he story is as old as sci-fi itself, from the days of the almost forgotten A.E. van Vogt's 1940 novel Slan to the feature film X-Men: Mutants will be shunned. Freaks will be persecuted. Even the most open-minded "normal" humans will ultimately turn on those who are different.
Like so many sci-fi concepts—flights to the moon, all-seeing computers and six-lane superhighways—this fantasy has become reality. Over the past few weeks we have seen the persecution of a small group of humanoids:
I speak of the Jacksons.
Michael Jackson is currently on trial in Santa Barbara County, charged with child molestation.
His sister, Janet, is on the run, charged in the court of public opinion with upsetting millions of Super Bowl viewers by allowing part of her costume to be ripped open during the halftime festivities.
I can't address the truth of the case against Michael Jackson. That's now a legal matter.
But I can look back at Michael Jackson's public career 30 years ago, when he was the youngest and cutest member of the Jackson 5 group, or 20 years ago, when five different singles from the Thriller album became hits, and see a human being whose entire life has been lived in an environment so unreal, so isolated, so indulged, so "handled," so artificial that he might has well have been raised on Mars.
You can say the same thing for his sister.
We created these mutants, and now, of course, we're turning on them. And all it took was a wardrobe malfunction at a football game.
The practice of standards and practices
I have conflicting views about censorship. On one hand, I'm a writer, and I revel in the freedom to write freely about sex, politics and violence in the service of a story.
On the other hand, I am acutely aware of the need to keep your audience in mind, to engage them without causing them to change channels. You see, I used to be a network television "censor." I was an editor in the program practices department for CBS in the early 1980s. (ABC called its in-house censors "standards and practices," which is probably the best-known title.)
I was one of a fairly large staff of people who read every script produced for CBS in its prime-time series, made-for-TV movies and miniseries, children's programs, daytime soaps and game shows.
I certainly had no personal agenda. If anything, I was amused by some of the "standards" I had to apply. (In fact, I never met anyone in the program practices staff who relished telling writers no.)
A decade after I left program practices, the department's staff had been cut in half and most of its functions parceled out to program executives. This was partly a result of financial cuts, and partly a result of "relaxed" standards.
Are we better off? The fragmentation of the television market, and the resulting lack of "censorship," has made it possible for truly adult drama such as The Sopranos to be produced and find an audience.
But it has also cost us those "shared experiences" I wrote about in Science Fiction Weekly #344 ("The Value of Shared Experience").
And there are practical, financial penalties. One well-known and talented sci-fi producer filmed a whole season of his series for a pay cable outlet—episodes replete with frequent use of the F-bomb as well as nudity.
Fine. Except that he neglected to shoot alternate versions of these scenes in which dialogue did not contain the four-letter words and the actresses were covered up.
Computer-based editing systems can do wonders, but they're not magic wands. There is no way to cut the "offending" material without destroying the scenes.
Which means that there is no American broadcast aftermarket for this series. Now, maybe that market no longer exists (see last month's column, "The Aftermarket", in fact), but I can't help thinking that it would be better for all concerned if the producer or his studio had had a memo from a broadcast standards editor asking them to shoot "coverage" ...
Sci-fi's taboo moments are memorable
Sci-fi used to be dangerous. The genre allowed writers to address taboo subjects without offending the same General Public that now wants Janet Jackson and MTV punished.
In the 1950s, Rod Serling turned from writing acclaimed contemporary dramas to The Twilight Zone precisely for this reason.
The original Star Trek also managed to touch on such hot-button or third-rail issues as racism—when white male Kirk kissed African-American female Uhura, it was daring. (What would have happened if they'd had a "wardrobe malfunction"? Nothing, of course. Recorded entertainment is subject to restrictions that don't apply to live, or should I say "live," programming like The Super Bowl.)
In bookstores right now you can find a "new" novel by Robert A. Heinlein titled—For Us, the Living—. It was actually written in 1938, before Heinlein commenced his career as the best and most influential sci-fi writer of the age.
The novel is not an artistic success—it is a series of lectures, what author, editor and critic Gardner Dozois used to describe as "tours of futuristic gasworks and other wonders." But it is fascinating, anyway. Sexual freedom, radical economic systems, new methods of parenting, they're all here, embedded in a work that completely fails as fiction.
Heinlein learned better: Within two years he had developed into a talented storyteller and was the most popular and highest-paid writer in the sci-fi pulps. He later broke into mainstream slick magazines, hardcover books and television.
There he continued to promote the same dangerous ideas, especially in his classic novel, Stranger in a Strange Land—about a human raised on Mars who comes to Earth, shakes people up (by having deliberate wardrobe malfunctions, among other radical activities) and is martyred.
I don't believe that dangerous ideas are valuable simply because they're dangerous, but I like to be challenged. I like a paradigm shift, a new way of looking at things.
That's what sci-fi is suppose to give us.
The most controversial moment I can recall from any televised sci-fi I've seen over the past few years is the unduly prolonged "decontamination" scene involving T'Pol and Archer on Enterprise two seasons back. Some fans were outraged, for the same reason people were upset by Janet Jackson: It's not the nudity they object to, it's the cynical nature of its presentation.
Suppose it had been Phlox, the alien doctor, naked, rubbing ointment on Archer?
Now, there's a real sci-fi moment.
Since leaving the ranks of network censors, Michael Cassutt has published 11 books (most recently Tango Midnight, a novel), a hundred pieces of short fiction and non-fiction and 60 television scripts.
