What happened then? In screen sci-fi, we simply got more Star Wars imitations. Battlestar Galactica on television-it was hilarious when Lucas sued Glen Larson for infringing on Star Wars, since everything in Star Wars was stolen from print science fiction, directly or indirectly, and I hadn’t noticed Lucas paying anybody for the privilege of using their ideas.
And in film, we had some great movies-the Alien franchise, and Terminator franchise. But those were both throwbacks to sci-fi as monster movies.
Starman was a powerful exception-a very personal story, which made a serious effort to be both smart and character-driven. But it was also not a blockbuster success, barely making back its budget in domestic box office. It was not the beginning of a trend.
Blade Runner also tried, and it was a good movie, too. In truth Blade Runner and Starman succeeded in bringing 1950s science fiction to the screen. It was an enormous step forward, but screen sci-fi still lagged behind print science fiction by a generation.
In film, the serious money went into big blockbusters. Even when, like the Lynch Dune, they were ghastly failures, nobody noticed that the actual stories of first-rate science fiction were usually butchered and made incoherent or tedious or ridiculous when they were adapted to the blockbuster formula.
Hollywood knew what sci-fi film was supposed to be, and whenever serious money was involved, they made sure that it never became anything else.
Without Hollywood ever noticing, however, film and television sci-fi began to serve the longtime social function of print sci-fi, as the scripture of our culture’s public religion. Now that we no longer admit to sharing the Judeo-Christian tradition as our common heritage, it is in science fiction that we find our parables, doctrines, dogmas, homilies, and faith-promoting Sunday school stories, along with, now and then, serious examinations of important moral issues and existential questions. Am I the only one who noticed that 2001, Star Trek, and Star Wars (which together moved film sci-fi out of the horror-film ghetto toward mainstream respectability) all had mystical and moral lessons that had far more to do with Sunday school than science? They completely replaced the public hunger that used to be satisfied with epics like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur.
Meanwhile, Star Wars and Star Trek were also dealing a crippling blow to print science fiction.
People wanted more movies than Hollywood could afford to produce. Those for whom Star Trek and Star Wars had become either their church or their social group could not wait. They wrote their own “fan fiction,” which the studios finally stopped trying to suppress, instead replacing it with dozens, then hundreds of professionally written work-for-hire novels that began to crowd out original science fiction in the bookstores.
People reading Star Trek and Star Wars novels are getting the opposite of the experience readers of the genre always looked for. The science fiction genre, in print, had always been about having new experiences. There were series and sequels, of course, but the best writers prided themselves on having each entrant in a series be quite different from the others. And, unlike the mystery genre, the sci-fi genre allowed writers of successful series to do completely unrelated books-and the readers would follow along.
The writers tried to come up with genuinely new ideas with each book. When Frederik Pohl wrote Man-Plus and Gateway in the mid- 1970s, it was hard to tell that this was the same writer who had done his earlier work. Not that it was necessarily better; rather he was developing ideas that had simply not been available in the 1950s.
Whereas with media tie-in novels, readers are disappointed if they don’t get exactly the same experience they had before. The story is cosmetically different, but it takes readers to the same place; that’s why they buy it.
It is an exercise in familiarity.
So not only was film and television sci-fi mired in an old-fashioned kind of story, it had become so financially and culturally successful that it was driving real science fiction into a corner, both in print and in film.
And I was waiting.
For what? I wasn’t sure. But I’d know it when I saw it.
I wanted film sci-fi that had the characterization of good science fiction. It didn’t have to be obsessive, but I needed to have a sense that these people had a life before they arrived in their spaceship, and that their personal relationships were changing over time.
I didn’t want stories that hinged on getting away from monsters or on becoming an adept of some mystical religion; I didn’t want them to feel like the characters were moving through space in order to have adventures. I wanted the characters to have individual motives and purposes; I wanted the stories to take place in real-seeming cultures that might actually exist.
And then I gave up.
Oh, I still went to sci-fi films, and enjoyed some of them. The feature film Stargate was fun, though it was really more Indiana Jones than genuine sci-fi.
I loved Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich and The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-these were truly in the spirit of the best of print science fiction, and if they had been published as novels or short stories in the sci-fi genre, they would have been hailed in the years they came out as showing the voice of an excellent new writer.
But Kaufman’s stories weren’t set in space. They weren’t even considered sci-fi films.
On television, I knew Straczynski was doing interesting things with Babylon 5, and people kept telling me that this or that series was the “good” Star Trek. But I just couldn’t engage. The people were still their jobs. It was still sci-fi that would not have been interesting if it came out in print.
And then . . .
And then I saw Firefly.
Years late. It had already been canceled. Like many viewers, I only caught up with it because I was forced to by insistent people that I couldn’t ignore. “But television sci-fi is boring,” I said. “Life is too short to waste any more of it on this stuff.”
Then, at last, I started watching Firefly and within ten minutes I knew: The writer of this series had actually read a book, and instead of copying it, like everybody else doing film sci-fi, he had understood what science fiction is for and how it’s done, and he had created something new.
Oh, it superficially looks like Star Trek-if it hadn’t sounded familiar in a pitch meeting, it would never have made it to the screen at all. In the pitch meeting, while it’s possible no one said the words Star Trek, you know that the studio executives were hearing the word constantly. Let’s see, a ship that goes from planet to planet and has adventures. The lead is the captain. The ship is always on the verge of falling apart and a mechanic magically fixes it just in time. The captain takes his crew to the surface and meets people in different cultures and fights and barely makes it back to the ship and. . . . Okay, sounds exactly like Star Trek, only different enough that Paramount won’t sue us. Go ahead.
But the differences were more than cosmetic. This wasn’t Wagon Train in space. The characters had a history. They were different from each other. They did way more (and less) than their jobs. They didn’t always like each other, didn’t always trust each other.
The cultures they ran into were always human (no aliens, did you notice?) and they functioned like real human societies. The characters they picked up had real problems (or plausible nefarious plans).
Best of all, it was a witty show. Not just a show trying to be witty, but a show in which the characters’ one-liners were actually funny and true to character. Not since The Dick Van Dyke Show’s sessions in the comedy-writers’ room had I seen writing this clever.
Television does force a shape onto every TV series; you can only bend the rules so far. Firefly was still a TV series. But within that frame, Joss Whedon had brought, not just the appearance of recent print sci-fi, but the fact of it: He was writing characters who had not existed before, and putting them into situations that, if they had been in short stories submitted to magazines or anthologies, would certainly have sold and been published.
He and his wr
iting staff were creating stories every bit as current and credible as the science fiction of Charlie Kaufman-only Firefly was set in space so that viewers knew they were getting sci-fi.
And by the time I saw it, it was already dead.
But you know the saga of how Serenity arose from the ashes of Firefly. You also know the problems faced by the script. This movie had to reach an audience that was not already familiar with the TV series. Therefore it had to ignore much of the character development that had already taken place in the series. Most particularly, the relationship between the doctor and the captain was dropped back to a level of suspicion and hostility that denied the experiences they had shared.
So what? The movie was meant to be a new start. It hit the ground running, gave the series’s fans a dollop of what we had come to expect, and then took us into brand new territory.
The story of Serenity was smart, hard science fiction. Not only were the regular cast still good strong characters, the new characters-Mr. Universe and the assassin-were fascinating, surprising, quirky. The plot actually hinged on a moral decision made by the bad guy. Who does that?
In most film sci-fi, as with Star Wars, serious sci-fi readers have to squint or hold their noses now and then to pretend that the story isn’t really this dumb. But that didn’t happen with Serenity. Not once. Whereas many sci-fi films and TV shows seem to be going out of their way to find new kinds of stupidity-about science, about human nature, about formulaic storytelling-Serenity never made me wince.
Joss Whedon, like Charlie Kaufman, is a new breed of film sci-fi writer: He knows how to read, he knows how to think, he knows how to create new milieux, believable characters, smart technology, plausible cultures, and great dramatic and comic scenes and dialogue.
Of course, Serenity did about as well, financially, as Starman. So I fear that it will be another flash in the pan. Except . . . except. . . .
Now that they’ve seen what sci-fi can be on the screen, isn’t it just possible that a new generation of writers will take the same kind of care to create scripts that aspire to this new standard? Even if Serenity didn’t wow the executives, won’t the writers insist that the script isn’t done unless it has real characters and relationships, great dialogue, and stories that make sense?
Of course, a writer like that will quickly get fired and replaced with somebody who’ll give the executives a script that follows the lame film-school formulas that don’t work and never have.
But what if the replacement writer also takes some pride in his work? What if you can’t get anybody to deliberately write bad sci-fi any more?
George Lucas’s awful Star Wars prequels in recent years are an embarrassment. The religious Star Wars fans still go, and many can’t tell the difference.
But the writers can. It’s just possible that Firefly and Serenity have pulled the whole sci-fi film genre up to a level where it is possible for science fiction as good as the best of contemporary print sci-fi to be put on the screen.
I sure hope so, because I have a script right here. . . .
ORSON SCOTT CARD, the author of Ender’s Game, Ender’s Shadow, Magic Street, and Enchantment, is a distinguished professor of writing and literature at Southern Virginia University.
I’ve remarked before that when some viewers see giant spaceships hover into view, they fear that giant ideas are right behind them. Over the years, science fiction has become linked with the idea of “message” in much the same way that rare ground beef has become linked with the idea of “E. coli.” Burns makes a great case for characters-messy, human, relatable, and even sometimes female characters-as the remedy to this unfortunate situation.
Mars Needs Women
How a Dress, a Cake, and a Goofy Hat Will Save Science Fiction
MAGGIE BURNS
Science fiction is broken. Like poetry and art music, science fiction threatens to spin itself into a self-referential genre so disconnected from everything else that only initiates can find value in it, a tiny irrelevant genre jealously guarded by hard-core fans. So much insider knowledge accrues about each created universe that it pushes away the newcomer. A genre that fired the imaginations of those who actually got humanity into space is reduced to teddy bear aliens, macho swagger, and jiggle. Those of us who love sci-fi are so hungry for it that we will devour nearly anything, which only serves to keep the standards low and the scenarios familiar.
What is the cure for sci-fi’s problems? A goofy knitted hat. A frilly dress. A birthday cake. You and me, and people we know, in space: Firefly.
Sci-fi at its best has higher goals than any other genre. Its creators bring us hope, fear, and truth. Hope in sci-fi shows us what we can be, what we could be if we lived up to our potential. Fear plays out in warnings about our present and future. Of these three, fear appears most often, since it encompasses all of the dystopian fiction: extrapolations of society’s flaws taken to their logical extremes, dark explorations of human nature, terrifying insights into the ugly side of our societies. This type of sci-fi also brings us aliens, which have been standing in for our fears and our flaws in various forms since they first appeared in literature.
But the highest goal of science fiction is to tell us the truth about ourselves. We find it in every sci-fi work that ever tried to say: “This is how it is. Don’t pretend, don’t turn away, don’t lie. This is who you are. This is what we are.” Seeking truth is the strongest and the bravest course, the hardest fiction to write, the most difficult to fall in love with, because it holds an honest mirror to humanity. We never want to look that clearly at our own reflections. Is that a blemish coming on? Does this dress make me look like the privileged product of a globally exploitative oligarchy? Why, yes, actually, it does. Turn that mirror to face the wall.
Firefly sets out to tell larger truths through fiction, just as sci-fi tackles larger social and socio-economic issues than most other genres. Firefly is not merely telling entertaining stories, though it does that exceptionally well. It’s not simply creating a vivid and gorgeously textured universe, one that is completely believable. It’s not just a fun ride with space cowboys and excellent cussing in Mandarin.
Firefly is all those things, but like the finest print sci-fi, from A Canticle for Leibowitz to The Martian Chronicles to The Dispossessed-and unlike the vast majority of sci-fi on television-it also sets out to show us our world through a created one. Like the best sci-fi novels, Firefly does this by being honest in its depiction of the breadth of life, in its inclusions and exclusions, in its reflections of class and gender and economics. The only sci-fi television show that has ever dared to tell the truth like this was Farscape, which only got away with it because every character except the hero was an alien. Farscape showed us messy, gross, violent, crazy alien life in Technicolor: old women who make soup that you don’t want to look at too closely, young women with good hearts and damaged souls, insecure warrior men who need friends, alien warrior women who discover they can be more-people we know in our own lives, but never see represented in sci-fi TV. Sci-fi television only allows this much reality, this much painful insight, only hits this close to the bone, when the characters are aliens. Until Firefly, we never saw so much reality played out with people. No aliens in Firefly. And no easy answers. There are plenty of monsters, but they all take human form, just like in our world.
Firefly reaches us in a way we can accept by giving us a world that draws us in, using touchstones that tell us: This is the real world. This is a recognizable ’verse, where we could live. The show does not use any of the easier sci-fi tropes: no aliens to embody our difficult or less palatable traits, no black-and-white hero, and most of all, no simple world consisting primarily of militaristic men. This world includes women of all kinds, rich and poor, strong and weak, brave and scared. This is so rare in science fiction that it’s completely revolutionary. Who lives in a world with so few women? Who lives so far removed from the messy realities of life? Modern sci-fi television has its roots in a genre historicall
y so sexist that women and the messy realities of life are identical, both eradicated from all those sparkling spaceship interiors, except for the occasional beautiful scientist’s daughter who needs to be rescued.
One of the biggest weaknesses of sci-fi television is its insistence on framing so many narratives within that same sparkling, orderly, male-dominated militarized hegemony. From Star Trek to Stargate SG-1, the universe appears through this lens. Whether it’s Star Trek’s Federation, or Stargate’s recognizable U.S. Air Force-right down to guest appearances by each Air Force Chief of Staff-this framework dominates television science fiction. The militaristic framework is off-putting, whether you have a military background or not. If you do, it’s always inaccurate and irritating, especially when lives are thrown away without comment. If you don’t have a military background, it’s alienating, familiar only through all of its sci-fi forebears. The trope is self-referential and lacks any visceral link to a familiar reality. Ultimately the military framework is a narrative cheat, a shorthand, without depth of thought or character resonance at all.
Powerful and cruel but faceless bureaucracies fronted by militaries made up of marching automatons are the dullest cheap trick of sci-fi. Firefly mercifully kept these people in the distant background, where we like our governments to be. When we did see representatives, the soldiers were wearing absurd purple armor and the officers appeared to be jackbooted hotel staff. Even the scariest villains seemed to be taking time from their office jobs to scrub the bathroom, with their black suits and blue rubber gloves, though their mysterious blue baton of infinite nosebleeds was quite effectively terrifying. The true villains of Firefly were far more frightening, because they were recognizable from our daily lives. They included ethical dilemmas, conflicting loyalties, putting food on the table. Financial survival, taking care of family. Trying to stay safe. Trying to keep flying.
Faceless bureaucracies, expendable military forces, demonized villains, God-like aliens: these will kill a genre that has infinite potential, because they dangerously limit the ways we allow ourselves to imagine. They exchange endless imaginative possibilities for a vending machine array of choices. As much as I love the decade of Stargate SG-1, it has done more than any other show to reinforce the prevailing male-dominated militaristic and oppositional human/alien tendency in science fiction. Humanity’s problem is ultimately humanity, after all. Sci-fi does not need to eradicate reality as we know it to speak the truth. Instead, it needs to embrace the familiar, as Firefly does. The people we know, the things they use. These draw us into a fictional world on such a deep level that we accept the truth of it without question.
Serenity Found Page 2