aybe it's being the father of a couple of busy teenagers.
Maybe it's the fact that two of my sports teams (Minnesota Twins and Vikings) are doing unusually well for this time of year.
Maybe it's because of the California recall. (No, I am not a candidate.)
But the beginning of the fall television season sneaked up on me. I woke up the other day and realized that all kinds of new series were having their premieres. I'm not equipped with Tivo, just Stone Age videotapes, so I'm scrambling to catch up with Jake 2.0 and Enterprise and Joan of Arcadia and Smallville and Angel, all the while keeping watch for later arrivals like Andromeda and wondering what shows I've just forgotten or failed to notice.
What I don't see is a lot of new sci-fi.
SF may be dead, so long live fantasy
Definitions are always tricky, and my own ability to draw a line between sci-fi and fantasy depends on the weather.
Nevertheless, I think I can make the general statement that science fiction deals with the fantastic-but-possible while fantasy deals with the fantastic-impossible.
It might be fantastic that we've been having a secret encounters with aliens since 1946, ala X-Files or Roswell, or that giant worms might be terrorizing a town in the sticks (Tremors) or that a team of U.S. Air Force techies can use alien technology to visit other worlds (Stargate SG-1)—far-fetched, certainly, but it's not impossible.
God speaking to a beauteous young teenage girl, as in Joan of Arcadia? A whole team of dead souls tasked with post-mortem missions (Dead Like Me)? A coroner who magically switches places with the dead bodies she examines, reliving their last days, as in Tru Calling? Cool ideas, sure, but I'd have to call them fantastic-impossible.
It's a sign of a larger problem that fans of sci-fi face—fantasy sells better.
Enterprise limps into its third season with a new mission and an extended name, but so far the ratings have not improved. Jake 2.0 gets horrible numbers and is already rumored to be doomed. (Maybe Jake will get a visit from Tru Calling's Tru ...)
The SCI FI Channel is looking for new series—as long as they're not set in the future or outer space.
Not too long ago I happened to glance at SCIFI.com's list of the ratings for top 10 "sci-fi" series. There weren't 10—and that list included shows I would call "fantasy."
Even in the world of books, it's tough for sci-fi writers. Yes, Jonathan Lethem and Neal Stephenson have been acclaimed in mainstream publications like the New York Times and Newsweek right in the past two weeks—
—but for work that is not sci-fi.
Just last weekend, I happened to have conversations with two close friends who work primarily in sci-fi prose. Between them, they've published a broad range of work, from hard SF to humorous fantasy, from big sellers to pseudonymous hackwork.
Both of them said the same thing: "The field is dead." Editors aren't buying SF novels. The book chains don't want them. Etc., etc.
So long, farewell, adios—perhaps
I have to plead guilty to a certain amount of pessimism on the subject myself.
For years I threatened to write an essay to be titled "Science Fiction, 1939-1986: An Epitaph." That is, that future-oriented, set-in-outer space SF had lasted two generations, less than 50 years, from the start of World War II to the Challenger disaster. Readers used to be excited about works by Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Delany, Le Guin, Card, Herbert, but no longer. The field was essentially played out in the 1980s, when cyberpunk novelists such as Stephenson and William Gibson helped launch a momentary revival of interest in the genre, sort of an Indian summer of Sci-fi.
I was going to blame the proliferation of books—how can two or three vital novels be noticed when there are a thousand new sci-fi or fantasy novels published every year?
I was going to cite demographics, the aging of the baby boomers, who had been the economic force behind the sci-fi boom of the 1960s and 1970s—
I never bothered to write more than a few paragraphs of the essay: It was too depressing, for one thing. And, to be perfectly honest, I wasn't convinced I was correct. God knows there were lots of successful sci-fi movies, television series and novels yet to come—
I'm not convinced I'm correct now.
For example, I know a lot of television writers who work in the sitcom field, and, by and large, they're making the same complaints! There hasn't been a breakout sitcom for years (the last one was Will & Grace), the form itself is tired and so on.
I heard the same complaints circa 1983, when I was a sitcom writer. Right before a show called Cosby came along and energized the whole field for a decade.
What I'm seeing and feeling, I think, is writer fatigue. We've allowed ourselves to get a little lazy. If we can't turn a 30-year-old Gene Roddenberry idea into a quick sale, we walk away, mumbling that network and studio executives just don't get it, when all my experience tells me that executives are far more open to sci-fi now than they were when I started working in television.
For that matter, so is the audience—the people who buy tickets to The Matrix or play Alpha Centauri.
Yes, with 500 channels (itself a sci-fi concept) it's more difficult to get attention. A show like Jake 2.0, lacking a brand name, really faces a battle to survive long enough for an audience to remember its title. (How long? It takes at least one season, possible one and a half.)
But we're sci-fi writers! We're supposed to think outside the box! All we need is one new hit, right?
So, as we watch the new fantasy series roll out, we should be thinking, plotting and planning—
I don't believe we're all ready to say, "Goodbye, sci-fi."
Michael Cassutt is executive consultant for USA's The Dead Zone. In addition to television scripts, he has written non-fiction and fiction, including the forthcoming novel Tango Midnight (Forge), which Publisher's Weekly claims "will satisfy space fans with a taste for thrillers, or thriller fans with a taste for space."
