There were several good values in the art book field this year, including The Art of James Christensen: A Journey of the Imagination (Greenwich Workshop), James Christensen; Ship of Dreams, Dean Morrissey (Abrams/Mill Pond Press); The Fantastic Art of Jacek Yerka, Jacek Yerka (Morpheus International); Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art (Underwood Books), edited by Cathy Burnett and Arnie Fenner, a sort of “Best of the Year” compilation of last year’s fantastic art, an interesting concept; Virgil Finlay’s Far Beyond (Charles F. Miller), Virgil Finlay; Mermaids and Magic Shows (Paper Tiger), David Delamare; Horripilations: The Art of J. K. Potter (Paper Tiger), J. K. Potter; and, just in case you had any doubts, a cartoon book proving that Gahan Wilson is Still Weird (Forge). Mention should be made here of a couple of unusual items: the black-humored Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book (Turner) by Terry Jones and Brian Froud, which is just what it says that it is, complete with Pressed Fairies that fall out of the book when you open it, which can get you some odd looks in bookstores; and I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay (Warner Aspect), by Harlan Ellison—as I mentioned the text under novels, I suppose it’s only fair to mention the artwork here, and, in fact, the illustrations, by newcomer Mark Zug, are stunning, vivid and painterly, and suggest that Zug could perhaps rival the accomplishments of a Michael Whelan if he continues to work in the field of fantastic art.
There were scads of books this year about Star Trek in one or the other of its incarnations, including biographies of Gene Roddenberry and various cast members, but I’m not going to bother to list them here. If you want to find them all, all you have to do is go into your local bookstore, where, no doubt, they will be piled up in stacks halfway to the ceiling.
Turning to the general genre-related nonfiction field, there was a fair amount of stuff this year that will probably be of interest to most genre readers. Perhaps the scariest such item is the hair-raising The Hot Zone (Random House), which tells the frightening story of how the ultra-deadly virus Ebola Zaire—which is not only highly contagious, but kills nine out of ten of its victims, very rapidly—almost got loose in the general population of Washington, D.C., in 1989, a disaster that could have killed tens of millions of people nationwide (the recently released film, Outbreak, is obviously inspired by this incident); you won’t sleep well nights after reading this one, especially when you realize that a successful outbreak of Ebola could happen at any time—and that, if it did, there would be very little authorities could do to stop the spread of the virtus. Ebola is only one of the biological catastrophes laying in wait for us that are described in The Coming Plague (Farrar Straus Giroux), by Laurie Garrett, which also deals with everything from the recent outbreaks of so-called “flesh-eating bacteria” to the spread of Hanta virus and drug-resistant tuberculosis, and on to the terrifying possibility that soon bacteria will develop resistance to all known antibiotics, something that is already close to happening, as antibiotics become useless one after the other, with appalling speed. Reading these books emphasizes again how precarious is our existence upon this earth; you don’t need an atomic war or the impact of a dinosaur-killer asteroid to wipe out the human race (or, at the very least, destroy much of our present civilization)—all you need is a killer virus striking into a population that has no immunity for it, something that becomes more and more possible in these days of jet travel between continents, when someone exposed in Africa or South America to a rare virus that’s never made it out of the jungle before can be coughing in an airport waiting room in New York City a few hours later (a theory unsettling like this—minus the jet planes and the airplane waiting rooms, of course—is now being advanced by some scientists to explain what really killed the dinosaurs, with the famous asteroid strike reduced to being just the coup de grace). After these harrowing scenarios, the benign future of space exploration and colonization mapped out in Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (Random House), by Carl Sagan, seems almost wistfully Utopian; assuming that human civilization can manage to turn aside or survive the various biological/ecological/social catastrophes that are lying in wait for it in the next few decades, though, Sagan offers a reasonable blueprint for what we ought to do in space and why we ought to do it, and this book is certainly a must for anyone interested in the exploration of space, or who believes in the hopeful future humanity could achieve there—which probably still includes a majority of genre readers, even in these fearful End-of-the-Millennium days. Another fascinating book that will probably be of interest to most genre readers is The Human Animal: A Personal View of the Human Species (Crown), by Desmond Morris, an examination of the biological basis for human behavior, and the instinctual/biological reasons why human cultures and social institutions have evolved in the way that they have. Not everyone will agree with everything Morris has to say here—he tends to generalize too widely from too little data in some places, and has a distinctly “human” tendency to ignore or downplay things that don’t agree with his theory—but the book is absolutely packed with fascinating information (did you know, for instance, that there are two kinds of sperm, with two distinctly different functions, released in the human male ejaculation? Well, you would if you’d read this book!), and much of Morris’s theorizing is not only ingenious but convincing—reading the book, for instance, has swayed me toward giving a lot more credibility to the theory that humanity evolved from shoreline-dwelling semiaquatic apes, a highly controversial theory that I had considered unlikely before, but for which Morris musters a formidable body of logical evidence. Another controversial book that gleefully attempts to overturn many of today’s “accepted” scientific theories is Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Addison-Wesley), by Kevin Kelly, which challenges such cherished genre notions as the idea that the human mind and personality can be succesfully “uploaded” into a computer, and even dares to champion a modified form of that most-sneered-at theory of the 20th Century, Lamarckian evolution, which may not be quite as totally discredited as most people think. It may be that in these two books we are getting a preview of the coming paradigm-shifts that will establish the new scientific consensus of the 21st Century—until the next paradigm-shift comes along to destroy it, of course! (For instance, our understanding of cosmology has just been destroyed by recent astronomical observations nobody can as yet understand or reconcile with current theory, leaving just about everything in question, including such scientific dogma as the Big Bang Theory of creation, which had been sacrosanct throughout the last half of the century. These are certainly “interesting times” for science, with many of the accepted paradigms under attack, and that makes for interesting reading for us.) Another book that is jam-packed with fascinating data, Ancient Inventions (Ballantine Books), by Peter James and Nick Thorpe, may be a bit further removed from the central concerns of the field, but will probably interest many genre readers anyway, dealing as it does with the technologies of the ancient world, many of them turning out to be surprisingly “modern”—for instance, they were using steam engines in ancient Greece, electric batteries in ancient Iraq, flush-toilets in ancient Crete, and condoms in ancient Rome long before their present-day equivalents were invented! Also richly informative and immensely entertaining is The Cartoon History of the Universe II (Doubleday), by Larry Gonick, a compilation of volumes 8 through 13 of Gonick’s famous comic book series. The quality of the artwork in this series sharply declined after volume 6 in the original sequence, unfortunately, but the text still remains funny, erudite, insightful, and amazingly well-researched—in fact, if you read this volume and its predecessor, you will know far more about history and the roots of culture than (alas) the average college graduate.
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1994 is being touted as a record year for genre films, at the box office, at least, although most of them didn’t impress me much artistically. And, if you limit your definition of “genre” films to “science fiction” films, you find that genre films really didn’t even do all that well at the box o
ffice, either. Most of the “genre” films that made a lot of money in 1994 were fantasy films—the blockbuster animated film The Lion King (which has already earned enough to win it a place on the highest-grossing-films-of-all-time list), The Santa Clause, the Flintstones, The Mask, Interview With the Vampire … even Forrest Gump and Schwarzenegger’s True Lies, which, while not genre films in the accepted sense, were certainly fantasies of some sort. If you look just at science fiction films, as opposed to fantasy films, the year begins to look less successful, even by money-earning standards. Star Trek Generations, the long-awaited film combining the casts of the original Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, was the biggest grosser among the science fiction films, and even it, although it did okay, didn’t elicit the kind of monumental box office–blockbuster business that it had been hoped it would attract. In fact, reaction to Star Trek Generations in general has been surprisingly lackluster, with most of the hardcore Star Trek fans I’ve talked to either disliking it outright or, at best, not responding to it with much enthusiasm—even those who liked it the most seem to be only lukewarm about it. (Considering the lackluster response to Star Trek Generations, there has been some talk about whether or not there will be another Star Trek theatrical film; if there isn’t, then Paramount, which deliberately scuttled the highly successful Star Trek: The Next Generation in order to move the cast into theatrical films, may have, ironically enough, killed this cash cow and wasted a highly popular ensemble cast for nothing.) Next down the list as a money earner was Stargate, which seems to have aroused even less enthusiasm, being widely regarded as a handsomely mounted film with great special effects, poor writing, and a badly muddled plotline. Reaction was even poorer to Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, a film version of the classic SF novel that emphasized the gooshey horror-movie, Alien-like aspects of the storyline, and that was generally felt to be a disappointment, in spite of a good performance by Donald Sutherland. Timecop was a somewhat slicker and more intelligent version of the usual Jean-Claude Van Damme film, which still allowed plenty of room for Jean-Claude to beat people up. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (which can be considered to be SF if you wink at the science), a well-intentioned attempt to return to an at least somewhat more “authentic” version of the classic story, flopped badly at the box office. Junior, a man-gets-pregnant comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, was another box office bomb. And that was about it for science fiction films this year.
Not really much of a year for genre films then, if you exclude fantasy films—and even most of the fantasy films, with the possible exception of The Lion King, were not terribly successful artistically (did anyone really need a live-action version of The Flintstones?), however much money they pulled in. (And, of course, there were also fantasy films that did mediocre-to-poor box office business this year, including The Shadow, a misguided remake of Miracle on 34th Street, and Indiana Jonesish live-action version of The Jungle Book, the combined live-action and animated feature The Pagemaster, and the animated film The Swan Princess.)
All of the big-budget blockbuster films that were promised last year are still looming somewhere over the horizon: the new Star Wars movie, the new Indiana Jones movie, the new Stanley Kubrick SF movie, the new Batman movie, Kevin Costner’s Waterworld (already the most expensive movie ever made, and still climbing, and being referred to derisively in the industry as Fishtar or Kevin’s Gate), the Jurassic Park sequel, and so forth. Maybe we’ll actually see some of them next year.
Turning to television, the big story of the year was the launching of the new Star Trek series, Star Trek: Voyager, which in turn was used to launch the new Paramount network. I have mixed feelings about Star Trek: Voyager. I didn’t much warm to Kate Mulgrew (an actress I’ve never much liked anyway) as Captain Janeway (although, to be fair, many other people do seem to have liked her). However, I did like many of the other cast members, who seem to have quite a bit of potential as performers, particularly the actor who plays Kim, the actor who plays the little warthog-like alien, and the actor who plays the Vulcan Security Officer. And the shows are already more entertaining and action-oriented than the dull-as-dishwater Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. On the other hand, the writing and plotting on “Voyager” have so far ranged from mediocre to downright bad, with the premiere episode in particular having holes in the plot-logic you could fly a starship through. And Star Trek: Voyager also suffers from a high level of scientifically illiterate gobbledegook and technical double-talk, an even higher level than is standard for most Star Trek shows—the episode wherein a character’s lungs are stolen and then successfully replaced with a pair of “hologram lungs,” for instance, is already infamous among Trek fans, as is the show wherein the ship is receiving messages beamed “out of the event horizon of a black hole” [!].
So, I don’t know. The production values are up to the usual high standard, the crew is likeable, and a few of the actors seem to have the potential to be effective and entertaining performers. If they can only improve the writing, the show may have a shot at being worth watching. Standards of quality in the writing seem to have slumped in the last few years throughout the entire Star Trek empire, with poor writing also being responsible for blunting a lot of the potential of the Star Trek Generations theatrical film, and producer Rick Berman really should know better, since he was the one mostly responsible for improving the quality of the writing on Star Trek: The Next Generation in the first place—improving it to the point where, at its height several seasons back, it was very probably the best science fiction show on television, and maybe the best ever put on television. But the level of writing quality was dropping fast in the seasons just before the cancellation of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and never have risen to a terribly high level in the first place on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, or, so far, on Star Trek: Voyager. You can do without expensive special effects if you have to in a science fiction show, but you can’t do without good writing, and I think that this is a lesson that needs to be relearned by those in charge of the Star Trek empire.
To be fair, we should give Star Trek: Voyager a reasonable chance to improve. After all, Star Trek: The Next Generation was so bad as to be nearly unwatchable in its first few seasons, and then improved dramatically later on, and it’s not impossible that the same thing could happen with Star Trek: Voyager. Already, in its unimproved-upon form, I like it better than Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. (The question has also been raised if Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager can hold the loyalty of the core Star Trek audience over the long haul, now that the immensely popular Star Trek: The Next Generation, the direct descendant of the original Star Trek show, is off the air. It’s really too early to tell, but neither of the new Trek shows seem to be as popular with the Trek fans I’ve talked to as Star Trek: The Next Generation was, for what that’s worth.)
There were plenty of other genre shows on television this year, perhaps more than ever before, most of them unimpressive. One of the new shows, Earth 2, had an interesting premise, but quickly bogged down in a morass of overly complex soap-opera-like plotting, with the endlessly trekking characters never really seeming to get anywhere or accomplish anything. SeaQuest DSV, frankly, stinks, as does a new show called Space Precinct, and as did the already-cancelled RoboCop. TekWar has its supporters, but hasn’t impressed me much. M.A.N.T.I.S., Highlander, and Forever Knight are just live-action comic books, although M.A.N.T.I.S. has a few clever touches. Mystery Science Theater 3000 seems to have grown a bit stale, and Northern Exposure is clearly on its last legs. Babylon 5 survived a shaky patch last year, and seems to be doing better this year; it also, against the odds, seems to be slowly winning against its direct rival, a show very similar in concept and format, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—or, at least, most people I’ve talked to seem to prefer Babylon 5 to Deep Space Nine; I suspect that the ratings are still higher for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, though, since it has the momentum of the Star Trek empire behind it. The Adventures of Briscoe County, Jr. d
ied, in spite of an enthusiastic cult following, and Lois and Clark survived, although, at year’s end, it was rumored to be on the chopping block. Speaking of cult followings, The X-Files probably has the most enthusiastic cult following of any genre show this side of Star Trek, and many people will go so far as to call it the best genre show on television; I myself will admit that it is usually smart, sassy, and stylish, and sometimes even scary, although the “science” is often absurd, and sometimes their tongues get pushed a little too deeply into their cheeks. After going through a bad patch late last year where it looked as though it would be cancelled, The X-Files has come back strong this year, even being featured on the cover of TV Guide, and looks as if it might grow into a genuine hit.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 6
