"Laurence M. Janifer - Into The Furniture" - читать интересную книгу автора (Janifer Laurence M)

Science Fiction on Broadway has been a dismal flop. Here’s a suggestion as to why.

INTO THE FURNITURE
LAURENCE M. JANIFER
==========

Some years back a TV announcer or maybe a radio announcer introduced a kiddie-SF show with one
wonderful blooper. “Here we go, boys and girls,” he said breathlessly, “twenty thousand years into the
furniture.”

A little while ago a (theoretically) adult-SF show opened Broadway. It was called “Via Galactica” and it
is now impossible for you to see it, which is just as well and, it might be, a little better. It was not the
worst show ever to hit Broadway. It was not even the worst show I have ever seen on Broadway: there
have been, and I have sat stunned and disbelieving through, some doozies. But it was distinctly, lousy.
The curtain went up, a Prologue descended from flies in a small bosun’s chair, off we went, “one
thousand from now,” according to the prologue, smack into the hardwooden furniture. A very little about
the show may give you some faint notion.

The hero, Gabriel Finn, was a sanitation man on Earth. He flew around in a spaceship modeled to look
like an ancient Ford, with headlights and ooka-ooka horn, collecting garbage and then getting rid of it by
dumping it into the stratosphere. Earth was in pretty lousy shape, anyhow: everybody was kept happy by
revolving cone-shaped hats, which people put on at birth and never, never took off (head size doesn’t
change? hats expand?) until the age of fifty-five. At fifty-five, everybody committed suicide. Sex was
rampant, but babies were decanted or something (I saw this happen on stage but it looked more
confusing than I can tell you: the attending doctor put a new hat on the new baby, though). Everybody
was blue.

That last is a statement of fact. Blue was the only color Earth people could agree on, and all Earth skins
were bright blue.

Ithaca was different, though. Ithaca (Gabriel got hijacked to Ithaca) was a small asteroid, gravity very
low (with Earth-normal atmosphere, though) to which a few! freedom-loving people had emi-| grated
long ago. Earth managed lose Ithaca somehow or other, well as another nearby asteroid called Hy Brasil
(described, off-hand, as lying “to the west” of Ithaca), and Ithaca and Hy Brasil became distant myths. (It
is not easy to lose an asteroid, once charted especially since Earth civilization was spacegoing—a ship
arrived on Ithaca near the end of the show in forty-four minutes from Earth takeoff.) The Ithacans
converted Gabriel and garnered his genes for their gene pool, since they were about to leave for a new
planet circling Aldebaran, in a voyage which will take one hundred years but will seem to them like
fourteen months (I think; that got sort of cloudy, too).

Gabriel contributed his genes by going into the hay one (1) time with one (1) woman. He then died
heroically fighting off the Earth ship which comes to get the Ithacans, after Earth figured out that Ithaca
still existed (and was still where it was charted).

And so on, and so on. Believe me, you did not want to see this show.

Why am I telling you all this?

Seems I described the show to Ben Bova, and got asked why there wasn’t any good SF on Broadway,
and I said there never had been, and he said I wonder why, and I said damned if I know, but I’ll think of