y first sci-fi short story was published 28 years ago. My first sci-fi script aired in 1985. I've been reading and watching sci-fi television and films with some interest since 1965.
Seeing those cold facts, one logical conclusion is that I am eligible for retirement from sci-fi. A more charitable conclusion is that I've certainly read and seen a lot of the stuff.
And, if nothing else, those thousands of hours of exposure have given me some small insight into what makes a good sci-fi story, whether in prose or on the screen, so uniquely satisfying.
Writing prose is difficult enough, but any trip to your Borders, Barnes & Noble or unaffiliated independent bookstore will show you hundreds of hardcovers and paperbacks, each one offering a vision of a possible future or a different past. The evidence suggests that, while certainly challenging, getting your personal vision into print is possible.
So what makes getting these personal visions to the screen so darn difficult?
A sci-fi movie or television series succeeds when it transports you to a world that does not exist, whether that world happens to be a contemporary United States wracked by a secret war against aliens (X-Files) or the 22nd century (Enterprise) or the other side of the galaxy (Farscape).
Transport you convincingly, I might add.
Each world is the manifestation of a writer's vision. This is one of the attractions, if not the attraction, of writing sci-fi—that is, the power and glory of creating your own world. (How do you tell a sci-fi writer from God? God doesn't go to conventions. God never wins the Hugo Award. God doesn't publish six-book trilogies. Etc. I haven't figured out how to disable the auto-joke program.)
Once you've created your own world, you've got to convince someone with hundreds of thousands, or tens of millions, of dollars to let you film it. It's not just a matter of yelling louder or claiming superior credentials, either.
It's a matter of defending your vision.
Muddying up the sci-fi sandbox
Although you might not think it, to look at the product, network and studio executives live in the real world. They have some informed idea of how doctors, police officers, White House staffers, elementary school teachers and even Al Qaeda terrorists live and work.
When it comes to a human colony on Mars or the crew of a starship in the 24th century, you are dealing with assumptions rooted elsewhere—in other sci-fi stories, for example.
Take starships as they are often shown in sci-fi films and television.
The first assumption is that at some point in the future the human race will either develop or obtain the technology to travel faster than light. (This conflict is at the heart of UPN's new Enterprise, in fact.) This is a key decision: Without FTL travel, you aren't going to do much galactic exploration, since you will be forced to send your cast from here to Alpha Centauri (forget Vega or the Lesser Magellanic Cloud) in a self-sufficient vehicle the size of an asteroid. The voyage is going to take centuries. And unless you put your starship travelers in some kind of suspended animation, those who arrive at the destination will be several generations removed from those who left. Etc.
Actually, this is a rich area for dramatic exploration: for example, What kind of people would actually sign up for a voyage like this? Those who have nothing left for them on Earth? How are they affected by the trip? What happens if human lifespan is increased to the point where a voyage of a hundred years doesn't matter?
Dozens of SF writers have explored this subject, from Robert A. Heinlein to Poul Anderson to Gene Wolfe. And, while I'm at it, I urge everyone to find a copy of A.E. van Vogt's classic 1945 story, "Far Centaurus," which deals very creatively with just such a voyage.
But you don't get to deal with a variety of aliens in a starship that doesn't go faster than light. So you invent a magic propulsion device that gets you across the galaxy with as many complications as you can stand. Call it warp drive and create a whole series of rules, as they do in Star Trek, or just press the button and go, as they do in Star Wars. You have the whole universe to play with.
Ah, but then you ask, who's doing the playing?
Shipping out to outer space
The traditional choice—given the magic stardrive—is to use the complement of a naval vessel as a model for your starship crew. You have a helmsman. You have a ship's doctor. You have an engine room, for God's sake, complete with some kind of chief engineer.
And, naturally, you have a captain. A father (or mother) figure for several hundred. Sound the roll of Trek captains—Kirk. Picard. Sisko. Janeway. Archer. Babylon 5's Sheridan. The Skipper. (Or, sorry, that's a different genre.)
How science fictional is this, really? Forget billion-ton starships—Are giant naval vessels with huge crews going to exist on Earth's oceans much past the year 2020? (Aircraft carriers, the closest thing to starships the human race has yet built, are fast approaching extinction, since their sheer size and complexity makes them fat targets for rogue states who can launch cruise missiles.)
Or look at International Space Station Alpha. It has a crew of three (it should be six or seven, and probably will be around the year 2006, but that's a horror story rather than sci-fi). There is a mission "commander," but he or she isn't necessarily the most experienced: Right now, the sole American in a crew of three commands two Russians, and vice versa. The whole idea of ultimate "command" is based on politics, not merit.
Given the expense of maintaining even a single person in Earth orbit, will the human race ever see starships of 500 people or more? The whole concept seems to be incredibly retro and not futuristic at all.
Now, that's just one set of questions to be answered in the development process. Any sci-fi writer—like me—is capable of writing stories about captains and starships even if he doesn't quite believe them, but probably not without a lot of discussion.
Multiply me by 13, which seems to be the average number of people who will have "input" to a film or television project, and you see how difficult it is to sustain a personal vision of any kind on any issue.
It's not only a political challenge, it's often personal. Sci-fi writers believe in their other worlds. Why else would they be creating them? Defending such delicate creations is as difficult as recalling the fine details of a dream.
Which makes the achievement of writers like Chris Carter and J. Michael Straczynski all the more miraculous.
Michael Cassutt is the author, most recently, of the thriller Red Moon (Tor paperback, January 2002), as well as on-going script projects for MTV and 20th Television.
