here is a type of sci-fi viewer who can never be completely satisfied by what he sees on the screen, not by Star Wars or Star Trek, nor by X-Files or Farscape. There's always something that sends him out of the Cineplex in a bad mood, or furiously clicking channels to Sports Center.
It's not the acting, though God knows the acting in most sci-fi series is often uninspiring.
It's not the special effects. Even on television, they've gotten good enough to satisfy the most demanding wirehead.
It's certainly not the stories.
No, what drives your hard-core sci-fi fan to despair is bad science.
I should know. I'm one of them. Or, at least, I have been.
The land of the giant mistakes
Now, in classic Cassutt Files style, I will immediately start to waffle. When I say "science," I'm not talking about the intricacies of Guth superstring theory or what kind of duct tape you're supposed to use for gene splicing, I mean the sort of science you could find on the Discovery Channel, where you would learn, for example, that space is a vacuum. That rockets need fuel, and even the best fuel won't make a rocket reach a fraction of the speed of light. That alien races and human beings are not likely to produce offspring.
When I was new to the universe, sci-fi that broke these rules was easier to come by. In fact, that's pretty much all there was. You had a network television series like Land of the Giants, where human beings somehow got themselves stranded on a world populated by giants. Except that these
giants (who lived in a world suspiciously like that of Southern California, perhaps even the San Fernando Valley, circa 1967) were built just like you and me. Only taller.
Well, any 13-year-old, which is what I happened to be, knows that a being as tall as an apartment building would have to be as wide as that building. And he couldn't have bones, either, because they would collapse of their own weight. Etc. (This was also the problem with the giant ants of that
classic film, Them.)
I hated Land of the Giants.
Then there was my all-time favorite, Lost in Space, where this relatively small, saucer-shaped spaceship, which looked open and empty inside, seemed to contain a sortie vehicle the size of a Range Rover as well as all kinds of stuff. Instead of paying attention to how Dr. Smith was trying to ruin Will Robinson's life, or, perhaps more significantly, wondering where Major West and the beauteous Judy Robinson kept running off to, I sat there fuming about, of all the damned things, logistics.
Then there was Star Wars, an entirely admirable film marred by various slips. Han Solo talking about making "the Kessel Run" in so many "parsecs," which is a measure of distance, not time, Mr. Solo. (And, yes, I know there has been a lot of explication on the possibility that Han Solo was just, er, testing young Skywalker. Sure.) Those explosions in the vacuum of space. The whole idea that you'd have these X-wing or TIE fighters zipping around like a bunch of Grumman Hellcats or Mitsubishi Zeros in a World War II dogfight in the Pacific.
Well, Star Wars had enough virtues that I was charmed out of my general grumpiness. But it took a lot. The years did not mellow me, either. Remember Silent Running, a pleasant feature film about a lone human on a ship populated by a handful of robots, all of them trying to preserve the last bit of an Earthly ecological system? In college I happened to ask Douglas Trumbull, the director of the film, who had come up with a line referring to "the whole world being paved over." My tone obviously suggested that this was idiocy, and Mr. Trumbull, very patiently, admitted that he was the culprit.
Resisting SF's magic is futile
The problem with being such a sci-fi Shiite--don't say that too fast--is that you are doomed to a life of anger or annoyance. Because not only will most, or all, filmed sci-fi fail to satisfy, so will most published sci-fi, even so-called "hard" science fiction.
Some years ago, I asked David Brin, winner of several Hugo and Nebula awards, just how much real science there was in his classic Startide Rising. (Have I mentioned that Brin has a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology? If anyone should know what's real science and what's not,
it's him.) What about these clever star drives used in David's novels, for example? Were they based on some breakthrough technology being whispered about in labs at Cal Tech?
Brin smiled and said, "It's nothing but magic."
That's right--all those star drives are no more scientific than a flying carpet or a broomstick. Nanomachines? Magic beans, baby. Talking computers? Ghosts. Or God.
Presented with the evidence, I persisted in my age-old snobbery. What about the pleasures of a film like 2001, with its realistic portrayal of space flight? Well, what about those monoliths and all the "through the stargate" jazz? How scientific was that? Not very, and wasn't it Arthur
C. Clarke himself who said, "Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic?"
I considered the many television series I had watched and enjoyed over the years, from Twilight Zone to several Star Treks to X-Files and Babylon 5, and even traveled back in time to some I'd written, such as Max Headroom, and sideways in time to one that's still new--Dark Angel.
There really wasn't much science in any of them. What there was just seemed to get in the way.
What all these shows possessed was the furniture of science. Starships used "warp drives" powered by "dilithium crystals" and operated according to rules. "Genetic engineering" allowed a character to have "realistic" super-powers, without sounding like a comic book. (These shows also displayed common sense, and didn't try to cram a hundred crew members into a living space suitable for 10.)
To quote another sci-fi figure, "Resistance is futile."
The lesson is, if you want your crazy, magical idea to be accepted by your most critical audience, which is to say, judgmental 13-year-olds, come up with cool jargon.
And, please, no giants.
Michael Cassutt's new story, "Beyond the End of Time," appears on SCIFI.com's SCI FICTION site on June 20. The author of the novel, Red Moon (currently in bookstores), he is currently writing a pilot for Nickelodeon.
