t happens every season. The creator of a new sci-fi series goes out of his way to state that his or her show is not sci-fi. This year's perpetrator is the very talented Charles "Chick" Eglee, co-creator, with James Cameron, of the Fox series Dark Angel. "I really don't look at it as science fiction," he said right here on SCIFI.COM (Science Fiction Weekly, Issue No. 180), going on to note that he had never read science fiction as a young person. Dark Angel does have a futuristic setting, of course, which allows it, in Cameron's words, to be "a prism to look at contemporary society," but since it emphasizes character, and lacks "robots or aliens," it's not sci-fi.
My reflexive response--perhaps yours as well--was that this was a silly statement unworthy of a writer as talented and perceptive as Eglee. A series about an artificially engineered human set in the year 2019 is sci-fi at least two ways, first for its futuristic setting (that acknowledged "prism" of the present) and then for its central character. Good grief, next you'll be telling me that The X-Files is really a cop show and Buffy the Vampire Slayer is just another series about adolescent sexuality.
I was reminded of a poem famous in sci-fi circles some 40 years ago, when novels like A Canticle for Leibowitz and Stranger in a Strange Land broke out of the sci-fi publishing category and muscled their way into
mainstream sales and critical response:
"It's no good," they bellow till we're deaf.
"But this looks good."--"Well, then, it's not SF!"
In other words, the sci-fi label is still sufficiently low-rent that it must be denied at all costs. So denying that your undeniably sci-fi-ish series is sci-fi is really just snobbery, isn't it?
But then I started thinking, usually a bad move.
You know what? I think he's right. I think I'm the one who's been mistaken all these years.
Defining SF
First, I suppose I have to define sci-fi, which you may call science fiction or SF, knowing that even by choosing one term over the other I'm halfway to some kind of definition. To the purist, which no doubt includes all of you reading this, "sci-fi" usually means futuristic or otherworldly adventure, "science fiction" often refers to more plausible stories about worlds other than our own, and "SF" can mean darned near anything you want it to mean.
For our purposes here today, sci-fi = science fiction = SF.
How about this? A sci-fi series is one that takes place in a world other than our own, such as the future, or a fantastical past, or an alternative history.
Let's see if it fits. Star Trek? Set 200 years or more from now, when humans tool around the galaxy in big interstellar liners.
Sci-fi.
Classic and more recent Twilight Zone and Outer Limits?
Both are anthology series, so their settings vary from week to week, but Outer Limits, with its menaces both alien and genetic, seems to fit without much question; even the least "sci-fi" episode of Twilight Zone--for example, one in which a machine in a diner can tell the future--sneaks in. (Unless you happen to have one of those machines down at your local Dew Drop Inn.)
Battlestar Galactica? Sci-fi ... alas. Max Headroom?
Well, it was set "twenty minutes into the future" and its titular character was an artificial intelligence. Sci-fi. X-Files? It's set in the here and now, but a here
and now in which we are fighting a secret war against alien domination.
Buffy? Same deal, only the war is against demonic domination.
Babylon 5? No question. Sci-fi.
Going further afield, what about a show like Knight rider? It's usually mentioned as being sci-fi... but is it? It was certainly set in this world, the only sci-fi element being Kit, its car-with-a-personality.
Well, it was sci-fi in 1983, but I, for one, have been having some interesting exchanges with my own automobile lately (fights over programming the radio stations,
for example), and pretty soon I expect the car to be talking back.
But NYPD Blue? Not sci-fi. ER? Nope. West Wing? Uh-uh.
Dark Angel? Set in the future with genetic engineering. Yeah, according to my definition, Dark Angel is sci-fi.
Well, then, let's look at that definition again. Maybe Chick Eglee and I are talking about different things.
Same questions, different answers
Sci-fi is defined by its setting. Dark Angel, to its creators, is actually about a character. The classic Trek series, while pitched as "Wagon Train to the stars"--a setting--was inspired by C.S.
Forrester's Hornblower novels, about a heroic British naval captain during the Napoleonic Wars. And while I enjoyed the setting of the original Trek, what made the show memorable was Hornblower--er, Kirk, and his relationships (as they
evolved) with Spock and McCoy. Star Trek: The Next Generation started out with a setting: Star Trek a hundred years later, and also evolved into a series about characters.
X-Files' appeal isn't the aliens, but in how Mulder and Scully deal with them. Same with Buffy and her friends, and their various demons.
Knight rider and Galactica, to pick on a pair of counter-examples, never seemed to me to have characters that truly lived in their sci-fi worlds. Maybe the worlds weren't all that different, or well-conceived. But maybe
the creators were only doing half the job.
It's an easy mistake for a writer to make. You have to create the setting, and given the crush of time (see last month's column, "Development Hell") that's usually all you get to develop.
It doesn't only happen in television. Look at the novel Dune--it's about Paul Atreides, sure. But the title tells you its setting.
(Suppose Huckleberry Finn had been called Life on the Mississippi?)
Okay, so setting makes a series sci-fi. But character is what makes a sci-fi series memorable. As a writer, you can't be satisfied with your setting, whether it's twenty-minutes-into-the-future or giant-starships-vs.-implacable-aliens--you've got to have people.
(Even if the people are Vulcans or computer-generated talking heads.)
It's all well and good to imagine a clever "prism of our times," but if you don't have that woman we want to spend time with, you're headed for the back shelves of the memorabilia store with all the other failed sci-fi.
So Chick Eglee is asking himself the right question, even if he's telling a fan something irritating. I hope he and James Cameron get the time to let us know their Dark Angel.
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, including his new novel, Red
Moon, to be published by Forge Books in January 2001."
