have always wondered what it was like to be a real sci-fi writer of the Golden Age, someone like Jack Williamson [right] or Isaac Asimov or Robert A. Heinlein, writing stories in the 1940s that foretold some element of life in the 21st century—their future, our present. Not just space flight to the moon, but genetic engineering ... radical social change ("Women Rule!") ... the replacement of cash with credit cards ...
And then watching the future arrive.
Asimov and Heinlein lived long, productive lives and saw many of their predictions come true. The magical Williamson, whose first story was published in 1928, is still writing wonderful fiction, most recently Terraforming Earth (Tor Books), and celebrates his 96th birthday in April. Williamson invented the term "genetic engineering." Asimov foresaw the complications robots and computers would create.
Heinlein, who actually charted a "history of the future," specifically of America from 1940 to 2500, foresaw an era he called "The Crazy Years," notable for "mass psychosis" and "breakdown in social mores." On Heinlein's chart, this era was the decade of the 1960s ... roughly the time of a first manned landing on the moon, the cessation of space travel and the rise of a religious dictatorship in the United States.
Well, let's not examine that too closely. It's entirely possible that being a true sci-fi prophet isn't totally satisfying: For every day when you feel smug and proud that you had a vision of the real future, there are days when you know you had a nightmare instead. ...
In my own way, one small prediction of mine has now arrived. My particular future is now.
The Sundance sci-fi film is here.
Sundance finally shines on sci-fi
For at least a decade—perhaps two—one of the best routes to becoming a major feature film director is doing a low-budget film of your own that could compete at the Sundance or other film festivals. Think of Steven Soderburgh, remember The Blair Witch Project. Joel and Ethan Coen started their careers with a small movie. So did David Lynch. Bryan Singer.
But while thrillers and horror films have been a staple of the Sundance-style movie, sci-fi has been pretty hard to find. The reasons are obvious: money, money and probably money. If the essence of a sci-fi film is a setting in a world somehow different from the one we live in, you need money to pay for sets, or for effects to create that setting.
Money, of course, is the one thing you don't have in low-budget projects. (Which are often so ill-funded they should be called no-budget films.)
In the last few years—or, given the swift changes in processing speeds, the last few months—the price of terrific sci-fi computer-generated EFX has gone down, while the ease of creating them has gone up. A single human being with a digital camera and an iMac can record, then edit a sci-fi movie at least as good as anything cranked out by Roger Corman's low-budget factory of the 1960s and 1970s (where Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, James Cameron and John Sayles got started).
While I don't claim to have been first with this insight, or alone in it, I have been predicting the Sundance sci-fi film for several years. In this vision, sci-fi writers would then be able to share their visions without having to first convince legions of studio or network executives to invest vast sums of money in them. It would be the dawn of a new Digital Golden Age ...
The winner of this year's Sundance Film Festival is called Primer. It is described as a "science fiction time-travel movie." The writer-director is Shane Carruth; he spent $7,000 on it, shooting it in his parents' living room with a cast that also served as a crew.
I haven't seen Primer, so I can't vouch for it as a piece of storytelling. (By the rules of this column, I don't review films or programs. Some of you may have noticed this.) It might be terrible science fiction.
But just the idea of it pleases me.
There's another example: Robot Stories, a new film by writer-director Greg Pak. Robot Stories is an anthology film made up of four different stories (another trend I'd like to encourage) all dealing with the same subject written about so effectively by Asimov and Williamson. I haven't seen Robot Stories either, but I'll be looking for it. And for more Sundance sci-fi.
A digital Golden Age awaits
Which gets to another problem: Making the film is one challenge—getting it distributed is a bigger one. This is the main reason for the existence of Sundance and other festivals ... to entice distributors to buy the films and put them before audiences. Someone has to be willing to spend money to make prints for theaters, to burn those DVDs and get them into Blockbuster, to convince Showtime, the SCI FI Channel or maybe Spike or FX to air the film.
Part of my Sundance sci-fi vision was that viewers at home would be able to call up any film at any time, pay for it, download it and watch it. The technology exists: Bandwidth is catching up. (Encrypting and copy-protection are apparently holding this back. ...) This, of course, to quote Mr. Heinlein on a similar subject, is about as challenging as "for a man to look out a train window, see that another train is coming head-on toward his own on the same track—and predict a train wreck."
Well, technology will eventually solve the distribution challenge.
But now I wonder if it will make a difference—will the Sundance sci-fi film truly lead to that Digital Golden Age?
Have print-on-demand publishing technology and the Internet unleashed a flood of striking new sci-fi novels and short stories? I can't tell. There almost certainly are striking new works of sci-fi being made available (I hesitate to even use the word "published"), but they are almost impossible to find. The ratio of sludge to gold is too great ... so far.
The future has arrived. But it refuses to hold still.
Michael Cassutt's most recent television assignment was for USA Network's The Dead Zone. His new aerospace thriller, Tango Midnight, is available from Forge Books. This Saturday, March 20, he will be speaking at EnigmaCon in Eugene, Oregon.
