EDITORIAL

teaching science fiction

Science fiction courses are being taught at several hundred colleges and universities in the US this year. No one has been able to make an accurate count of how many high schools and junior highs are also giving short courses in science fiction.

Science fiction is also becoming a very popular item in the golden hills of Hollywood. There are literally dozens of feature-length movies and new TV serials being made on science fiction themes and subjects.

This could be very wonderful. It could also be very disastrous.

Those of you with stomachs strong enough to watch a few episodes of the TV series, The Starlost, may have noticed that my name was among the list of credits at the finish of the show. I was listed as "Science Consultant." This is something like being Science Adviser to the Nixon Administration: you can give advice, but don't expect it to be taken.

In effect, my association with The Starlost has been an experience in teaching science fiction. An experience that ended in total failure and disillusionment. More on that in a moment.

It seems to me that teaching science fiction is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Yet, in most of the colleges and universities that offer science fiction courses, the qualifications of the teachers—in the field of science fiction—are either vanishingly small or totally nonexistent.

This is where a possible disaster lurks for those of us who love this field.

We expect, with some justification, that a burgeoning of interest in science fiction on campuses and in movies and TV, will bring about a sizable increase in the numbers of people who can enjoy science fiction. For purely esthetic reasons, this is highly to be desired. Science fiction has been a ghetto literature for far too long; it's time that we took our rightful place in the limelight of American fiction. The greater the number of readers and viewers who enjoy and appreciate science fiction, the stronger and healthier our field will be. We will get more, better, and more varied writing talent devoted to science fiction. And, strictly on the mercenary side, the bigger our family of readers and viewers, the more prestigious and financially rewarding will the field become.

But if this interest on campuses and in the entertainment world is bungled, if it turns people away from science fiction instead of toward it, then we've lost a magnificent opportunity and doomed ourselves to another generation of literary and artistic ghettoization.

I have seen, at first hand, some of the problems of teaching science fiction, both on campus and in the hectic atmosphere of a television series. Let me tell you about the TV business first.

The Starlost was Harlan Ellison's creation. With typical elan and imagination, Harlan envisioned a TV series set on a thousand-mile-long starship that was carrying hundreds of separate national, cultural and social groups to colonization among the stars. The ship was damaged and for centuries it has been drifting, while its various groups of colonists remained locked in their separated environmental domes, each of them fifty miles in diameter. They lost all memory of the ship and its original purpose over the course of many generations.

Not the world's most original science fiction plot, but one that has been the backbone for many good stories. Harlan's idea was to turn this series into a "novel on television," and have each episode advance the total plot of the story, so that over a three-year course the entire story is developed and brought to a dramatic conclusion.

Good thinking. But it overlooked some of the facts of the television industry. Among those bitter facts was one central obstacle: the show was not bought by a network for prime time broadcast. Rather, it was sold in syndication. Every major city in the US bought the show—a sign of their interest. But, since the networks control the prime evening hours of eight to eleven, the individual stations could not broadcast The Starlost during prime time. In most cities, it was being shown at seven PM, either on Friday or Saturday.

This simple fact—lack of a prime time slot—turned The Starlost from a bold venture into a travesty of its original concept. For the producers of the show decided that they would not put into it the money that was required to make it live up to its original promise. They had already contracted for Keir Dullea to play the leading male role in the series. That was the last big-money decision they made.

It was all nickels and dimes from there on in.

I agreed to work with Harlan and the people who were actually doing the show, as a science adviser. If you want to see excitement, pathos, burning passions, adventure, intrigue and all the other goodies of the drama ... then you should have watched what was going on behind the cameras when the show was being put together. What got into the scripts was bland. And what got onto the videotape was rancid.

As far as my science advice was concerned, the production crew listened very politely and thanked me profusely, then went off and did it their own way. I read scripts that were absolutely ludicrous, scientifically. I pointed out the problems with each script, in great detail, and suggested solutions to the problems, or alternatives to the story situations that led to the problems.

I could have just as well tried climbing Mr. Everest on my hands, for all the good it did.

After watching one show in its entirety, as it was aired in New York, I quit The Starlost. I asked that they take my name off all the shows that I worked on, but they didn't even manage to do that.

Why should this have come to pass? Everyone connected with the show was a fairly competent professional in his or her field, qualified to produce reasonably solid television drama.

But they were not qualified in the critical area of science fiction. Harlan got so disgusted that he quit the show long before I did, and wisely took his name off the list of credits. He substituted his Writers Guild registered pen-name, Cordwainer Bird, which is Harlan's way of giving the bird to those who displease him.

Without Harlan's driving force and SF knowledge the series foundered. No one connected with the show on a day-to-day basis had the slightest understanding of science fiction. And, from the results, it's obvious that a strong understanding of our field's special attitudes, background and capabilities is a prime requisite for any successful show.

My own comments on the scientific side of the scripts would not have been enough to give the show a consistently good science-fictional look, even if my comments had been heeded.

Thus, people who are adequate writers, editors, directors, actors, special effects experts, et cetera—but who lack the special insights of science fiction—have produced a science fiction series that was dreadful.

While hardened science fiction fans may have watched The Starlost simply because it was science fiction, and because there was occasionally something interesting going on, it's impossible for me to believe that this show attracted any new fans to science fiction. An uncommitted TV watcher would see one episode and tell himself, "If that's science fiction, I'm going back to I Love Lucy."

Is the same thing happening on campus?

Those of us who love science fiction think it's wonderful that all those schools are giving courses in SF. But I recently had the somewhat shaky experience of meeting a lovely, leggy, blond engineer who was, in her spare time, teaching a science fiction course at an eastern technical college. It was a shaky experience because, when I asked her how she was chosen to teach the course, she told me this story:

"I went to the dean and told him we ought to have a science fiction course. He agreed. Then he asked me who would teach it. I said I would. He asked me what my qualifications were. I said I'd read 'The Martian Chronicles' and 'Stranger in a Strange Land' and all that. He said, 'Well, that makes you the local expert. OK, you can teach the course.'"

I can imagine myself going up to the head of the anthropology department at a similar school and telling him that rd like to teach an anthropology course. When he asked for my qualifications, I'd say, "Well, I've read Carleton Coon and Margaret Mead and all that stuff."

The point is, there is a certain body of knowledge that should be required of anyone who teaches a course in science fiction. Our field is as complex as they come, with its roots in literature, history, science and technology, social change, et cetera. No English department would let someone teach an English course unless he or she had some demonstrable qualifications in the field—papers published in the professional scholarly journals, or works of fiction published in the press. Something. Not just an earnest desire.

There is a professional society devoted to teaching science fiction, called the Science Fiction Research Association. But it is doing nothing about setting and demanding professional qualifications among SF teachers. SFRA is so new, its leaders claim, that its main interest lies in getting dues-paying members so that the organization can become strong. It will accept membership from just about anyone: teachers, writers, librarians, even people who merely "express a sincere interest in science fiction."

This is not professionalism, and it will not lead to a professional attitude toward the teaching of science fiction.

I am not advocating a stuffy, academic closed-mindedness toward who should be allowed to teach science fiction. That long-legged blond might be a terrific teacher. But I don't think she—or many, many others like her—knows much about the history of our field, the influences of various writers, the interplay between technology and story subjects, and many of the other facets that are important for an understanding of SF.

The people who will get hurt first by this are the students. Those who take a science fiction course because they're seriously interested in the field will get short-changed.

Those who take an SF course because they're curious about science fiction will quickly get turned off by inadequate teaching. (There are also those who take SF courses because they're good for an easy credit; who ever flunked science fiction?)

In the longer run, all of us will be hurt, too. Because our field will not grow as it might if the majority of those students came away from their courses satisfied and eager to learn more.

It's happened to science fiction before. There was a boom in our field just after the end of World War Two, when the advent of nuclear weaponry made it clear to many who had scoffed at SF that we were speaking prophetically. That boom ended rather quickly.

There was another flurry of interest just after Sputnik, in the late 1950's, but it petered out fast, too.

All through the 1960's, though, the interest in science fiction on campus has been steadily growing. And now it has become "respectable" enough to be considered legitimate material for classes.

Fine. But if these classes result in disillusionment, then these hard-won gains will evaporate, and it will take another generation before anyone can mention science fiction in "respectable" company again.

We have come a long way in this generation. There are many good teachers of science fiction. The basic idea of the Science Fiction Research Association is a good one, even though the chalkdust aura of academia seems incongruous in the science fiction area. There are even good movies and television shows being done, with solid science fiction ideas and stories. And more to come.

But I fear a variation of Gresham's law, in which the bad teaching and schlock movies and TV shows will drive out the good ones.

This is something that SFRA and SFWA—Science Fiction Writers of America, the professional organization of the writers—should struggle against with every ounce of their strength.

There must be minimum standards for anyone who teaches a science fiction course. No less than there are standards for those who teach gym, history, criminology or English literature. SFRA could set out a suggested standard of qualifications, and urge colleges and universities to adhere to it.

There must also be minimum standards for the science fiction movies and TV shows that are being produced. But here, the standards will be made and enforced by the buying public, just as they have done for decades with magazines and books.

But wouldn't it be wise for SFWA—whose major officers are now located on the West Coast—to try to suggest to the Hollywood moguls that a science fiction show should have competent science fiction advice, just as a medical show has at least a pharmacist hanging around?

And it would be even wiser if the advice were heeded.

THE EDITOR