Half a century later, Mr. Sturgeon’s story was adapted into…the same New Twilight Zone episode cited in Mr. Bott’s letter to the editor! I regret that I haven’t seen it, but if Mr. Bott’s synopsis is accurate, the adaptor took the same odd approach The Truman Show does. To explain how and why a person’s entire lifetime could be a fraud, both modern writers posited not unknowable aliens with inconceivable technology, nor God Himself as a playwright/producer…but that other universal symbol of absolute power and mysterious motives: a cable channel.
To the TV generation, raised on the Loud family, confessional talk shows and fishbowl scrutiny of anyone who dares achieve prominence of any kind, this must seem a more hip explanation than either aliens or God. It is certainly much less plausible. Forget mere practical implausibilities, like a cable station with a budget bigger than Canada’s. Accept for the sake of the story the absurdity of a whole nation transfixed by a boring man going about his business; there actually are two women who’ve placed cameras in their homes and live their whole lives in public view on the Internet—for an audience of dozens, yes, but that’s enough of a trend to satirize, these days—and reality TV is, for some ungodly reason, getting more popular every day.
What I boggle on is the emotional implausibility. Hapless Truman is being raped—repeatedly, profoundly and most publicly—and his movie requires me to believe that throughout his entire life, there hasn’t been one moral or compassionate person in all of North America.
I seem to be the only one who has a problem swallowing this. Could these be the Crazy Years?
Recutting the Crown Jewels
FIRST PRINTED NOVEMBER 1997
I’D LIKE TO EXAMINE the recent film ostensibly based on one of my mentor Robert A. Heinlein’s immortal science fiction novels.
There: I couldn’t even get through one line without allowing my bias to show. The “ostensibly” gives me away. But I cannot remove it—for the film assays out to no more than 10 percent Heinlein content, net…and, in my opinion, perverts or subverts nearly every one of the few elements it does reluctantly take from its source. I don’t think any true friend of the book (and there are millions) could possibly leave the theater other than enraged and dismayed.
Starship Troopers is one of Robert’s most challenging works. Published in 1959, it’s perhaps the most difficult of his forty-six books for a child of the sixties to come to terms with, since it strongly champions two things that fell into grave disrepute around then: the military and the concept of personal responsibility for one’s actions. It was so controversial that it was rejected by the entire editorial board of Scribner’s, ending a decade-long association. But Putnam’s snapped it up at once, and wisely so: it won Robert the second of his five Hugo Awards and became one of his bestselling titles, continuously in print for forty-five years. Its absorbing surface story of how Basic Training turns a callow young man into a competent combat officer during a time of interstellar war is underlaid with profound and trenchant discussion of (forgive the use of these obsolete terms) morality, duty and social justice, based on the provocative speculation that we might one day develop a scientifically verifiable code of morals. And eye-popping visual special effects are built into the book’s very core.
It would, in short, make a wonderful movie. Instead, its name was contemptuously placed on a lame and pointless cartoon.
A modestly successful cartoon, to be sure. I saw it in a theater totally full of eighteen-year-old boys having a wonderful time, and I’m sure those few who can get a date will come back with one to see it again. (It’s a gross out flick, featuring blow-dried young models to whom things happen that are so terrifying and disgusting that a guy’s girl might just, for a moment, find him less terrifying than the film and cling to him.) During the first week nearly 3 million people bought a ticket; doubtless its makers were pleased.
But they could have sold at least another ten million tickets. That’s a fraction of the known—proved—Robert Heinlein fans in North America alone…all of whom have been waiting more than half a century for Hollywood to give him some respectful attention. A competent team could have made a faithful adaptation of that novel for the same money or less—and still pleased the testosterone brigade.
But nobody wanted to. Director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Ed Neumeier don’t try to conceal their contempt for a book that praises the military even as they exploit it for gore. For example, Sergeant Zim, though tough, is wise, compassionate and decent in the book; in the film he’s a grinning sadist who enjoys crippling and maiming his own cadets. The book, while it’s entertaining the reader, also provides fascinating instruction on principles of tactics, strategy and command, as adapted to interstellar interspecies warfare; the film’s “army” is an armed mob, milling about with no battle plan and no leadership, firing aimlessly. (A co-ed mob. They all shower together, and there is no sex.)
Even in terms of sheer action-spectacle, the filmmakers ignored one of the best parts: the powered suits. In the book, a Mobile Infantryman fights in awesome combat armor which weighs a ton, allows him the option of hopping over a factory or crashing through it and features enough high-tech weaponry and comm gear to let him control a square mile or more at the close direction of an officer fifty miles away. The film’s “starship trooper” fights in shirt-sleeves and a bicycle helmet, carries a single slug-gun—“futuristic” and loud but inferior in cyclic rate and firepower to an AK-47—and has no radio: commands are shouted to him. In the book, the Bugs build starships and have weapons technology as good as ours…in the film, they are mindless and have no technology except the mysterious ability to throw a rock from their star-system and hit Buenos Aires, for unimaginable reasons. And so on.
Why does Hollywood do this, over and again: recut the Crown Jewels? It’s not just science fiction, either. If all you want is to make a braindead Val-Kilmer-as-high-tech-thief movie, why pay Leslie Charteris’s estate a large sum for the right to pretend it has anything to do with his deathless character The Saint? If all you want is a Tom Cruise solo vehicle, why call it Mission Impossible and then kill off the whole team in the first ten minutes? Why title a movie The Scarlet Letter but change the ending? Why pay heavily for access to millions of pre-existing fans whom you plan only to insult and ignore?
Of course I’m happy that Robert’s book has just jumped to number five on the bestseller list (again). But I fear that anyone who liked the movie and buys the book may find it insufficiently stupid and be disappointed—and thus unlikely to seek out other Heinlein titles.
There’s still hope. Three other Heinleins are presently sold or optioned: Tunnel in the Sky, Orphans of the Sky and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the latter by the vaunted Dreamworks. Maybe one of them will have the sense to take more than a cursory glance into the goldmine they’ve bought. But I’m not optimistic.
Gone With the Wind. Destination Moon. Rosemary’s Baby. 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Godfather 1&2. Lonesome Dove. Field of Dreams. These are about the only examples I can call to mind of popular books which were faithfully adapted to film. They simply put the author’s story on the screen, with as little disturbance as possible. Please note that each was not just a hit, but an historic, record-breaking genre-changing classic.
Now note how few of them there are. And nearly all over twenty years old. It always works, so they’ve stopped doing it.
And we’re talking about people with the power to risk many millions of dollars. You were right again, Robert: surely these are the Crazy Years.
The Anarchists Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight,
or Please don’t shoot the guitar player
FIRST PRINTED JANUARY 2001
THE TRICK IN LIFE is usually to find the balance point—the happy medium between incompossible extremes. Exactly where, for instance, lies the line between keeping an open mind…and being a sucker? Now that any quack with a modem can call himself an “alternative therapy healer” and no fact can ever be conclusively checked anymore, what shoul
d I do when cancer comes and mainstream medicine admits helplessness? Nod and die? Or try snake oil?
Exactly where is the border between editorial judgment…and censorship? I used to think I knew, but now that any fool with a browser can call himself a “journalist” and all accusations are true, I’m no longer sure.
Is there a stable balance point between discriminating against people and being indiscriminate? Between being racist and being reverse-racist? Between equal rights for women and no respect for men? Between the dread One World Government and World War Three? Or—to get even more basic—between order and anarchy? Now, there’s a tricky one.
I’ve never been an anarchist myself. I read. But back in college, my circle of acquaintances included SDS leaders, Black Panthers, Weathermen, draft resisters, deserters and assorted other radicals. I got along with most, counted some as my friends. My knee-jerk sympathies often incline toward anarchy—most people’s do, these days. Fight the power…rage against the machine…tune in and drop out…turn your poptop beer upside down and open it with a churchkey…I am not a number, I am a man!…information wants to be free…
Deep down, nobody really likes authority—except perhaps the few in authority. I don’t think many of us were rooting for Nurse Ratched to break Randall McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. We whose lives depend utterly on order and system all at least sympathize with the anarchist. Why? Because he’s generally been the underdog, and his target a bloated oppressor of one sort or another.
Until today.
Science Fiction Writers of America, the professional organization to which most sf writers in the world (including myself) belong, is presently battling cyberpiracy—the posting online of members’ copyright material without permission. But a recent issue of SFWA’s journal Forum reprints an e-mail from someone I’ll call CrazyEddie, proudly proclaiming a new cybernetwork I’ve renamed “ThiefNet.” Think of Napster on steroids. It threatens the eventual end of all art and all professional-quality entertainment…
ThiefNet’s creators describe it as, “a distributed decentralised information storage and retrieval system…It provides anonymity [and is] totally decentralized: nobody is in control…not even its creators. This makes it virtually impossible to force the removal of information from the system.” CrazyEddie makes clear what “virtually impossible” means: “It has been proven formally, by mathematical proof, that the system is immune to all attacks save for physical destruction of all host machines (spread across multiple jurisdictions).”
What’s this bulletproof system for? “To allow the free distribution of information on the Internet without fear of censorship.” Who could possibly quarrel with such a noble goal as ending censorship?
Me. And many others. Because what CrazyEddie means by “censorship” is “attempts to stop theft.” The information that he feels “wants to be free” is my latest novel—and all its predecessors and potential successors. All novels, by anybody. Also my new CD—all recorded music—all films—pretty much anything CrazyEddie wants to enjoy without paying for it, really. He’s quite clear: once a book…or CD, movie, documentary or dance video…is uploaded to ThiefNet, it’s free, forever: Bill Gates and the CIA combined couldn’t take it down again, “except by installing monitoring software on an Orwellian scale, utterly unacceptable to any democracy.”
CrazyEddie’s already personally stolen twenty-five novels, posted them on ThiefNet: works by Orwell, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Andre Norton and less famous authors. He plans to keep doing so. Why? “The explicit aim of ThiefNet from the outset was to destroy the system of copyright as we know it. A noble aim…”
Got that? CrazyEddie’s done his noble best to make sure nobody will ever write a book for you again, except the writers currently served by vanity presses. Nobody will ever compose or perform music for you again except the folks presently playing for free in the park. All software will be freeware. In order to wound Commerce, CrazyEddie is murdering Art and Entertainment. He and ThiefNet’s supporters intend to starve an entire generation of creative artists and entertainers out of business, in the vague hope that something will replace them, someday.
And the vandals are proud of themselves. They think they’re liberators. Like their fellow anarchists Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski, they are stunningly inept at target selection: they think writers, dancers, musicians and actors who eat regularly are oppressors.
Every one of the twenty-five writers CrazyEddie mugged happens to be strongly and loudly opposed to oppression, racism and economic exploitation. They are, without exception, eloquent champions of individual liberty. Six are personally known to me to be in difficult financial straits. CrazyEddie has no idea which ones and doesn’t care. They all earn (at least some) money from their work, so they’re all pigs. He’s never read Dr. Johnson, who said, “No one but a fool ever wrote, save for money.”
The irony is bone-crushing. Cyberspace anarchists have declared war—not on governments, banks or multinationals—but on artists, their traditional allies! And left artists only one thing they can possibly do to defend themselves: turn their talents of persuasion to selling the public on “monitoring software on an Orwellian scale.” CrazyEddie may believe that’s “utterly unacceptable to any democracy”—but he’s never lived in a democracy whose artists are all literally starving. We stopped a war together, once. I imagine we could start one.
Some of my colleagues already react somewhat emotionally to ThiefNet, and call for measures I personally find extreme. I think it would be quite sufficient merely to torture the vandals to death, despoil their corpses and destroy their computers. Execution of their parents seems excessive—unless they’re still of breeding age, of course.
Not all information wants to be free. My stories and songs aspire only to be reasonably inexpensive.
If You Take It…We Can’t Leave It
FIRST PRINTED JANUARY 2003
THE US SUPREME COURT rendered a historic decision regarding the Sonny Bono Act—I’m not making this up—and it could with some accuracy be characterized as a Mickey Mouse decision. But don’t laugh too hard: what’s at stake might just be the death of art, and the everlasting impoverishment of human life.
The Supremes upheld Congress’s power to extend the term of copyright by twenty years. Until 1998, copyright protected a work for the lifetime of the author plus fifty years. Then the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (named for the late congressman/entertainer), bumped it two decades, to seventy years.
Big whoop, right? Why would anybody get upset over that—much less push it all the way to the Supreme Court? I suppose Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig might have decided to challenge the Sonny Bono Act, at his own expense, so we all wouldn’t have to wait twenty more years to rip off the heirs of Gershwin and Frost and could immediately record “Rhapsody in Blue” or publish “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” without paying anyone a dime.
But I suspect what really got on Professor Lessig’s wick was that a major lobbying force behind the Sono Buoni Act…excuse me, the Sonny Corleone Act…I’ll have it under control in a minute…that one of the biggest supporters of the Sonny Bono Act was none other than Mordor itself: the evil empire men call Disney.
I’ve never understood exactly what’s so vile about Disney. Every time I’ve ever given them a dollar, I got back a buck and a half of value. If the Sonny Boy Williamson…I mean, if the Sonny Bono Act hadn’t passed, Steamboat Willie—The Mouse himself!—would have slipped into the public domain. Naturally the Disney corporation pressured Congress. If it hadn’t, today we’d probably be paying half a buck for cut-rate Mickey Mouse gear that isn’t worth a dime, and wondering why nothing good ever seems to last.
Granted: as far as I know, nobody who’s currently a major player at Disney is a relative, loved one, friend or associate of Walt himself anymore. I doubt anybody getting rich on his genius today ever met the man. And I’ll bet they all wear better clothes, drive better cars and have
more aerobic sex than the average Stanford law professor. I’m not disputing that they’re scum.
But they also jealously guard, and thus zealously preserve, old Walt’s creations. To this day, every smallest thing in Disneyland is perfect. You can sneer at Mickey Mouse watches if you like, but they keep good time, and all the great Disney cartoons have been restored and reissued precisely because someone in a power suit could make enough money to lease a cool car to have hot sex in by doing it…because he held copyright to the material.
Lessig argues that Congress only has the right to permit copyright within limits: apparently in his view fifty years is a limit, but seventy somehow is not. To explore this, let’s shift perspective 180 degrees from Disney, and focus on the exact opposite end of the financial spectrum: me.
Science fiction can have a fair shelf life, with a little luck: some of the biggest moneymakers in the field today have been dead for decades. The biggest, Robert A. Heinlein, died in 1988. I’ve written thirty-two books so far. I believe I’ve earned what money they’ve brought me (and then some!), and I hope they’ll stay in print awhile after I’m gone.
So when I do snuff it, I’d like to leave them, and any money they may fetch (the wee percentage the publishers, producers and taxmen won’t keep), to my daughter Terri—just like any other craftsman would. I don’t think that’s an outrageous, capitalist-pig desire: it’s a large part of why the stories exist in the first place.
Terri’s twenty-eight. If I hand in my lunchpail tomorrow, she’ll hold US copyright on my works until she’s ninety-eight. Again, that doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Lifespan is increasing. Her great-grandfather died last year at 100. I recently heard an eminent expert—Dr. Phil—say if you are alive in the year 2010, your life expectancy will be 125. If that’s true, and I croak later today, Terri will be S.O.L. for the last quarter-century of her life, helpless to prevent slipshod pirate editions, bogus spin-offs or Hollywood rip-offs of her dad’s legacy. So I’m fine with the Sonny Rollins…the furshlugginer Sonny Bono Act; I wouldn’t mind extending it further.
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