Friday Radio: Child's Play & Venus Is a Man's World (X Minus One)

"Child's Play"

Based on the story by William Tenn, originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, March 1947.

Originally broadcast on NBC, October 20, 1955.

"Venus Is a Man's World"

Based on the story by William Tenn, originally published in Galaxy, July 1951.

Originally broadcast on NBC, February 6, 1957.

Philip Klass, who, under his pseudonym William Tenn, was one of the greatest short fiction writers, and probably the greatest satirist of the Golden Age, died last Sunday at the age of 89. In his memory, we present radio adaptations of two of his stories.

Klass/Tenn wrote only two novels, both expansions of shorter works, and his entire output as a science fiction writer fills only two volumes, but he produced far more than his proportionate share of classics.

To name two... "The Liberation of Earth" (written in 1950) was a satire on the Korean War in which two warring alien races repeatedly "liberate" from each other the people of Earth... until there are none left. "Time in Advance" (written in 1956) explored the fascinating idea of gaining the right to commit a crime--even murder--provided a person serves the sentence first. Once he gets out... watch out.

According to Tenn/Klass in his 2001 collection Immodest Proposals, he wrote "Child's Play" in 1946 on a dare while serving as a purser on a cargo ship.

My brother had sent me the May issue of Astounding, containing my first published story, "Alexander the Bait," and... I showed it around quite proudly. My fellow officers, however, wondered why I made such a fuss over a printed tale by someone named William Tenn; again and again, I had to explain the concept of a pen name....

The first mate... took me to the purser's cabin and dumped me in a chair in front of my typewriter desk. "If you are really William Tenn and can write stories that get published," he said, waving a wobbly forefinger in the air, "prove it. Write one now."

And so he did, and "Child's Play" became Klass/Tenn's "second published story and... first science-fiction 'success,'" and his first anthologized story. It was also his first to be adapted for radio, on NBC's Dimension X in 1951. So why are we presenting the X Minus One version from over four years later? Well, I'll get to that reason in, oh, seven or eight weeks...

I was already considering doing "Venus Is a Man's World" (written in 1951) soon on Friday Radio, because, you know... Venus... our new edition of Between Worlds... etc., etc.

Tenn/Klass had this to say in 2001 about the story:

[Galaxy editor] Horace Gold was worried about publishing this one. He said it was a bit too much of a feminist story. He was not sure that feminist stories belonged in science fiction. As I said, it was 1951.

My favorite part of the story is how, in typical Tenn fashion, it turns the accepted on its head, and we realize how traditionally "feminine" qualities like emotionalism and intuition can just as easily be pinned on men instead.

Since this is, after all, the Thrilling Wonder Stories website, I'll point out that Klass/Tenn wrote four stories for the magazine, three of them in consecutive issues in 1948. Or maybe I should just say that Klass did, since the first, "Dud" (April 1948) went out as by Kenneth Putnam instead of William Tenn. The Tenn three (as it were) were "Consulate" (June 1948), "The Ionian Cycle" (August 1948), and "The Jester" (August 1951).

The Next Small Thing

This week, we've had news that ABC's creatively troubled remake of V will premiere with four episodes in November, then stay off the air until the 2010 Winter Olympics are over, in March.

Then NBC announced that Day One, originally slated as a 13-episode mid-season replacement, will run instead as a four-hour miniseries. The interesting part to me is that NBC based its decision on the notion that while they could effectively advertise Day One as event television, it would be a harder, prohibitively expensive, sell as a series.

Which got me thinking... is this the beginning of a new phenomenon in television: the sweeps month micro-season?

The longtime model of a 35-week season, with reruns scattered amongst 22 new episodes, has become increasingly uncommon for dramas. Partly it's due to increasing serialization of shows, which makes reruns potentially confusing for the more casual audience. We've become used in recent years to shorter blocks of all-new episodes, as with Lost and 24.

At the same time, networks have become more reluctant to commit to seasons of 22 episodes, increasingly preferring figures like 13, 16, or 17, even with successful series (as, again, with Lost). Partly, this ties into the serialization and seasons without reruns. Sweeps periods come in November, February, and May, making 17 (or occasionally 18) the number of weekly episodes needed to have a season premiere at the beginning of one sweeps period, and the season finale at the end of the next.

So why not take this maximization of sweeps months one step further, and, as it were, cut out the middlemonths? Imagine a series which premieres as a big November event with four episodes. If that goes well, it comes back with another four-episode event in February, and a final block of four in May.

Obviously, a network couldn't do a series like 24 that way (besides that they'd have to rename it 12), but I can easily picture a series model with four-episode plot arcs with a beginning and end unto themselves, but picking up from, and springboarding into, other arcs. Sort of a season along the plotting lines of a film trilogy (or, perhaps more to the point, a Star Wars trilogy, inasmuch as the aim would be to get renewed for another trilogy).

Or possibly I'm dreaming, and it's just the models of V and Day One which will catch on. The advantage to the V model of 13 episodes, shown in blocks of four and nine, is that if the first four do well, the network can air the remaining nine starting in late March, with the big season finale at the end of the May sweeps. If it doesn't, the network can start the second block in early March, and have it done before May sweeps.

The advantage to the Day One model (or, after its true originator, the Battlestar Galactica model) is that the network has only committed to four hours. If they don't do well, that's the end, at no additional cost.

With either model, the network could use the 17- or 18-episode sweeps-to-sweeps model for the series the next year.

Still, I keep thinking about the "event series" of sweeps-month micro-seasons. What network could resist the idea of, essentially, three premieres and three finales per season, all on sweeps weeks?

In any case, it looks like, when it comes to premiering a series, networks are looking to do more with less.

Well, We All Shine On

...And then, after saying how much I love science fiction, I started reading the SF news websites again, after neglecting them for a couple of months, and almost immediately, I got that depressed and futile feeling again.

Why is that? you may ask. Have you read much science fiction lately? I counter. If you haven't, let me sum it up for you: we're doomed, there's nothing we can do about it, and we deserve it, anyway. There. I've now saved you vital time you can spend doing something more helpful and energizing, like drowning yourself in the bathtub.

But, of course, I exaggerate. Not all science fiction is like that, thank goodness. But enough of it is that when I hear about a project like Shine, I heave a mighty sigh of relief. Shine is an upcoming anthology of... well, hell, go back to the source when you can, I say, and the press release says it so well:

SHINE is a collection of near-future, optimistic SF stories where some of the genre's brightest stars and some of its most exciting new talents portray the possible roads to a better tomorrow. Definitely not a plethora of Pollyannas (but neither a barrage of dystopias), SHINE will show that positive change is far from being a foregone conclusion, but needs to be hardfought, innovative, robust and imaginative. Most importantly, it aims to demonstrate that while times are tough and outcomes are uncertain, we can still bend the future in benevolent ways if we embrace change and steer its momentum in the right direction. Let's put the "can" back in "We can do it," and make our tomorrows SHINE.

The creator and editor of Shine is Jetse de Vries, for four and a half years editor of Interzone, which isn't one of your more fluffy and escapist magazines. So you know this isn't going to have starships zooming around all over the place, like... well, a lot of what I publish, actually. Nonetheless, I can assure you I'll be reading it with great interest when it comes out next year.

(There isn't an entry for it yet on Amazon. But I'm sure I'll be posting again about this anthology once you can pre-order it.)

In the meantime, check out the Shine blog at http://shineanthology.wordpress.com/. It has updates about the project, and intellectually/spiritually nourishing information about just now not-necessarily-doomed we all are.

(The blog is also where I got the illo, above, but I don't have the information to credit it more exactly.)

Gosh, a future that's worth working to achieve. Imagine that.

Philip José Farmer (1918-2009)

According to Wikipedia, science fiction and fantasy author Philip José Farmer died earlier today. He was best known for his role in introducing overt sexual themes into science fiction, elaborating on such famous characters and worlds in the public domain as Tarzan and Oz, and playing with auctorial voice by writing as such fictional authors as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s, Kilgore Trout and Harlan Ellison pseudonym Cordwainer Bird.

Thrilling Wonder Stories and its sister magazine Startling Stories played an important early role in his career. His controversial early novel The Lovers first appeared in Startling in August 1952 (see corner illustration) before being expanded for a book version in 1961. His novelet "Mother," in the April 1953 issue of Thrilling Wonder, explored Freudian themes as a stranded explorer becomes, in essence, both fetus and lover to an alien creature. A sequel, "Daughter," appeared in the Winter 1954 issue.

Perhaps his most popular work was the Riverworld cycle of stories and novels about a planet-wide river valley populated by every person who has ever lived and died. The Sci-Fi channel produced a TV movie/series pilot based on the cycle in 2001, and aired it in 2003.

His use of existing literary characters and worlds included fictional biographies of Tarzan and Doc Savage (in which he connects them genealogically to numerous other fictional characters), a novel in which Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan team up, a science fiction sequel to Moby Dick, a novel filling in the blanks of Around the World in Eighty Days, and a book about the adventures of Dorothy's barnstormer son in Oz. He also wrote authorized Tarzan and Doc Savage novels.

Under the name of Kilgore Trout, the brilliant but unrespected science fiction author who appears in a number of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr's, novels, he wrote Venus on the Half-Shell in 1975. He wrote numerous other "fictional author" stories, including, in a second remove from reality, one as by a character whom Farmer had created as Kilgore Trout in Venus.

A longtime Midwesterner, Farmer was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, and died in Peoria, Illinois, where he had spent most of his life.

YouTube Tuesday: The Prisonbear

As you may know from sites with a higher proportion of SF news-related content, Patrick McGoohan, probably best known as the star, creator, executive producer, and occasional writer and director of The Prisoner, died last Tuesday.

I just read his Wikipedia entry. I have to say I was surprised to learn he was married only once, from age 23 until his death. But I was probably more surprised to learn he returned to the role of Number Six in an episode of The Simpsons. I kind of pictured him as a humorless loner who was difficult to get along with... but then, it's just possible I was conflating him with the character.

Anyway, this being YouTube Tuesday, the important thing is, here's a little parody of/homage to The Prisoner, enacted by stuffed animals. Well, animals and... things.

Majel Barrett Roddenberry (1932-2008)

According to SyFy Portal and other online news sources, Majel Barrett Roddenberry died early Thursday morning after a long battle with leukemia.

She was with Star Trek from the beginning, playing the first officer of the Enterprise, the otherwise nameless Number One, in the original pilot episode. She was a semi-regular on the series in two roles, as Nurse Christine Chapel and as the voice of the ship's computer.

However, it was on Star Trek: The Next Generation that she came into her own as the "Auntie Mame of the galaxy," Lawaxana Troi, mother of regular character Deanna Troi. She also played the role on Deep Space Nine. On all the Trek series, she continued to voice various Federation computers to the very end (to date) of Star Trek on broadcast television, the finale of Enterprise in 2005.

Her final role in Star Trek, completed before her death, will be in the original series-reboot feature film, coming out next May, again as the Enterprise computer. The final Trek performance released during her lifetime was the Star Trek New Voyages episode "World Enough and Time," reprising the role of the original NCC-1701 Enterprise's computer.

She married Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry shortly after the end of the original series in 1969. Following his death in 1991, she was instrumental in bringing two of his unmade projects, Earth: Final Conflict and Andromeda, to television, where they enjoyed long runs.

I only ever saw her once in person, at a convention in Chicago in 1986. She happily delivered the news of the very positive preview figures for the then-upcoming Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and the first news about what became Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'll never forget how she raised goosebumps reading the Federation President's speech from Voyage Home, recounting the disaster that had befallen Earth and urging all listeners to avoid the planet "at all cost."

Forrest J Ackerman (1916-2008)

I'm sad to announce the death of Forrest J Ackerman, founder/editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, agent for the estates of many early science fiction authors, coiner of the term "sci-fi," and proud wearer of the sobriquets "Super-Fan" and "Mr. Science Fiction."

You can read the announcement on the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) website.

I knew Forry a bit. As you know, I interviewed him for Thrilling Wonder Stories, Volume 1. I was at his big 90th birthday party two years ago. Reprints I contracted with him in his capacity as estate agent have appeared in TWS, and will be appearing over the next several months. Like, I suspect, many people my age who knew him, I kind of thought of him as the science-fiction-nerd grandfather I never had.

I'm dedicating Volume 2 to Forry and to Jack Speer, another icon of First Fandom whom we lost this year. Without them, and others like them, we science fiction fans wouldn't have what we have today. Certainly I wouldn't be publishing something called Thrilling Wonder Stories.

Chesley Awards Announced

The Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists (ASFA) has announced the winners of their Chesley Awards for the eligibility year 2007.

According to their website, "The Chesley Awards were established in 1985 as ASFA's peer awards to recognize individual works and achievements during a given year. The Chesleys were initially called the ASFA Awards, but were later renamed to honor famed astronomical artist Chesley Bonestell after his death in 1986."

The cover (pictured here) to Thrilling Wonder Stories, Volume 1, by Iain McCaig, was nominated in the category of best magazine cover artwork.

Here are the winners:

Best Cover Illustration – Hardback Book:
Donato Giancola, The Outback Stars, by Sandra McDonald, Tor, 4/07

Best Cover Illustration – Paperback Book:
Donato Giancola, Crystal Dragon, by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller Ace, 11/07

Best Cover Illustration – Magazine:
Cory and Catska Ench, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 3/07

Best Interior Illustration:
James Gurney, Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, Andrews McMeel, 9/07

Best Gaming Related Illustration:
Donato Giancola, "Vanguard: Saga of Heroes," Sigil Games Online

Best Product Illustration:
Todd Lockwood, "War of Angels," poster for Bullseye Tattoo

Best Monochrome – Unpublished:
Donato Giancola, "Season of Change," Pencil and Chalk on Toned paper

Best Color Work – Unpublished:
Donato Giancola, "Red Sonja," Oil

Best Three Dimensional Art:
Vincent Villafranca, "Conscious Entity and Its Maker," Bronze

Best Art Director:
Irene Gallo, Tor Books

Award for Artistic Achievement:
Michael Wm. Kaluta

Congratulations to the winners... although, of course, it's an honor just to be nominated.