Star Wars on Trial (37 page)

The people who are content with the way things are now are not reading or watching sci-fi, they're not imagining themselves living other lives in other places and times, and they are most definitely not following this trial. They're off somewhere else, reading and watching stories about the sex lives of doctors and lawyers.

So who cares what they think? Clearly, they are not going to be part of the next stage of human evolution!

AY BACK IN LATE AUGUST of 1980, five of us were driving from Toronto down to the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. For reasons I can no longer remember but I'm sure made sense at the time, we left home at one A.M. and arrived at the Canada/U.S. Thousand Island border crossing at five A.M. Our ages ranged from eighteen to twenty-three, and we were not, at that hour, looking our best.

Now, we'd all been across the border to science fiction conventions before and we were all expecting trouble trying to explain to a civil servant working the end of the night shift-an armed civil servant at that-where we were going and why. Neither the hour, nor our youth, nor the fact we were a mixed group (three men, two women) was working in our favor. Lying never occurred to us. It might have been a Canadian thing. It might have been because we figured we were too damned tired to lie convincingly.

So we paid our toll and crossed the bridge and rolled up to the only station open at U.S. customs and immigration. A beefy, middleaged man peered into the car.

"Where you going?"

"Boston."

"Why?"

"We're attending the World Science Fiction Convention."

"Science fiction?" he demanded suspiciously.

And before any of us had time to imagine the inevitable strip searches and start panicking, my ex smiled brightly and said, "You know, like Star Wars."

The guard's suspicion morphed instantly to delight. "Star Wars?" he repeated, smiling broadly. "I loved that movie! Saw it three times." And he waved us through.

In the summer of 1980, George Lucas was already changing the public perception of science fiction. Only three years after Star Wars's debut on May 25, 1977, with The Empire Strikes Back only four months into its first run, three years before the Ewoks, nineteen years before jar jar Binks, it was already well on its way to becoming an accepted definition.

Twenty-five years later, Star Wars continues to control the public perception of science fiction-not by sustaining that early mass hysteria but by having changed the production and marketing of an entire genre.

Before 1977, the public's perception of science fiction wobbled about between the old Buck Rogers serials, the rumor that Charles Manson was a huge fan of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, a somewhat skewed perception of the way the genre dealt with social commentary, and a remarkable string of less-than-stellar television shows. Science fiction was considered to be both kid's stuff and weirdly dangerous, probably having, given the times, something to do with drugs.

If you read it, you were considered weird at best and very likely a social outcast. Pocket protectors and psychotropics figured prominently, albeit dissonantly, in the nonreader's visualization of an SF fan.

On the bright side, thanks to writers who had emerged out of literature or the social sciences rather than an engineering background, there had begun to be a slow acceptance of science fiction among academics and reviewers. According to Magic Dragon Multimedia, which offers chronologies of science fiction literature and authors:

The 1970s was not a decade of stylistic revolution such as the "New Wave" of the late 1960s, but perhaps a decade of consolidation, where
the lessons learned from mainstream literature, "New Wave" experimentalism, and the classics of science fiction were melded into a healthy hybrid. For example, leading author of the literature of paranoia Thomas Pynchon published a mainstream bestseller which used experimental techniques and was unquestionably science fiction: Gravity's Rainbow.'

It was still possible to read every major work in the field. This is not to say that everyone did, or even that I did, only that I could have and that there were many who made it a point of honor. Those of us who haunted the dark corners of specialty bookstores-where the staff definitely had read every major work in the field, most of the minor works and more than likely a couple of manuscripts provided by regular customers-were expected to be able to talk as animatedly about Gene Wolfe as we did about Andre Norton or Larry Niven or Anne McCaffrey.