BRUCE BETHKE
So we’re sitting in the rec room, watching Serenity on the big screen with the surround sound cranked. Only we can never simply watch a movie: there’s just one degree of separation between us and the folks who did Mystery Science Theater 3000, and I’m afraid that all too often, it’s audible.
For example, right now Larry the Astronomer is in hog heaven, trying to work out the celestial mechanics of the Firefly universe in his head. (“Maybe if we start with a couple of super-Jovian worlds orbiting the blue-white primary in a Sirius-type binary system, and most of these so-called worlds are actually terraformed moons. . . .”) But John the Screenwriter is having some trouble understanding why I’m so excited about a movie based on a TV series that was canceled halfway through the first season. I briefly consider dragging out the DVD boxed set and forcing him to watch at least the two-hour series premiere, but there’s not enough time for that, so I settle for, “John, think of this as the anti-Trek.”
That’s a good opening gambit. We’ve long since agreed that Star Trek’s Federation is some kind of intrusive and heavily militarized police state. Now we only argue over whether it’s a socialist or fascist utopia.
“Firefly,” I continue, “is set some five centuries in the future, and six years after the end of a failed war for independence against the Alliance: the oppressive central government. Now, Mal here-”
John interrupts. “-is Han Solo with an actual backstory. I get that. He’s Rick Blaine with a spaceship instead of a nightclub. He’s a classic lost paladin; an embittered losing-side war vet with a junk freighter, struggling to eke out a living on the fringes of civilization and the law. But underneath that rough exterior he’s still got his honor, his pride, and that sense of justice that forces him to get involved and become a big damn hero, from time to time. I get that about him. I like him. And the blond guy-”
“Wash.”
“He’s a classic comic-relief sidekick, who gets to have all the emotional reactions the paladin can never show. Now, this tough chick-”
“Zoe.”
“She served with Mal in the war, didn’t she? Because she’s got the whole calls-him-‘sir’-even-when-she-doesn’t-say-it-out-loud thing going, which is done very nicely. I also think it’s really nice to see a woman in the role of the engine room grease-monkey, because she reminds me of my first wife and her intimate relationship with her Jaguar XJ6.
“But the doctor-Simon?-there’s obviously some bad blood between him and Mal, so I’d have to guess he has a little black bag full of patent medicines that save the day on a regular basis and make him worth putting up with, while his sister, Buffy-”
“River.”
“-is obviously the ninety-pound pixie who can toss around men three times her size when she gets mad, and I suspect she’s the focus of the entire plot. But the one character here I’m really having trouble getting a fix on is him.” John points at the screen.
“Jayne?”
“Yeah, him. I mean, clearly, he’s big and tough, none too bright, obsessed with weapons, and probably worth his weight in gold in a fight. But Jane? What kind of name is that? Is this like ‘A Boy Named Sue’? Is that why he’s so surly?”
“No,” I say. “J-A-Y-N-”
“Oh,” John says, as understanding dawns. “Jayne. As in, John Wayne. Okay, I get it now. So how soon do we meet the PTP and the HHG?”
It’s my turn to be confused. “The what?”
“The Preacher with a Troubled Past and the Hooker with a Heart of Gold. They must be in this story. It just wouldn’t be the same without them.”
I start to tell John about Shepherd Book and Inara, but then decide to keep him in the dark a little longer. “What makes you say that?”
“Because,” he says, “you’re wrong, Bruce. This is not the anti-Trek.
“This is Stagecoach in Space.”
You must understand: in the world of science fiction, there is no deadlier insult than to call something “a Western set in space.” As a science fiction writer you’re permitted to lift freely from any other period in history and any other body of world folklore except the American Old West. Authors have made entire careers out of recycling Asian, African, and Amerindian folk tales in the guise of science fiction stories, and the whole genre of fantasy can fairly be described as one endless series of Christianity-free repackagings of Celtic, Nordic, and Germanic fairy tales and heroic myths. Even the most successful science fiction franchise of all time, Star Wars, has been described quite accurately as being simply an anthology of Japanese samurai stories (most notably The Tale of Heike), gussied up in science fiction drag and trotted out onstage to near-unanimous critical acclaim and worldwide commercial success.
But put your hero on horseback without also giving him a sword or a lance-give him a Winchester laser rifle, a Colt proton blaster, or a broad-brimmed Stetson hat to protect his skin from the searing UV radiation of the local blue-white main sequence star-write a story that in any way reflects the actual experience and well-documented history of the American Civil War and the subsequent exploration and settling of the lands between the Mississippi River and the Pacific coast-and sooner or later some fool critic will accuse you of “calling the jackrabbit a smeerp” and “writing a Western set in space,” and after that there’s nothing left to do but build up a thick skin, because the law frowns on calling out fool critics and gunning them down in the street. There is even a special pejorative term reserved for a science fiction story that has been identified ex post facto as being a latent Western: it’s called a Bat Durston.
Why?
Why, in a genre that routinely pays tribute to space pioneers, is there this special antipathy for the Western? Why, in a form where the space colony revolt is a standard summer-stock set-piece, is the American Civil War and its aftermath strictly off-limits? Why, with all of human history and all of known literature to draw on for source material, is this one particular historical period and one body of folklore so rigorously forbidden?
Why, in science fiction’s critical/literary/academic/pretentious circles, is Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels considered an important antecedent to modern speculative fiction, while Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is not?
To understand the answer to this question, we must travel back to the beginning. . . .
No, not back to Verne and Wells. If you were to hop into your Wayback Machine and travel back in time to discuss science fiction with Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, you’d overshoot your temporal destination and they wouldn’t know what you were talking about anyway. Jules Verne considered himself simply an adventure story writer, and while he’s best remembered today for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, he also wrote mysteries and satires, and it was the stage performance rights for Around the World in 80 Days that made him rich in his lifetime. Similarly, H. G. Wells called his early stories and novels “scientific romances,” and while he did enjoy his initial success, he eventually abandoned the field in order to write what he considered more important work, now largely forgotten mainstream novels such as Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr. Polly.
No, the real history of science fiction begins, not in Europe in the late nineteenth century, but in the United States in the early twentieth, and it’s mostly the story of three men: Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, and H. L. Gold.
There is a curious synchronicity at work here. In 1890, the United States Census Bureau declared the American frontier officially closed, to the extent that there was no longer a discernible line of separation between settled and unsettled areas within the continental United States. In 1896, the frontier of the imagination might be considered to have officially opened, with the launch of the first pulp fiction magazine, Argosy. This magazine, and the many imitators that soon followed it, was in a direct line of descent from the dime novels and “penny-dreadfuls” that made legends of Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid. Every month it served up generous helpings of pur
e, unadulterated, escapist adventure fantasy to a mostly young, mostly male, and increasingly urbanized audience.
While some of the early pulps such as The Shadow and Doc Savage were simply dime novels issued in serialized format, others gave their readers a glorious hodge-podge of war, sports, jungle, railroad, horror, mystery, crime, pirate, and “scientific romance” stories, intermixed with the occasional factual article-and yes, they also ran plenty of Westerns. Genre lines were crossed and recrossed with gleeful abandon until they were mincemeat for the very simple reason that they didn’t exist yet; Edgar Rice Burroughs’s martians might be ten-feet tall, green, oviparous, and equipped with four arms each, and their horses might have eight legs, but in terms of behavior they were indistinguishable from any band of H. Rider Haggard’s nomadic savages. Above all, the early pulps excelled in delivering what a later generation might call “that Indiana Jones stuff”: lost cities, uncharted islands, vanished civilizations, and secret cults plotting terrible things, from which only broad-chested heroes with flashing swords or blazing guns could rescue the beautiful women.
In 1909, publisher, editor, and sometimes writer Hugo Gernsback launched Modern Electrics magazine, and to fill space he occasionally ran reprints of old Verne, Wells, or Edgar Allan Poe stories. Impressed by the positive response these stories drew from readers, in 1926 Gernsback launched Amazing Stories, the world’s first magazine devoted exclusively to science fiction-or as Gernsback dubbed it, “scientifiction.”17
The success-and bankruptcy, and reborn success-of Amazing Stories quickly led to a host of imitators: Planet Stories, Marvel Tales, Wonder Stories, Weird Tales, Startling Stories, Astounding Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories. . . .
All these magazines tilled the same fields, bought work from the same writers, and played by the same rules as the older pulp fiction titles. While the genre of science fiction quickly became known as “that Buck Rogers stuff,” for the very good reason that Captain Anthony “Buck” Rogers made his first appearance anywhere in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, most science fiction stories continued to abound in that Indiana Jones stuff: lost treasures, hidden civilizations, mysterious plateaus where dinosaurs still roamed, and beautiful women who needed to be rescued. Battles between spaceships were still as likely to be settled by boarding the enemy’s ship and engaging in a sword-fight as by exchanging salvos of electro-cannon fire; the treacherous leader of the evil aliens might be a blue-skinned four-eyed reptiloid from Saturn but he still had an inexplicable lust for blonde Earth women; and the hero of a Murray Leinster tale might use an “interdimensional catapult” to journey to a new world, but once he got there the rest of the story could very well be a straight-ahead jungle adventure of the sort in which Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan would feel perfectly at home.
And yes, every now and then, some magazines ran science fiction stories that looked an awful lot like Westerns.
All of this changed in 1938, when John W. Campbell, Jr., took over as editor of Astounding Stories. An accomplished and widely published author in his own right, Campbell insisted that science fiction readers were more intelligent than the readers of other forms of pulp fiction, therefore science fiction writers had to be more intelligent than the writers of other forms of fiction, and so the old-school pulp writers were no longer welcome at Astounding. Instead, Campbell concentrated his editorial energies on finding and developing new writers, who wrote stories in which the science was both credible and integral to the story, and in so doing he pretty much single-handedly defined what we now think of as modern science fiction.
Campbell reigned as the editor of Astounding (later renamed Analog) from 1938 to 1971, and the roll call of writers he discovered and famous stories he published during those years reads like a combined Who’s Who and Hall of Fame of science fiction. Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Lester del Rey, A. E. van Vogt, L. Ron Hubbard, Theodore Sturgeon-the list goes on and on. And while Campbell was not the first to publish Isaac Asimov (Amazing gets that honor, for a story Campbell rejected), he did buy the majority of Asimov’s early work, including the series of short stories that were later collected and reissued as Asimov’s legendary novels, Foundation and I, Robot.
Rather less well-remembered now are the names of the 1930s pulp writers whose careers effectively ended because Campbell refused to buy any more fiction from them, as well as the names of the “slick” magazine writers whose stories he rejected on the grounds that only authors who wrote science fiction exclusively were qualified to write science fiction. 18 What we do know is that Campbell was famous for writing excoriating rejection letters, and he saved his worst verbal eviscerations for those writers he thought were trying to pass off conventional pulp stories as science fiction-especially Westerns.19
While science fiction and mystery magazines prospered in the 1940s, the rest of the pulp adventure field fell on hard times. Not only did wartime paper shortages and economic dislocations put many titles out of business, but by the end of the decade, Terra was running terribly short of incognita. There were no longer any uncharted islands in the Pacific Ocean; farewell, Skull Island and the sons of Kong. The air routes through the Himalayas were thoroughly mapped; goodbye, Shangri-La and Lost Horizon. There were no noble savages or ancient civilizations waiting to be discovered in the jungles of the Congo, no more mysterious cities hidden high in the mountains of South America, and getting to Mars was beginning to look like it would take considerably more effort than cobbling together a spaceship in the backyard from a discarded atomic motor and some government surplus parts. Not only that, but once you got there, the prospects for finding any beautiful half-naked Martian women who needed to be rescued began to seem pretty darn slim.
With terra incognita gone, then, and astra incognita looking increasingly unreachable, many science fiction writers began to turn to psyche incognita. In 1950 Horace (H. L.) Gold launched the last of the Golden Age pulps, Galaxy Science Fiction, with the deliberate intention of deemphasizing technology and concentrating on serious sociological and psychological stories. Unfortunately Gold also suffered from severe agoraphobia, and many writers quickly realized that they could sell to Galaxy by writing fiction that catered to Gold’s illness, hence the large number of “domed city,” “underground city,” and “the whole world is just one big city” stories that dominated printed science fiction well into the 1970s. For our purposes, though, this vast body of phobic fiction is merely an unfortunate side-effect of Gold’s tenure as editor. His real, lasting, and profoundly irritating contribution came in the form of these paragraphs: Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing . . . and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand.
“Get back from those controls, Bat Durston,” the tall stranger lipped thinly. “You don’t know it, but this is your last space trip.”
That’s right. While it was Hugo Gernsback who named it science fiction and declared it to be a genre apart, and John W. Campbell who rejected the idea of there being any possible crossover between science fiction and other forms of fiction, it was H. L. Gold who gave that rejection its enduring name. Bat Durston first appeared in the pages of Galaxy-but not in an actual story. “Bat Durston, Space Marshal” was a full-page advertisement, which appeared under the headline “YOU’LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY!” and ran repeatedly throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The rest of the ad copy went on to ridicule the idea of “a Western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet” and extol the virtues of Galaxy as being a magazine that published only stories “by people who know and love science fiction”-by which Gold meant authors who would never be caught dead crossing genre lines. Ergo, to answer the question we asked at the beginning of this essay: Why?
Because for more than fifty years now, the members of science fiction’s critical/literary/academic/pretent
ious circles have adhered to Campbell’s conceit that science fiction is somehow innately superior to all other forms of adventure fiction, by repeatedly and ritualistically beating the stuffings out of H. L. Gold’s straw man.
The ironic part is, for a genre that routinely deals in stories of space exploration and colonization, the history and folklore of the American West offers a vast wealth of fascinating source materials and proven paradigms, just waiting to be rediscovered and used. It was the experience of the American West-or more accurately, the succession of “wests” that began on the Atlantic seaboard in the early seventeenth century and ended somewhere near Yuma in the late nineteenth century-that formed the uniquely American character and made the Americans a different people from their European ancestors. Even those writers who are the first and loudest to cry “Bat Durston!” routinely imbue their fictional creations with the character traits that were forged in the crucible of the American West: self-reliance, stoicism, a distrust of distant government, and a certain handiness with firearms. Moreover, it was the frontier experience that produced a uniquely American idea, and one that, however unconsciously, seems to permeate nearly all science fiction written today: that it’s possible to go somewhere new, meet new people, discard the unpleasant parts of your own culture, and by blending together create a new and better culture.
The opening of the American West was a unique event in human history. Almost everywhere else in the world, a frontier was the heavily fortified border between two competing and roughly equivalent political powers, reinforced by centuries of distrust and cultural differences. For an unhappy Frenchman, for example, it would be madness to pack up the family and move out to the frontier, because all he would do then is end up in Germany. Only on the North American continent did the frontier-the West-come to symbolize freedom and the chance to escape from your past and start over. Certainly there were risks in going west-if it was easy, everyone would be doing it-but along with physical mobility came social mobility, and the environment, while often hostile, was not invariably lethal. Only in the American West was it possible to start out with little more than gumption and a few smarts, and by the grace of God and the strength of your own two hands, reinvent yourself in the image of your choice. (And with a little extra luck, get rich doing it, too!) Only in the West was what you did of more immediate importance than where you came from.20
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