The Cassutt Files
Eternal Sunshine of the Sci-Fi Mind

A valued friend who is a devoted reader of this column—no, he's not valued because he's a devoted reader, though it doesn't hurt—told me the other night that he had detected a note of "darkness" here. That is, that I was paying too much attention to depressing external matters, such as the ongoing writers' strike, and focusing on sci-fi television, movies and prose that takes a grim view of human activity.

At least, I think that's what he said. It was at a party, and I wasn't taking my usual party notes.

And, naturally, my first reaction when confronted with any opinion of my work not 110 percent positive is defensive denial. I could easily have pointed out that the worlds portrayed in many sci-fi television series, movies and prose are grim ... look at CBS' Jericho (scheduled to return with seven new episodes beginning Feb. 12). It's about ordinary people trying to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange.

Or Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (at right), premiering on Fox on Sunday, Jan. 13, and airing regularly thereafter on Monday nights. In that world, a woman tries to protect her son from time-traveling death machines from the near future.

What about this season's biggest holiday movie, I Am Legend? In this film, the third version of the classic Richard Matheson novel, Will Smith is the only recognizably human survivor of a human-created holocaust, living out his days pumping iron, talking to a dog and hunting deer on the weed-choked streets of Manhattan.

Yeah, and I'm the gloomy one.

Seeking the sci-fi smiles

OK, if I had to smile in a sci-fi way, what would do the trick?

There haven't been that many outright sci-fi comedies. On television, the favored template is the funny alien, all the way back to My Favorite Martian (1963-66), which was followed a decade later by the insanely funny Robin Williams series Mork & Mindy (1978-82) and Third Rock From the Sun (1996-2001).

Even better, however, was Futurama, which ran from 1999 to 2003. This series, ostensibly about a pizza delivery guy who is frozen in 1999 and wakes up a thousand years later, was smart and filled with more sci-fi jokes than I would have thought possible. And now Fry, Bender, Leela and the other denizens of the 30th century have returned—if not to network television then at least to your Blockbuster—in Bender's Big Score (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment), the first of four promised direct-to-DVD movies.

What really makes me smile is the CBS comedy series Big Bang Theory, created by Chuck Lorre, a survivor of such high-profile comedies as Roseanne, Grace Under Fire and Two and a Half Men, and Bill Prady, a veteran of various Jim Henson projects, Dream On and even a Star Trek: Voyager. (Prady was also a candidate for California governor in the 2003 recall movement, which would be an interesting setting for a sitcom.)

Big Bang Theory stars Jerry Galecki as Leonard Hofstadler and Jim Parsons (at left) as Sheldon Cooper—both are post-docs in physics at Caltech and roommates in a Pasadena apartment building where beauteous young Penny (no last name given, but winningly portrayed by Kaley Cuoco) has moved in. Penny is from Nebraska. She wants to be an actress and is writing a screenplay. And she works at the Cheesecake Factory.

Leonard is smitten. Sheldon is loudly, brilliantly skeptical of Leonard's chances with the blond goddess. Let hilarity ensue.

Now, one can make the case that BBT is not sci-fi. It's set in Pasadena in a reasonable facsimile of the first decade of the 21st century. The characters are human—though more on that below.

Yet it is a clear case of applying the sci-fi method—and it has the best sci-fi-like jokes I've ever heard ... not to mention great sci-fi-style episode titles. "The Luminous Fish Effect," "The Dumpling Paradox," "The Fuzzy Boots Corollary" and "The Middle-Earth Paradigm." In that one, it's Halloween, and Leonard, Sheldon and friends all turn up at Penny's party as the Flash. (What do the producers do when they run out of synonyms for "theory?")

Are the characters human? Well, there is an exchange on one episode where Leonard returns to the apartment to find Sheldon and nerd buddies Wolowitz and Raj playing some kind of tower block game. "The Internet has been down for 20 minutes."

Wolowitz and Raj start gaslighting Sheldon with the following question: "If you were a robot, but didn't know, would you want us to tell you?" And by golly they quote from Asimov's Three Laws.

Just thinking about Big Bang Theory makes me smile. And given that it's been renewed for a second season, you will have the chance to do the same.

Mind over method

In some sense, Big Bang Theory is surfing on the wave of geek chic, which seems to have kicked off with the CBS drama Numb3rs, the series about a crime-fighting mathematician from, yes, Caltech. The wave rolls on with NBC's new Chuck and the CW's Reaper.

For that matter, what is House (at right) but a series about a science-fiction personality, an asocial or even anti-social genius who knows more than anyone in whatever room he happens to inhabit?

Big Bang Theory and its cousins are examples not of the sci-fi method but of the sci-fi mind at work.

And what, you ask, is the sci-fi mind? The temptation is to echo Damon Knight's definition of sci-fi—"It's what I'm pointing to"—but I owe you more than that. OK, the sci-fi mind is smart, often in a painfully self-conscious way. It looks at the world in a new way ... it often seeks to re-create the world, either in imagining a future or re-imagining the past.

This is partly due to vision. It is also due to an inability to function easily in the world as it is. (If I can't play the game, I'll change the rules.) Thirty years of observing sci-fi minds, my very own as well as those of other writers and fans, confirms this: We don't easily fit in the "mundane" world. And when you don't fit, you get frustrated at the state of things.

So you invent ways they might be changed. Or destroyed. Death and/or destruction loom.

Ah, that's where that sci-fi darkness originates!

Back, damn you! Back to the dungeon!