The Cassutt Files
Tomorrow Through the Past

I'm good about anniversaries—I remember not only when I was married and most birthdates, but also space- and SF-related events, like the day my friend Tom Stafford reached lunar orbit on Apollo 10, or that 07/07/07 is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Robert A. Heinlein.

Later this week I will be in Kansas City, Mo., joining several hundred readers and guests, including NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis and SF writers such as Ben Bova, Spider Robinson, Allen Steele and John Scalzi, in commemorating this centennial, honoring the most influential SF writer of the 20th century. (Check it out yourself at www.heinleincentennial.com.)

I've mentioned Heinlein frequently—perhaps too frequently—but then he is the figure more responsible for my career than any other. His juvenile novels inspired my interest in sci-fi. His approach to storytelling shaped my own fumbling methods of composition and world-building. I still find myself either following in his steps or, perhaps more often, deliberately choosing a different path. Either way, I am still reacting to him.

To twist the title of his collection of "Future History" stories, I see the future through the past he shaped for me.

A crisis of organization

For example—

Among his many accomplishments as a novelist and short-story writer, Heinlein was the most sophisticated and prescient visionaries of the future, exploring such themes as the rise of religious fundamentalism in the United States, the start—and cessation—of space flight, the appearance of contraceptive ads on television and other trends long before the rest of the world (and most sci-fi writers).

Take this crisis he saw looming in 1950: The greatest challenge faced by the human race, he wrote, is "not Russia, not the atomic bomb, not corruption in government, not encroaching hunger, not the morals of the young. ... It is a crisis in the organization and accessibility of human knowledge." (Which is another way of saying, "There are more things in heaven and earth than are found in Wikipedia ....")

Over the past two months I have been in my own version of this crisis, reviewing and reorganizing 350 separate files of my works. This is also Heinlein-related, because years ago I foolishly adopted his "opus" system for organizing a writer's files, where each work, as finished (or abandoned), gets an opus number.

This worked fine for Heinlein, who by the time he adopted it was largely creating three to four projects per year. It doesn't work for someone like Michael Cassutt, who often generates 20 projects a year. (What about "The Cassutt Files"? This is #96. ... Does that mean I have 96 separate file copies? Or one big file?)

I have switched to a more rational alphabetical system, in which my hard copies have the same names as the folders on my computer. You'd think as a sci-fi thinker—as someone who actually first used a computer and modem in 1970—I'd have gotten around to this years ago, but I didn't.

Storming the Dream Palace

What I found in this slog through the swamp of memory were manuscript copies of unsold short stories dating back to college—stories of 30 to 40 pages, neatly typed, double-spaced, with carbon copies. (My children looked at these as if they were the Dead Sea scrolls. Not at their religious value, just in amazement at their antiquity.) Many of these went into recycling.

What I also found were multiple drafts of half a dozen sci-fi scripts I wrote, each one carrying its own hypertext-like suite of memories, usually painful.

There was, for example, Arthur C. Clarke's Red Planet—based on an original 10-page story document by Clarke himself and dealing with a teenage girl growing up in a colony on Mars. (One version of the story was literally titled Arthur C. Clarke's A Princess of Mars.) This was for Universal and went through three drafts, none of them satisfactory.

There was X-Ray TV, the "retro sci-fi" anthology series Joe Dante and I pitched until we ran out of places to approach.

Here's Nebula Award Theater, yet another SF anthology series that was to have featured adaptations of short stories, novelettes and novellas that had won this award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. My partners in this and I had gotten the right to use the trademarked name—but this one never got out the door, throttled in its crib by an agent.

Way Station is another heartbreaker—doubly so, since I wrote multiple versions of a one-hour family television pilot for ABC based on Clifford Simak's novel. When the network shelved it, I spent my own money for an option on the book—and wrote at least three feature-film versions, one of which I like a lot. (And the ABC pilot script has been a successful sample of my work for a decade.)

Here is the fat folder of scripts Karl Schaefer and I wrote for NBC for a project called Dream Palace, dealing with a team of psycho-imagery specialists who solve problems (crimes?) by invading and shaping dreams. Cool idea, fairly well executed, ill-timed.

Then, of course, we have the failed Heinlein project.

Lost with Robert Heinlein

In 1963, Heinlein developed a 90-minute sci-fi drama titled XXII Century for Screen Gems. It was never filmed, primarily because it was utterly unsuitable for the network TV world of 1964, where the juvenile Lost in Space was as sophisticated as sci-fi was allowed to get. XXII Century disappeared into Heinlein's files ... forgotten.

In the one extended meeting I had with Mr. Heinlein, in May 1977, he happened to mention a failed TV project from the 1960s, adding a further clue that it had been shelved and that its producers had "moved across the street to do Batman."

That nugget of data stuck in my head for a decade until I decided to track it down, even having a conversation with Bill Dozier—the producer who had "moved across the street." Eventually, with Mrs. Heinlein's permission, I was able to obtain a copy from the Heinlein archive at UC Santa Cruz.

It was fun to read a "lost" Heinlein project, though I found the script slow, talky and too dark. Still, it had possibilities. If someone with suitable talents and sympathies did a rewrite.

Someone like me.

By 1999, I had a deal to adapt the script, and to direct it, as a TV movie. I had a production start date. Then, suddenly, in a manner entirely familiar to anyone working in television or film, the whole project cratered.

Oh well. I had the pleasure of finding the project and playing in Heinlein's world for a little while.

And next week I will actually be living in Heinlein's world.

P.S. Congratulations to the fans of Jericho, who accomplished the miracle of the age in helping CBS decide to renew the series (see Cassutt Files #95, "The Walls Come Tumblin' Down").