ou start your career with dreams. (If you don't, please return to the California border and proceed north or east, thank you.) Some of these dreams linger through various disappointments, surprising triumphs, all kinds of distractions.
My dream was to turn some of my favorite sci-fi stories into television shows. After all, I'd grown up reading Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Clifford Simak, Jack Williamson--the grand masters of classic sci-fi--while watching Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space and Land of the Giants, the work of a somewhat less grand master named Irwin Allen.
I thrilled to these stories of robots designed to serve mankind, whether mankind wanted the service or not, or of mysterious galactic way stations hidden in middle-western woods, or of a Neanderthal child snatched out of his time. I frankly thought they would make better television than the adventures of the robot-like Robinson family, snatched out of their world and marooned on a planet that just happened to be a galactic way station.
When I started working in this business--approximately a hundred years ago--this wasn't even possible, let alone likely. The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits had done good adaptations of some classic sci-fi, provided it was set here on Earth right about now, and didn't need more than a single alien--preferably a human-looking one. The technology to produce exotic settings (a future city? An alien landscape? You've got to be kidding me!) either didn't exist or was impossibly expensive, especially on a television series schedule.
Television executives in those long-ago days were also slightly or possibly totally unfamiliar with the work of those classic writers I liked so much.
Yes, the original Star Trek hired sci-fi writers I respected, such as Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch and Theodore Sturgeon, to write scripts. Trek came the closest to being my dream show, but it foundered after two good years and one definitely-less-good, primarily because of the economics.
The opportunity existed. And as I moved through my career, from lowly network drone to junior writer to somewhat more established writer-producer, I finally reached the point where I could make this dream come true.
Well, so I thought.
The reality
My first target was Clifford Simak's Way Station, the 1963 novel about a Civil War veteran still living to this day--no older than he was at Gettysburg--running a secret intergalactic matter transport node in the backwoods of Wisconsin. I saw it as a TV series with the tone of a movie like Field of Dreams, and convinced ABC to let me develop it for a possible Sunday night family drama, though without success.
Breaking yet another of the unwritten rules of Hollywood (can anybody send me the unwritten rule book?), I spent my own money to option the book in hopes of trying to sell it as a TV movie or low-budget film. I wrote two different scripts on spec. Nope. One script was "too small," another script was "too large." Neither was, like that fairy-tale porridge, "just right."
With Joe Dante I tried to sell a series of "retro SF" TV movies under the title X-Ray T.V. Retro sci-fi meaning that the stories would be shown as true to their original roots as possible: a story about the first rocket to the moon, for example, would ignore the Apollo program. Our first X-Ray was to be Jack Williamson's The Humanoids, about robots who appear from nowhere to protect mankind from harm, and ultimately wind up repressing us. We pitched that everywhere; no takers. Granted, the concept is a little wild ... but Star Wars is retro SF, right?
Then there was the Heinlein project I was supposed to write and direct: that fell apart because of a rights problem. Then there was the Richard Matheson story that a cable network simply didn't want me--a TV guy--to write. (They wanted, and ultimately got, a fairly well-known feature film writer-director.)
Somewhere in there I also got involved with a Philip Jose Farmer concept, and then there was the original Arthur C. Clarke treatment I turned into a TV movie that doesn't look as though it's ever going to be filmed.
The Clarke project is the only one I can look back on with anything approaching benign wistfulness (as opposed to baffled anger), because it was the one I got paid for.
The dream is alive
Whatever the reason these particular projects failed to sell, whether the timing was wrong, my presentation was awful, or the idea was just too darned weird, I am convinced that this classic work would make good sci-fi TV.
For example, one of the classic motifs for a TV series is the adventure, where a group of people move from point A to point B, running into various threats along the way. This is Wagon Train, or Star Trek or even Sliders.
What makes this tricky is finding a plausible sci-fi setting to have your people moving through. Enter Jack Vance's classic novel Big Planet, set on, naturally, an Earth-like world that is much, much larger than our own.
(Gravity is the same, of course, due to Big Planet's lower density. And right there you have more "hard" sci-fi data than I got in a season of Land of the Giants.) The native cultures, spread out and isolated, are incredibly varied, providing a plausible set of different villains for each weekly episode.
Big Planet requires you to posit a world in which humans have traveled to the stars, putting us in the somewhat distant future--a setting that has always presented difficulties for me. I can confidently create a well-rounded picture of an early 21st-century human, with traits an actor can play. A 24th-century humanoid is a much greater challenge.
So you pick up James Blish's Cities in Flight, where the invention of an immensely powerful mode of transportation called the spindizzy (love that name) allows you to launch New York City to the stars. Tell me this wouldn't be fun--Mayor Giuliani faces down the Borg! Alien invaders pummeled into submission by encounters with New York cab drivers! It's ... it's Star Trek crossed with The Sopranos!
Or, to take a slightly different tack, the fall series that everyone thinks is a sure-fire hit is CBS's remake of The Fugitive, a truly classic show from the 1960s created by Roy Huggins, about a man wrongly imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit--oh, hell, you all know it.
James Gunn's 1961 novel The Immortal concerns a small group of people whose blood confers immortality. There was an earlier TV version that concentrated on the one man who had this blood. Would he be hunted? Would he have Fugitive-like adventures? You bet.
Someone should look at that one again. (Don't confuse it with the new Lorenzo Lamas syndicated show, as I did here. Not the same.)
Some ambitious writer in search of a great sci-fi premise should be digging into the works of all of these writers--Vance, Blish, Simak, Gunn--and even newer writers, like Greg Bear, Nancy Kress, Stephen Baxter.
It just won't be me.
Michael Cassutt has been a writer and/or producer for a
number of SF and fantasy television series, from The Twilight Zone and Max Headroom through Eerie, Indiana, The Outer Limits and, most recently, Seven Days. He is also the author of a number of books on space flight, two dozen science fiction short stories and, most recently, a novel about NASA titled Missing Man (paperback from Tor, March 2000).
