Christchurch, she never signs a contract or sees family members acquired and spun off like subsidiaries. Where Friday's continuous movement and suspect origins had barred her from participating in so many different types of community, political, familial and religious, Friday finds herself at the center of numerous associations:
Invested in a "healthier" society providing actual opportunities for community, Friday's problems with her own identity vanish not only because it has ceased to be a practical liability, but because she can look ahead rather than back. Where Friday's concerns had previously centered on the past, or on the emergency right in front of her, whether an assassination attempt or a recurrence of Black Death, she now looks to the expansion and improvement of her community, as her participation in the planning committee of Botany Bay's community college demonstrates. This restoration of scope for a healthy, "ethical" individualism, and for durable human relationships and associations, makes possible the eventual rebuilding of the civility and civilization lost back on Earth. At last, Friday can know the "warm and happy feeling" (344) of belonging because not only is she in a place where she is allowed to belong, but because that scope for activity allows human beings to build something that is actually worth belonging to.
1. Leon Stover, Robert A. Heinlein (Boston: Twayne, 1987), p. 67.
2. Diane Parker-Speer "Almost a Feminist," Extrapolations (Summer 1995), pp. 113-125.
3 The characterization of this novel as quasi-cyberpunk or "proto-cyberpunk" may seem problematic, given that while the depiction of corporations and the exploration of biotechnology are there, information technology has a relatively low profile. Nevertheless, in contrast with earlier Heinlein novels, such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (in which computers perform select functions for large organizations while Chinese shopkeepers still use an abacus to keep the books), computers are absolutely ubiquitous in Friday. Moreover, while they do not come together to create the "consensual hallucination of cyberspace" (51) epitomised by the Matrix in William Gibson's Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), they nonetheless form a global network that effectively keeps the world's population under constant surveillance. A computer net indistinguishable from today's Internet is a part of daily life in Friday (227-28) and as the title character observes, "a credit card is a leash around your beck. In the world of credit cards a person has no privacy" (203). Indeed, the situation is such that "there is a moral obligation on each free person to fight back wherever possible-keep underground railways open, keep shades drawn, give misinformation to computers" (5).
4 See Zaki Laidi, A World Without Meaning, trans. June Burnham and Jenny Coulon (London: Routledge, 1998).
5 David Samuelson, "The Frontier Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein," in Joseph D. Olander and Martin H. Greenberg eds., Robert A. Heinlein (New York: Taplinger, 1978) p. 23.
6 H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (New York: Oxford UP, 1980), p. 19.
7 Slusser, of course, does not call Heinlein a Calvinist, but rather suggests that his works manifest its broad cultural influence in a secular parallel to Calvinist theology. George Edgar Slusser, "Heinlein's Fallen Futures," Extrapolations (Summer 1995), pp. 96-112.
8 Franklin, p. 19.
9 Barton Paul Levinson, "The Ideology of Robert A. Heinlein," New York Review of Science Fiction April (1998), pp. 1, 8-10.
10 As he lays dying what the Gray Voice says to him is that "You are you, playing chess with yourself. You are the referee. Morals are your own agreement with yourself to abide by your own rules", and the face of the Gray Voice, of course, can be glimpsed in "a mirror." Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1973), pp. 602.
11 Robert Heinlein, "By His Bootstraps," in The Menace From Earth (London: Dobson, 1966), p. 110.
12 Alexei Panshin, Heinlein in Dimension (Chicago: Advent Publishers, Inc., 1968), pp. 164-169.
13 Franklin, p. 189.
14 Franklin, p. 87.
15 Stover, p. 71.
16 Franklin, pp. 172-173.
17 Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree (New York: Atheneum, 1986), p. 387.
18 Robert Heinlein, The Puppet Masters, p. 67.
19 Heinlein, The Puppet Masters, p. 132.
20 Heinlein, The Puppet Masters, p. 158.
21 Of course, it should be noted that the codes seem less controlling than such statements suggest. Friday says that an AP can not look at sex the way a human does (205), which is supposed to be an explanation of her polymorphous sexuality, but humans commonly look it just as she does, being freely available "everywhere" (51), with few objecting save for groups like the Angels of the Lord. As Boss tells Friday, geniuses "always make their own rules on sex as on everything else" (223). For more on this theme, see Warren G. Rochelle, "Dual Attractions: The Rhetoric of Bisexuality in Robert A. Heinlein's Fiction," Foundation (Summer 1999).
22 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 89.
23 Toffler, p. 84.
24 Again unlike The Puppet Masters, or for that matter Stranger in a Strange Land, there are no "tempus" pills or time sense-stretching techniques to give human beings some respite from such pressures by allowing them to speed up their time perception and effectively squeeze more than twenty-four hours into a day. The only way to beat the strictures of time and space in Friday's world, in fact, is to journey through hyperspace, in a word, through the space travel that offers the sole escape from her crumbling civilization.
25 Heinlein, The Puppet Masters, p. 111.
26 Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1966), p. 166-167.
27 Heinlein, Time Enough, p. 211.
28 Heinlein, Time Enough, p. 210.
29 "The Heinlein individualist always acts the gentleman" rather than embodying "'rugged individualism' as the critics habitually see it." Stover, pp. 28-29.
30 Elsewhere, Lazarus Long observes that there is "'no use in written marriage contracts; they can't be enforced . . whereas if the partners want to make it work, no written instrument is necessary . . . a nod of your head is enough." Heinlein, Time Enough, p. 435.
31 Heinlein, Moon, pp. 216-219.
32 Laidi, p. 100.
33 Heinlein, Time Enough, p. 315.
34 Heinlein, Time Enough, pp. 355-57.
35 Stover, p. 75.
Originally published in FOUNDATION: THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SCIENCE FICTION, Summer 2006, pp. 34-46.
While Robert Heinlein's work has received a great deal of critical attention over the years, Friday, one of his last works, has been little commented upon, least of all as a work of cultural criticism.1 A number of reasons for this exist, the most important of which may be the widespread view that Heinlein's later works merely repeated earlier ideas, preoccupations and themes that he had better explored on previous occasions. Another is that the novel is frequently attacked as sexist. While that charge is leveled against Heinlein's work time and again, the outcry is never so loud as when Heinlein tells the story from the standpoint of a female character, as in the oft-maligned I Will Fear No Evil, and the book presently at hand.2 However, while Friday echoes earlier works in its approach to questions of cultural and societal decay, freedom, community and the frontier, Heinlein's title character grapples with them in the fundamentally different context created by post-industrial society-placing a Heinlein heroine in (and confronting the Heinlein ethos with) a quasi-cyberpunk milieu.3 Belonging, explicitly and repeatedly declared by Friday to be her greatest desire and the quest unifying her various misadventures is problematic not because of anything so coherent or discrete as a repressive world government, but the diffuseness of contemporary life, and its recklessly accelerating pace. In Friday's America, the pressures of the present erode a sense of the future-and therefore the common future implicit in the notion of belonging-while driving unanswerable questions of identity-which concern who one was in the past-to the center of experience.4
Since it is a result of a different problem, the inability to fit in and the escape to the frontier take on new shades of meaning, while remaining consistent with ideas Heinlein had developed earlier. Consequently, while the novel covers new ground it is well worth touching on these ideas before continuing.5 Like so many of Heinlein's earlier works, Friday is partly an exploration of two contradictory ideas that H. Bruce Franklin has observed "branching" throughout his work.6 The first is a monadic individualism which critics like George E. Slusser see as rooted in Calvinistic-Emersonian ideas of "self-reliance" and individual salvation, which has frequently been termed "libertarian."7 The other, less commonly discussed, is Heinlein's understanding of morality as founded on the principle of group survival, a "sense of the individual as part of a human collective, organically joined to a death-defying timeless racial identity"8, a sensibility that other readers have sometimes termed "fascistic"9. Franklin observes quite correctly that this contradiction is never resolved, but the conradiction is dynamic nonetheless, the two ideas intertwined in a dialectical interplay branching throughout the author's career. That process drives Heinlein's characters to the outer limits of human possibility, from the communalism of Smith's water brothers to the solipsism of Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, impregnating female clones of himself, making love to a mother who is a mirror image of himself and at the end of it all learning that there was never anyone or anything in his universe but himself.10
For the most part the extremes do not work well in his fiction. Heinlein is ever alert to the danger of the community trampling on the rights of the individual, an idea reflected in his succession of works from the 1940s on depicting heroic rebels against repressive governments. He is equally alert to the sterility as well as the temptations of solipsism. Bob Wilson in "By His Bootstraps" believes at the end that his had been a "good life, a grand life . . . [which] beat anything the ancient past had to offer," but is nonetheless cosmically lonely.11 While the lone, self-created "Heinlein Individual" is one who can pull themselves up "by their bootstraps," so to speak, alternatives to participation in society, like withdrawing from it or taking it over and bending it to one's own will, are usually characterised in Heinlein's work as unethical, unrealistic or untenable.12
Solipsism thus has the quality of a cosmic joke, as with Wilson's time loop, or the "Solipsistic Tournaments" that are a favorite pastime in heaven as described in Stranger, an approach to life possible for angels but not human beings. The same goes for communalism, attainable for Michael Valentine Smith's water brothers, but equally impractical as a societal-level solution. In what Slusser has characterised as this "fallen" world, ethical engagement with other human beings is necessary for fulfillment, but humans within it must be free to realise themselves in order for that community to have meaning.13
A synthesis of these antitheses is consequently a necessity, and Heinlein typically finds this in a community comprised of free individuals coming together to create a society where authentic human development is possible.14 Starship Troopers, in which the people of an "Earth that works" embrace collective survival as the foundation of their morality, yet provide for their defense through a radically volitional military force in the Terran Mobile Infantry, is one attempt by Heinlein to imagine such a community. Friday likewise concerns the quest for such a synthesis, one which is unattainable on Earth.
The state of Western civilization in Friday is characterised by Heinlein as fundamentally unhealthy and less a new phase or type of civilization than civilization's collapse. Moreover the novel's response is not acceptance but resistance, the question how to "restore health to the sickness devitalising this sweet land of liberty."15 In Starship Troopers, the establishment of a quasi-military government was adequate to arrest this process, but he appeared to conclude by the late 1960s that America's "moral, political, environmental, social, and economic" sickness was a "terminal" case16, which "not even special organizations"-or the heroine's actions-"can reverse."17 Nevertheless, the spirit of resistance to civilization's decline is never broken, and when collapse is recognised as inevitable there is a looking-ahead to a future rebirth. Recognising that Western civilization is beyond salvage, Boss in Friday decides that "we must now prepare the monasteries for the coming Dark Age. Electronic records are too fragile; we must again have books, of stable inks and resistant paper" (235). Equally important, Friday is not reconciled to her lot until she finds a lot with which she can genuinely be content-and this is found only on the frontier planet of Botany Bay, where she is at last able to build a life for herself with other people, in her own word, "belonging."
FRIDAY'S TRAVELS
As is commonly the case with works of cultural criticism, the title character and narrator claims the advantage of an outsider's viewpoint. Nonetheless, this claim has to be taken with a grain of salt. Her claim to being an outsider lies specifically in her lacking "the human viewpoint" (203) on the grounds that she is an Artificial Person. However, this begs questions about what exactly constitutes a human, and why such a definition should exclude Artificial Persons.
Heinlein has dealt with the issue of Artificial Persons before, as with the twinned female clones of Lazarus Long and the flesh and blood avatar of the computer Minerva in Time Enough for Love, all of whom represent even more exotic creations than Friday. The humanity of all of these was never in question, and the same goes for Friday no such definition of humanity forthcoming, though it is clear that some "posthuman" entities are not human, like self-aware computers and the humanoid robots that these computers make possible (96). These being baldly non-human are wracked by a "psychological crisis" which cripples and destroys them. While Friday's agonising over the question of her humanity might be said to be similar, it does not affect her in the same way as a crashed supercomputer. Indeed, Boss regards her preoccupation as being more along the lines of "neurotic weakness" than anything comparable to a computer's psychological crisis. In the eyes of George's Perreault, a designer of living artifacts, Friday's "human essence" is undiluted by the manner in which her human genetic material was assembled (129), and the same goes for Boss, who declares her to be "as human as mother Eve."
Those who would disagree can scarcely articulate a position, the line typically drawn by "ignorant laymen" rather than on the basis of a provable fact. The mere identification of artificial persons is close to impossible, not only for the average person, but for those who would presumably know better. This includes not only the geneticist Georges, but Friday herself, who has a difficult time making those she wishes to know believe her when she chooses to reveal the fact (69), and fails to recognise Trevor as another AP (201-202). Even if Friday's DNA features an array of modifications ranging from an immunity to cancer to the manual dexterity necessary to pick a fly out of the air with thumb and forefinger, these are not characteristics that are immediately obvious (44).
Biology aside, no mental or psychological difference between Artificial People and "woman-born" humans is suggested, either; no basis is ever even suggested for an equivalent of the Voight-Kampf empathy test from Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The lack of a soul alleged by the churches is an unprovable theological point rather than a scientific one. The commodification of Artificial Persons and their corresponding lack of citizenship (which results in Friday's marriage contract being declared null and void in New Zealand) is not a demonstration of their lack of humanity, but rather a refusal to recognise their humanity.
Indeed, for all of her anxiety over whether or not she actually is human Friday's own words give away the reality of the situation, that the distinction between human and non-human in the case of Artificial Persons is arbitrary: humans just "decided" that her "sort are not human and therefore not entitled to equal treatment and equal justice" (70). Friday's position in this regard is compared to that of a member of a human ethnic group being prejudiced against, a point emphasised when she blows her cover, so to speak, in an argument over a family member's marriage to a Tongan.
While that may suggest an alternative source of belonging for her there are difficulties. Artificial people are custom-tailored for their functions, so that they do not necessarily share much in the way of common genetics or common experiences. While many artificial people are indistinguishable from human beings, others are plainly visible as artificial creations, as with a "man creature with four arms or a kobold dwarf" (44). Friday is able to choose to "pass." The lack of group loyalty makes that choice more probable, and that lack has been constructed. Friday explains, that while she's "heard that Frenchmen will die for La Belle France . . . can you imagine anyone fighting and dying for Homunculi Unlimited, Pty., South Jersey Section?" (58).
Nevertheless, despite the practical impossibility of providing a rigorous definition of humanity that excludes Friday, making her claim to outsider status ambiguous, real anxieties over belonging do exist for her that may appear to be less an issue for ordinary human beings. The fact that she is a biological artifact deprives her of many of the ways in which human beings not necessarily know themselves to be human, but by which they identify themselves within the human community. While others may come from families that are non-traditional to say the least, she can only say that "'My mother was a test tube, my father a knife'" (34). She was not conceived and born but was rather "designed in Tri-University Life Engineering Laboratory, Detroit" and her "inception formulated" by Mendelian Associates, Zurich (32). Friday, moreover, is quite conscious of the fact: "Wonderful small talk, that!" she quips. "You'll never hear it; it doesn't stand up well against ancestors on the Mayflower or in the Domesday Book" (32).
Even where the contributor of the genes used to manufacture her are concerned, her strongest link is to a deceased "Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Green" to whom she is "something between a granddaughter and a great-granddaughter." She cannot claim to be a member of a racial or ethnic group on the basis of her genes any more than she can claim a national or religious one since these were derived from persons of virtually every conceivable background, from Finnish to Korean to Hindu to Swazi (243). Boss may have been her adoptive father, but because of his secretiveness about his own background he can scarcely give her one, and she is apprised of these facts only after his death. Friday's occupation, that of an intelligence operative whose commander is also her father, invites a parallel between Friday and The Puppet Masters, though the comparison only reflects the fundamental differences between the two works. Boss's paternity is a highly qualified one, the validity of which in the story only demonstrates just how much more complex human relationships had become in Friday's world than in Sam/Elihu Niven's, where fatherhood can more or less be taken for granted. That the Old Man is Sam's father comes only as a surprise to the reader, not to Sam, who had apparently always taken this fact for granted.18 Certainly calling the Old Man "dad" twice in one month is a bit much for him, but even the fact of estrangement is a reminder that the character of their relationship was never in doubt.19
The choice of nickname is no less telling. Old Man can be a term of affection, one commonly synonymous with paternity, unlike "Boss", which has a more functional, work-related connotation; as the Old Man observes in The Puppet Masters, "a boss is the man who does the bossing."20 Anybody can be the "Boss," but not anybody can be the "Old Man." Perhaps more important is the meaning of this relationship for the protagonist. Sam never finds his sense of who he is questioned; the danger to him is that he will lose his well-established sense of self to a puppet master. Friday, on the other hand, has yet to find herself, to have something that she can lose in a sense.
There are striking parallels between the two characters in that neither of them ever knew their mother, though Sam (whose given name "Elihu" was his maternal grandfather's, giving him at least that connection) seems to have had an otherwise normal upbringing. However, Friday was raised "in a creche," so that aside from not knowing her parents, everyday matters of human experience, "a million little things that are the difference between being reared as a human child and being raised as an animal" (36) are alien to her. As Friday reports, she was an adult before she ever saw a pregnant woman (45) or used a fork (64), finds herself at sea when she lands in situations where there are "no established protocols" (31) and claims to be befuddled by human sexual taboos. Rather than having acquired such cultural idiosyncracies organically-which she sometimes confuses with being human rather than a member of a specific human culture (206)-she finds that she must take pains to memorise them (205).21 Because she lacks the connections with blood or soil implied in nativity, she can not consider herself a "native" of any place. Consequently, she can not claim an affiliation with any group on the basis of culture.
Even so, what is for Friday a personal crisis is a universal problem in her milieu. Were she a traditional womb-born human she would still lack the sense of belonging she desires so strongly, this being imperiled in general in a world where human relationships are so short-lived.22 Urbanization had already changed the experience of intimate contact with a small number of persons to one of contacts with a far larger number of individuals, contacts which are necessarily briefer and more superficial because of their greater number.23 The number and superficiality of such contacts is accelerated still further by the compression of time and space.24 Can anyone be truly said to belong to a group when they are continually shifting from one group to another? In a world where the rate of change is overwhelming, belonging may be the last thing that a human being can do, since nothing lasts long enough for anyone to belong to it properly speaking.
While Artificial Persons like Friday may be unique in having no mother or father to speak of, traditional notions about sex, heredity and family had fundamentally changed so that Friday's ignorance of or disconnection from them would appear to matter much less. The earlier medical advances that delinked sex and reproduction, like contraceptives, have been surpassed by developments like in vitro fertilization, allowing a woman to carry a fetus to which she has not contributed anything genetically to term (which became a reality shortly after the book's publication). To Friday, natural birth means having babies "like a cat", rather than going through an essentially human experience. It is also inconceivable to her that sex could be a motivation for marriage, since, for all the troublesome taboos, "sex is readily available everywhere" (40), and the implicit divorce between sex and reproduction, genetics and parentage has acquired explicit legal and social recognition. The nuclear and extended families have been replaced by the "S-family" and the "group marriage" underpinning it, children in such arrangements typically having some parents with whom they have no biological connection.
At first glance, something like the S-family may appear to be a common enough feature of Heinlein's writing. However, the context of the novel makes them something more. In The Puppet Masters for instance, Sam and Mary have their choice of marital arrangements: "Term, renewable, or lifetime . . . either party, mutual consent, or binding."25 In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, group marriages represent an adaptation to demographic realities, men outnumbering women two-to-one in Luna City.26 To the extent that the relations of Valentine Michael Smith with his "water brothers" can be considered a group marriage, the sexual relations in Stranger in a Strange Land are simply an extension of communalism to that sphere.
In any of these cases, the sense is not that the function of marriage has changed, only that it has been somewhat modified for the convenience or desires of those who choose to wed, or adapted to the circumstances posited in his stories. Such a position is made explicit by Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love, in which he openly and forcefully espouses the position that the specific marital arrangement is far less important than the institution of marriage itself. Regardless of whether it is "monogamy, polyandry, polygyny, plural and extended marriages with various frills," what makes it marriage is that "the arrangement both provides for children and compensates the adults [with] companionship, partnership, mutual reassurance, someone to laugh with and grieve with, loyalty that accepts foibles, someone to touch, someone to hold your hand."27
In Friday, group marriages have a fundamentally different character. The artificial quality is emphasised: "S" actually stands not for security, siblings, sociability, sanctuary, succor, safety or sex as is widely supposed to be the case, but "synthetic" (40), a term which would not seem applicable to an institution which, driven by "the blind forces of evolution", came to exist "among human beings everywhere . . . long before it was codified by church or state."28 Indeed, marriages have taken on a nakedly contractual character, with S-families acquiring and spinning off members the way conglomerates do subsidiaries, consistent with a world where the "irresponsible, antisocial brand of self-interest" Heinlein condemned seems to prevail above all other values.29 While it can be argued that marriage has always had a financial or economic aspect, an S-family is explicitly defined as as something that one "buys into" (39). Purchasing a share in a family as a stockholder purchases a share in a public corporation, and the contract is negotiated much like any other business deal (46-48).30
In the case of Friday's first marriage, she had made her rather disproportionate financial contribution in order to experience belonging, an experience which is shattered when she is let go upon being found out as an Artificial Person (73). Anita, the S-family's matriarch and herself a prime example of antisocial self-interest, used the breach of contract represented by the truth of Friday's origins as an excuse to strip her of her share, and that is the last she ever sees of her former "family," the children she had helped to raise no longer hers; legal loopholes trumped emotional connections. Some families appear more hospitable and caring than others, but the fundamentals of the S-family arrangement are the same. By contrast, money was never even mentioned when the O'Kellys of Luna City voted new members into their family, and familial bonds were almost unbreakable, virtually every spouse having to vote in favor of a divorce.31
Occupational groups are similarly problematic as a basis for belonging. Friday is, again, a special case. Her profession was that of undercover courier, one which by definition requires her to keep her work a secret (in short, to conceal her true affiliations, whatever they may be). Moreover, because of the arcane character of her skills, she does not have marketable skills that will allow her to earn a living in civil society; there is, as she observes, little demand for supermen. Nevertheless, her problem reflects a larger problem in the information age: work had become so abstract and specialised that people had jobs instead of trades, so that they were identified with their position rather than by their activity.32
The same economic dynamics mean that jobs will be changed frequently enough, with still more corrosive effects on belonging. Occupations arise and pass quickly out of existence, sometimes before they can be properly named, and Friday has this problem at one point when she becomes what is later termed a "staff intuitive analyst." It is Friday, incidentally, who asks that her occupation be named, rather than receiving the label with the job, which causes Boss to quip that she is developing a bureaucratic mind (223). The explosion of temporary employment, the higher rate of job change and consequent relocation, increase the difficulty of maintaining human contacts, and for all practical purposes, render it impossible in a great many cases.
Insofar as citizenship is concerned, one school of thought in political science holds that states per se are in decline. Present-day nation-states, proponents of this idea believe, are divesting themselves of responsibilities, fragmenting and combining to create new political arrangements, perhaps akin to the Christendom of the Middle Ages. Such predictions appear to have materialised in Friday. At least three-quarters of the four hundred nation-states represented in the United Nations are "ciphers, aboard only for quarters and rations" (160), entities with more past than future, Germany and the Soviet Union long since reverted to being a mutually hostile Prussia and Russia (37).
As such developments suggest both nation-states and the national cultures that they were supposed to shelter and develop were both in decline. States had lost both their capacity to manage their own affairs, and the loyalty of their citizens. The "income and outgo [of national governments] get out of balance and stay that way" (249) in far too much of the world, and legislation has long passed a point of diminishing returns, weighting down the law books while only creating unenforceable, counterproductive regulations.” (249-250)
Even as states grow more oppressive, turning to "conscription and slavery and arbitrary compulsion of all sorts" (250), they lose the capacity even to maintain simple law and order, "little incidents of violence" like mugging, sniping, arson, riots, bombing and other sorts of terrorism "pecking away at people day after day" (250). Moreover, "particularism", which is defined by Friday as the cessation of identification with the country and instead with "A racial group . . . a religion . . . a language. Anything, so long as it isn't the whole population" (249) is rampant. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that these groups acquiring their own states will produce political entities more viable than those they left behind, that it is a relatively simple matter of redrawing borders. State failure aside the hold of local or "particularist" cultures-implicitly a negative phenomenon – was itself weakening in the face of a "worldwide culture" (251) that transcends such lines, and the broader decline of "gentle manners" (251).
Consequently, the diversity of the world's cultures may make Friday's sex life more complicated, but they scarcely seem sufficient to confer a sense of belonging and the nation-state, as a place where people can strive to belong allows nothing of the kind. Not surprisingly in such an environment, multinational corporations like "Interworld" having equal weight with nations, fighting wars and nuking cities. If anything, they may be even more powerful, given that the dispersion of their assets through the territory of hundreds of states makes them virtually invulnerable to counter-attack (40-1). Friday herself is employed by a private intelligence outfit, rather than a country's secret service, and when Boss, a professional above all else who had recently become dedicated to the salvation of civilization seeks a new basis for world order, he looks not to any Great Power, or any other sort of human community, but to the Shipstone corporate empire. The Old Man in The Puppet Masters, by comparison, is a government official who wears his patriotism on his sleeve.
This may suggest that "corporate loyalty" is newly endowed with meaning, but short of the Shipstone corporation bringing the world together, something which never does happen, this would appear to be merely another unstable particularism, especially given the transience of employment in general. Moreover, the structure of a corporation like the Shipstone company is by no means transparent, making it difficult to tell exactly who owns what or works for whom and thus to know where the loyalties lie. Shipstone may be a single company, but it looks on paper like twenty-eight separate companies (230).
Implicit in the decline of citizenship and states more generally is the death of politics. The Balkanised America through which Friday must make her way includes a myriad of political forms democratic and undemocratic, with many places reverting to monarchy even when they had never had it before, such as the Chicago Imperium. Political ideology, which assumes a coherent vision of the world and a basis for acting correctly in it (something necessarily contrary to the fragmentation of time into blips), has become the purview of cranks and fanatics like those who claim responsibility for the terrorism of Red Thursday: theocratic "witchburners,"
"retarded schoolboys" pushing "fascist socialism," "hard-boiled pragmatists who favor shooting the horse that misses the hurdle" (102). Ultra-democratic California, where politics is the "favorite sport" of the citizenry (136), is a "freak show" where the disease is, if anything, most advanced (235).For the rest survivalism, its sanctification of emergency and implicit withdrawal from political life is the order of the day, with homes fortified (77) and bunkers proliferating underneath houses in wait for falling H-bombs (101-107), as they had been in Farnham's Freehold. Old-fashioned Plague is again a world-threatening problem (218-221), the spread of which had required outright alien invasion in The Puppet Masters. In the end, Friday too must look to her own survival, and Boss counsels her to do so by literally leaving the world behind, advice which she takes. Ironically, Friday only manages to do so through a process that itself involved no small amount of emergency and accident, an escape from still more assassins out to keep her from finishing her last mission-for-hire. While the coincidence that led to her arrival on Botany Bay into the arms of a loving family she had encountered back on Earth is implausible, the details are consistent with the pattern of events in the novel thus far, the sense of racing from one crisis to another, until, fortuitously, she arrives in a place beyond crisis.
FLIGHT TO THE FRONTIER
Certainly, many of Friday's personal obstacles to the attainment of an identity do not disappear. She remains, as ever, an artificial person without a lineage, a past to speak of. Nor does she find a new occupational niche: she is a housewife, something that she had tried before. Nevertheless, the principal problem, the transience which has had such a savaging effect on belonging, disappears. Botany Bay is about as far from Earth as a human being can get in Friday's future, a staggering one hundred and forty light years, and just as disconnected from Earth's relentless pace of change (343-344). Where communication between any two points on Earth was virtually instant, it takes four to eight months for mail to make the round trip between Botany Bay and Earth. Additionally, Botany Bay is very much a frontier planet, thinly populated and lawless, and Earth's decrepit institutions conspicuously absent so that much of what had earlier distressed her has ceased to matter.
Out on this frontier, Friday begins to build a life for herself. The distance from Earth and its problems aside, no reference is made to the flight to the frontier as a culling process which weeds out the baser human stock and leaves an improved product behind, a major point in many of his works, like Time Enough for Love. In keeping with the role played by corporations in this novel, for instance, the pioneers do little more on a planet like Eden than prepare it for old, wealthy retirees from Earth (293). What gives the experience value is something different, if not entirely separable. Where one came from does not matter out on the frontier, and Friday no longer thinks about her "odd and sometime shameful origin", the past no longer privileged at the expense of the present and future.
As it was for Lazarus Long when he was trying to make his longevity a non-issue, the frontier is a place where Friday and her companions "could quit pretending . . . ignore the difference, forget it and be happy."33 "Neighbors have never asked snoopy questions about parentage" (341), the frontier is a place as free from sexual taboos as governmental restrictions.34 "Nobody cares here, babies are welcome on Botany Bay; it will be many centuries before anyone speaks of 'population pressure' or 'ZeePeeGee'" (341). She lives in an 8-group family, but informally; there are few laws regarding marriage on Botany Bay, and unlike with her family back on Christchurch, she never signs a contract or sees family members acquired and spun off like subsidiaries. Where Friday's continuous movement and suspect origins had barred her from participating in so many different types of community, political, familial and religious, Friday finds herself at the center of numerous associations:
Last week I was trying to figure out why I was so short on time. I'm secretary of the Town Council. I'm program chairman of the Parents-Teachers Association. I'm troop mistress of the New Toowoomba Girl Scouts. I'm a past president of the Garden Club, and I'm on the planning committee of the community college we're starting (344).Removed from the pressures of transience, with space and time "decompressed", human relationships, while more limited in variety on Friday's frontier planet, are not only more durable, but reacquire meaning because people are together in one place long enough to be connected. It is notable, moreover, that membership in voluntary associations appears so prominently in her claim to have found a place where she can belong. Civil society, associated with the frontier since Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy in America, was conspicuously lacking back on Earth, where it would appear, as Benjamin Barber has suggested of present-day civil society, to have been squeezed out of existence by a decrepit, oppressive public sector and the "rude, wolfish pursuit of self-interest" that was a "mark of a sick and dying culture."35
Invested in a "healthier" society providing actual opportunities for community, Friday's problems with her own identity vanish not only because it has ceased to be a practical liability, but because she can look ahead rather than back. Where Friday's concerns had previously centered on the past, or on the emergency right in front of her, whether an assassination attempt or a recurrence of Black Death, she now looks to the expansion and improvement of her community, as her participation in the planning committee of Botany Bay's community college demonstrates. This restoration of scope for a healthy, "ethical" individualism, and for durable human relationships and associations, makes possible the eventual rebuilding of the civility and civilization lost back on Earth. At last, Friday can know the "warm and happy feeling" (344) of belonging because not only is she in a place where she is allowed to belong, but because that scope for activity allows human beings to build something that is actually worth belonging to.
1. Leon Stover, Robert A. Heinlein (Boston: Twayne, 1987), p. 67.
2. Diane Parker-Speer "Almost a Feminist," Extrapolations (Summer 1995), pp. 113-125.
3 The characterization of this novel as quasi-cyberpunk or "proto-cyberpunk" may seem problematic, given that while the depiction of corporations and the exploration of biotechnology are there, information technology has a relatively low profile. Nevertheless, in contrast with earlier Heinlein novels, such as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (in which computers perform select functions for large organizations while Chinese shopkeepers still use an abacus to keep the books), computers are absolutely ubiquitous in Friday. Moreover, while they do not come together to create the "consensual hallucination of cyberspace" (51) epitomised by the Matrix in William Gibson's Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), they nonetheless form a global network that effectively keeps the world's population under constant surveillance. A computer net indistinguishable from today's Internet is a part of daily life in Friday (227-28) and as the title character observes, "a credit card is a leash around your beck. In the world of credit cards a person has no privacy" (203). Indeed, the situation is such that "there is a moral obligation on each free person to fight back wherever possible-keep underground railways open, keep shades drawn, give misinformation to computers" (5).
4 See Zaki Laidi, A World Without Meaning, trans. June Burnham and Jenny Coulon (London: Routledge, 1998).
5 David Samuelson, "The Frontier Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein," in Joseph D. Olander and Martin H. Greenberg eds., Robert A. Heinlein (New York: Taplinger, 1978) p. 23.
6 H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (New York: Oxford UP, 1980), p. 19.
7 Slusser, of course, does not call Heinlein a Calvinist, but rather suggests that his works manifest its broad cultural influence in a secular parallel to Calvinist theology. George Edgar Slusser, "Heinlein's Fallen Futures," Extrapolations (Summer 1995), pp. 96-112.
8 Franklin, p. 19.
9 Barton Paul Levinson, "The Ideology of Robert A. Heinlein," New York Review of Science Fiction April (1998), pp. 1, 8-10.
10 As he lays dying what the Gray Voice says to him is that "You are you, playing chess with yourself. You are the referee. Morals are your own agreement with yourself to abide by your own rules", and the face of the Gray Voice, of course, can be glimpsed in "a mirror." Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1973), pp. 602.
11 Robert Heinlein, "By His Bootstraps," in The Menace From Earth (London: Dobson, 1966), p. 110.
12 Alexei Panshin, Heinlein in Dimension (Chicago: Advent Publishers, Inc., 1968), pp. 164-169.
13 Franklin, p. 189.
14 Franklin, p. 87.
15 Stover, p. 71.
16 Franklin, pp. 172-173.
17 Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree (New York: Atheneum, 1986), p. 387.
18 Robert Heinlein, The Puppet Masters, p. 67.
19 Heinlein, The Puppet Masters, p. 132.
20 Heinlein, The Puppet Masters, p. 158.
21 Of course, it should be noted that the codes seem less controlling than such statements suggest. Friday says that an AP can not look at sex the way a human does (205), which is supposed to be an explanation of her polymorphous sexuality, but humans commonly look it just as she does, being freely available "everywhere" (51), with few objecting save for groups like the Angels of the Lord. As Boss tells Friday, geniuses "always make their own rules on sex as on everything else" (223). For more on this theme, see Warren G. Rochelle, "Dual Attractions: The Rhetoric of Bisexuality in Robert A. Heinlein's Fiction," Foundation (Summer 1999).
22 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 89.
23 Toffler, p. 84.
24 Again unlike The Puppet Masters, or for that matter Stranger in a Strange Land, there are no "tempus" pills or time sense-stretching techniques to give human beings some respite from such pressures by allowing them to speed up their time perception and effectively squeeze more than twenty-four hours into a day. The only way to beat the strictures of time and space in Friday's world, in fact, is to journey through hyperspace, in a word, through the space travel that offers the sole escape from her crumbling civilization.
25 Heinlein, The Puppet Masters, p. 111.
26 Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1966), p. 166-167.
27 Heinlein, Time Enough, p. 211.
28 Heinlein, Time Enough, p. 210.
29 "The Heinlein individualist always acts the gentleman" rather than embodying "'rugged individualism' as the critics habitually see it." Stover, pp. 28-29.
30 Elsewhere, Lazarus Long observes that there is "'no use in written marriage contracts; they can't be enforced . . whereas if the partners want to make it work, no written instrument is necessary . . . a nod of your head is enough." Heinlein, Time Enough, p. 435.
31 Heinlein, Moon, pp. 216-219.
32 Laidi, p. 100.
33 Heinlein, Time Enough, p. 315.
34 Heinlein, Time Enough, pp. 355-57.
35 Stover, p. 75.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
The Metatemporal Detective, by Michael Moorcock
New York: Prometheus Books, 2007, pp. 370.
Michael Moorcock’s recent collection, The Metatemporal Detective, contains eleven stories centering on the adventures of Sir Seaton Begg, a crisp, clever, Sherlock Holmes-like English detective with a classic stiff upper lip who travels the moonbeam roads of the multiverse solving crimes, carrying on a long-running duel with his nemesis, the enigmatic Monsieur Zenith.
As readers familiar with Moorcock might guess, there is a lot more to these stories than this simple premise suggests. Once again Moorcock is writing in his Edwardian adventure story mode, with both Begg and his antagonist homages not to Holmes, but the stories of Sexton Blake, and his sometime opponent, the original Monsieur Zenith. (The Sexton Blake tales are relatively obscure today, the books no longer even in print, but those interested can learn more about them at "Blakiana," a web site devoted to the phenomenon which Moorcock himself recommends on his acknowledgements page and which includes, among other things, Moorcock's own thoughts on the character in his article "The Odyssey of Sexton Blake.")
Moreover, this is a story deeply rooted in Moorcock's multiverse, where the primal forces of Law and Chaos struggle against one another, and the precarious balance between the two is maintained only by the Knights of the Balance, like the various incarnations of the "Eternal Champion," the most famous of whom is very much present. The black sword-wielding Zenith, as the image of the pale, crimson-eyed gentleman on the book's cover hints, is none other than Elric of Melnibone.
As one might expect given Moorcock's rejection of simplistic notions of good and evil, and his insistence that Elric is not an anti-hero, but a hero, period, Elric does not precisely take a villainous turn here. While often on the wrong side of the Law that Begg is sworn to uphold--and certainly as capable of cold-blooded acts as ever--his adventures nonetheless have him acting not out of selfish personal gain, but his familiar role as rescuer, righteous avenger and servant of the balance. Additionally, his contest with Begg is an honorable one, played by rules they both recognize.
As a consequence, the tone in these pieces is rather lighter than in most of Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories, which so often tended toward the brooding and the tragic, and they are quite effective in this mode. The individual stories in the collection are witty, intricately plotted without being confusing, and at the same time Moorcock never shies away from going over the top, the outstanding example of which is the "The Mystery of the Texas Twister," with its caricatures of well-known figures and wild climax. Additionally, even working within the Edwardian adventure mode they also manage to reflect Moorcock's trademark versatility, from the hard-boiled crime story "The Girl Who Killed Sylvia Blade" to the Western "The Ghost Warriors," the satirical spy caper in "Twister" to the Parisian-set police procedural of "The Affair of the Bassin Les Hivers," which helps to keep them from being repetitive, and the worlds across which Begg pursues Zenith have an interest of their own.
As is commonly the case, particularly in the Pyat Quartet, Moorcock's settings come alive, urban ones especially, and the element of alternate history, which Moorcock earlier used to good effect in the Oswald Bastable tales, is compelling because of the uniqueness of his approach. Instead of fictionalizing plausible counterfactuals, or nightmares which make history as it turned out seem like a relief for all of its horrors, his main use of it is the visualization of alternative paths that may have had more rather than less attractive outcomes--which as he demonstrates is not a barrier to interesting and at times extravagant world-building. In most of the worlds Begg visits it is not a dwindling supply of oil but electricity which powers cars, as we can only wish was the case today; and instead of squeezing aboard crowded, paranoid passenger planes, long-distance travelers enjoy the amenities of a more gracious age on airships. The neoconservatives are not only confined to the rogue state of Texas, but find their war-making schemes thwarted and their reign cut short. (Moorcock's political sympathies are not one of the book's mysteries.) Adolf Hitler, who so often triumphs in genre stories that Gavriel D. Rosenfeld recently devoted a book-length study to them, 2005's The World Hitler Never Made, is here checked long before his regime wreaks anything like the damage it did in our world. While this sometimes has Moorcock going over ground familiar from his other works, sometimes later ones which treated the subject in greater depth (as in "The Case of the Nazi Canary," which deals with some of the same history as the Pyat novel The Vengeance of Rome), the distinctiveness of this series keeps his handling of them fresh.
The collection was also put together with an eye to making it more than the sum of its parts. As with the fifteen-volume reissue of much of Moorcock's earlier writing under the Eternal Champion heading in the 1990s, Detective retroactively puts these disparate series into a more or less linear sequence, and there is some unevenness. A few are only tenuously connected to the Begg-Zenith duel, particularly the oldest pieces, 1966’s "Sylvia Blade" and "The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius" (one reason why in some editions the stories have been revised retroactively to make them a closer fit). The same goes for "Sir Milk-and-Blood," which is basically a piece of supernatural horror in which Bad People get their comeuppance from something far scarier than themselves. Nonetheless the first story in the set, "The Affair of the Seven Virgins," is a fitting start to the saga, which develops through most of the stories that follow, particularly the last two pieces, "Les Hivers" and "The Flaneur des Arcades de l'Opera." While "Les Hivers" vaults over quite a bit of narrative territory I would have preferred to see more thoroughly fleshed out here, it succeeds in advancing the relationship between Begg and Zenith, and in deepening the world they both inhabit. "Flaneur," which here appears for the very first time, is ambitious and grandly imagined, bringing together other threads from the Elric and Von Bek sequences, and makes for a very satisfying close to the volume.
Moorcock's polished, lucid storytelling makes these pieces accessible and enjoyable for newcomers, but as the elaborate background to them suggests, they will not get quite all of the layers and nuances to them. It is mainly longtime readers of the author's works who will appreciate the dizzying interconnections, the crossovers and the in-jokes that form a significant part of this series' full entertainment value, here even more so than in most of Moorcock's fiction. (The Von Bek family mythos Moorcock established in The War Hound and the World's Pain is not much less important than Elric's own sprawling saga to the stories in Detective, which is as good an argument as any for a comprehensive, thorough and up-to-date encyclopedia of Michael Moorcock's writing.) Old fans will likely find themselves going back to earlier works, while new readers may find their curiosity sufficiently piqued to look up his earlier books-and lose themselves on the moonbeam roads of the multiverse.
Michael Moorcock’s recent collection, The Metatemporal Detective, contains eleven stories centering on the adventures of Sir Seaton Begg, a crisp, clever, Sherlock Holmes-like English detective with a classic stiff upper lip who travels the moonbeam roads of the multiverse solving crimes, carrying on a long-running duel with his nemesis, the enigmatic Monsieur Zenith.
As readers familiar with Moorcock might guess, there is a lot more to these stories than this simple premise suggests. Once again Moorcock is writing in his Edwardian adventure story mode, with both Begg and his antagonist homages not to Holmes, but the stories of Sexton Blake, and his sometime opponent, the original Monsieur Zenith. (The Sexton Blake tales are relatively obscure today, the books no longer even in print, but those interested can learn more about them at "Blakiana," a web site devoted to the phenomenon which Moorcock himself recommends on his acknowledgements page and which includes, among other things, Moorcock's own thoughts on the character in his article "The Odyssey of Sexton Blake.")
Moreover, this is a story deeply rooted in Moorcock's multiverse, where the primal forces of Law and Chaos struggle against one another, and the precarious balance between the two is maintained only by the Knights of the Balance, like the various incarnations of the "Eternal Champion," the most famous of whom is very much present. The black sword-wielding Zenith, as the image of the pale, crimson-eyed gentleman on the book's cover hints, is none other than Elric of Melnibone.
As one might expect given Moorcock's rejection of simplistic notions of good and evil, and his insistence that Elric is not an anti-hero, but a hero, period, Elric does not precisely take a villainous turn here. While often on the wrong side of the Law that Begg is sworn to uphold--and certainly as capable of cold-blooded acts as ever--his adventures nonetheless have him acting not out of selfish personal gain, but his familiar role as rescuer, righteous avenger and servant of the balance. Additionally, his contest with Begg is an honorable one, played by rules they both recognize.
As a consequence, the tone in these pieces is rather lighter than in most of Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories, which so often tended toward the brooding and the tragic, and they are quite effective in this mode. The individual stories in the collection are witty, intricately plotted without being confusing, and at the same time Moorcock never shies away from going over the top, the outstanding example of which is the "The Mystery of the Texas Twister," with its caricatures of well-known figures and wild climax. Additionally, even working within the Edwardian adventure mode they also manage to reflect Moorcock's trademark versatility, from the hard-boiled crime story "The Girl Who Killed Sylvia Blade" to the Western "The Ghost Warriors," the satirical spy caper in "Twister" to the Parisian-set police procedural of "The Affair of the Bassin Les Hivers," which helps to keep them from being repetitive, and the worlds across which Begg pursues Zenith have an interest of their own.
As is commonly the case, particularly in the Pyat Quartet, Moorcock's settings come alive, urban ones especially, and the element of alternate history, which Moorcock earlier used to good effect in the Oswald Bastable tales, is compelling because of the uniqueness of his approach. Instead of fictionalizing plausible counterfactuals, or nightmares which make history as it turned out seem like a relief for all of its horrors, his main use of it is the visualization of alternative paths that may have had more rather than less attractive outcomes--which as he demonstrates is not a barrier to interesting and at times extravagant world-building. In most of the worlds Begg visits it is not a dwindling supply of oil but electricity which powers cars, as we can only wish was the case today; and instead of squeezing aboard crowded, paranoid passenger planes, long-distance travelers enjoy the amenities of a more gracious age on airships. The neoconservatives are not only confined to the rogue state of Texas, but find their war-making schemes thwarted and their reign cut short. (Moorcock's political sympathies are not one of the book's mysteries.) Adolf Hitler, who so often triumphs in genre stories that Gavriel D. Rosenfeld recently devoted a book-length study to them, 2005's The World Hitler Never Made, is here checked long before his regime wreaks anything like the damage it did in our world. While this sometimes has Moorcock going over ground familiar from his other works, sometimes later ones which treated the subject in greater depth (as in "The Case of the Nazi Canary," which deals with some of the same history as the Pyat novel The Vengeance of Rome), the distinctiveness of this series keeps his handling of them fresh.
The collection was also put together with an eye to making it more than the sum of its parts. As with the fifteen-volume reissue of much of Moorcock's earlier writing under the Eternal Champion heading in the 1990s, Detective retroactively puts these disparate series into a more or less linear sequence, and there is some unevenness. A few are only tenuously connected to the Begg-Zenith duel, particularly the oldest pieces, 1966’s "Sylvia Blade" and "The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius" (one reason why in some editions the stories have been revised retroactively to make them a closer fit). The same goes for "Sir Milk-and-Blood," which is basically a piece of supernatural horror in which Bad People get their comeuppance from something far scarier than themselves. Nonetheless the first story in the set, "The Affair of the Seven Virgins," is a fitting start to the saga, which develops through most of the stories that follow, particularly the last two pieces, "Les Hivers" and "The Flaneur des Arcades de l'Opera." While "Les Hivers" vaults over quite a bit of narrative territory I would have preferred to see more thoroughly fleshed out here, it succeeds in advancing the relationship between Begg and Zenith, and in deepening the world they both inhabit. "Flaneur," which here appears for the very first time, is ambitious and grandly imagined, bringing together other threads from the Elric and Von Bek sequences, and makes for a very satisfying close to the volume.
Moorcock's polished, lucid storytelling makes these pieces accessible and enjoyable for newcomers, but as the elaborate background to them suggests, they will not get quite all of the layers and nuances to them. It is mainly longtime readers of the author's works who will appreciate the dizzying interconnections, the crossovers and the in-jokes that form a significant part of this series' full entertainment value, here even more so than in most of Moorcock's fiction. (The Von Bek family mythos Moorcock established in The War Hound and the World's Pain is not much less important than Elric's own sprawling saga to the stories in Detective, which is as good an argument as any for a comprehensive, thorough and up-to-date encyclopedia of Michael Moorcock's writing.) Old fans will likely find themselves going back to earlier works, while new readers may find their curiosity sufficiently piqued to look up his earlier books-and lose themselves on the moonbeam roads of the multiverse.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Warehouse 13: A Reaction
I've seen SyFy's Warehouse 13, and had some time to think about it.
At first I was hesitant, all the more so because of the initial description of the concept: Indiana Jones meets Moonlighting.
I was fine with the first half of that in theory, skeptical about the realization-but distinctly discouraged by the second, since while I remember that something called Moonlighting existed, I have only very fuzzy memories of it, and the distinct impression that it is a show in which the writing essentially consists of two idiots annoying each other.
Usually, I'm the one who ends up getting annoyed by character dynamics of that sort.
Fortunately, the core characters showed some signs that they won't be nearly so annoying as that, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it included Joanne Kelly, who I remembered from Jeremiah (2002-2004), back when Showtime was into this sort of thing (an underappreciated show, season 2 of which is not even available on DVD). Parts of the pilot were frankly better-written than I expected. And at this point, anything that isn't a reality show (such as those which have been cluttering up the channel's prime time schedule as of late) is something of a relief. However, as many a hardcore fan of science fiction television suspected, it is very far from being the sort of show that breaks new ground. Instead think of it as a twist on Eureka, a very lightweight cop/investigative show with one big gimmick (tending toward the generic) as the central plot point in each episode. It's the kind of SFTV that people who don't much care for SFTV can enjoy, and for those who are more deeply into this stuff, and frankly more demanding, it is still watchable, though far from being a must-see.
Personally, I don't have a problem with SyFy airing "grounded" series as such, something it has long been doing, as with The Invisible Man (2000-2002) or The Chronicle (2001-2002). The difference is that back then such shows were clearly part of a richer variety of programming, existing alongside material for a more hardcore audience, like Farscape or Lexx. Of course, there will still be Stargate: Universe, and Caprica, and Sanctuary (which showed some promise by the end of season 1), but there is no denying that the prospect of pleasant surprises is weaker than it once was in a line-up clattered with the cheap, annoying reality TV (Scare Tactics, Ghost Hunters, etc.) that the channel's marketing people push shamelessly and relentlessly. They've gone so far as to include a "complimentary" episode of Ghost Hunters on the Caprica DVD, which strikes me as only too indicative of things to come.
New in Strange Horizons (Statistical Study of the Book Market, Dinocivilization)
7/13/09
At first I was hesitant, all the more so because of the initial description of the concept: Indiana Jones meets Moonlighting.
I was fine with the first half of that in theory, skeptical about the realization-but distinctly discouraged by the second, since while I remember that something called Moonlighting existed, I have only very fuzzy memories of it, and the distinct impression that it is a show in which the writing essentially consists of two idiots annoying each other.
Usually, I'm the one who ends up getting annoyed by character dynamics of that sort.
Fortunately, the core characters showed some signs that they won't be nearly so annoying as that, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it included Joanne Kelly, who I remembered from Jeremiah (2002-2004), back when Showtime was into this sort of thing (an underappreciated show, season 2 of which is not even available on DVD). Parts of the pilot were frankly better-written than I expected. And at this point, anything that isn't a reality show (such as those which have been cluttering up the channel's prime time schedule as of late) is something of a relief. However, as many a hardcore fan of science fiction television suspected, it is very far from being the sort of show that breaks new ground. Instead think of it as a twist on Eureka, a very lightweight cop/investigative show with one big gimmick (tending toward the generic) as the central plot point in each episode. It's the kind of SFTV that people who don't much care for SFTV can enjoy, and for those who are more deeply into this stuff, and frankly more demanding, it is still watchable, though far from being a must-see.
Personally, I don't have a problem with SyFy airing "grounded" series as such, something it has long been doing, as with The Invisible Man (2000-2002) or The Chronicle (2001-2002). The difference is that back then such shows were clearly part of a richer variety of programming, existing alongside material for a more hardcore audience, like Farscape or Lexx. Of course, there will still be Stargate: Universe, and Caprica, and Sanctuary (which showed some promise by the end of season 1), but there is no denying that the prospect of pleasant surprises is weaker than it once was in a line-up clattered with the cheap, annoying reality TV (Scare Tactics, Ghost Hunters, etc.) that the channel's marketing people push shamelessly and relentlessly. They've gone so far as to include a "complimentary" episode of Ghost Hunters on the Caprica DVD, which strikes me as only too indicative of things to come.
New in Strange Horizons (Statistical Study of the Book Market, Dinocivilization)
7/13/09
Sunday, July 19, 2009
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People: A Memoir, by Toby Young
Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003, pp. 368.
As those of you who know anything about me might guess, I am an unlikely reader of this sort of book, which I guess is why I had never heard of the book until after seeing the movie.
I don't remember ever picking up an issue of Vanity Fair, even while sitting in a doctor's office, even in that period when I read Variety religiously (thinking I would find some key to the film business in its pages, as of course I didn't); was in fact somewhat confused by Christopher Hitchens' association with the magazine given that he mostly seemed to write about political stuff (if you don't know him, you could do worse than read Alexander Cockburn's take on the man, as well as Hitchens' comeback if you'd like to see his defense, here); and had never even heard of Graydon Carter until after I found out that the movie was based on a true story.*
Indeed, I've never been much for celebrity gossip of this sort. When I saw O.J. Simpson's white Bronco on TV, the first thing that occurred to me, even at that comparatively tender age, was that we would never hear the end of it, and how sick I already was of hearing about it.
Yet, I enjoyed the book.
Granted, apart from being surprised that a few of the incidents from the film were based on things real people were alleged to have said and done (the "seven rooms" speech about which I wrote before included, this apparently having been put into the film almost word for word), the gossip that was probably the book's main selling point business-wise (and likely, for many another reader too) was ho-hum for me.
But Young makes an engaging (and highly quotable) narrator, and his relation of his adventures is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. This is, in part, because he captures quite well a certain position that I think a great many of us not nearly so famous can identify with: of having a bit (or more than a bit) of education and culture and intellectual substance but being drawn to some (or more than some) lowbrow things; of being intensely attracted to that world of fame and riches and status and privilege and celebrity and all the things that go with it when you know very well that you are "supposed" to regard it sardonically as something trivial and beneath you; of feeling like you have your nose pressed up to the glass, especially in a moment of youthful frustration, and thinking that maybe, just maybe you will be able to join the party, but never getting in.
There is a great deal more of interest, not least of it the sociology, specifically the Briton-in-America stuff (and how Britain looks from over here; we too rarely get this sort of thing right in America, as I was reminded while watching my first and last episode of Bones, the execrably written "Yanks in the U.K."); his observations about the sycophantic timidity and outright cowardice of so much American journalism; and especially his thoughts on social class and wealth in these respective countries. He is not often original, but sharp nonetheless.
The distance between Toby and parents who were not merely respected intellectuals but a father whose work in the Labor Party qualifies him to be called "one of the architects of Britain's post-war consensus," also founded "dozens of organizations enriching the lives of tens of millions of people, from the East End of London to the Horn of Africa," and as if all that was not enough, happens to be a "minor immortal" in the world of sociology for his 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy; and a like-minded mother prominent in her own right as editor, television producer, novelist, educator and activist; is also of interest - especially because his feelings about it are so contrary to the zeitgeist of these times, as seen from where I'm sitting now, this one a
Besides, failures have the virtue of not being invested in the system they're talking about, or grateful to it, and free to burn the bridges they were unable to successfully cross in giving the facts and telling the truth, especially when the truths are of the sort the relevant Establishment would prefer went unspoken (as quite a few of the truths in this book are). This is a story of a man for whom America was not the land of opportunity, but the "land of the unreturned phone call," a reality not just for the newcomer, but many an American as well; of the man who failed to take Manhattan, who tried to make it in that place where if you could make it there you could presumably make it anywhere, and didn't make it.
Of course, this is probably starting to sound unfamiliar to those of you who saw the film but never read the book (there may not be many of you, to judge by the box office receipts - the global gross being $17 million, and the movie's North American take actually less than that of Uwe Boll's Bloodrayne when inflation is factored in - but then I was one until this week), and there's a reason for that: most of the best stuff is left out of the movie.
This was all too predictable, of course, given the changes one should have seen coming from a long way off, like the filmmakers' changing many of the characters' names to protect the not-so-innocent; downplaying the essential crassness of the hero's motivation by adding a touch of tragedy to his childhood (as well as sanitizing the character with regard to his alcoholism, drug use and womanizing, the last more often attempted than successful); turning his romance with Caroline Bondy into a clichéd tale of giving up on the glamorous but manipulative, self-centered starlet who captured his fantasies, in favor of the smarter, nicer office girl who for much of the film is the only one willing even to talk to him (and true to romantic comedy convention, spends much of the film giving our hero grief for simply having a male id); marginalizing the themes of politics and class, not least through the change of his parents' occupations and accomplishments (dad's "a philosopher," mom's an actress); and last but not least, having the younger Young learn What Really Matters in Life when he is in room seven, instead of after he's been kicked back out into the street from room one. The film was advertised as a "testosterone-laced The Devil Wears Prada," and while I have only seen bits of the latter film while flipping channels (so that I am in no position to make a proper comparison), it strikes me that turning Young's memoir into that entails not merely the usual compression, combination, exaggeration and sanitization, but an outright reimagining.
* Incidentally, a remark by Christopher Hitchens (in a review of Zachary Leader's bio of Kingsley Amis for The Atlantic, brought to my attention by David Langford's Ansible via the pages of Interzone) inspired this little piece of mine a couple of years ago in Tangent Online.
As those of you who know anything about me might guess, I am an unlikely reader of this sort of book, which I guess is why I had never heard of the book until after seeing the movie.
I don't remember ever picking up an issue of Vanity Fair, even while sitting in a doctor's office, even in that period when I read Variety religiously (thinking I would find some key to the film business in its pages, as of course I didn't); was in fact somewhat confused by Christopher Hitchens' association with the magazine given that he mostly seemed to write about political stuff (if you don't know him, you could do worse than read Alexander Cockburn's take on the man, as well as Hitchens' comeback if you'd like to see his defense, here); and had never even heard of Graydon Carter until after I found out that the movie was based on a true story.*
Indeed, I've never been much for celebrity gossip of this sort. When I saw O.J. Simpson's white Bronco on TV, the first thing that occurred to me, even at that comparatively tender age, was that we would never hear the end of it, and how sick I already was of hearing about it.
Yet, I enjoyed the book.
Granted, apart from being surprised that a few of the incidents from the film were based on things real people were alleged to have said and done (the "seven rooms" speech about which I wrote before included, this apparently having been put into the film almost word for word), the gossip that was probably the book's main selling point business-wise (and likely, for many another reader too) was ho-hum for me.
But Young makes an engaging (and highly quotable) narrator, and his relation of his adventures is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. This is, in part, because he captures quite well a certain position that I think a great many of us not nearly so famous can identify with: of having a bit (or more than a bit) of education and culture and intellectual substance but being drawn to some (or more than some) lowbrow things; of being intensely attracted to that world of fame and riches and status and privilege and celebrity and all the things that go with it when you know very well that you are "supposed" to regard it sardonically as something trivial and beneath you; of feeling like you have your nose pressed up to the glass, especially in a moment of youthful frustration, and thinking that maybe, just maybe you will be able to join the party, but never getting in.
There is a great deal more of interest, not least of it the sociology, specifically the Briton-in-America stuff (and how Britain looks from over here; we too rarely get this sort of thing right in America, as I was reminded while watching my first and last episode of Bones, the execrably written "Yanks in the U.K."); his observations about the sycophantic timidity and outright cowardice of so much American journalism; and especially his thoughts on social class and wealth in these respective countries. He is not often original, but sharp nonetheless.
The distance between Toby and parents who were not merely respected intellectuals but a father whose work in the Labor Party qualifies him to be called "one of the architects of Britain's post-war consensus," also founded "dozens of organizations enriching the lives of tens of millions of people, from the East End of London to the Horn of Africa," and as if all that was not enough, happens to be a "minor immortal" in the world of sociology for his 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy; and a like-minded mother prominent in her own right as editor, television producer, novelist, educator and activist; is also of interest - especially because his feelings about it are so contrary to the zeitgeist of these times, as seen from where I'm sitting now, this one a
generation of cyberpunk anti-heroes, alienated and alone for all the promised connectiveness of their technology, abiding by no rules in its scramble to survive and succeed, and incapable of even imagining a different sort of world.There is also an element of interest in this book's being a study of failure (not total, not irredeemable, of course, indeed partially redeemed before the last page, but failure all the same). We all too often underestimate failure's interest, which when presented honestly is really greater than the interest of your average account of success. Winners, after all, are not pressed to take a hard look at themselves, or think much about the reality of the world around them. (The worst of them wallow in their exaggerated idea of their own worth - as indeed, many of the insufferable figures in Young's story do - a luxury failures don't have.)
Besides, failures have the virtue of not being invested in the system they're talking about, or grateful to it, and free to burn the bridges they were unable to successfully cross in giving the facts and telling the truth, especially when the truths are of the sort the relevant Establishment would prefer went unspoken (as quite a few of the truths in this book are). This is a story of a man for whom America was not the land of opportunity, but the "land of the unreturned phone call," a reality not just for the newcomer, but many an American as well; of the man who failed to take Manhattan, who tried to make it in that place where if you could make it there you could presumably make it anywhere, and didn't make it.
Of course, this is probably starting to sound unfamiliar to those of you who saw the film but never read the book (there may not be many of you, to judge by the box office receipts - the global gross being $17 million, and the movie's North American take actually less than that of Uwe Boll's Bloodrayne when inflation is factored in - but then I was one until this week), and there's a reason for that: most of the best stuff is left out of the movie.
This was all too predictable, of course, given the changes one should have seen coming from a long way off, like the filmmakers' changing many of the characters' names to protect the not-so-innocent; downplaying the essential crassness of the hero's motivation by adding a touch of tragedy to his childhood (as well as sanitizing the character with regard to his alcoholism, drug use and womanizing, the last more often attempted than successful); turning his romance with Caroline Bondy into a clichéd tale of giving up on the glamorous but manipulative, self-centered starlet who captured his fantasies, in favor of the smarter, nicer office girl who for much of the film is the only one willing even to talk to him (and true to romantic comedy convention, spends much of the film giving our hero grief for simply having a male id); marginalizing the themes of politics and class, not least through the change of his parents' occupations and accomplishments (dad's "a philosopher," mom's an actress); and last but not least, having the younger Young learn What Really Matters in Life when he is in room seven, instead of after he's been kicked back out into the street from room one. The film was advertised as a "testosterone-laced The Devil Wears Prada," and while I have only seen bits of the latter film while flipping channels (so that I am in no position to make a proper comparison), it strikes me that turning Young's memoir into that entails not merely the usual compression, combination, exaggeration and sanitization, but an outright reimagining.
* Incidentally, a remark by Christopher Hitchens (in a review of Zachary Leader's bio of Kingsley Amis for The Atlantic, brought to my attention by David Langford's Ansible via the pages of Interzone) inspired this little piece of mine a couple of years ago in Tangent Online.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (A Meditation)
While not as funny as other Simon Pegg comedies like Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, and certainly no stand-out for originality of concept, surprising plot twists or satirical teeth (everyone who's ever come into contact with this kind of material can probably tell from early on how it's going to end up, the targets are easy, and I imagine I'm not the only one who thinks we've got too much media about media as it is), How to Lose Friends and Alienate People was more enjoyable than I expected, and actually contained some surprisingly good bits.
One of these is the scene in which Jeff Bridges' character, magazine editor and "linchpin of the media-industrial complex" Clayton Harding, launches into an extended metaphor about "seven rooms," explaining to our protagonist Sidney Young (Pegg) that while he thinks he may have arrived, he's "only in the first room." Now,
This necessarily means a much more worried life for anyone pursuing any particular ambition, and while this goes for people in any and every career path (especially in an age of economic strain, especially when one doesn't have someone already inside positioned to open some of those doors for them), it seems to me an especially troubling point for those who want to be writers in the "author of fiction" sense of the word: because there are so many jockeying for a very few slots (book deals that will let them live from their writing); because the career track is necessarily so ambiguous (it's not like becoming a lawyer or doctor, for instance); because it is so damnably difficult to correlate performance with success (there always being plenty of atrocious books on the bestseller lists, plenty of careers dragging long past their productive periods, and hype muddling everything); because every conversation writers enter into that gets beyond the face of sunny optimism complacent insiders present to anxious outsiders betrays just how much those who are not in the "seventh room" or close to it are stuck going by rumor and speculation. The how-to industry sells the idea that you just write the book (or maybe just the proposal), send out the query letter and . . . well, they don't usually say much about what happens between then and the deal (and what makes the difference between the rejection letter and the acceptance), which for most of us is probably not just a gap, but the gap.
It all comes down to those doorways, doorways you might not always be cognizant of facing or going through given how much of the decisionmaking happens out of the writer's sight and mind (and maddeningly, outside their control), and while the people in room seven can afford to be easygoing about it, those desperate to even get into room one can only worry that they never will.
One of these is the scene in which Jeff Bridges' character, magazine editor and "linchpin of the media-industrial complex" Clayton Harding, launches into an extended metaphor about "seven rooms," explaining to our protagonist Sidney Young (Pegg) that while he thinks he may have arrived, he's "only in the first room." Now,
"in about a year, maybe longer, you will discover a secret doorway in the back of the first room that leads to the second, and in time if you're lucky you'll discover another doorway in the back of the second room that leads to the third. There are seven rooms altogether."It is, of course, part of a rather unsubtle dominance display in which Harding reminds Young of their respective places in this particular hierarchy ("You're in the first [room]. I'm in the seventh. Don't you forget it."), but it's also much more than that, a truth that we're generally inclined to avoid: that instead of a straightforward meritocracy, and ladders ascended with talent and the "hard work" that is the subject of many a sanctimonious lecture, making one's way through the world means navigating the uncharted and unchartable paths to which those hidden doors open. (That's what all the talk about "networking" comes to, for instance, upping the odds that you'll find your way to one of those doors.) The truth is that even when you are doing everything right, there's no guarantee that you'll find the door-or even that there is one of those secret doors in the particular room you've found your way into. Far from it, you can get old without getting out.
This necessarily means a much more worried life for anyone pursuing any particular ambition, and while this goes for people in any and every career path (especially in an age of economic strain, especially when one doesn't have someone already inside positioned to open some of those doors for them), it seems to me an especially troubling point for those who want to be writers in the "author of fiction" sense of the word: because there are so many jockeying for a very few slots (book deals that will let them live from their writing); because the career track is necessarily so ambiguous (it's not like becoming a lawyer or doctor, for instance); because it is so damnably difficult to correlate performance with success (there always being plenty of atrocious books on the bestseller lists, plenty of careers dragging long past their productive periods, and hype muddling everything); because every conversation writers enter into that gets beyond the face of sunny optimism complacent insiders present to anxious outsiders betrays just how much those who are not in the "seventh room" or close to it are stuck going by rumor and speculation. The how-to industry sells the idea that you just write the book (or maybe just the proposal), send out the query letter and . . . well, they don't usually say much about what happens between then and the deal (and what makes the difference between the rejection letter and the acceptance), which for most of us is probably not just a gap, but the gap.
It all comes down to those doorways, doorways you might not always be cognizant of facing or going through given how much of the decisionmaking happens out of the writer's sight and mind (and maddeningly, outside their control), and while the people in room seven can afford to be easygoing about it, those desperate to even get into room one can only worry that they never will.
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