s thirteen, according to a famous line first uttered by an astute aficionado named Peter Graham more than that number of years ago. Funny, to be sure, but also true. For at least a generation, sci-fi television and movies were aimed at a juvenile or young adult audience.
The first sci-fi television series, years before Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, were after-school adventures like Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. The marketing of sci-fi movies that were supposed to be adult emphasized elements that would appeal to 13-year-olds, especially 13-year-old boys: the first trailers for Forbidden Planet spend more time talking about Robby the Robot than anything else.
Even as prime-time adult sci-fi and fantasy series came and went through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the after-school and Saturday morning time blocks were not only filled with long-running sci-fi and fantasy, it seemed as though genre series predominated.
I worked for a television network in children's programming in the 1980s, and everything we developed had some sort of fantastic element. At its best this meant an animated series like Dungeons and Dragons, about a group of ordinary kids flung into a magic world, where they developed extraordinary powers. At its worst--well, let's not go there today.
It still seems to be the case. Pinky and the Brain, or Action Man. The list is long. Sci-fi (have I said that I'm including fantasy, even though we all know there are differences?) seems to be for kids. And even as trends in prime-time series and feature films change, it seems as though it always will be.
Now, why is this?
Children want to rule the universe
Some years ago critic Thomas Disch, himself an accomplished novelist and short-story writer, noted, and I paraphrase: The core of any sci-fi concept is the idea that you, an awkward, pimply, inexperienced boy or girl of 13 might actually be the ruler of the universe.
Or, in other words, these sci-fi stories are power fantasies.
For a long time I dismissed the whole idea. Surely, I thought, great sci-fi is something more than that! So I went looking for counter-examples.
And I glanced over my shelf of award-winning sci-fi novels, where I found Stranger in a Strange Land, which is about a young human born and raised on Mars, and thus heir to strange powers, and Ender's Game, about a young man who doesn't know he's the product of a genetic experiment to produce a sort-of warrior.
Well, forget the books. So I turned to my video collection, and came across Star Wars, which is the adventures of Luke Skywalker, a kid from a backwater desert world who finds out he's actually--
Okay, set that one aside, too. So I haul out my new tape of the SCI FI Channel's Dune, and it only takes me until about the beginning of the second hour to realize it, too, is about a young man who has mysterious powers that few appreciate--
I dug out my collection of comic books. Spider-Man?
I even looked at my own work, series I wrote for and enjoyed the most. Hmmm, Eerie, Indiana, about a 14-year-old boy and his friend, who know things adults don't--
Fine, I told myself. Even though these examples are all hugely popular (well, except for Eerie, though it has its fans) and so central to the field that you can be understood in Hollywood just by mentioning the title, their presence in my collection undoubtedly says more about me than about the sci-fi fantasy world.
What about the stuff I haven't read yet? What is the rest of the world in love with? What concept has people lining up to be the first to experience it?
Harry Potter, of course. Which, if I've heard correctly, is about a young boy with magical powers, and will not only be a big movie and series of movies, but is being imitated and/or ripped off on six continents as we speak, and maybe Antarctica, for all I know.
Mythic words into moral actions
All right, our favorite stories are juvenile power fantasies. Is this a bad thing?
Nobody likes to make moral judgments these days, and I'm as reluctant as anyone. Does watching Dune make a teen-ager go out and shoot up his high school? Or, more generally, and not to pick on a fine story, does reading power fantasies cause a troubled teen to act them out? Obviously not, 99.999% of the time. But all it takes is one awful incident inspired by a sci-fi movie or a game, and you're faced with the question.
People in my business like to scoff at the idea that anything we write or produce causes actions or reactions in the audience. I'm afraid this is nonsense, or network television wouldn't be supported by advertisers, who have a lot of evidence to show that what they write and produce most
certainly does cause people to buy and consume things.
I guess my qualified answer is, sure, it can indeed be a bad thing. Storytellers themselves rarely realize how much power they possess.
Now, there are writers who are always aware of the mythic underpinnings of their work, such as George Lucas, who studied the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell prior to writing what was then The Star Wars. There are others who write from some deep inner compulsion, who simply record
episodes from a dreamscape, and remain completely oblivious to source and meaning, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs, to take an example safely deceased. Both types of writers, however, tell the same basic story.
They reach the inadequate 13-year-old in all of us (and weren't we all inadequate as 13-year-olds?) before hauling out the TIE fighters or the magic spells.
Unless you do the same, in practical terms your work will be flat, unconvincing, wrong. Just aimless, meaningless adventures involving magic amulets and Cylons and other stock furniture.
It's difficult to reconcile yourself to this, when you're a writer. Because using your high-powered brain to construct power fantasies for 13-year-olds will never get your book featured in the New York Times Book Review (unless you sell more copies than the Bible), will not get you a professorship at a major university nor a nomination for the Nobel in literature, nor will it win you an Academy Award or an Emmy (though you might get a Golden Globe). Throughout your career and your lifetime, you will be thought of as second-rate by grown-up critics.
But you will have shaped young minds, and even minds not so young.
Use your power wisely.
The writing of a truly great sci-fi story is itself a sci-fi story.
Now ... where did my son hide that Alpha Centauri game?
Michael Cassutt has been a writer and/or producer for a number of SF and
fantasy television series, from The Twilight Zone and Max Headroom through Eerie, Indiana, The Outer Limits and, most recently, Seven Days. He is also the author of a number of books on space flight, including his new novel, Red Moon, which was published by Forge Books in January 2001. His short story "More Adventures on Other Planets" was recently published in SCI FICTION.
