20th Century Science Fiction and Fantasy

This is a huge topic. I have read and been exposed to a lot of science fiction and fantasy; granted, most of it was post-1980, but a lot of it dates from earlier, too. For brevity's sake, I'll stick with those stories which had the most impact on me.

The Arabian Nights. Pick any translation and sit down for a great adventure. I recommend getting both an abridged edition to share with the kids in your life, and an unabridged (ie, sexy, violent) original adult version. Most people are only familiar with "Aladdin" and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," but there is a lot more to The Arabian Nights than just those stories — and plenty of heroic women. For a film version — well, there have been lots. I recommend Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944) and the Harryhausen epic The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958).

Leigh Brackett is a forgotten name among modern sci-fi and fantasy aficionados, which is too bad. Brackett was the author of dozens of Golden Age science fiction and fantasy short stories, novellas and novels. Most of Brackett's longer stories focus on John Eric Stark, an Earth child raised by natives of Mercury; as an adult, he becomes a bounty hunter/mercenary/jack-of-all-trades, having adventures all over the solar system and beyond. (Oh, and did I mention that her novel No Good From a Corpse is the basis for the film The Big Sleep, for which Brackett also co-authored the screenplay?)

Buck Rogers is most familiar to me in his 1979-1981 tv series incarnation. Even as a kid, the show was a silly, guilty pleasure. I didn't watch it for Rogers, or even the dopey robot. I watched Buck Rogers because it had a princess; even if she was a villain, she was still a princess. I'm not sure when I found out just how old the character really was, and that there had been movie and comic book versions. Sadly, I have yet to see any of those. (Really, someday I will buy the collected comic strips.)

The Crystal Gryphon by Andre Norton was one of the first serious fantasy novels that I bought for myself, at a school book fair. The cover caught my eye: a beautiful woman holding a pendant with an ethereal gryphon rearing above her (not sure, but I think it was a Vallejo cover). It had a deep impact on me. I loved the fact that the two protagonists/love interests were treated as equals by the author, but not by their society; the dichotomy was striking. I eventually tracked down Gryphon in Glory and Gryphon's Eyrie, but the first will always hold a special place in my memory.

Fantasy Island was another guilty childhood pleasure. Okay, it was hokey. But it was so much fun to watch these hapless tourists get their wishes fulfilled — and have to deal with the unexpected consequences. There was always a life lesson to be learned, and sometimes a bit of adventure. (I think I must be one of three people who watched the short-lived 1998 series, starring Malcolm McDowell; I thought it was awesome.)

The Flash Gordon film of 1980 was my first exposure to that character and his universe. It was ... well, at the time, I loved it. As I got older, I would wince in embarrassment every time I thought about the film. But, I have to say, I'm starting to appreciate its unique charms as I get older. The music was energetic, the sets and costumes were spectacular. There was plenty of humor and adventure, and the Hawkmen were a riot. I have yet to go back and read the original comic strips, but, I promise, I will one of these days.

I Dream of Jeannie — um. I'll admit that I loved it as a kid, and that's all I'm going to say.

CL Moore is another sadly overlooked (or forgotten) Golden Age author. I am most familiar with two of her fantastic creations: Jirel of Joiry and Northwest Smith. Jirel is a fiery-haired, fiery-tempered knight, her father's only heir and thus protector of her realm. And she does protect it, against everything from mad wizards to alien Gods. All five Jirel stories have been collected as Black God's Kiss (Paizo Publishing). Northwest Smith is Moore's sci-fi action hero, sort of a cross between Han Solo and The Man With No Name; his universe, appropriately, is a sometimes wild and lawless place of miraculous technology and ancient races. Check out Paizo Publishing's Northwest of Earth: The Complete Northwest Smith, which contains thirteen stories. (Oh, and "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," which she co-wrote with husband Henry Kuttner, is the basis for The Last Mimzy.)

When I was a child I can remember catching the reruns of shows like Batman and Flash Gordon with a certain amount of glee. The thought of a superhero fascinated me. Being a child I was immune to the cheese factor these shows were ripe with because of limitations at the time.

When a new Flash Gordon series was announced, I went around singing Queen for days, annoying most of my co-workers that apparently have never heard that particular Queen song. I waited anxiously and when the first show aired I was pleasantly surprised. It definitely was not the Flash of old, but it was entertaining. They shook up the premise, set it in a more accessible setting and gave the characters more depth than the original.

Unfortunately, like many sci-fi shows I enjoy, it doesn't appear that this show will be returning for another season. Still, it's worth looking up and getting a taste of something old made new again.

This is a huge topic, even when whacking out Star Trek, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. So, what's going to follow is the highlight reel.

In terms of SF movies? I remember an independent LA station (I think it was Channel 9) showing Godzilla and a goodly amount of low-budget 1950s and 1960s SF movies on Saturday afternoons.

I was about 10 when I discovered and read both Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea Trilogy and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Fry, read CS Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia to us, and I enjoyed it immensely, but Earthsea and Prydain were the first fantasy books I picked up on my own. I don't know if I would have loved Earthsea as much if I had read the books in the right order. I started in the middle with The Tombs of Atuan. Arha was unlike any female character I'd ever read in a book, and to this day, I think that how LeGuin pulls the reader into Arha's world, into Arha's life, into all of those women's lives and then drops Trouble (aka "Ged") into the mix. For all that Tombs is a short book with a rather crisply paced plot, it's also an intensely character-driven book. In fact, all of the action rests on what choice Arha will make. Will she choose to continue serving the Nameless Ones, stuck out in the middle of the desert, all but forgotten, paid rote lip service by the Godking, told she's the most important, most sacred priestess, but having none of the authority that should go with it, or will she reject all that she's ever known and seek her own destiny? Needless to say I was sad to see that the third book had no Arha (now called Tenar) in it.

What I enjoyed about The Chronicles of Prydain is that a person not much older than I got to be important, and Princess Eilonwy was useful, and that the books were actually scary, unlike a lot of mainstream children's fantasy of the 1980s, which was watered down and sanitized to no end. (Dungeons and Dragons anyone?) I was shocked the point of not eating dinner the night I finished The Black Cauldron when a character actually died, and parts of The High King were so intense (mostly anything to do with the Cauldron Born) that I kept the lights on in my room. I credit the Chronicles of Prydain with making me ready to read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in sixth grade.

In junior high and high school, I read most of the SF and fantasy contemporary to the times: The Dragonlance books, Forgotten Realms (and I will still read anything FR if Artemis Entreri is in it), Piers Anthony, David Eddings, Louise Cooper ... and of course I saw all the fantasy and SF blockbusters of the day and somewhere in the middle of high school, a lot of Michael Moorcock came back into print. I speak of course of the Elric Saga.

Hot damn! And though I read all of Moorcock's other tales of the Eternal Champion, and I loved how he crossed them all over, and it was fun as hell to see Corum and Elric meet, none of them matched up to Elric, and a part of me will always love Elric's selfish doomed albino ass, and Moorcock for following through on making Elric's doom total and not pulling any punches. The end of the last book out-ragnaroks Ragnarok, I'm just sayin' is all.

Stephen King and J. Michael Straczynski both got me to read Alfred Bester's books by writing stories and creating characters that outright homaged him, and both flat-out said where they got their ideas. (Richard K. Morgan hasn't homaged Bester quite the same way those two have, but having read his books, his explorations of class, identity, and the evils of megacorporations, are very Besteresque.)

King's short story "The Long Jaunt" comes straight out of Bester's The Stars My Destination, which is one of the best, idea-dense, and most challenging novels I've ever read. (And the feminist in me shivers at the idea of upper class women being kept in jaunt-proof rooms for "their own protection." The whole book is a catalog of the "worst of Victorianism" in a way.)

Babylon 5 owes the entire Psi-Corps and the character of Bester to The Demolished Man, which I like a bit better than The Stars My Destination, partly because I like the character Ben Reich a skoosh better than Gully Foyle (even though Reich's goal is to commit murder and he's really an awful man, too). And even though Reich comes to an end that leaves me shuddering in horror, the novel ends with a paragraph I consider one of the most beautiful ever written:

I watched a lot of science fiction shows in the 1970s: the old Batman TV show, Battle of the Planets, and, naturally, Star Trek.

But there were only two shows that I was able to get my whole family to watch: The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman.

I'm not sure how I got my mother to let me have control of the television to watch The Six Million Dollar Man. It could have had something to do with Lee Majors, who looked quite fine back then. But whatever the reason, I was allowed to watch and the rest of the family had to be quiet about it. Given there were five of us and one television, this was a big deal.

Personally, I think it's because all of us loved the opening.

"She's breaking up! She's breaking up!"

"We can rebuild him, we can make him better than he was ...."

Cue really cool bionic music.

Steve Austin, our remade bionic hero, was sent on many different spy missions, all of which required him to use his new limbs and eye accompanied by that cool bionic music. Oddly, the bionic moves were done in slow-motion, rather than fast. I read much later that the producers of the show felt it was more dramatic that way, as speeding up the action looked silly. I do remember exactly when my mother got hooked on the show. It was the arrival of Lindsey Wagner as Jaime Sommers. She played Steve Austin's childhood sweetheart who came back into his life. As melodrama would have it, Jaime was injured horribly in an accident while skydiving and Steve insisted that Jamie be saved with the same procedure that had saved his life. And thus, the Bionic Woman was born. Unfortunately, Jamie's body didn't react well to her new bionics and started rejecting them. It drove her insane and Steve had to track her down and bring her back to the hospital.

Where she died.

Really died.

Until network executives apparently got a good look at the ratings for the two-part story and apparently decided that they'd killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

Jaime Sommers was brought back for her own show. The explanation was that she'd been in a coma, not dead, but Steve wasn't told because they didn't know if she'd ever recover. Once she did wake up, most of her memories were missing. She didn't remember Steve, she barely remembered her past life.

She spent much of the first season trying to figure out who she was, a storyline that added a lot of depth to the show and made it significantly different than the action adventure stories in The Six Million Dollar Man.

Of course, at the time, I was far more impressed by the fact that she could literally rip a phone book in half. Looking back, I also loved that Jaime was what we'd describe today as kick-ass but with a deep essential kindness. Too often in television and movies, kick-ass heroine means a women with a hard, cynical edge. Jaime combined her strength with her compassion.

Later, of course, Steve found out Jamie was alive but and he still loved her but she didn't remember him. Awkward. Still, they worked together when the network needed a crossover, most memorably in the Fembot episodes where John Houseman was in control of a giant weather machine that would perhaps destroy the world. This was a silly storyline but, again, it was the relationship between Jaime and Steve that made it work.

Plus, Lee Majors ran around for half an episode wearing nothing but his boxer shorts.

The later episodes of both shows got very silly (though the Sasquatch shows were fun in their own way), and they ended in a whimper, almost forgotten.

But I've always thought that it's no coincidence that Joss Whedon named his heroine Buffy Summers. Okay, different spelling. But still.

Flatland, pseudonymously written by Edwin Abbott Abbott under the name "A Square", is an odd sort of book. It's definitely science, and it is definitely fiction, but it is not a traditional sci-fi story.

Set in the two-dimensional world of Flatland, it is narrated by the lone Flatland resident who has seen the universe in three dimensions.

In part one of Flatland, the narrator describes the society he lives in. All Flatlanders are one of many geometrical figures: Triangles, Lines, Squares, Circles, Hexagons, etc. Each geometrical figure in its own special class, with irregular triangles and lines being the lowest class, with circles being the highest order of individuals.

The narrator continues, describing how life functions in a two-dimensional world, how people recognize each other when everyone looks like lines. He tell us about the history, education and interrelations of the various classes. How some classes rise and how some can never ascend.

In part two of Flatland, the narrator describes his dream journey to Lineland, a one-dimensional world and his struggles to convince the king of Lineland of the existence of two-dimensions.

Later, the narrator meets a Sphere, who appears as a circle in his world. Utterly baffled, the narrator attempts to grasp a three-dimensional world as described by the Sphere and finds himself suddenly looking down on Flatland itself. Converted, he returns to Flatland and attempts to convince others of what he knows and has seen.

Flatland is an utterly fascinating book, making geometry and mathematics literally life itself. Much like the narrator himself, we are transported to other worlds that are so alien to our own, but yet understandable and fascinating. A classic trope of science fiction that stands the test of time.

As these were the years I became the sci-fi loving girl that I am, it's hard to figure out what to say to sum it all up. Buck Rogers only sucked me in when Hawk was introduced. Aliens who didn't quite fit in were always my downfall.

I loved both Wonder Woman and The Bionic Woman with their strong, but still caring female characters. I was never a fan of the invisible jet, but I wanted to be bionic in the worst way. The newer versions of both are too harsh for me. Okay, perhaps more realistic, but I don't go to fantasy for realism. My favorite parts of Wonder Woman were the glimpses into Paradise Island. It was probably what started my love of archery. I vaguely remember a fantasy movie from back then based on Amazons trying to take over the country, but I can't remember the name.

Anyway, much of the newer stuff is too harsh for my liking. I prefer more escapism in my fantasy. It's about places like Fantasy Island where what you think you want, may not in fact be what you need. Or those fantastically bad fantasy movies that would show on Sunday afternoons. Give me a bad "B" movie any day. Perfection.