Future perfect: 'welcome to paradox.'

Theodore Sturgeon was one of the truly fine writers of science fiction, and at a s-f convention in the late fifties - well before the genre became academically respectable - he shocked his audience by announcing what has come to be known, among fans and writers, as "Sturgeon's Law." "Let's face it," he began his talk, "90 percent of science fiction is crap." And, after the expected gasp from the assembly, he continued: "Ninety percent of everything is crap!"

Wise words from a good man; though, if Sturgeon had ever written about the quality of s-f on TV, he would probably have ratcheted up the crap-quotient. The simple, sad fact is that TV has done very poorly by s-f. Oh, yeah, there's "Star Trek" - which the mighty Harlan Ellison refers to as "Star Dreck" - and its latter-day clones, and there's Rod Serling's apparently never-to-be-out-of-reruns "Twilight Zone." But neither of those is really s-f. "Trek" is essentially a serial, like "Bonanza," "Ally McBeal," or (the admittedly brilliant) "Law and Order": Each week the same cadre of characters encounters a problem, and each week resolves it, so that the next week they can resolve another one (as in, "Captain, it's an alien life form of pure energy, something we've never encountered before"; as in, "Oh, stuff it, Spock"). And "Zone," except for maybe ten or twelve episodes of real force, is a collection of anecdotes, all ending, as in the worst of Poe, in a punchline (They're really in hell, see? They were on Earth all along, see? The monster on the airplane wing was real, see? Und so weiter).

They're not s-f, in other words, they're "sci-fi," a term that makes aficionados and writers alike cringe: because "sci-fi" is the idiot twin of "s-f," concerned not with the chances for moral survival in an uncertain technological future, but with the glories of gadgetry and the funny little, mean little jokes our gadgets might choose to play upon us.

This is all by way of celebrating a TV series, new this year, that just might be the first honest, canny, and responsible meeting of TV and s-f at their mutual best. It's called "Welcome to Paradox," and it runs on - the irony has not escaped me - the Sci-Fi Channel.

Now since the Sci-Fi Channel geared up, maybe a decade ago, it's been mainly a sci-fi (not s-f) fan's dustbin: reruns of schlockmeister fifties films, godawful TV shows, and, more recently, original, made-for-TV movies and series, almost all of them powerful demonstrations of the major premise of Sturgeon's Law. In other words: dire.

What a surprise, then, to find, this season, "Welcome to Paradox" on the schedule. Produced by R. W. Vincent and conceived, and mainly written, by Jeremy Lipp - of whom I haven't heard before - it's a show that almost justifies the whole damn channel, maybe the real entry of sf at its best into the medium. The major networks could never make a profit out of a show this smart (remember the fate of "Nothing Sacred"?), but the coterie audience for a sci-fi may be just large enough to keep it afloat.

Here's the setup. In the future city of Betaville (a nod to Godard's classic s-f film "Alphaville"?) technology has triumphed, and triumphed altogether. What you want, that's what you get: clone yourself as a younger man and then .transplant your brain back into the young you? Find a way to erase - until you want them back - all memories that torment you, all your sins and failures? Make a virtual-reality recording of the experience of your lover falling in love with you, and feed it to your head forever and forever after she leaves? That's Betaville.

The problem, of course, is what you do with yourself, what you do with your life, after you've achieved - or been given - that absolute control of your life: after you've become god. Welcome to paradox: welcome to paradise, or is it?

That's the very simple, and I believe, startlingly (for TV) grown-up thesis of this series. "Betaville" is not really a place at all, at least not like the too-too-solid bridge of the Starship Enterprise or the ooga-booga atmospherics of the Twilight Zone. Betaville is, in fact, the domain of s-f, its very self, where we explore the morality of our technology or, if you wish, the humanity of our "humanity."

H.G. Wells, the founder of the feast and one of my few idols, said early and often that the central problem of our century would be trying to keep our ethics apace with our technological advancement. It's a pronouncement that's become a well-worn coin among our politicians - the difference being that Wells took it seriously. Twenty years ago, when I was a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., a lecturer from one of the local think tanks explained it this way: We can do anything we want, in the sense that we can start making plans to accomplish the goal; but, time being time and money money, we can't do everything we want. Colonize Mars? You got it. Banish AIDS forever? No biggie. But not both, not at the same time. Virtual omnipotence, that is, entails nearly paralyzing moral ambiguity: welcome to paradox.

And that paradox - a damn sight more than the question of whether Luke Skywalker will kill Darth Vader - has dominated the best American s-f at least since August 6,1945. As the host of "Paradox" (Michael Phillips) asks at the end of one episode: "Is technology a blessing or a curse - or can we now no longer know the difference?"

It's such a simple and such a crucial concept upon which to hang the series. And yet, remarkably, no TV show I know of (and I watch a lot of TV) has had the wit to do it before this one.

Mike Resnick, a wonderful s-f writer, argues that s-f is essentially a short-story medium, not a novelistic one. There are, he says, and he's right, maybe ten great s-f novels but surely hundreds of great s-f stories. The reason for this, I think, is that s-f is essentially parable rather than fully fledged narrative, descended from Aesop rather than Homer. Put it this way. Narrative gives us the thick psychic soup that lies behind and below all our crucial choices; but parable gives us the radish-crisp moment of those choices. Narrative, like the mystery novel, is ethical (why did he do it?) and parable, like s-f, is moral (what does it mean that he did it?): a reason, by the bye, for considering Kafka one of the premier s-f writers of the century.

Each episode of "Paradox" is based on a short story by one of the many - so many - brilliant s-f writers currently working in the field, and each, or each i've seen, is a perfect little articulation of the base-line dilemma we all face as we surf, or are swept, into the twenty-first century.

Check your local listings and visit Betaville. You'll see the first wedding of science fiction and the medium - TV - science fiction predicted. And, with luck, you'll find yourself conflicted.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning