Cover of the May 1976 edition of Galaxy Magazine, which is where I probably first read Varley’s “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank.” (Click to embiggen)In the spring of 1976 I still had a subscription to Galaxy magazine, thanks to my grandparents, though things were not going terrible well in my life at that time, so I didn’t always get all the way through one issue before the next came in. So I might not have read it until some months, after my parents’ divorce was final, and Mom, my sister, and I moved 1200 miles away. I definitely remember owning the magazine with this cover. This issue contained the story, “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” by John Varley.
Varley was the author of “Picnic on the Near Side” which I wrote about before, and which made quite an impression on me. This story is set in a similar world, with extensive colonies on the moon. It concerns a man named Fingal how has purchased a vacation at one of the “disneylands” which was large lunar caves that have been made to duplicate long lost environments on earth, complete with cloned wildlife. Fingal’s memory and personality are transferred from his brain into a cube, which is then implanted in a lioness so that Fingal can experience the life of a predator on the savannah.
Something goes wrong, and Fingal finds himself back in his own life sooner than expected, and strange things keep happening, such as books rewriting themselves before his eyes to become messages to him. He eventually learns that his body has someone been misplaced, so the memory cube has been put into a safety mode, interfacing with a computer which is creating a simulation of his real life. Messages come to him from a technician named Apollonia Joachim who explains that the simulation is necessary to keep his memories and personality intact until it can be returned to his body.
As the days stretch into weeks, Fingal starts taking classes in the simulation to teach himself new skills to get a better job when he does get back. Strange things happen, as the technician tries to keep him focused. In one incident, Fingal notices strange patterns in the floor tiles in his bathroom, and starts tracing them with his toe, suddenly the bathroom fills up with money. Fingal’s consciousness had somehow gotten into someone’s financial records. Apollonia warns him about losing himself again and again.
Over the months that follow, Fingal finds himself falling in love with Apollonia, and making plans for a future together.
Eventually Fingal is reunited with his body, and then learns that what felt like years to him in the simulation was only six hours, because his thoughts were moving at computer speed while connected. Ms Joachim has only been interfacing with him for a few hours, and doesn’t share his feelings.
The simulated classes he took did result in real learning, so he does have new skills and can pursue a more interesting job. Plus, of course, he gets a refund on the vacation and a lump sum settlement from the company. He’s informed that other people who suffered similar accidents have not always fared so well, and he’s the first person two survive six hours outside the memory cube’s normal limit.
Varley didn’t win an award for this particular story. He did win a Special Locus award the year this was published for having four novelettes, including this story, voted in the top ten in the Locus Reader Awards.
The story was adapted badly into a movie that changed a lot of things for no particular reason. Avoid the movie. The story isn’t action packed, but is more focused on the internal conflicts of a man unhappy with his life who is forced to stay there even if it is simulated. The notion being that if they allow his fantasies to run wild while his personality is in the memory cube, he will go mad and forget who he really is.
I enjoyed the story a lot. The notion that it’s the boring and repetitive parts of our lives that anchor our identities wasn’t terribly revolutionary, but it was interesting to see how this sort of technology might play out without any world-threatening peril giving it at artificial sense of danger. Really, who needs a bigger threat than literally losing your mind to provide a sense of dramatic tension?
One odd side note: I always get this story mixed up with another Varley tale, “The Phantom of Kansas.” They’re both set in the same fictional future world (the Kansas in the title of the second story is an artificial recreation of the midwestern plains of North America in another Lunar cave), and both stories involve stored personalities, but otherwise the plots have nothing to do with each other. The simple fact is that I think the title “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” would have been better for the second story as it evokes a metaphor for the central plot better than the notion of a phantom. So there has been more than one occasion when I’ve pulled out an anthology, such as my hardcover copy of Wolheim’s 1977 World’s Annual Best Science Fiction, see the title of Varley’s story, turn to it expecting to read the other story, and then as I read the opening paragraphs remember that I always get them mixed up.
Oddly, I own more than one anthology that includes “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,” but absolutely none that include the other story. I need to fix that.
Cover for the first edition hardback of The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov. (Click to embiggen)I first heard of “The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov when I saw the anthology, The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories offered as a selection in the Science Fiction Book Club. I was 16, and still technically a member of the club, but most months I checked off the “Send nothing at this time” box on the card, because even the cheaper prices of the book club were a bit much for my budget. It a bit over a year later when I found a paperback copy of The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wolheim in the local used book store when I finally got a chance to read the story.
Asimov wrote a lot of short stories about robots. Most of the stories collected in his anthologies I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots dealt with various logical contradictions that robots would be placed in by various circumstances, and how the robots (and the humans working with them) would work out those conflicts between the Three Laws of Robotics, their other programming, and the situation at hand. Even in his longer novels where robots figured prominently, such as the two sci fi murder mysteries, The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, the robots were always motivated by pure logic. The fact that the world is not a purely logical place, and that humans are seldom covered by rationality alone, formed the framework for the conflict in the stories.
“The Bicentennial Man” centered on a single robot, dubbed Andrew by the daughter of its first owner (a Mr. Martin, identified in the story which is told from Andrew’s point of view as simply Sir). Andrew demonstrates an unusual talent with wood carving—his works of art fetching high prices when offered for sale—and develops a desire to became human. Andrew is part of a new series of robots with what Asimov describes “more open-ended architecture” in his positronic brain, which the experts believe is where his apparent artistic talent comes from. Andrew’s stubborn insistence that he can become a human worries the scientists at the world’s largest robotics company, causing them to try to buy Andrew back.
In part because of the pleading of the owner’s daughter (whom Andrew calls Little Miss), Sir refuses to sell Andrew back to the company. Later, Sir helps Andrew gain some form of legal independence as a “free robot” with the legal name of Andrew Martin.
From there the story follows Andrew’s physical and legal journey through several generations of the original family, as Little Miss grows up, grows old, and dies, and her son and grandson found a legal firm which, among other things, fights to secure Andrew’s legal rights. Andrew designs new kinds of prosthetics, which are almost indistinguishable from natural body parts. Andrew’s body is slowly ungraded to first being a more human-looking android body, to an organic one. The proceeds from the patents on the various processes to create the prosthetics (which are used medically to improve the lives of disabled, maimed, and diseased people) providing Andrew’s income and funding the legal fight.
One of his important legal victories happens when he is 150 years old, where at a dinner in his honor (celebrating his medical inventions), he is toasted as the Sesquicentennial Robot.
Eventually, as Andrew realizes that he will never persuade a human legislature to pass a law declaring him, or any robot, a human because the key difference will always be his positronic brain. Which leads Andrew to compel a robotic surgeon to perform an operation on his brain that will cause the brain to slowly decay and die. Andrew’s reasoning is that it’s the immortality that forms the final barrier between him being accepted as a human.
The story really resonated with me. And it was interesting to see Asimov explore the nature of emotions and creativity from the point of view of artificial intelligence. But more interesting was the series of legal barriers that Andrew has to go through. Laws have to be changed to allow a robot to own property, for instance. Laws must be changed to make harming a robot a crime, at another point.
The legal progression to personhood that Asimov takes us through is based on the historical legal fights for woman’s rights and racial equality. For millenia, the legal system treated women as property. Assaulting a woman was a crime, yes, but the penalties imposed always included paying a fine to the woman’s father (if she were unmarried) or her husband, because the man in her life was deemed to have been harmed by the degradation of his property.
Similarly, Andrew discovers, once he is a free robot, that since there is no owner to whom damages would be owed, the legal system doesn’t consider anyone assaulting and damaging him a crime as assault. Vandalism, perhaps, but then, who is the owner who should be compensated for the damage?
It seems ridiculous to us now that some people, simply because of their gender or the color of their skin, had once been in a similar situation: harming them wasn’t inherently a crime, it was only a crime if it caused their “owner” to suffer a loss. And especially frightening to realize that in the matter of sexual assault laws in the U.S., for instance, that as recently as the 1970s the law was still structured this way. A woman couldn’t file rape charges against her husband or sometimes even her ex-husband, because once married her consent was no longer hers to give or withold, in that regard.
Andrew’s struggle for human rights parallels, thus, every oppressed groups struggle for equality. Something that I came to appreciate more some years later, when I finally bought my own hardcover copy of The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories and re-read this particular short story again. There is even a point, during the discussion about the assault laws, where another character makes the same argument at homophobes current make against hate crime laws: they aren’t needed, because the action is already a (minor) crime under existing laws.
Asimov’s story about a robot who wants to be a human might seem, on the surface, to be little more than a retelling of Pinocchio, but we see here one of the Grandmasters of Science Fiction—a sci fi writer who first reached prominence during the “golden age” of sci fi—turning a civil rights argument into a rattling good tale of old-fashioned science fiction. Who would have thought an old, white (okay, jewish, but still) male sci fi writer who made his first professional sale in 1939 would be a social justice warrior? Don’t tell the melancholy canines!
When I read “The Bicentennial Man” I was a very closeted high school student, terrified that people would find out I was queer because I knew that strangers, friends, and even family members would see me as an abomination if they knew. So the story of Andrew, who wanted to be seen and accepted as a person certainly struck a chord. Even if his ultimate solution, dying, seemed like a terrible way to achieve his goal.
Cover of the paperback edition of the 1977 Annual World’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Donald Wolheim (click to embiggen)When I was a junior in high school there was one comic book shop in the town I lived in. It was also a used book store, so I visited there a lot. I didn’t have much money, and I was still reading several comics regularly which took up most of my discretionary spending, so I spent a lot more time there browsing—trying to find the cheapest books—than actually buying.
One day at the store I happened upon a paperback copy of The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wolheim. I owned several of his earlier annual anthologies, having gotten several of them as part of my introductory new member shipment from the Science Fiction Book Club a few years previously. The paperback was in pretty good shape, having only been published about six months previous, so it was probably marked at half cover price, which meant it wasn’t in my usual price range, but I had enjoyed the earlier collections, and there was more than one author in the table of contents whose work I really loved, so I bought it.
One of the stories in this particular collection was a novella, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” by James Tiptree, Jr. I didn’t know, at the time, that Tiptree was a pseudonym of Alice Sheldon (I think the year I read this was the year that her true identity was revealed, after ten years of being published under the name).
I believe I had read a few of Tiptree’s earlier short stories in the various SF magazines that I followed semi-regularly. I recognized the name, at least, but didn’t have a strong recollection of what kind of stories Tiptree had written before or whether I liked them. So I wasn’t prepared for just how good this story was.
The tale concerns the three-man crew of a NASA mission sent on a polar circuit of the sun. The ship is hit by an unexpectedly strong solar flare and is severely damaged. The crew survives and eventually gets their radio repaired, but are unable to reach Earth. At first it’s because Earth isn’t where they expect it to be in relationship to their position. They eventually figure out that they are further off course than they thought, and start transmitting their distress signal in the correct direction. No answer comes.
Eventually, as they scan more frequencies, they start picking up signals, many of them conversations in English with Australian accents. This is confusing, particularly since many of the signals are coming from various parts of the solar system, indicating a rather large number of space ships. Plus Australia, as far as they knew, didn’t have much of a space program. Also, almost all of the voices on the radio sound like women.
They establish contact with one ship which detected them and has diverted from its course to rescue them. During the radio exchanges before the rescue ship reaches them, they learn that it has been hundreds of years since their mission went up. The world is anxious to meet them, they are told, because they had long been assumed to be dead.
They also learn that there has been some sort of catastrophe on Earth in the intervening years which greatly reduced the population. When the rescue ship finally arrives, the men are surprised that there is only one man in the crew of the ship. Lots of other things surprise them, too. Two of the crewmembers seem to be twins, and both named Judy, but one seems to be several years older than the other. There are several other anomalies and slips of the tongue during the weeks that the ship is returning them to Earth that make the astronauts more suspicious.
Eventually they learn that the catastrophe was even worse than they imagined: it was a plague which only 11,000 women survived; not one single man survived it. The remaining people have been reproducing for several generations by cloning. Children are raised in a communal setting. Some are chosen to receive hormone treatments to give them the musculature and size of men. The story seems to imply that the only reason this is done is for the physical benefits of the muscles and such, and it is unclear if these children choose to became essentially transmen, or if it is imposed by some sort of societal system.
The three astronauts react in very different ways to the discovery. One becomes convinced that god threw them through a wormhole so that they can “rescue” this society and bring men back in charge. Another assumes that since there’s a whole planet of women who have never had sex with a “real man” that he will become sort of a sex god to them all. The last simply hopes that they will be allowed to rejoin society and help repopulate the species (since there are some health problems due to the of lack of genetic diversity).
It turns out, of course, that none of that is to be. The actions of the three men have been being recorded and sent back home. The men were slipped drugs which supposedly made them act out their true natures. The leaders of the world agree that men are simply too dangerous to introduce back into the species. There’s a particularly moving conversation between the captain of the rescue ship and the one man who has remained rational where she points out that most of the heroic behavior the man has tried to cite as proof that men can be good was simply men protecting their own women and children from other men.
The men’s genes are going to be used. Before the three are euthanized, sperm is collected, to diversify the gene pool, but only female babies will be taken to term. Since the entire story is told from the point of view of the one man, the reader never finds out what happens after he and his companions are put to sleep.
I wasn’t the only one who thought the story was good. It won both the Nebula and Hugo award for best novella the year it was published. The story did not kick off much in the way of controversy at the time, in part because people believed Tiptree was simply a feminist-minded man. A man could write a science fiction story decrying generations of misogyny and patriarchal violence and be thought of as open-minded, and a forward thinker. A woman, on the other hand, would (and still often is) branded as a radical man-hater.
I simply thought it was an intriguing story. I was still struggling to accept my own sexual orientation at the time, and I was intimately familiar with how the cruelty of boys toward boys who weren’t manly enough was overlooked, approved, and often encouraged by a sexist society. So the notion that culture might be a better place without all that hypermasculinity was appealing, even if I felt sorry for the reasonable male viewpoint character who was going to be exterminated along with his more brutish companions.
I want to emphasize that Tiptree made the male character sympathetic. She laid out the case for both sides convincingly, and seemed to be inviting the reader to consider (and maybe fight for) solutions to the problems of toxic chauvinism other than simply wiping the men out.
It was another mind-blowing story. Another time that sci fi helped me (as a very closeted queer teen living in a small town among Christian fundamentalists) imagine a better life, particularly the notion of romantic relationships other than opposite-sex pairings. After that story, whenever I saw Tiptree’s name on an anthology or magazine cover, I knew I wanted to read it.
Cover of Arthur C. Clarke’s -The City and the Stars- (Click to embiggen)I think I was 16 when I found a battered paperback copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s The City and the Stars in a used bookstore. This was not my first Clarke novel. That had been 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I had found in a library a few years before. I wouldn’t see the movie until many years later. I had also read many of Clarke’s short stories, so I was familiar with his work and his reputation as one of the best.
I had never heard of this particular novel, but the description on the back cover was intriguing, and since he had such a reputation, I felt almost obligated to read more of his work.
The story is set a billion years in the future, in the city of Diaspar, which is the last home of mankind. Humans are effectively immortal. Individuals are “born” nearly full grown in essentially replicators, and they live in the perfect unchanging city creating art and exploring philosophy or literature or poetry for hundreds or even thousands of years, until they decide to rest, at which point their memories are transferred back to the central memory banks and their bodies un-replicated. Until some random interval later when the computer will determine they need to be reborn again.
Cover of the first paperback edition of The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton. (Click to embiggen)The first time I remember hearing about The Andromeda Strain was while reading a movie theatre calendar. We were living in a small town in Utah which didn’t have a movie theatre of its own, but we were about an hour drive away from the small Colorado town where I had been born and my grandparents still lived. And often when we visited I would look at the monthly theatre calendar which was distributed free with the local weekly paper. Sometimes I would attempt to talk my parents into letting me come back on a particular weekend to go to the movie.
I think it was the fall of 1971 (I would have been eleven) when I saw the listing, and the name and very short description had me intrigued. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to convince my parents to let me have the movie trip.
About a year later The Andromeda Strain was broadcast on network TV, probably as a movie of the week (that was a thing back then), and for whatever reason, we didn’t watch the first part of the movie. Probably it conflicted with a show my dad liked, so we watched the other show, first, then switched channels and watched the last half of the movie. So I was a bit confused, but it was still pretty exciting. The last part of the film was very tense and entertaining, even without the beginning.
The following week in school, everyone was talking about the movie. It was one of the few times that I remember kids who usually didn’t know a thing about science fiction talking about a sci fi plot.
Not long afterward, I happened across a battered paperback copy of Michael Crichton’s novel upon which the movie was based. I read it in a single sitting. One of the things that amazed me when I finished was how closely the half of the movie I saw followed the latter portion of the book. My previous experience of comparing movies to the books they were based on was that the movie often bore virtually no resemblance to the book.
The story of the Andromeda Strain is that a space probe is sent into low earth orbit and brought back down. It lands in a small, isolated town, and by the time the retrieval team arrives to pick it up, it seems that every inhabitant of the town has been killed. The retrieval team dies will communicating with their government superiors, and a Wildfire alert is activated. Wildfire is a codename for protocol government scientists have put together to respond to a biological threat from space. A team of scientists are pulled from their regular jobs and rushed to a secret underground facility. Two of the scientists go into the town in hazmat suits, find the satellite, and also find two survivors, an old man and a crying infant. The bulk of the story deals with how the scientists figure out what the infection is, and why those two very different characters are immune.
Before they have quite figured everything out, the extraterrestrial organism (which is neither a virus nor a bacterium) mutates and starts eating the plastics and rubber seals throughout the lab. This sets off an alarm and starts an automatic countdown on a nuclear self-destruct device. One of the things the scientists have determined about the organism is that it is not only immune to radiation, but will actually thrive in the explosion, and probably destroy all life on the planet. Thus we get to the tense ending where the characters are trying to stop the self-destruct and find a way to neutralize the infection.
One of the things that disappointed me about the book was that one of the most interesting characters in the movie, Dr. Ruth Leavitt, was a much less interesting man, Dr. Paul Leavitt, in the novel. I’m not sure if the character in the movie was more interesting because the actress, Kate Reid, played a very believable character, or if the character was just less interesting in the original.
I re-read The Andromeda Strain at least once more after seeing the movie all the way through, and I still found Reid’s version of the Leavitt character more interesting. And this was decades before I’d ever heard of the Bechdel Test!
The Andromeda Strain was a bestseller, and set Michael Crichton on the path of future success that would lead to, among other things, Jurassic Park. The movie was only a moderate success, which is too bad, because it was really well done. The science included was, for the most part, plausible at time. In fact, nothing in the film required any sort of advancement of technology beyond what we had available. Exactly how the life form could convert energy to matter was the only bit of dubious handwaving to speak of. It wasn’t the only time that the movie version of a science fiction story was better than the book, but I think it might have been the first time that I noticed it.
I enjoyed the show. So did my (now late) husband, Ray. We tuned in faithfully each week, chatting about various aspects of the show as we watched. I’d been such a big fan of Kolchak: The Night Stalker that of course I was interested in this show. Ray, on the other hand, barely remembered the other series (and he wasn’t sure if it was because he was a few years younger than I, or if maybe his family simply hadn’t watched it), but he was a fan of mysteries and sci fi and “spooky stuff” so was just as interested in the concept of the show before we had even seen it.
The show’s mysteries were interesting. Sometimes very creepy, sometimes sad. There was just the right amount of human and pathos in the most serious shows to keep you hooked. And then occasionally there were episodes that were primarily funny.
They avoiding the obvious “she’s always a cold-hearted skeptic”/”he’s a passionate true believer” dynamic that he seemed implied from the beginning. Mulder wasn’t a true believer. He frequently repeated the line, “I want to believe.” As we learned about the childhood disappearance of his sister, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding it, we understood why he needed to believe that there were things happening beyond the simple, rational explanations with which so many mysteries are dismissed. And Scully, of course, wasn’t cold-hearted, and while she remained skeptical, she wasn’t close-minded.
The show did a really good job of portraying different ways that a sense of wonder (and sometimes dread) could manifest when we are confronted with situations that don’t have an obvious, simple, and safe explanation.
I really loved the show in the early seasons. I recall especially being on the edge of my seat at the end of the season two finale, barely able to contain myself waiting to learn what the answer to the cliffhanger would be the next fall. Things started to go awry, for me, during the third season, and by the fifth or sixth I was finding myself irritated by the show more often then entertained. I might have given up if not for a friend who suggested this way of looking at it: “I’ve decided to think of it as two completely separate shows happening in parallel universes. They happen to have identically named characters played by the same actors, but they are other wise unconnected. One is the quirky, cool ‘there are more things than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ mystery of the week show that I adore; and the other is the awful, poorly written, contradictory, batshit alien conspiracy/maybe we’re all crazy show that I hate—and I have to put up with the latter in order to keep watching the former.”
And that helped a lot. Don’t get me wrong, the conspiracy related to aliens was there from the very beginning, and I was onboard with watching them confront and explore that. The problem, from my perspective, was that unlike their monster of the week kinds of episodes, they never seemed to have a clear idea of what was actually happening with the conspiracy. Years later we might call their problem the “Lost syndrome,” because like that more recent show, the writers seemed to be throwing contradictory and confusingly cryptic clues at us without a clear idea of what the “real” explanation was.
I think that the show’s original creator did have an idea of what the explanation was, but either he allowed other writers who didn’t know to go off on misleading tangents that couldn’t be reconciled as simply red herrings, or perhaps he didn’t know how to keep the series going if he ever revealed the answer.
So it was with a bit of trepidation that I watched the first episode of the new mini series a few weeks ago. And I have to admit, that opener left me with a lot more dread than hope. Then the second episode was a bit better, like one of the typical mystery of the week shows I used to love.
And then we got to the third episode, “Scully & Mulder Meet the Were-monster” and I was in heaven. It was funny. And with a lot of Easter Eggs that weren’t annoying. Two actors who played stoned teen-agers who witnessed a mysterious event back in the very first season, returned to play the same characters, no longer teens, who are out in the woods huffing spray paint when they witness another event. There was a homage the Kolchak in the story, an incredible amount of humor, yet it was an incredibly dark commentary on real life at the same time. It was really, really good, and included everything I had loved about the best of the earliest episodes. And I was incredibly happy to see, online over the next several days, the number of review sites and sci fi/fantasy enthusiasts who had enjoyed the episode the same as I had.
At its best, the X-Files was about things in life—sometimes awful, tragic things—that don’t fit neatly into our preconceptions of how the world can be. More importantly, it is about the way we try to understand those things—how we confront mystery, tragedy, disappointment, horror, and betrayal—and how we cling to meaning and hope in spite of it. It’s about finding the human connection, finding the reasons to hope, finding the things to cherish, and never losing our curiosity.
And it’s also, sometimes, about really creepy monsters.
In the movie, The Night Stalker, Darren McGavin plays Kolchak, a reporter working in Las Vegas, dating a showgirl, and covering typical news stories. Until he began being suspicious about a series of deaths that seemed very similar, but which the police insisted were unrelated. First Kolchak was convinced that it was simply a serial killer who was draining all the blood from his victims’ bodies because he was insane and believed he was a vampire. As Kolchak finds more and more evidence of similar crimes going back decades, he begins to worry that the killer really is a vampire.
Which, of course, turns out to be the case. Kolchak witnesses a couple of attempts by the police to capture the killer. The second attempt is such an epic failure, with multiple cops killed and dozens of bullets striking the killer (played creepily by Barry Atwater) to no avail. This convinces at least one FBI agent that it is a vampire. Kolchak and his FBI buddy track down and kill the vampire.
Kolchak writes the full account of the vampire’s long career of murder and eventual destruction, proposes to his girlfriend, and prepares to move to New York City where he expects to be able to write his own ticket. Except the FBI and local police don’t want anyone to know about vampires. They kill the story (getting Kolchak’s boss fired, I believe). They substitute a more mundane tale of a serial killer with Kolchak’s byline. Then they inform him that his girlfriend has already been convinced to leave town, and tell him he’s no longer welcome in Vegas.
The story ends with Kolchak re-dictating the entire tale into his portable tape recorder while sitting alone in a sleazy motel room. He explains how all the evidence is destroyed, and that he’s exhausted his savings trying to find his fiancée, so far to no avail.
It was a sad and creepy end to a film.
The Night Stalker was a made-for-TV movie based on an unsold novel by Jeff Rice, originally titled The Kolchak Papers. Rice’s agent had more luck selling the novel idea to ABC as a movie idea than he’d had selling it to a book publisher. The movie was a surprise hit, drawing in unheard of ratings when it ran. It was so successful that the network commissioned Richard Matheson, who had adapted Rice’s book into script from, to write a sequel. A book publisher was suddenly interested in Rice’s novel, but only if they could also get a deal on the sequel. So Rice wrote a novelization of Matheson’s sequel script, and in 1973 two Kolchak books, along with the sequel TV movie, The Night Strangler were all released.
The Night Strangler came out almost exactly a year after the first movie. In it Kolchak had relocated to Seattle where he stumbled upon an immortal who was living in Underground Seattle2 who every 21 years has to kill several women in order to harvest their blood in a very specific fashion to manufacture his “elixer of life.” The sequel did well enough again that work began on a third movie. Until the network put that all aside and decided to turn Kolchak’s story into a regular weekly TV series, which debuted in September of 1974 and ran for one season.
McGavin returned to play Kolchak. In the series Kolchak, along with his editor from both movies (played by Simon Oakland), have been relocated to Chicago where they work for the Independent News Service. Each week Kolchak stumbles upon a new monster or mystery that winds up having a fantastic explanation. Unlike the original movie, Kolchak never has any credible witnesses survive to corroborate his stories, so no one ever believes.
After the two wildly successful TV movies, the network had high hopes, but the initial ratings weren’t terribly exciting. After four episodes of The Night Stalker had aired, the series went on hiatus for a bit over a month. It came back, re-titled Kolchak: the Night Stalker! with new theme music, though not any changes to the tone, setting, or cast.
Ratings continued a slow, steady decline, causing the network to pull the plug at episode 20, cutting short the original order of 26 episodes.
The series ran during my 7th grade year. We had moved by the Colorado, this time returning to the small town where I’d been born, and where one set of grandparents and one set of great-grandparents still lived. Puberty had hit the year before, and I suddenly knew exactly why I’d always felt out-of-place to the point of wondering if I was a changeling left in place of my parent’s real child by evil elves, or maybe an alien sent to study humans—I was gay. It was during this same period that I started fooling around regularly with one other gay classmate (while having a completely unrequited crush on a different classmate that as far as I know was straight). I lived in a constant state of fear of being found out, terrified of what family, friends, and the rest of the town would do if they had proof I was a fag.
I threw myself even more fervently into reading science fiction and fantasy, so of course I was a faithful viewer tuning in each week to see what Kolchak would uncover next. Kolchak was appealing in part because these incredible, usually awful, things kept happening around him, but no one ever believed him. He was in sort of a reverse closet. He wanted people to know the truth, but everyone else did everything they could to ignore, explain away, and ridicule that truth.
While I did tune in faithfully each week, I have to confess that as the series went on, each episode was a little bit less satisfying. I can’t be certain why, having not re-watched it in years, but something about seeing Kolchak not be believed week after week was much less interesting than seeing it in two movies separated by a year. Maybe it was because Kolchak was seldom heroic. He had a determination to learn the truth, yes, but clearly he would have much rather interviewed people after the fight with the monster, rather than take on the creatures himself. He was always a bit rumbled and always seemed to stumble and fumble his way into a lot of the stories and events in the series, rather than get there through dogged determination. Maybe the series just didn’t know how to walk the tightrope between mystery/horror and comedy.
Some years later Chris Carter would have more success with The X-Files, a series he admitted was inspired by Kolchak. So the week-to-week mysteries the world doesn’t want to admit exist notion could be spun into a successful show. I don’t know what about the collective consciousness of 1974 made Kolchak less appealing than the audience of the 90s would find Scully and Mulder4.
I still look back on The Night Stalker with a lot of fondness. I empathized so much with they guy who knew and believed things no one else would credit. It wasn’t just the parallels to my own queer secret, though. I was also having an ever more difficult time reconciling my love of science and history with the fundamentalist evangelical beliefs of our church and the vast majority of our neighbors. I felt as if people were constantly belittling scientific facts and scientists, blatantly ignoring evidence right in front of them and insisting on a worldview that just didn’t square up with not just my lived experience, but theirs.
Kolchak kept chasing that truth, kept examining the evidence, never letting the naysayers or conventional wisdom stop him. And that was a role model I desperately needed.
Notes:
1. I wound up completing the entirety of 5th and 6th grade, in addition to the half of 4th in that same school. This tied my previous record of Kindergarten, 1st, and part of 2nd in the Ft. Collins, Colorado school district. By contrast, 3rd grade was split between three schools, each in a different state (and if the brief sojourn in Kansas had begun a few weeks earlier than in did, 3rd grade would have been four schools in four states).
2. This movie makes the mistake of most pop culture representations of Underground Seattle do. It portrays it as if some sort of disaster buried part of the city in a single night and the survivors rebuilt on top. A dining room underground that still has dishes, silverware, and petrified food figures in the story, for instance. In actuality, Seattle decided it was tired of the routine flooding and sewer backups that happened in the part of downtown built on swamp land, and they razed a hill at the north end of town to redistribute the dirt to raise the streets in the south end. It took many months. During the transition some of the taller buildings had new doors built into the existing second or third floors at the new street level. Other buildings had additional stories built atop them. Spaces that had originally been ground floors became basements. In only a very small number of cases have any of those old spaces been kept in anything close to their original state3.
3. Many, many years ago a software company I worked for that had offices downtown rented storage space in the basement of the building next door. The basement had originally been a dance hall before the streets were raised. The solid wood dance floor was still there, and some of the fancy woodwork on the walls was still visible, but the building owners and subdivided the space into a bunch of 10 foot by 10 foot cubes with cheep plywood, and rented each out for storage. It wasn’t terribly exotic any longer. And you just walked down ordinary stairs to get to it.
4. A subject I’ll go into much more detail about next week, I think!
Dust jacker of the first edition of Bradbury’s collection, R is for rocket.I don’t remember when I first read a story by Ray Bradbury.
That’s not quite right. The sentence is true, but it doesn’t convey the full meaning. It’s equally true that I cannot remember a time when I didn’t know about Ray Bradbury’s incredible stories. He isn’t the only author who falls into the category. Since my Mom read to me from her favorite two authors: Agatha Christie and Robert Heinlein, since I was a baby as part of her plan to make sure I learned to talk correctly, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about Heinlein or Christie. And it’s more than slightly likely that Mom read some Bradbury in there at one point, so that might account for it…Continue reading I is for Imagination – more of why I love sf/f→
I was watching a recording of a football game Sunday night after a day spent with friends role-playing in 19th Century Scotland when I saw the first “Oh, no! Not Bowie” go by on twitter. So at least I didn’t hear the news of David Bowie’s death while I was laying half-asleep while the clock radio played news before I had to get up for work. Which is, unfortunately, how I heard about Alan Rickman. This hasn’t been a great week, obviously. But I saw one reaction this morning that helped:
Yes, let’s all be bold and creative and weird as hell.
It wouldn’t be correct to say the David Bowie was my hero, though in many important ways he was. He was also so much more. I wish that I had been bold enough during the height of his Glam Rock period to have been a Bowie fan. Make no mistake, I liked his work a lot. The first song I remember liking by Bowie was “Starman” which didn’t become much of a hit in the U.S. in 1972, but how could I not like it, since it seemed to have a sci fi theme?
Then I saw him on TV. Back the the 70s there were a lot of musical/comedy variety shows on prime time, and Bowie appeared on one of those. I don’t remember what song he sang. What I do remember was that he was dressed in something that flashed and glittered, and that his hair was in a style I had never seen on any human before, and he had face paint. When I try to visualize it, the colors keep changing, which means this was before we got out first color TV (which happened when I was 15 years old).
I was mesmerized. I had no idea a man could look like that, dress like that, and move like that while singing. I had seen men in movies and TV in weird costumes, and even in certain kinds of drag, but nothing like this. And then my dad growled, “Who is that cocksucking freak? What are you watching?”
Throughout my childhood, any time that my dad was really, really angry at me—angry enough that he’d grab something club-like to beat me with rather than just slap or punch me around—one of the things he called me was “cocksucker.” And for most of those years I had no idea what the word meant. From his tone of voice and actions while calling me that, I knew that it was a horrible, awful, vile thing—but that was it. By the time of this TV incident, I knew what the word meant, and I knew that literally it was true about me. But I also knew that my dad wasn’t the only person who thought it was the most awful thing a boy could be. I knew with absolute certainty that if any family member, or any of the people at church or school found out it was true about me, that my life would be over. Probably literally.
And Dad had just called this singer on TV (that I was finding so fascinating) a cocksucker. I knew, immediately, that I could never, ever let dad know that I thought David Bowie’s music was good—let alone admit to my fascination with how he looked! I don’t know exactly what I said in answer to Dad. I probably said the name of the variety show we were watching, and I know I said something about not liking the freaky guy at all, and hoped they got to someone else, soon.
A couple of years later, I saw a story in a magazine about a new movie coming soon, The Man Who Fell to Earth, based on a sci fi novel by the same name, starring David Bowie. I owned a paperback copy of the book, and had read it and enjoyed it. Immediately, seeing some photos of Bowie in makeup for the film as an alien who comes to Earth, I realized he was perfect for the role. I dug out the book and re-read it, imagining the alien looking and talking like Bowie. I went from simply liking the book to loving it.
The movie wasn’t a big hit, so never made it to the theatre in the small town where we lived. But I kept imagining it, based on the novel and those pictures, for years.
In the 80s, when I was in my twenties, Bowie’s music videos were among my favorites. And then the movie Labyrinth came out, and I and a bunch of my sci fi nerd friends went to see it in the theatre. I bought the soundtrack album. It was around the time, some months later, when I bought my own copy of Labyrinth on videotape when I realized that I could safely purchase regular Bowie albums. I hadn’t lived with or even near my dad since just before my 16th birthday, but that initial fear of being recognized as queer if I bought any Bowie music lingered. It didn’t help when Bowie described himself as gay in an interview in 1978 (something he later didn’t exactly renounce, but did say wasn’t accurate). Ironically, I owned lots of Queen and Elton John music in my teens, and it never occurred to me that anyone would infer anything about my sexuality from those.
Anyway, I picked of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and listened to it so often, I wore out the cassette tape. I started acquiring some of his other albums on disc, both the older ones and the albums from the 80s.
Eventually I also finally saw The Man Who Fell to Earth. Although by that time, I had been imagining how the movie went so vividly, that I thought I had managed to see it somehow. The actual film didn’t live up to my imagination in many ways. Except Bowie himself. He was magical and ethereal and totally believable as the alien trying to pass as a human.
And by the time I was buying Bowie and admitting I liked him, I was also in the process of coming out. Which is appropriate. Knowing Bowie existed—both the singer who gave me “The Width of a Circle,” “Moonage Daydream,” “Starman,” “Space Oddity,” and “Suffragette City” and the actor who played the Man Who Fell to Earth—kept alive the idea that maybe a freak like me could have a happy and full life during those dark closeted years. He was one of people who saved my life.
Alan Rickman didn’t come into my awareness until my late twenties, when I saw Die Hard for the first time in theatres. He was awesome, of course, as he was in every role I saw him in, afterward. So he didn’t have the same impact on my formative years as Bowie did. But his work touched my adult life in profound ways, as well.
I don’t like thinking of the world without either of them.
Harrison Ford as Han Solo in the original Star Wars. (Click to embiggen)I was a high school student in the small town of Longview when Star Wars first came out. I saw it on opening night, thanks to a couple of older friends who were even bigger science fiction fans. They drove me down to Beaverton, Oregon, (which was the closest place with a full-sized wide screen and Dolby sound at the time) on opening night, insisting that I’d love this film I had never heard of.
They were right. A lot of people loved it.
It wasn’t really original. The movie was a loving homage to the pulp magazine adventure stories and serial movies of the 30s and 40s. It didn’t have anything profoundly new philosophically to say. The special effects were better than we were used to seeing, but otherwise it just told an old-fashioned story. You knew who the good guys and the bad guys were. The heroes were confronted with a series of obstacles to overcome, and they worked hard to win the day.
In that way, it was an oasis in the desert. Over a decade before the movie came out, “legitimate literature” had embraced the modernist school. Narrative (storytelling) was considered “unrealistic” and “naïve.” Modernist writers abandoned plot and character development for style and grand themes. Resolution was replaced with ambiguity.
That listless ambiguity had infected a lot of pop culture. To be fair, in the U.S. at least we had good reason to be despondent. The economy had tanked. Inflation was out of control, lots of people were out of work, and even more were under-employed. We had finally admitted what a pointless quagmire the war in Viet Nam had become, so closely on the heels of the national embarrassment of the Watergate scandal and the ouster of President Nixon (itself following not the long after Vice President Agnew had resigned and pled guilty to tax evasion charges). And victories of the civil rights movement seemed to have produced more backlash than noticeable improvements in the lives of ordinary people.
By 1977 most of popular culture had been tainted by modernist angst. Many of the films and novels of the day accentuated style, mood, and setting, and had endings that left the audience wondering what had happened. Star Wars brought plot, heroes, and villains back in style. And none too soon, in my opinion. There’s something comforting and satisfying about a story that begins with a problem, builds to a climax, and resolves things in the end.
Not to say that some of the other types of stories aren’t fun from time to time.
Star Wars was the perfect combination of fun, adventure, struggle against a seemingly unbeatable foe, and triumph. With space ships and blasters and energy swords thrown in for good measure. It’s not really science fiction, because the attempts it makes at science are laughably wrong. It follows the conventions of 30s science fiction in that regard. It’s space opera, following the rules of epic fantasy with the accoutrements of science fiction. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
The Empire Strikes Back was a much darker story, and as a middle chapter in a continuing tale, its ending wasn’t triumphant. But it still told a really good tale. There were resolution of some issues, character arcs advanced, and the open issues were daunting problems, but with a hope that they could be resolved. It was a superior movie to Star Wars in every way, but was still firmly built from the foundation laid by the previous movie. Return of the Jedi was fun—flawed, but fun. It wasn’t as good a move as Empire, but it still worked, and it paid off in at least an acceptable way on all of the cliffhangers of the previous films. Don’t get me wrong, some of the pay-offs were fantastic, I’m just admitting that not all were perfect.
Star Wars (which I hate referring to as “Episode IV – A New Hope”) still remains an especially bright shining beacon in my personal firmament. It made me love the idea of science fiction and fantasy in movies, again. It gave me a new celebrity crush (if you were a queer boy watching the first film and didn’t swoon for Han Solo I don’t know what’s wrong with you!). It gave me characters to aspire to be like: Obi Wan, Luke, Leia (yes, Leia! Seriously! Go watch those scenes with Leia and Darth, or the moment she takes the blaster away from one of the men, shoots open a vent cover, and says, “Someone has to save our skins. Into the garbage chute, fly boy!” and tell me she isn’t bad ass!)…
I love Star Wars. I loved it so much that the first summer it was in theatres, I drove to a theatre in another state 13 times to re-watch it. Not to mention seeing it at a local theatre, later watching it on cable, and eventually on tape again and again. It was a life changing experience.
But I must admit that the modernists were right in some ways. The traditional narrative form is seldom the way real life works out. The difference between real life and fiction is that fiction has to make sense. In real life, we don’t always get the clear-cut endings where the heroes defeat the villains and go on to live happily ever after:
The friend who drove that night when I first saw Star Wars, 38 years ago, is dead. James Curtis Bruce died from complications of AIDS at the age of 36.
Another friend, who drove us down to see the opening of Empire, has also passed away. Lawrence Lee Church died of an anueurysm at the age of 34.
I had admired and looked up to both of them as “big brothers” during a very important part of my life. Jim was a lot like the character of Han Solo, while Larry had more in common with Yoda.
I miss them both.
Sometimes we all wish that life was more like a good, fun movie.
Font Folly 