Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (220 page)

I remember turning then toward Garnett, who had joined me and was now standing motionless at my side. He seemed quite oblivious to me, so I did not disturb him but walked to the edge of the cliff in an effort to marshal my thoughts. There below me lay the Mare Crisium—Sea of Crises, indeed—strange and weird to most men, but reassuringly familiar to me. I lifted my eyes toward the crescent Earth, lying in her cradle of stars, and I wondered what her clouds had covered when these unknown builders had finished their work. Was it the steaming jungle of the Carboniferous, the bleak shoreline over which the first amphibians must crawl to conquer the land—or, earlier still, the long loneliness before the coming of life?

Do not ask me why I did not guess the truth sooner— the truth that seems so obvious now. In the first excitement of my discovery, I had assumed without question that this crystalline apparition had been built by some race belonging to the Moon’s remote past, but suddenly, and with overwhelming force, the belief came to me that it was as alien to the Moon as I myself.

In twenty years we had found no trace of life but a few degenerate plants. No lunar civilization, whatever its doom, could have left but a single token of its existence.

I looked at the shining pyramid again, and the more remote it seemed from anything that had to do with the Moon. And suddenly I felt myself shaking with a foolish, hysterical laughter, brought on by excitement and over-exertion: for I had imagined that the little pyramid was speaking to me and was saying: “Sorry, I’m a stranger here myself.”

It had taken us twenty years to crack that invisible shield and to reach the machine inside those crystal walls. What we could not understand, we broke at last with the savage might of atomic power and now I have seen the fragments of the lovely, glittering thing I found up there on the mountain.

They are meaningless. The mechanisms—if indeed they are mechanisms—of the pyramid belong to a technology that lies far beyond our horizon, perhaps to the technology of para-physical forces.

The mystery haunts us all the more now that the other planets have been reached and we know that only Earth has ever been the home of intelligent life in our Universe. Nor could any lost civilization of our own world have built that machine, for the thickness of the meteoric dust on the plateau has enabled us to measure its age. It was set there upon its mountain before life had emerged from the seas of Earth.

When our world was half its present age, something from the stars swept through the Solar System, left this token of its passage, and went again upon its way. Until we destroyed it, that machine was still fulfilling the purpose of its builders; and as to that purpose, here is my guess.

Nearly a hundred thousand million stars are turning in the circle of the Milky Way, and long ago other races on the worlds of other suns must have scaled and passed the heights that we have reached. Think of such civilizations, far back in time against the fading afterglow of Creation, masters of a universe so young that life as yet had come only to a handful of worlds. Theirs would have been a loneliness we cannot imagine, the loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and finding none to share their thoughts.

They must have searched the star clusters as we have searched the planets. Everywhere there would be worlds, but they would be empty or peopled with crawling, mindless things. Such was our own Earth, the smoke of the great volcanoes still staining the skies, when that first ship of the peoples of the dawn came sliding in from the abyss beyond Pluto. It passed the frozen outer worlds, knowing that life could play no part in their destinies. It came to rest among the inner planets, warming themselves around the fire of the Sun and waiting for their stories to begin.

Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favorite of the Sun’s children. Here, in the distant future, would be intelligence; but there were countless stars before them still, and they might never come this way again.

So they left a sentinel, one of millions they have scattered throughout the Universe, watching over all worlds with the promise of life. It was a beacon that down the ages has been patiently signaling the fact that no one had discovered it.

Perhaps you understand now why that crystal pyramid was set upon the Moon instead of on the Earth. Its builders were not concerned with races still struggling up from savagery. They would be interested in our civilization only if we proved our fitness to survive—by crossing space and so escaping from the Earth, our cradle. That is the challenge that all intelligent races must meet, sooner or later. It is a double challenge, for it depends in turn upon the conquest of atomic energy and the last choice between life and death.

Once we had passed that crisis, it was only a matter of time before we found the pyramid and forced it open. Now its signals have ceased, and those whose duty it is will be turning their minds upon Earth. Perhaps they wish to help our infant civilization. But they must be very, very old, and the old are often insanely jealous of the young.

I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait.

I do not think we will have to wait for long.

* * * *

Copyright © 1951 by Avon Periodicals, Inc.

Science fiction films are worth discussing. Better yet, science fiction films are
as worthy as any other kind of film
for serious discussion. One would think that would not only be non-controversial but so transparently obvious that it wasn’t even worth mentioning. Alas, such is not the case.

Imagine a world where an Oliver Stone could say in an interview, “
Platoon
isn’t a Vietnam War movie. It’s really about people.” Or perhaps Clint Eastwood explaining that
Unforgiven
isn’t a western at all, but simply uses the trappings of the genre to explore relationships. Or perhaps Meryl Streep insisting that
It’s Complicated
isn’t like those other romantic comedies and, in fact, isn’t a romantic comedy at all—it’s about how people are changed by divorce. You probably can’t. These excuses are so absurd and so in opposition to the films themselves that if such “explanations” had been seriously offered you would think these folks were deranged.

Yet writers, directors, and actors who play in the science fiction sandbox often deny that that’s what they’re doing, and insist that their books and films aren’t science fiction at all. Indeed, unlike what you would expect from this apparently unspeakable and unworthy genre,
their
works are about people. The most notorious—and laughable—example of this was when author Margaret Atwood, author of such books as The Handmaid’s Tale, argued that her dystopian and speculative novels couldn’t possibly be science fiction. SF, as she defined it, was about “talking squids in space.” There are numerous examples of critics, film historians and others insisting that movies like Frankenstein, The Time Traveler’s Wife, and even Metropolis aren’t “really” science fiction. One could just laugh off these people as ignorant or prejudiced, for many of them are, but it’s such a widely held belief that you come to realize that some of these filmmakers and stars and authors are doing this in self-defense. In effect what they’re really saying is, “Please don’t put me and my work in the science fiction ghetto. We want to be taken seriously.” Even writers who were friendly to the genre and obviously liked writing in it, such as the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., knew that he could be treated as a serious author of fiction or as a science fiction writer but not both.

At the risk of setting up the proverbial strawmen, let’s consider some of the arguments as to why SF movies are unworthy of serious critical consideration:

“They’re childish. Most of it is geared to the mentality of 12 year old boys.”

While, as a well known quote attributed to SF fan Peter Graham has it, “the golden age of science fiction is 12,” it is nonsensical to argue that all or even most science fiction is geared to non-adults. Part of the problem is that while there are early examples of science fiction in both literature and film, it didn’t get firmly established as a film genre until the 1950s. So while we can point with pride to Georges Méliès and his A Voyage to the Moon and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as two landmark films that bookend the silent era and Things to Come as a fascinating film that had the participation of H. G. Wells himself, Hollywood’s pre-World War II overtly SF offerings were the musical curio Just Imagine and the Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers movie serials. Prior to Destination Moon in 1950, which started Hollywood’s first SF boom, American science fiction films were largely for kids. When something was a serious film and unambiguously SF, like Frankenstein or The Invisible Man, it got classified as part of Universal’s “monster movie” cycle. Science fiction would get the blame, but never the credit.

“Science fiction writing isn’t literature. It started out in those lurid pulp magazines.”

Even putting aside author Brian Aldiss’s claim for Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
as the first true SF novel, science fiction as literature only admitted two members before the guardians of cultural standards barred the door: Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Two later entries in the canon, George Orwell’s
1984
and Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
, were obviously important works which could not bear the taint of the “science fiction” label, and would be treated as satires or dark warnings about the present day world. In contrast, nothing written for cheap magazines printed on even cheaper paper could be considered worthy of attention. Well, unless it was written by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler or any of the other hard-boiled authors who laid the groundwork for not only literary crime fiction (modernizing a genre arguably invented by Edgar Allan Poe), but also providing the stories for the complex cinematic genre of film noir. A dividing line here was, perhaps, that most SF wasn’t marketed in book form until the 1950s. James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity had come out as a book long before Billy Wilder did his great film adaptation of it. By contrast an outstanding film like The Day the Earth Stood Still was based on a short story (“Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates) that had appeared in the pulp magazine Astounding a decade before. It might or might not have been known by fans, but virtually no one else would have been familiar with it. Without a literary underpinning as a genre, it was hard to get SF films thought of as part of a tradition.

“Most science fiction films are junk, often little more than special effects shows interrupted by bad writing and amateurish acting.”

According to what is usually referred to as Sturgeon’s Law, after the SF author Theodore Sturgeon, there’s nothing untoward or unusual in noting that 90 percent of science fiction is, in his words, “crud.” As he then went on to say, “90 percent of
everything
is crud.” A case in point would be a genre that no one would seriously dispute is important, having been much studied and written about, and that is the western. When John Ford made Stagecoach in 1939, his first western since the silent era, none of the major studios wanted to touch it. Westerns were kiddie fare, churned out for Saturday matinées by Poverty Row studios like Republic and Monogram. Although in the years to come there would be numerous great westerns like Red River, High Noon, Shane, and many others, there would also be lots and lots of, well, crud. Occasionally even the good stuff would be dismissed as crud if it didn’t have the right pedigree. It took later critics and historians to rediscover, for example, that the westerns made by Budd Boetticher starring Randolph Scott were, in fact, spare dramas that rewarded careful viewing. Science fiction has had few such champions who could point out that movies like Forbidden Planet, Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for example, were as worthy of such attention as an intelligent but low budget western or film noir.

“Serious filmmakers make serious movies, not science fiction, and when they do it’s a break from their ‘real’ films.”

Among the great directors who have one or more science fiction films on their resume are Fritz Lang, James Whale, Robert Wise, Don Siegel, Stanley Kubrick, Richard Fleischer, Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Philip Kaufman, Peter Weir, Danny Boyle, David Cronenberg, and Ridley Scott. Howard Hawks, a master of genres, never directed a science fiction film, but did produce The Thing from Another World, and is thought to have had a hand in guiding director Christian Nyby, a protege. What usually happens when important directors make such films is that they either dismissed as larks or mere “entertainments.” Their careers will rest on their other films. What if the SF offering turns out to be an outstanding achievement? Ah, then the film “isn’t really science fiction” after all. Instead, like the Orwell and Huxley novels, such movies are reclassified as “satires” or “horror movies” or “dystopias” or “romances.” Sometimes we’re told the movies are grounded in real world speculation about the future as opposed to those talking squids in space stories.

This argument is essentially summed up as “if it’s good, it can’t be science fiction.” The flip side also proves convenient: “if it’s bad, it
must
be science fiction.” The only film that seems to have escaped this trap is
2001: A Space Odyssey
, arguably one of Stanley Kubrick’s
three
SF offerings, the other two being
Dr. Strangelove
with its Doomsday Machine and
A Clockwork Orange
with its futuristic dystopia and mind control. In the case of “2001” it was just too hard to file off the serial numbers. Not only did it have a crazed computer and a space ship, not only was Kubrick’s collaborator renown SF author Arthur C. Clarke, but Kubrick himself has posited his effort as an attempt to do “the proverbial good science fiction movie.” The result was such a towering masterpiece that Kubrick was granted Hollywood’s equivalent of the philosopher’s stone wherein he transmuted this leaden genre into cinematic gold.

* * * *

If all these arguments could be shot down without much effort, it’s obvious that Hollywood did nothing to try to alter the debate. Instead, they surrendered without a shot being fired. SF films might, occasionally get Oscar nominations, but the only ones they could win were for special effects, makeup, and the like. You have to go back to Frederic March winning Best Actor for the 1932
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
to find an exception and since that was based on the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson (i.e., “literature”) it couldn’t possibly be science fiction. Director Steven Spielberg won his Oscar for
Schindler’s List
, one of his “serious” films dealing with the quite serious subject of the Holocaust. With the exception of
Minority Report
his SF offerings are all variations on a child’s adventure story (although sometimes a very twisted and misguided adventure, as with
A.I.
) while his “serious” films about adult concerns are strictly non-genre, or at least not this particular genre.

In the early 1950s there were a number of SF films that attracted general audiences like
Destination Moon
,
The Day the Earth Stood Still
and
Forbidden Planet
, but by the end of the decade it seemed SF was a genre for movies like
I Was a Teenage Caveman
and
The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman
. It was something teenagers could ignore at the drive-in while they were making out. When the genre came roaring back twenty years later with Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Hollywood proceeded to learn the wrong lessons. Aided and abetted by the filmmakers themselves, they saw SF films as potential blockbusters, heavily reliant on special effects. A movie like Ridley Scott’s Alien might not be for youngsters, but reviewers found it a “monster movie” where we could be scared while admiring the impressive creatures designed by artist H. R. Giger. Certainly critics like Pauline Kael were not writing book length treatises on the significance of the modern SF film. (Roger Ebert, an admitted SF fan, may have been a lonely voice on the subject.)

While there are some notable academic works on the genre, for the most part the science fiction label is still one to to be avoided. Indeed it was a noted film historian who was one of the people responsible for the
Metropolis
restoration who insisted that viewing the complete film proves how “thin” the “SF trappings” of the movie are, even though this is a movie with a robot that almost destroys a city. Such dismissal misses the function of genre in film, and how great storytellers can address timely or profound issues by
using
what the genre offers, not ignoring it. A movie like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
is a devastating statement about mindless conformity coming during the complacent ‘50s and its paranoid witch hunts over “subversives.” When one of the pod people makes the case for becoming part of the collective mind, it’s a compelling critique of how painful the human condition can be with dysfunctional families and flawed marriages. Movies as different as The Twonky and Colossus: The Forbin Project could tap into our fears of living in a technological age where we don’t know how the equipment we rely on works nor how much control it may have over our lives. Blade Runner was a complex meditation on finding meaning in our lives with no guarantee that our desire for such meaning will be granted, while The Fly—for all its gore and goo—was one of the most intense romantic dramas of the ‘80s showing how often people sabotage their own relationships.

The argument here is not that SF is better than other genres. I enjoy many other genres and have taught courses on several of them. Indeed, one of my previous books was on romantic comedies. However I think that the genre gets a double whammy. It’s not taken seriously by film people as discussed above, and it’s often not taken seriously by those who do take science fiction seriously because it’s “media SF.” It’s a truism that the literature is often far ahead of where the movies and TV shows are in terms of real science, extrapolation of the future and some of the other issues discussed, scientific or not.

For those who dismiss SF out of hand I argue that as with the western, the romantic comedy, or the mystery, science fiction has a rich history and its classics are as worthy of study as that of any other genre. The films work as genre pieces, building on what came before while also reflecting and commenting upon the times in which they were made. A movie like District 9 reveals as much about South Africa, for example, as Clint Eastwood’s sports movie/hagiography of Nelson Mandela, Invictus.