Stalking the Nightmare

by Harlan Ellison

  SOMEHOW, I DON’T THINK WE’RE IN KANSAS, TOTO

  Six months of my life were spent in creating a dream the shape and sound and color of which had never been seen on television. The dream was called The Starlost, and between February and September of 1973 I watched it being steadily turned into a nightmare.

  The late Charles Beaumont, a scenarist of unusual talents who wrote many of the most memorable Twilight Zones, said to me when I arrived in Hollywood in 1962, “Attaining success in Hollywood is like climbing a gigantic mountain of cow flop, in order to pluck one perfect rose from the summit. And you find when you’ve made that hideous climb … you’ve lost the sense of smell.”

  In the hands of the inept, the untalented, the venal and the corrupt, The Starlost became a veritable Mt. Everest of cow flop and, though I climbed that mountain, somehow I never lost sight of the dream, never lost the sense of smell, and when it got so rank I could stand it no longer, I descended hand-over-hand from the northern massif, leaving behind $93,000, the corrupters, and the eviscerated remains of my dream. I’ll tell you about it.

  February. Marty the agent called and said, “Go over to 20th and see Robert Kline.”

  “Who’s Robert Kline?”

  “West Coast head of taped syndicated shows. He’s putting together a package of mini-series, eight or ten segments per show. He wants to do a science fiction thing. He asked for you. It’ll be a co-op deal between 20th Century-Fox and the BBC. They’ll shoot it in London.”

  London! ‘Tm on my way,” I said, the jet-wash of my departure deafening him across the phone connection.

  I met Kline in the New Administration Building of 20th, and his first words were so filled with sugar I had the feeling if I listened to him for very long I’d wind up with diabetes: “I wanted the top sf writer in the world,” he said. Then he ran through an informed list of my honors in the field of science fiction. It was an impressive performance of the corporate art-form known as ego-massage.

  Then Kline advised me that what he was after was, “A sort of The Fugitive in Space.” Visions of doing a novel-for-television in the mode of The Prisoner splatted like overripe casaba melons; I got up and started to walk.

  “Hold it, hold it!” Kline said. “What did you have in mind?” I sat down again.

  Then I ran through half a dozen ideas for series that would be considered primitive concepts in the literary world of sf. Kline found each of them too complex. As a final toss at the assignment, I said, “Well, I’ve been toying with an idea for tape, rather than film; it could be done with enormous production values that would be financially impossible for a standard filmed series.”

  “What is it?” he said.

  And here’s what I told him:

  Five hundred years from now, the Earth is about to suffer a cataclysm that will destroy all possibility for life on the planet. Time is short. The greatest minds and the greatest philanthropists get together and cause to have constructed in orbit between the Moon and the Earth, a giant ark, one thousand miles long, comprised of hundreds of self-contained biospheres. Into each of these little worlds is placed a segment of Earth’s population, its culture intact. Then the ark is sent off toward the stars, even as the Earth is destroyed, to seed the new worlds surrounding those stars with the remnants of humanity.

  But one hundred years after the flight has begun, a mysterious “accident” (which would remain a mystery till the final segment of the show, four years later, it was hoped) kills the entire crew, seals the biosphere-worlds so they have no contact with one another … and the long voyage goes on with the people trapped, developing their societies without any outside influence. Five hundred years go by, and the travelers—the Starlost—forget the Earth.

  To them it is a myth, a vague legend, even as Atlantis is to us. They even forget they are adrift in space, forget they are in an interstellar vessel. Each community thinks it is “the world” and that the world is only fifty square miles, with a metal ceiling.

  Until Devon, an outcast in a society rigidly patterned after the Amish communities of times past, discovers the secret, that they are onboard a space-going vessel. He learns the history of the Earth, learns of its destruction, and learns that when “the accident” happened, the astrogation gear of the ark was damaged and now the last seed of humankind is on a collision course with a star. Unless he can convince a sufficient number of biosphere worlds to band together in a communal attempt to leam how the ark works, repair it and re-program their flight, they will soon be incinerated in the furnace of that giant sun toward which they’re heading.

  It was, in short, a fable of our world today.

  “Fresh! Original! New!” Kline chirruped. “There’s never been an idea like it before!” I didn’t have the heart to tell him the idea was first propounded in astronautical literature in the early 1920s by the great Russian pioneer Tsiolkovsky, nor that the British physicist Bernal had done a book on the subject in 1929, nor that the idea had become very common coin in the genre of science fiction through stories by Heinlein, Harrison, Panshin, Simak and many others. (Arthur C. Clarke’s then-current bestseller, RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA, was the latest example of the basic idea.)

  Kline suggested I dash home and write up the idea, which he would then merchandise. I pointed out to him that the Writers Guild frowns on speculative writing and that if he wanted the riches of my invention, he should lay on me what we call “holding money” to enable me to write a prospectus and to enable him to blue-sky it with the BBC.

  The blood drained from his face at my suggestion of advance money, and he said he had to clear it with the BBC, but that if I wrote the prospectus he would guarantee me a free trip to London. I got up and started to walk.

  “Hold it, hold it!” he said, and opened a desk drawer. He pulled out a cassette recorder and extended it. “Tell you what: why don’t you just tell it on a cassette, the same way you told it to me.” I stopped and looked. This was a new one on me. In over twenty years as a film and television writer, I’ve seen some of the most circuitous, sleazy, Machiavellian dodges ever conceived by the mind of Western Man to get writers to write on the cuff. But never before, and never since, has anyone been that slippery. It should have been all the tip-off I needed.

  I thought on it for a moment, rationalized that this wasn’t speculative writing, that at worst it was “speculative talking,” and since a writer is expected to pitch an idea anyhow, it was just barely legitimate.

  So I took the cassette home, backed my spiel with the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey, outlined the barest bones of the series concept, and brought it back to Kline.

  “Okay. Here it is,” I said, “but you can’t transcribe it. If you do, then it becomes spec writing and you have to pay me.” I was assured he wouldn’t put it on paper, and that he’d be back to me shortly. He was sure the BBC would go bananas for the idea.

  No sooner was I out of his office than he had his secretary transcribe the seven-minute tape.

  March. No word.

  April. No word.

  May. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity. Marty the agent called. “Kline sold the series. Go see him.”

  “Series?” I said, appalled. “But that idea was only planned to accommodate eight segments … a series, you say?”

  “Go see him.”

  So I went. Kline greeted me as if I were the only human capable of deciphering the Mayan Codex, and caroled that he had sold the series not only to 48 of the NBC independent stations (what are called the O&O’s, Owned & Operated stations), but that the Westinghouse outlets had bitten, and the entire Canadian Television Network, the CTV.

  “Uh, excuse me,” I said, in an act of temerity not usually attributed to writers in Hollywood, “how did you manage to sell this, er, series without having a contract with me, or a prospectus, or a pilot script, or a pilot film … or anything?”

  “They read your outline, and they bought it on the strength of your name.”

  “They read it? How?”
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  He circumnavigated that little transgression of his promise not to set my words on paper, and began talking in grandiose terms about how I’d be the story editor, how I’d have creative control, how I’d write many scripts for the show, and what a good time I’d have in Toronto.

  “Toronto?!” I said, gawking. “What the hell happened to London? The Sir Lew Grade Studios. Soho. Buckingham Palace. Swinging London. What happened to all that?”

  Mr. Kline, without bothering to inform the creator of this hot property he had been successfully hawking, had been turned down by the BBC and had managed to lay off the project with CTV, as an all-Canadian production of Glen Warren, a Toronto-based operation that was already undertaking to tape The Starlost at the CFTO Studios in Toronto. It was assumed by Mr. Kline that I would move to Toronto to story edit the series; he never bothered to ask if I wanted to move to Canada, he just assumed I would.

  Mr. Kline was a real bear for assuming things.

  Such as: I would write his series (which was the way he now referred to it) even though a writers’ strike was imminent. I advised him that if the strike hit, I would be incommunicado, but he waved away my warnings with the words, “Everything will work out.” With such words, Napoleon went to Elba.

  At that time I was a member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, West and I was very pro-union, pro-strike, pro-getting long overdue contract inequities with the producers straightened out.

  Just before the strike began, Kline called and said he was taking out advertisements for the series. He said he’d had artwork done for the presentations, and he needed some copy to accompany the drawings. I asked him how he could have artwork done when the spaceship had not yet been designed? (I was planning to create a vessel that would be absolutely feasible and scientifically correct, in conjunction with Ben Bova, then-editor of Analog.) Kline said there wasn’t time for all that fooling-around, ads had to go out now!

  It has always been one of the imponderables of the television industry to me, how the time is always now, when three days earlier no one had even heard of the idea.

  But I gave him some words and, to my horror, saw the ad a week later: it showed a huge bullet-shaped thing I guess Kline thought was a spaceship, being smacked by a meteorite, a great hole being torn in the skin of the bullet, revealing many levels of living space within … all of them drawn the wrong direction. I covered my eyes.

  Let me pause for a moment to explain why this was a scientifically-illiterate, wholly incorrect piece of art, because it was merely the first indication of how little the producers of The Starlost understood what they were doing. Herewith, a Childs’ Primer of Science Fiction:

  There is no air in space. Space is very nearly a vacuum. That means an interstellar vessel, since it won’t be landing anywhere, and doesn’t need to be designed for passage through atmosphere, can be designed any way that best follows the function. The last time anyone used the bullet design for a starship was in The Green Slime, circa 1969 (a Nipponese nifty that oozes across the “Late Late Late Show” in the wee’est hours when normal folks are sleeping; this excludes systems analysts and computer programmers, of course).

  But it indicated the lack of understanding of sf that is commonplace among television executives who, for the most part, have not read an entire book since they left high school.

  Look: if you turn on your set and see a pair of white swinging doors suddenly slammed open by a gurney pushed by two white-smocked interns, you know that within moments Trapper John, M.D. (or Ben Casey, or Dr. Kildare, or Marcus Welby) will be jamming a tube down somebody’s trachea; if you see a snake-eyed dude in a black Stetson lying-out on a butte, aiming a Sharps .52 caliber buffalo rifle, you know that within moments the Wells Fargo stage is gonna come a-thunderin’ down that dusty trail; if Dan Tana (or Mannix, or Jim Rockford, or Ironside) comes into his inner office and there’s a silky lady lounging in the chair across from his desk, showing a lot of leg, you know that by the end of Act One someone is going to try ventilating his (or Magnum’s) hide. It’s all by rote, all templates, all stolen from what went before by a generation of writers and producers whose only referents are what they grew up with watching television; it’s all cliche, all predictable.

  And while I make no brief for the reams and volumes of low-grade, moronic Star Wars imitation space opera hackwork that has turned this into the worst period in the history of sf, the genre is not predictable. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

  (Though shit like Battlestar Ponderosa and Universale Buck Rogers seems to assure us that the steamroller mediocrity of tv can even trivialize sf, despite the built-in deterrents.)

  A science fiction story has to have interior logic. It has to be consistent, even within the boundaries of its own extrapolative horizons. That’s irreducible in the parameters of what a sf story or teleplay must do, in order to get the reader or viewer to go along with it, without feeling conned or duped or lied to. Rigorous standards of plotting must be employed to win that willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience; it allows them to accept a fantastic premise.

  How many sf movies have you seen—Outland, Message From Space, Silent Running are perfect awful examples—during which you recognized sophomoric inaccuracies that made you groan and feel cheated? Errors that first-year science students would not make: sound in a vacuum, people walking around on alien planets without filtration masks, clones that spring fully grown from fingernail parings, robots that act like midgets in metal suits.

  Break that logical chain, dumb it up, accept the insulting myth that no one knows or cares if the special effects are spectacular enough, and the whole thing falls apart like Watergate testimony.

  But the ad was only an early storm warning of what troubles were yet to befall me. The strike was called, and then began weeks of a kind of ghastly harassment I’d always thought was reserved for overblown melodramas about the Evils of Hollywood. Phone-calls at all hours, demanding I write the “bible” for the series. (A “bible” is industry shorthand for the precis of what the show will do, who the characters are, what directions storylines should take. In short, the blueprint from which individual segments are written. Without a bible, only the creator knows what the series is about.) Kline had no bible. He had nothing, at this point, but that seven-minute tape. With which item, plus my name and the name of Doug Trumbull—who, at that time had done the special effects for 2001 and had directed Silent Running—he’d been signed on as Executive Producer—Kline had—sans a contract with me!—sold this pipe dream to everyone in the Western World,

  But I wouldn’t write the bible. I was on strike. Then began the threats. Followed by the intimidation, the bribes, the promises that they’d go forward with the idea without me, the veiled hints of scab writers who’d be hired to write their own version of the series … everything short of actually kidnapping me. Through these weeks—when even flights out of Los Angeles to secluded hideaways in the Michigan wilds and the northern California peninsula failed to deter the phone calls—I refused to write. It didn’t matter that the series might not get on the air, it didn’t matter that I’d lose a potload of money, the Guild was on strike in a noble cause and, besides, I didn’t much trust Mr. Kline and the anonymous voices that spoke to me in the wee hours of the night. And, contrary to popular belief, many television writers are men and women of ethic: they can be rented, but they can’t be bought.

  I remember seeing a film of Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife when I was a young writer living in New York and lusting after fame in Hollywood. I remember seeing the unscrupulous Steiger and his minions applying pressure to a cracking Palance, to get him to sign a contract, and I remember smiling at the danger-filled melodramatics. During that period of pre-production on The Starlost, I ceased smiling.

  The threats ranged from breaking my typing fingers to insuring I’d never work in the Industry again. The bribes ranged from $13,000 to be placed in an unnumbered Swiss bank account to this:

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sp; One afternoon before the strike, I’d been in Kline’s office. I’d been leafing through the Players’ Directory, the trade publications that list all actors and actresses, with photos. I’d commented idly that I found the person of one pictured young starlet quite appealing. Actually, what I’d said was that I’d sell my soul to get it on with her.

  Now, weeks later, during my holdout and Kline’s attempts to get me to scab, I was pottering about my house, when the doorbell rang. I went to the door, opened it, and there stood the girl of my wanton daydreams. Bathed in sunlight, a palpable nimbus haloing that gorgeous face. I stood openmouthed, unable to even invite her in.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” she said, entering the house with no assistance from me, “and I’ve heard so much about you, I decided just to come and say hello.”

  She said hello. I said something unintelligible. (I have the same reaction when standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica. Otherworldly beauty has a way of turning my brains to prune-whip yogurt.) But it took only a few minutes of conversation to ascertain that yes, she knew Mr. Kline and, yes, she knew about the series, and …

  I wish I could tell you I used her brutally and sent her back to where I assumed she had come from, but feminism has taken its toll and I merely asked her to split.

  She split.

  I couldn’t watch any TV that night. My eyes were too swollen from crying.

  And the cajoling went on. Kline, of course, knew nothing about the girl, had never had anything to do with sending her over, would be affronted if anyone even suggested he had tried such a loathsome, demeaning trick. Hell, I’d be the last one to suggest it. Or maybe second from the last.

  But howzabout the scab writer threat? Well …

  At one point, representatives of Mr. Kline did bring in a scab. A non-union writer to whom they imparted a series of outright lies so he’d believe he was saving my bacon. When they approached well-known sf writer Robert Silverberg to write the bible, Bob asked them point-blank, “Why isn’t Harlan writing it?” They fum-fuh’ed and said, well, er, uh, he’s on strike. Bob said, “Would he want me to write this?” They knew he’d call me, and they told him no, I’d be angry. So he passed up some thousands of dollars, and they went elsewhere. And this being the kind of world it is, they found a taker.