Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (371 page)

“Oh, I think that’s the little boy those kids beat up?”

“What!?!
Where is he?”

“They took him to the Manager’s office. No one knew who he was or where to find his parents—”

A young girl wearing an usher’s uniform was kneeling down beside the couch, placing a wet paper towel on his face.

I took the towel away from her and ordered her out of the office.

She looked insulted and she snorted something rude; but she left. I sat on the edge of the couch and tried to swab away the blood from the lacerations without opening the wounds where the blood had caked. Both his eyes were swollen shut. His mouth was ripped badly. His hair was matted with dried blood.

He had been standing in line behind two kids in their teens. They started selling tickets at 12:30 and the show started at 1:00. The doors weren’t opened till 12:45. He had been waiting, and the kids in front of him had had a portable radio. They were listening to the ball game. Jeffty had wanted to hear some program, God knows what it might have been,
Grand Central Station, Let’s Pretend, The Land of the Lost,
God only knows which one it might have been.

He had asked if he could borrow their radio to hear the program for a minute, and it had been a commercial break or something, and the kids had given him the radio, probably out of some malicious kind of courtesy that would permit them to take offense and rag the little boy. He had changed the station…and they’d been unable to get it to go back to the ball game. It was locked into the past, on a station that was broadcasting a program that didn’t exist for anyone but Jeffty.

They had beaten him badly…as everyone watched.

And then they had run away.

I had left him alone, left him to fight off the present without sufficient weaponry. I had betrayed him for the sale of a 21” Mediterranean console television, and now his face was pulped meat. He moaned something inaudible and sobbed softly.

“Shhh, it’s okay, kiddo, it’s Donny. I’m here. I’ll get you home, it’ll be okay.”

I should have taken him straight to the hospital. I don’t know why I didn’t. I should have. I should have done that.

* * * *

When I carried him through the door, John and Leona Kinzer just stared at me. They didn’t move to take him from my arms. One of his hands was hanging down. He was conscious, but just barely. They stared, there in the semi-darkness of a Saturday afternoon in the present. I looked at them. “A couple of kids beat him up at the theater.” I raised him a few inches in my arms and extended him. They stared at me, at both of us, with nothing in their eyes, without movement. “Jesus Christ,” I shouted, “he’s been beaten! He’s your son! Don’t you even want to touch him? What the hell kind of people are you?!”

Then Leona moved toward me very slowly. She stood in front of us for a few seconds, and there was a leaden stoicism in her face that was terrible to see. It said, I have been in this place before, many times, and I cannot bear to be in it again; but I am here now.

So I gave him to her. God help me, I gave him over to her.

And she took him upstairs to bathe away his blood and his pain.

John Kinzer and I stood in our separate places in the dim living room of their home, and we stared at each other. He had nothing to say to me.

I shoved past him and fell into a chair. I was shaking.

I heard the bath water running upstairs.

After what seemed a very long time Leona came downstairs, wiping her hands on her apron. She sat down on the sofa and after a moment John sat down beside her. I heard the sound of rock music from upstairs.

“Would you like a piece of nice pound cake?” Leona said.

I didn’t answer. I was listening to the sound of the music. Rock music. On the radio. There was a table lamp on the
end table beside the sofa. It cast a dim and futile light in the shadowed living room.
Rock music from the present, on a radio upstairs?
I
started to say something, and then
knew…
Oh, God…
no!
”

I jumped up just as the sound of hideous crackling blotted out the music, and the table lamp dimmed and dimmed and flickered. I screamed something, I don’t know what it was, and ran for the stairs.

Jeffty’s parents did not move. They sat there with their hands folded, in that place they had been for so many years.

I fell twice rushing up the stairs.

* * * *

There isn’t much on television that can hold my interest. I bought an old cathedral-shaped Philco radio in a secondhand store, and I replaced all the burnt-out parts with the original tubes from old radios I could cannibalize that still worked. I don’t use transistors or printed circuits. They wouldn’t work. I’ve sat in front of that set for hours sometimes, running the dial back and forth as slowly as you can imagine, so slowly it doesn’t look as if it’s moving at all sometimes.

But I can’t find
Captain Midnight
or
The Land of the Lost
or
The Shadow
or
Quiet, Please.

So
she did love him, still, a little bit, even after all those years. I can’t hate them: they only wanted to live in the present world again. That isn’t such a terrible thing.

It’s a good world, all things considered. It’s much better than it used to be, in a lot of ways. People don’t die from the old diseases any more. They die from new ones, but that’s Progress, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

Tell me.

Somebody please tell me.

* * * *

“Jeffty Is Five” by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © 1977 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation. Reprinted by arrangement with, and permission of, the Author and the Author’s agent, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., New York. All rights reserved. Harlan Ellison is a registered trademark of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

By the time television began to take over the American living room, SF was already a major presence in weekly serials, shown in theaters before the movies as part of the matinee package. The very first SF television series was
Captain Video,
shown beginning in 1949 by the DuMont Television Network. Unfortunately, like those weekly movie-house serials, it was geared directly toward an audience of pre-adolescents. The props were literally made from cardboard boxes, and the uniforms were army-surplus fatigues with lightning bolts hand-stitched on the shoulders. It was an omen of things to come.

Fortunately, those things to come also included the ’50s boom in SF movies, beginning with more adult fare like
Destination: Moon
(1950) and
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951), and SF television was forced to mature somewhat to try to attract some of that audience. Even the silliest shows, the ones that were little more than extended ads for the licensed products (“Send in 25 cents for your genuine Buck Rogers insignia!”), had to spend some money on quality scripts. Beginning in 1952,
Captain Video
began buying scripts from the likes of Clarke, Asimov, Sheckley, and Knight. Other kids-only series included
Buck Rogers,
on ABC for only 10 months in 1950, and the more successful
Space Patrol
(featuring Commander Buzz Corry of the United Planets Space Patrol and his sidekick, Cadet Happy!), which lasted more than four years on ABC. However, the more mature shows were already a major force. Tales of Tomorrow, originally conceived by Theodore Sturgeon, was intended as an adult alternative to the ubiquitous kids’ shows, and adapted classic and contemporary SF works, such as Frankenstein and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, with major actors in the casts. The original SF anthology series on television—meaning that each episode was self-contained, with no recurring stories or characters—it was broadcast live on ABC from 1951–53. Science Fiction Theatre, another anthology show syndicated from 1955–57, took a more realistic look at “new” scientific and pseudo-scientific ideas, ranging from deep-sea submersibles to alien visitors. After the launch of Sputnik, CBS launched Men into Space in 1959. Although it lasted only a year, its Cold War theme (many nations, mainly the U.S. and the Soviets, trying to be the first to colonize the moon, for instance), its realistic approach to space exploration (modeled after Destination Moon), and the all-American image of its Air Force Colonel-astronaut hero, helped Americans feel better about their fledgling space program, despite its repeated failures and its lagging behind the Soviets.

Also premiering on CBS in 1959 was
The Twilight Zone.
Rod Serling was already one of the most highly respected screenwriters in television when he decided that the only way to escape the constant meddling and “script suggestions” from the sponsors and the network, and to sneak the ideas he wanted to write about past the censors, was to produce his own show and write in the SFF genre. Serling wrote the majority of the scripts himself, and script-edited most of the rest. The episodes, whether SF, horror, or just weird, concentrated on characterization and well-crafted plots, and featured famous or soon-to-be famous actors. Critics and viewers loved it. Twilight Zone lasted for five years, and is still the most well-known SF anthology series. Who can ever forget Burgess Meredith when he finally has “Time Enough at Last” to read, and breaks his glasses, or William Shatner trying to convince the stewardess there’s a goblin ripping up the wing of the airliner, or…? The list of legendary scenes is endless.

Equally thoughtful, and even more artfully crafted,
The Outer Limits
ran on ABC from 1963–65. Produced and script-edited by Joseph Stefano, who wrote the script of
Psycho
for Hitchcock and also wrote many of the
Outer Limits
episodes, the first-season shows were uniformly atmospheric and thought-provoking, more like serious SF lit than even
The Twilight Zone.
The series also included two award-winning scripts by Harlan Ellison. I remember watching the premiere episode on a small black-and-white television when I was eight years old.
The Galaxy Being
was the coolest and scariest monster I had ever seen, and it was intelligent and altruistic! The cancellation of
The Outer Limits
after only a season and a half is one of the greatest crimes against SF in the history of American television.

Speaking of crimes against SF, the mid-sixties brought a string of SF series from Irwin Allen, who would later gain fame filming other disasters like
The Towering Inferno.
In order of year of first broadcast,
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel,
and
Land of the Giants
were all juvenile, childish adventures meant for children and those with the intellect and artistic sense of children—am I being redundant enough to make my point? Playing to the lowest common denominator does have its advantages, though:
Lost in Space
(“Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!”) had the highest ratings of any SF television show in the ’60s. Much higher than…

…
Star Trek.
What can I say about Gene Roddenberry’s creation that hasn’t already been said in hundreds of books and articles? When I saw the first ads for it, months before the airing of the first episode in September 1966, I was so thankful it was on NBC, because where I lived we could barely see or hear the only CBS and ABC stations, while the NBC station was usually just a little cloudy. When that first episode aired—“The Man Trap,” usually referred to as “The Salt Vampire”—my eyeballs were glued to my family’s black-and-white television set for sixty minutes straight. I didn’t blink. I didn’t breathe. If you missed a single second, there might be a rerun six months later, but that was it: You would never see it again. There were no VCRs. There was no webflix service or enhanced DVDs or hyulutube. You saw it once or twice, and expected that you would never see it again. (You can’t imagine my joy when I saw my first syndicated rerun in 1975! In color!!) Why was it so revered, right from the start? The briefest clips or PR photos showed detailed, futuristic, but believable sets, characters, and costumes; and that spaceship—My gosh! Then when you read that there would be scripts from Sturgeon, Ellison, Bloch, Spinrad, Matheson—real SF was coming to television at last, treated with care and dignity the way it should be. Very quickly in the first season it became evident that character development really was important, and even though much of it actually was just “Wagon Train to the Stars” as Roddenberry is said to have described it in selling the idea to Desilu Studios, some serious SF ideas got serious airtime, too. And remember, this was in the depths of the Viet Nam era, and the Cold War, and race riots: most of all Star Trek presented a future that we wanted to, and most importantly could, believe in. It was no Utopia: there was war in the Federation, but maybe we could find ways to stop it; there was plenty of xenophobia, but the crew of the Enterprise itself was just about as multi-racial and multi-national as it could get. Maybe someday, not in my lifetime, not even in Captain Kirk’s lifetime, but maybe someday, we can work it all out.

And it was a helluvalotta fun to watch.

Running concurrently with
Star Trek,
The Invaders
was an alien infiltration story with echoes of the communist-invasion paranoia movies from the ’50s, such as
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
and
Invaders from Mars. Mistaking the public moods of the ’60s for the Cold War paranoia of the ’50s, it lasted only a season and a half on ABC.

One last late-’60s American SF series of note was not really SF at all, at least not intentionally.
The Wild Wild West
was created simply to try to find an interesting, saleable concept for a show, by combining the western and the James Bond-type spy thriller. What resulted was a nineteenth-century police adventure filled with mad-scientist geniuses who were inventing sonar, computers, futuristic weapons and robots of various types, etc., all run by the power sources available in their time—in other words, steampunk, 25 years before the term was coined. Luckily there was no serious intention to be found anywhere, and it was great fun from 1965–69.

Before leaving the ’60s, I must mention
Dr. Who,
the British mega-phenomenon from the BBC that ran continuously from 1963–89, the longest-running SF show of all time. Early on it was renowned for its imaginative—albeit cheap—special effects, and its general sense of fun, even while probing some serious SF and historical themes. It was revived by BBC Wales in 2005, and continues today. The series maintains its continuity over so long a period by the process of “regeneration,” whereby the Doctor trades in his old body for a new one, and a younger actor takes over the role. Plots run the gamut from action/adventure to social satire to mind-blowing SF ideas, and it is almost always fun and interesting.

The most popular series of the ’70s were, of course, not the best.
The Six Million Dollar Man
began in 1973 with some promise: It was, after all, about very cutting edge cyborg technology. However, it quickly became nothing more than a weekly dose of “find the bad guys using your bionic eye, chase them down on your bionic legs, and beat them up (in slow motion, with irritating sound effects).” This went on for five seasons. Slightly more interesting was Lynda Carter as
Wonder Woman.
Based on the DC comic book, the first season was set during World War II, and ran for a year on ABC starting in 1975. However, ABC did not renew the contract, so the producers moved to CBS, who modernized the show to present-day (1977), and gradually began aiming it at younger audiences. It was particularly popular among young girls, who wanted to see Wonder Woman deflect danger (bullets) with her bracelets, or fight off (male) bullies with ease. By the third season, CBS changed the theme song to a disco track and filmed mostly plots with teenagers as the secondary characters, and then canceled the show.

There was a
Planet of the Apes
spinoff in 1974 that got surprisingly good ratings and reviews, but it was canceled after 14 episodes.

Worthy of mention here is
Star Trek: The Animated Series,
which ran for 22 episodes in 1973–74. It included almost all of the original cast as voice actors, had some very good scripts (one by Larry Niven), and was able to animate aliens and landscapes that the live-action show could not afford. It remains one of my favorite SF television shows.

The final, and most disappointing, bad-SF of the ’70s was
Battlestar Galactica,
so disappointing because it held such promise. Featuring the best and most expensive special effects seen on television until that time, the show strove to be a grand epic of the future human race fighting its way across a galaxy filled with human-hating robots, the Cylons, trying to reach its ancestral home, Earth. But the lead characters were shallow and emotionless, little more than heartthrobs for teenagers of both sexes; the plots were equally silly and unrealistic; and Lorne Greene—Ben Cartwright to a generation of
Bonanza
viewers—just seemed silly as mankind’s prophet and leader, wearing a futuristic toga. In the end, the special effects were the only reason to watch. Despite good ratings, the expensive show was canceled by ABC after 24 episodes.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
ran from 1979–81 on NBC, reviving the old storyline with modern special effects and pinup lead actors, but the action-oriented storylines were straight out of the ’30s serial.

I finish the ’70s with
Mork and Mindy,
which had no pretensions to be anything but a funny sitcom, but was actually profound SF to the core. As portrayed by a then–little known Robin Williams, Mork, a visitor from the planet Ork, comes to Earth to study human ways. Because he is so completely unfamiliar with mankind’s thoughts and customs, he is the quintessential Other,
forced to figure out the smallest details of life on Earth. Thus
we
become the Other, observed instead of observing, and are forced to see ourselves in a totally unfamiliar light week after week. The series was a smash hit from 1978–82 because of Robin Williams, but don’t miss the SF, powered by amazed wonder and gentle tolerance, revealing to us a totally foreign race—us.

SF in the ’80s began in 1983 with the much-hyped “
V,”
but the only thing anyone remembers about it today is that image of miles-wide spaceships hovering over large cities, an image stolen from Clarke’s novel
Childhood’s End.
Then it was stolen from “
V
” by
Independence Day,
then stolen from them by others, including a remake of “
V.
” Hollywood’s idea of re-gifting. Otherwise it was badly acted soap opera with no ideas more modern than the pulp SF of the ’20s and early ’30s.

Then in 1985, two new, high-quality anthology series were launched. The first revival of
Twilight Zone
was launched by CBS in 1985 with much promise. It had adaptations of stories by Ellison, King, Bear, Clarke, and Bradbury, with Harlan Ellison as a creative consultant. And it had a new theme song by the Grateful Dead! After initial ratings success, conflicts between the network and the creative forces led to its cancellation after the second season. (A third season of half-hour shows was produced a year later for business reasons, but barely made a ripple in the public consciousness.) But along the way, several fine stories were produced.

The other anthology series premiering in 1985 was a new venture by Steven Spielberg, Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. The show started with good ratings but quickly lost its fan base, despite Spielberg producing and doing some directing, and a big budget, and music by John Williams. I remember, at the end of show after show, being amazed by the visuals and the music and the excitement, but then thinking, “Yeah, but what’s the point?” It was like a flashy Las Vegas production, all glitz and glitter, but no heart. It lasted only two seasons.