by David Brin
S/N 108, 1 should point out, was the Cray X-MP supercomputer used to generate the CGI footage used in The Last Starfighter (1984), 2010 (1984), Dune (1984), Labyrinth (1986) and the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987). This machine was returned to Cray in 1987 and kept running as a test bed and as the backup for a meteorology system in India, until we finally decommissioned and scrapped it in 2001. Not a bad track record for a twenty-year-old pile of hardware, eh?
4. It gave us the film career of Harrison Ford. Without Star Wars there would have been no Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Ford would probably have spent the rest of his career playing supporting roles in clunkers like Force 10 from Navarone. The fact that Lucas later changed the cantina scene would seem to indicate that he really didn't understand what he'd created in Han Solo, and the fact that there is no comparable character in the later series seems to indicate that he really didn't understand that it was Harrison Ford who was the star of the original series.
Look: Han shot first. It's a defining moment for his character, easily equal to when Rick Blaine plugs Major Strasser in Casablanca, and I could write a lengthy essay on this topic alone. But I'm trying to reach a conclusion here, so we'll move along.
5. Finally, from a writer's point of view, the Star Wars series taken in toto has taught us all a very important lesson, and this is: prequels are bad. Science fiction writers should always strive to go forward, into the unknown, and to tell the story that has not been told yet. Speculation is more interesting than history: the story whose ending is not known in advance is always more interesting to more people than the story that goes back and explains how things got to be the way they are now. From the very first frame of The Phantom Menace we know that the Jedi will be destroyed, the Republic will fall, and the Empire will rise. In retrospect, then, Lucas's single biggest mistake was to go back and tell the story of the rise and fall of Anakin, rather than to go forward and tell the stories of the further adventures of Luke, Han and Leia.
Once Lucas committed to making a prequel, though, there was no way that the second series could be anything but depressing, futile and fatalistic.
DAVID BRIN: If the ebullience of Episodes IV and V helped engender other fun SF films in their day, is it possible that the dour, simmering pessimism of Episodes I-III has been just as influential, helping bring us to the point where it's hard to name more than a few optimistic sci-fi films in the last ten years?
Make your own list. Find more than one or two exceptions to the tone of defeatism, failure and predestined doom that pervades everything from The Matrix to the new Battlestar Galactica.
BRUCE BETHKE: I'll admit my list is pretty short: Men in Black, Men in Black II, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Independence Day, Stargate-and now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure Stargate is more than ten years old. Maybe Red Planet, if you count a "survival against impossible odds" story as being optimistic; maybe the comic books movies such as Hellboy, Spider-Man and X-Men, if you want to stretch the definition of sci-fi far enough to include them.
But I don't think we can lay the blame for this on Episodes I through III. As I think the list of precursor films described in the main body of this testimony shows, sci-fi has always had a profoundly pessimistic streak. Even in print, optimistic SF stories are rare; by and large, sci-fi is the literature of disaster, human extinction, inhuman invasions and the end of the world as we know it. Even the Hitchhiker's Guide series starts with the complete destruction of the Earth and the near-total annihilation of humanity, and even the genre's most optimistic stories usually require the viewpoint characters to experience some difficult dislocations, terrifying transformations and painful sacrifices before the ostensibly happy ending is reached.
I believe the reason for this is far older than and goes beyond the influence of a few recent movies. I might even go so far as to claim that it's a fundamental principle: science fiction is the literature of people who are deeply discontented with the way things really are right now.
I mean, when you're telling the optimistic story of contented people, you're peddling a utopia, right? And what's more boring than utopia? The readers, writers and fans of science fiction have always shown a pronounced preference for dystopia. If you present them with a utopia, they immediately start looking for the blue pill, the seamy underside, the dirty little secret that underlies everything, the Morlocks munching away in the dark, or at least the incinerator that everyone goes into when they turn thirty.
The people who are content with the way things are now are not reading or watching sci-fi, they're not imagining themselves living other lives in other places and times, and they are most definitely not following this trial. They're off somewhere else, reading and watching stories about the sex lives of doctors and lawyers.
So who cares what they think? Clearly, they are not going to be part of the next stage of human evolution!
AY BACK IN LATE AUGUST of 1980, five of us were driving from Toronto down to the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. For reasons I can no longer remember but I'm sure made sense at the time, we left home at one A.M. and arrived at the Canada/U.S. Thousand Island border crossing at five A.M. Our ages ranged from eighteen to twenty-three, and we were not, at that hour, looking our best.
Now, we'd all been across the border to science fiction conventions before and we were all expecting trouble trying to explain to a civil servant working the end of the night shift-an armed civil servant at that-where we were going and why. Neither the hour, nor our youth, nor the fact we were a mixed group (three men, two women) was working in our favor. Lying never occurred to us. It might have been a Canadian thing. It might have been because we figured we were too damned tired to lie convincingly.
So we paid our toll and crossed the bridge and rolled up to the only station open at U.S. customs and immigration. A beefy, middleaged man peered into the car.
"Where you going?"
"Boston."
"Why?"
"We're attending the World Science Fiction Convention."
"Science fiction?" he demanded suspiciously.
And before any of us had time to imagine the inevitable strip searches and start panicking, my ex smiled brightly and said, "You know, like Star Wars."
The guard's suspicion morphed instantly to delight. "Star Wars?" he repeated, smiling broadly. "I loved that movie! Saw it three times." And he waved us through.
In the summer of 1980, George Lucas was already changing the public perception of science fiction. Only three years after Star Wars's debut on May 25, 1977, with The Empire Strikes Back only four months into its first run, three years before the Ewoks, nineteen years before jar jar Binks, it was already well on its way to becoming an accepted definition.
Twenty-five years later, Star Wars continues to control the public perception of science fiction-not by sustaining that early mass hysteria but by having changed the production and marketing of an entire genre.
Before 1977, the public's perception of science fiction wobbled about between the old Buck Rogers serials, the rumor that Charles Manson was a huge fan of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, a somewhat skewed perception of the way the genre dealt with social commentary, and a remarkable string of less-than-stellar television shows. Science fiction was considered to be both kid's stuff and weirdly dangerous, probably having, given the times, something to do with drugs.
If you read it, you were considered weird at best and very likely a social outcast. Pocket protectors and psychotropics figured prominently, albeit dissonantly, in the nonreader's visualization of an SF fan.
On the bright side, thanks to writers who had emerged out of literature or the social sciences rather than an engineering background, there had begun to be a slow acceptance of science fiction among academics and reviewers. According to Magic Dragon Multimedia, which offers chronologies of science fiction literature and authors:
The 1970s was not a decade of stylistic revolution such as the "New Wave" of the late
1960s, but perhaps a decade of consolidation, where the lessons learned from mainstream literature, "New Wave" experimentalism, and the classics of science fiction were melded into a healthy hybrid. For example, leading author of the literature of paranoia Thomas Pynchon published a mainstream bestseller which used experimental techniques and was unquestionably science fiction: Gravity's Rainbow.'
It was still possible to read every major work in the field. This is not to say that everyone did, or even that I did, only that I could have and that there were many who made it a point of honor. Those of us who haunted the dark corners of specialty bookstores-where the staff definitely had read every major work in the field, most of the minor works and more than likely a couple of manuscripts provided by regular customers-were expected to be able to talk as animatedly about Gene Wolfe as we did about Andre Norton or Larry Niven or Anne McCaffrey.
That changed with Star Wars.
But wait, what about Star Trek, you ask. Wasn't the original Trek (1967-69) hugely popular?
Yes. And no.
The original Trek was hugely popular among those who have always made up the science fiction audience, but I don't remember it being exactly must-see TV among the general population. We read the James Blish novelizations (I have the fifteenth printing of book one July 1972), we watched the appalling cartoon, and, suddenly more visible than we'd ever been before, we accepted slings and arrows of those who just didn't get it.
Some people came into science fiction through Trek, some people remained exclusively Trekkie (or Trekker), but there weren't enough of them to affect the genre as a whole.
The Trek phenomenon is more about staying power than size.
Don't ever let anyone tell you size doesn't matter.
To paraphrase the late, great Douglas Adams, Star Wars was big. If you think space is big, well, take a look at what George Lucas did to it. According to IBM.com, Star Wars (now known as Star Wars IV: A New Hope but not by those of us who saw it first in 1977) is number two in the top-grossing films of all time with U.S. box office earnings of $460,935,665. That's almost $461 million in the United States alone. On May 25, 1977, Star Wars's opening day totaled $254,309 from just thirty-two theaters. That was Wednesday, there were fortythree theaters by Memorial Day Weekend, and the box office gross had risen to $2.1 million.
According to ABC News online, Star Wars had over the course of its first run 178,119,595 admissions. That doesn't mean 178,119,595 individuals. I personally saw it once a week for the seven remaining weeks I was posted in Victoria, B.C., five times once I got transferred to the East Coast and once in Mann's Chinese Theatre that winter when I was staying in L.A. Even the decidedly non-fannish border guard had seen it three times by 1980.
If we assume, just to get us a little closer to a number we can work with, that I was fairly typical of the non-obsessed fan and divide those 178,119,595 admissions by thirteen-recognizing that for every person who saw it once there was someone who saw it twentyfive times-we still have 13,701,507. Let me spell that out for you: thirteen million, seven hundred one thousand, five hundred seven people.
Thirteen million, seven hundred one thousand, five hundred seven people all, if not obsessed, at least fascinated, with the same thing.
And they wanted more. Science fiction was no longer weird; it had become trendy.
Movies-even the fascinatingly bad movies like Battle Beyond the Stars, which immediately jumped on the Star Wars bandwagon-take time to produce, so a large part of that nearly fourteen million headed for bookstores. Some of them very probably for the first time ever.
Those of us who were already readers had a couple of reactions. Some of us welcomed these new numbers, the thrill of being suddenly popular going to our heads. Some of us sneered at the Johnnycome-latelys with so much to learn about what it meant to be an SF fan. Some of us ran for cover. Many of us managed all three reactions simultaneously.
But what we missed, what hadn't actually occurred to most of us, with our noses buried in books and our conversations peppered with phrases like, "If it can't be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion,"' was that these new people in our playground weren't science fiction fans; they were Star Wars fans. They wanted more Star Wars, and there were a lot of them, and they'd already proven themselves willing to pay for what they wanted.
Publishing companies are not in business to promote whatever specific branch of literature they produce. They do not exist to nurture talent or to enrich the lives of their readers. They are in business to make money. If they can also promote, nurture and enrich, even better, but if they don't make money, they disappear. Before 1977 science fiction publishers made enough to stay in business but not much more; there just weren't enough of us buying their books. What profits there were got funneled back into the companies.
Then all of a sudden a cry of "We want more Star Wars!" went up across the land and the novelization which had been released by Ballantine/Del Rey a year earlier to typical science fiction numbers was suddenly in great demand. By 1980, and the twenty-fourth printing of the paperback, there were five million copies in print. (I'm looking at my copy of the paperback, and that's the number splashed across the cover.) Five million copies at $2.50 translates to $12,500,000, and that's more than enough to be noticed.
According to Sarah Brouillette in "Corporate Publishing and Canonization: Neuromancer and Science-Fiction Publishing in the 1970s and Early 1980s," (Penn State University Press) "From 1977 alone, production was up 21%."
Thanks to Star Wars the audience for science fiction had expanded enormously. Unfortunately, the weight of those numbers insisted that Star Wars-type stories be produced. Spin-offs appeared. In 1978 there was The Doomfarers of Coramonde and The Starfollowers of Coramonde. In 1979 there was Han Solo at Stars' End and Han Solo's Revenge. In 1980 there was Han Solo and the Lost Legacy. All of these published by Ballantine/Del Rey, which had (and still has) a contract with the Star Wars Corporation.
Other publishers, understandably, wanted in on the action. How hard could it be? After all, Star Wars was nothing more than old-fashioned space opera mixed with some New Age "living force," vaguely spiritual flavoring. It was heroes and villains and very little science. It exploited the most basic of all fairy tales-the hidden prince who would discover his destiny and become something larger than life. Most of all, it was fun-George Lucas's gee sparkly method of storytelling could be enjoyed with critical and analytical thought turned off for the duration. Best of all, a book purchased by those nearly fourteen million Star Wars fans would allow a lot of promoting, nurturing and enriching of the rest of the genre.
So here we are, entering the 1980s. Star Wars is a worldwide cultural phenomenon and a useful shorthand for getting carloads of science fiction fans across international borders. Science fiction publishers are actually making money. What's the problem?
Strangely enough, the problem is that, because of Star Wars, science fiction publishers are actually making money.
One of the tenets of capitalism is growth. Corporations, the backbone of the capitalist system, must continue to grow or they die. One of the ways they do this is by acquiring profitable businesses and adding them to their bottom line. The moment small specialty publishers began to make money, they suddenly became attractive to corporate publishing.
Back in the early 1980s when I started working at Bakka Books in Toronto (now Bakka-Phoenix and still North America's oldest science fiction bookstore), there were dozens of small imprints handling science fiction. Even Playboy had a science fiction imprint. The power to buy manuscripts rested in a lot of individual editorial hands. There was room for the weird and the wonderful. For hard science and engineering. For social commentary. For literary merit. Very few of these imprints made much money when looked at one by one, but the genre as a whole, supported by those nearly fourteen million Star Wars fans, was actually running comfortably in the black.
And then, one by one, over the years the smaller imprints began to disappear
.
Right now, Holtzbrinck Group, a transnational German-based media corporation, controls (among many, many others) these familiar North American publishers: Macmillan, St. Martin's Press and Torall of whom have imprints of their own. Bertelsmann AG, another transnational German-based media corporation, controls Random House, Inc., which is responsible for Ballantine, Del Rey, Del Rey/ Lucas Books, Fawcett and the entire Bantam Dell Publishing Group. Pearson, PLC, an international media corporation based in the U.K., controls Penguin Putnam, which is responsible for Ace, Berkley, Penguin, Jove, NAL, Putnam and Viking. This didn't happen all at once, of course; it took years of larger companies devouring smaller imprints who were then devoured in turn. At Bakka we called it "PacMan Publishing" because imprint after imprint got munched.
Three international media corporations control most of the genre publishing in North America. Genre publishing made profitable and therefore acquirable by the massive influx of Star Wars fans.
And again, what's the problem? It's already been established that publishing companies must make money or they don't last. Isn't this just a difference of scale?
Yes. And no.
Back before Star Wars, the people in charge of the publishing companies were, if not also the people who chose the books, not very far removed. Now, the people in charge answer to the shareholders and the shareholders could care less about promoting, nurturing and enriching. Marketing has more power than editorial, and marketing is all about numbers.
Remember those 13,701,507 Star Wars fans?
That was a rhetorical question, by the way, since I doubt at this point you're able to forget them.
And lo, as corporations began to take over genre publishing, Marketing looked at what was selling and said, "Damn, this Star Wars stuff is selling like crazy. Let's give the readers more of what they will pay us money for." And Editorial said, "Wouldn't it be better if we gave the readers books that would challenge them and make them think? Books that explore new ideas and delve deep into the human psyche trying to find out just what it is that makes us human?" And Marketing said, "Are you nuts?"