The Mongoose Effect
Thomas Wolfe wrote that "You can't go home again," but every once in a while we all do that. We return, in our bodies and/or in our minds, to our roots. We visit the old home town. We return, as Indigo Girls sang in "Devotion," to the site of our original establishment. What makes matters worse for us, what confirms what Wolfe wrote, is that our memories are ten, twenty, fifty years old. People and places aren't the same anymore. Why, if now, fifty years later, you and your high school girl friend [or boy friend] should pass each other on the street, you'd each say, "Wow, someone's really let themselves go." And yet, we remember . . .
Although I started reading science fiction in 1956 [The Star Beast, by Robert A. Heinlein], I was watching science fiction as early as 1949. There were several shows on television, notably Captain Video and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. There were also serials in the movie theaters. As incredible as it sounds, back then you could get into the theater on Saturday for a dime and watch like four hours of serials, cartoons, and so forth. In fact, there were even Space Cards, rather like baseball cards, on which a visit throughout the Solar System was narrated. [Card #41 was the rarest, as I recall. I had the whole series except that one. I never owned #41, though I did see it one time]. In this card series, Venus was depicted as a tropical forest. Little did we know, eh?
But I was talking about early science fiction. In Hollywood, science fiction had been around for decades. One of the more popular shows was Flash Gordon, in Republic Pictures. As it happens, I just acquired the DVDs of Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe, which fact of course has led to this particular Tuppence.
FGCTU was filmed in black & white, and those who reissued DVD had the good sense to keep it that way. The serial features rocket ships that take off horizontally, and rather resemble a blimp with a sparkler in its tailpipe. This is preferable, however, to a rocket ship landing on its tail fins. You can't quite see the strings holding the rocket as it maneuvers through papier-mache mountains. Ming the Merciless could have been more ominous. Flash Gordon [here portrayed by Buster Crabbe] is heroic enough. It's all good camp, good theater. Science fiction--and science, for that matter--has come a long way.
Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go.
These days it almost feels lonely in the field of science fiction. Oh, sure, there are some excellent pieces on the shelves, by Robert Sawyer and Joe Haldeman and Connie Willis and the like, but so many of these take place on Earth or in the vicinity of Earth. Not so long ago, Charles Sheffield and Jack Chalker, among others, were writing of fictional events on other worlds [the Well of Souls, in Chalker's case] or at least on the outer planets of the Solar System. Now both those writers are telling their tales in Twohy's Bar, second star from the right. David Weber is telling outer space tales, of course, having resurrected the Horatio Hornblower series in the person of Honor Harrington, plus other independent novels.
But Sam's Dot publishes annually The Martian Wave, which contains stories of exploration and settlement in the Solar System and on other worlds, and it is struggling to find suitable submissions. Why? Because horror and fantasy are more alluring--as if the destiny of humanity can be met by frightening people into solving their difficulties with magic. Maybe it's a phase. Maybe it's the way society as a whole is tilted these days. With our own NASA having to hitch rides on rockets launched by Luxembourg, Slovenia, and Mali, maybe we've decided to retreat from an astral destiny and drift toward one more . . . arcane. One thinks of humanity withdrawing into a safe and secure and highly regulated shell--rather like Logan's Run or Aeon Flux. Jim Baker probably wears a bit of a frown these days.
See, Jim founded ProMart Publishing to help beginning writers get their voices heard. As a parallel purpose, he believed the destiny of humanity lay in the stars, and loved stories about people going out there and exploring and living and working. Now those voices seem all but stilled, as if some mad clerk from Home Depot has gone around placing strips of duct tape over the science fiction keyboards.
Times are tough, yes. But they're no tougher than when Jim Baker grew up, in the Dust Bowl during the Depression. He got through that and dreamed. So can you.
One of the chief characteristics of a sentient human is curiosity. It drove us to sail across the Atlantic in the late 15th century. It drove the study of the stars in ancient Mesopotamia, when it was discovered that some stars move more than others, and some stars return to the same point in the sky each March 21 [okay, so they didn't have March back then]. It drove us and still drives us to find out what we can about ourselves, our world, and our universe. In that, we are like mongooses, because--to borrow shamelessly from Kipling--the motto of the mongoose is: Go And Find Out.
Look back up at the stars, then, and tell us in stories what is possible to us.
Past Tuppence:
June 2010
March 2010
December 2009
September 2009
June 2009
March 2009
December 2008
September 2008
June 2008
March 2008
December 2007
September 2007
June 2007
March 2007
December 2006
September 2006
June 2006
March 2006
December 2005
September 2005
June 2005
March 2005
December 2004
September 2004
June 2004
March 2004
December 2003
September 2003
June 2003
March 2003
December 2002
October 2002
August 2002
June 2002
April 2002
February 2002
December 2001
October 2001
August 2001
Read more from Tyree Campbell in any of the following:
Nyx: Mystere
by Tyree Campbell
The Dog at the Foot of the Bed
by Tyree Campbell
Wondrouse Web Worlds Vol. 6
Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 5
Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 4
Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 3
Sex and the Single Alien
An anthology
Nyx
A novel by Tyree Campbell
Wondrous Web Worlds Vol. 2