he last thing you need is more wordage from me on the events of Sept. 11. Like all of you, I was shocked and horrified. Like many of you, I lost a friend and a friend of a friend. I wasn't surprised that terrorists would strike at the United States, any more than I was surprised when humans walked
on the moon. Anticipating the future, good and bad, is part of being a sci-fi writer.
But now I, like you, have to deal with a new world. I look at my 15-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter and wonder what it will mean for their lives. Nothing good, I'm afraid. Certainly not in the near future. Here in Hollywood, the reaction has been swift, if inconsistent, as executives, producers and other powers struggle to find their place in this New World Horror. On a practical level, the big new Schwarzenegger film, Collateral Damage, has had its release delayed indefinitely. Spider-Man is going back for a reshoot.
In television, which has the blessing and curse of being able to respond more rapidly to events, producer Dick Wolf reportedly had to jettison a five-episode Law & Order storyline about bioterrorism in New York. I can only begin to imagine the long nights awaiting Aaron Sorkin and the staff of The West Wing.
And the new pilots in development are being re-evaluated. How much global crime can the audience stand now? How many urban dramas? A friend tells me that in the week after Sept. 11, networks picked up three new series concepts, each one about the mayor of a small town. ...
On a more general level, the whole cult of celebrity, fostered by programs like Access Hollywood and magazines like In Style or Vanity Fair, is facing hard times. I mean, who really cares about Jo-Lo's latest covering (or lack thereof), or wants to read about Anne Heche's multiple personalities (or lack thereof) in light of painful, all-too-real horror? It all seems incredibly trivial, hardly worth a moment's thought.
It's all irrelevant.
Sci-fi is not irrelevant
Being irrelevant, of course, is the writer's greatest professional terror. It means you don't have an audience. (And with no audience, you don't make any money, but it's the lack of readers that really hurts a writer.)
It's particularly galling to sci-fi prose writers, who have railed for years against a literary establishment which consigns reviews of their books to an occasional "Sci-Fi Corner" in the newspaper. Those of us who work in television and film have it a little better: we can make money because we
can sometimes bypass critics and reach an audience. But tell me how many Emmys Chris Carter won for X-Files. Joe Straczynski for Babylon 5? What movie was Steven Spielberg's Oscar winner?
By and large, sci-fi is still considered irrelevant. Empty entertainment for juveniles or adults who still think like juveniles.
Which is odd, when you realize how often sci-fi stories have proved to be a better reflector—not to mention predictor—of the "real" world than most mainstream literature and filmed entertainment. I'm not going to claim that, for example, Robert A. Heinlein was a more intelligent man or a
better writer than, say, Philip Roth. I am saying that the quirk of intellect or way of looking at the world that defines a science-fiction writer seems to provide direct access to universal fears and hopes.
What were all those alien-invasion movies of the 1950s, from War of the Worlds to Kronos, if not subconscious warnings about takeover by Communists?
How do you account for Armageddon and Deep Impact? Was the popularity of those films a sign that audiences were worried about facing weapons of mass destruction launched by powers beyond their control?
It's one thing to reflect the fears of an age. What happens when you deliberately try to warn against them?
Cautionary tales, cautionary time
On Dec. 13, 1966, NBC aired a "world premiere movie" called Doomsday Flight. Written by Rod Serling, it dealt with an extortionist who phoned an airline to announce that he had planted a bomb on one of its aircraft, and would set it off unless the airline paid up.
The idea had a roots in reality: Serling's brother, Robert, later to become a noted suspense novelist, was then a journalist specializing in aviation, and he had tipped the creator of Twilight Zone to a similar extortion plot, which turned out to be a hoax.
Rod Serling turned it into a cautionary tale.
Doomsday Flight was the highest-rated TV movie aired to that time. I don't have exact figures, but assume it was seen by 30 million people, possibly more.
What happened? Within a week, three major airlines received copycat extortion calls. Five years later, when the film was re-run, the same thing happened.
Doomsday Flight is often credited (perhaps blamed is a better word) with originating the wave of airline skyjackings of the late 1960s and early 1970s, fairly or not, I don't know. I can't recall whether any skyjacker ever cited the movie as an influence.
Nevertheless, my own experience in network television confirms this: stories about teen suicide were taboo, precisely because there was some evidence that airing one encouraged copycats. Doomsday Flight was withdrawn from broadcast after that single re-run in 1971, so someone must have assumed a link.
And, according to Joel Engel's 1989 biography of Serling (Rod Serling: The Dreams and Nightmares of a Life in the Twilight Zone), Serling later confessed to his brother, "I wish to hell I'd never written the damn thing."
Then there is the horror story that haunted me for years, and still does: a 1984 TV movie called Special Bulletin, written by Marshall Herskowitz and Edward Zwick and dealing with a terrorist-planted nuclear bomb which explodes, devastating an entire American city.
These two talented writer-director-producers went on to create the series thirtysomething and Now and Again; Zwick directed Glory, among other feature films. They are not sci-fi writers. So I'm hoping they were unconsciously reflecting their (my) fears, not sending a warning—and making an idea all too real.
The bad guys on the new Enterprise are named the Suliban. Is that a brilliantly prescient choice by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, or one they will eventually regret?
For a sci-fi writer, there's a worse fate than being ignored.
Michael Cassutt is currently writing scripts for Fox TV and a couple of other places. Those were pitches that worked. His novel, Red Moon, will be reprinted in paperback by Tor in January.
