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

something.
What, eventually, I thought of is that we were both wrong. We were also both right.

There has been SF on Broadway. There has been good, and successful, SF on Broadway. But there is
not likely to be much more; and a good, successful straight play with an SF theme (“Via Galactica” was a
musical, so described) has never happened and is not likely to.

The reasons, I think, are interesting enough to deserve a little space.

The successful jobs are all either musicals (“Connecticut Yankee” with time travel, “On a Clear Day”
with psi) or screaming farces (just to start arguments, I’ll nominate “Three Men on a Horse” as a psi
story, and SF). The failures-and there is quite a list, including Arch Oboler and Ray Bradbury—are
mostly straight plays.

Part of the answer is that SF is thought to be a gimmick medium-lots of special effects—and only
musicals, generally speaking, can stand the cost of the sets and the effects. (But “Via Galactica” had half
a million dollars’ worth of effects, all marvelous, and failed; “Con-necticut Yankee” and “On a Clear
Day” had next to none. “Three Men‘ on a Horse” had none, pe-riod.)

Another part is that Broadway has been taken over by the Broadway equivalent of the New Wave: Al
bee, say, and Hooch, and their followers. Not entirely, of course—but enough. And the New Wave is
mostly surreal, interested in parable or straight-out lecture and not, definitely not, in the science half of
science fiction. The New Wave hasn’t had much effect on TV or the movies yet: that’s why we’ve had
“2001” and “Charlie” and, on a much smaller scale, “Star Trek.” And, being straight-arrow serious and
dedicated, it isn’t interested in musicals or farces either, so we have had “On a Clear Day,” and a good
SF farce is perfectly thinkable: Neil Simon may be working on one now.

Now, the science half of SF isn’t a necessity for the printed page, or for the movies either. You can get a
reader, or a moviegoer, interested and involved in something having only the faintest relation to reality, as
experimental novels and movies show. On Broadway things are different. Broadway cannot distort or
ignore reality to nearly so great an extent: it involves real people on a real, visible stage. That much reality
demands some measure of reality in the play and the playing, just to make it possible for an audience,
seeing the real people, to accept and then get involved in what these people are doing.

There needn’t be much reality. “Tiny Alice” is fine, and “The Fantasticks.” And so are a lot of even
stranger plays, and musicals. But no successful play exists which either contradicts what an audience
believes to be reality without offering a pretty solid underpinning of the argument to sustain that
contradiction, or which contradicts itself.

Working outside of SF these demands are not so troublesome: the second, in fact, is so much taken for
granted that people don’t bother to mention it. But in SF the writer is suddenly required to invent
relationships between his people, a society for them to live in, and anything else needed, from scratch.

The Broadway New Wave seems to know no science, to begin with; more, it seems to harbor a general
belief that conscious logic is not a useful tool. (This also seems true of the SF New Wave, and has many
of the same results there.) These qualifications, if that’s what they are, provide the writers with a handy
shortcut to a number of dead ends: inventing societies that contain self-contradictions, for instance. (On
Ithaca, I haven’t had room or strength to mention until now, everyone is entirely free; they keep on saying
so, and the authors clearly mean me to believe that. But the most noticeable thing about the society is that
everyone takes orders at all times and on every subject, without serious demur, from one single man,