Future Perfect

...They were on Earth all along, see...

...Doctorate, knowledge of Roman Catholicism, and excellence in either teaching or pastoral practice are preferred...

...but, time being time and money money, we can't do everything we want...

...You will receive a detailed description of the Institute for further review and, about January 1, a posting of open positions for 1999...

...In other words: dire...

...H.G...

...though, if Sturgeon had ever written about the quality of s-f on TV, he would probably have ratcheted up the crap-quotient...

...Would a nice, liberal father react with less outrage to discovering his son had been raped...

...This is all by way of celebrating a TV series, new this year, that just might be the first honest, canny, and responsible meeting of TV and s-f at their mutual best...

...The monster on the airplane wing was real, see...

...Wells, the founder of the feast and one of my few idols, said early and, often that the central problem of our century would be trying to keep our ethics apace with our technological ajdvhncement...

...Narrative gives us the thick psychic soup that lies behind and below all our crucial choices...

...Let's face it," he began his talk, "90 percent of science fiction is crap...

...as in, "Oh, stuff it, Spock...

...Solondz is a real artist in that he knows how to make the look and feel of his movie mirror its emotional content...

...But not both, not at the same time...

...The major networks could never make a profit out of a show this smart (remember the fate of "Nothing Sacred...

...That is Solondz...

...No biggie...

...The problem, of course, is what you do with yourself, what you do with your life, after you've achieved--or been given--that absolute control of your life: after you've become god...

...Mike Resnick, a wonderful s-f writer, argues that s-f is essentially a short-story medium, not a novelistic one...

...What a surprise, then, to find, this season, "Welcome to Paradox" on the schedule...

...Now since the Sci-Fi Channel geared up, maybe a decade ago, it's been mainly a sci-fi (not s-f) fan's dustbin: reruns of schlockmeister fifties films, godawful TV shows, and, more recently, original made-for-TV movies and series, almost all of them powerful demonstrations of the major premise of Sturgeon's Law...

...Colonize Mars...

...or Certificate in Pastoral Ministries...

...You got it...

...When Bill tells his wife he's sick, she advises him to take a Tylenol...

...Gregory Sobolewski, IPM Resumes, Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, 700 Terrace Heights #3, Winona MN 55987-1399 or fax 507-457-1722...

...Betaville is, in fact, the domain of s-f, its very self, where we explore the morality of our technology or, if you wish, the humanity of our "humanity...

...Oh, yeah, there's "Star Trek"--which the mighty Harlan Ellison refers to as "Star Dreck"--and its latterday clones, and there's Rod Serling's apparently never-to-be-out-of-reruns 'Twilight Zone...

...IPM enrolls students from more than two dozen states and Canadian provinces who seek an M.A...

...AA/EOE...

...The simple, sad fact is that TV has done very poorly by s-f...

...But the Geek Revenge problem abides and somewhat abrades the undeniable brilliance of Happiness...

...It's called "Welcome to Paradox," and it runs on--the irony has not escaped me---the Sci-Fi Channel...

...Narrative, like the mystery novel, is ethical (why did he do it...

...Courses include Human Relations, Leadership, Pastoral Planning, Christian Spiritualities, Prayer, Foundations in TheNogy, Ecclesiology, Scripture, Liturgy, Sacraments, Morality...

...Why does the father of one of Bill's victims have to be portrayed as a bullet-headed macho-fascist...

...Send a letter of interest and resume to: Dr...

...Banish AIDS forever...

...It's just about impossible to make first-rate art featuring characters you are dedicated to unmasking and/or punishing...

...Und so weiter...

...Virtual omnipotence, that is, entails nearly paralyzing moral ambiguity: welcome to paradox...

...I doubt it...

...Courses occur in a non-traditional format, beginning after Easter and concluding before Advent...

...They're not s-f, in other words, they're "sci-fi," a term that makes aficionados and writers alike cringe: because "sci-fi" is the idiot twin of "s-f," concerned not with the chances for moral survival in an uncertain technological future, but with the glories of gadgetry and the funny little, mean little jokes our gadgets might choose to play upon us...

...The music is of the "Hi, honey, I'm home" variety, especially when it's the pedophile coming home...

...Each episode of "Paradox" is based on a short story by one of the many--so many--brilliant s-f writers currently working in the field, and each, or each I've seen, is a perfect little articulation of the base-line dilemma we all face as we surf, or are swept, into the twenty-first century...

...Trek" is essentially a serial, like "Bonanza," "Ally McBeal," or (the admittedly brilliant) "Law and Order": Each week the same cadre of characters encounters a problem, and each week resolves it, so that the next week they can resolve another one (as in, "Captain, it's an alien life form of pure energy, something we've never encountered before...

...Produced by R. W. Vincent and conceived, and mainly written, by Jeremy Commonweal | 8 December4, 1998 Lipp--of whom I haven't heard before--it's a show that almost justifies the whole damn channel, maybe the real entry of sf at its best into the medium...

...That's Betaville...

...Wise words from a good man...

...But, the abiding emotion Happiness leaves you with is sadness...

...He often makes us laugh, but he's not laughing...

...There are, he says, and he's right, maybe ten great s-f novels but surely hundreds of great s-f stories...

...technology has triumphed, and triumphed altogether...

...It's such a simple and such a crucial concept upon which to hang the series...

...a reason, by the bye, for considering Kafka one of the premier s-f writers of the century...

...Check your local listings and visit Betaville...

...You'll see the first wedding of science fiction and the medium--TV--science fiction predicted...

...That's the very simple, and I believe, startlingly (for TV) grown-up thesis of this series...

...Welcome to paradox: welcome to paradise, or is it...

...And "Zone" except for maybe ten or twelve episodes of real force, is a collection of anecdotes, all ending, as in the worst of Poe, in a punchline (They're really in hell, see...

...Find a way to erase--until you want them back--all memories that torment you, all your sins and failures...

...Commonweal | 9 December4, 1998...

...but the coterie audience for a sci-fi may be just large enough to keep it afloat...

...What you want, that's what you get: done yourself as a younger man and then transplant your brain back into the young you...

...True, she's half-asleep at that moment, but are we to think she'd be more perceptive if she were awake...

...but parable gives us the radish-crisp moment of those choices...

...The reason for this, I think, is that s-f is essentially parable rather than fully fledged narrative, descended from Aesop rather than Homer...

...To which Joy replies, "But I'm not laughing...

...At one point, Helen tells her sister, "We're not laughing at you, Joy, we're laughing with you...

...But neither of those is really s-f...

...And, after the expected gasp from the assembly, he continued: "Ninety percent of everything is crap...

...Betaville" is not really a place at all, at least not like the too-too-solid bridge of the Starship Enterprise or the ooga-booga atmospherics of the Twilight Zone...

...And, with luck, you'll find yourself conficted...

...And yet, remarkably, no TV show I know of (and I watch a lot of TV) has had the wit to do it before this one...

...heodore Sturgeon was one of the truly fine writers of science fiction, and at a s-f convention in the late fifties-well before the genre became academically respectable he shocked his audience by announcing what has come to be known, among fans and writers, as "Sturgeon's Law...

...The photography is deliberately kept as bland as a '70s situation comedy...

...By so insisting upon the crassness of his characters, Solondz often comes across as mean-spirited rather than truly satirical...

...Here's the setup...

...But, in his determination to mock what he takes to be the factitious normalcy of middle-class life, especially as embodied in Trish, Solondz goes overboard...

...Because Solondz's feelings for Bill and Joy are ambivalent--a sort of compassionate loathing for him, an exasperated affection for her--the two emerge as the most interesting figures...

...In the future city of Betaville (a nod to Godard's classic s-f film "Alphaville...

...and parable, like s-f, is moral (what does it mean that he did it...

...And that paradox--a damn sight more than the question of whether Luke Skywalker will kill Darth Vader--has dominated the best American s-f at least since August 6,1945...

...Make a virtual-reality recording of the experience of your lover falling in love with you, and feed it to your head forever and forever after she leaves...

...For information about the Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Atonement, contact: Vocation Director Graymoor ,~,~'~' PO Box 300 ~ ~ Garrison, NY 10524-0300 914 424 3671 FACULTY for PASTORAL MINISTRIES PROGRAM The Institute in Pastoral Ministries invites resumes from persons who are dedicated to educating veteran Catholic lay ministers...

...Twenty years ago, when I was a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., a lecturer from one of the local think tanks explained it this way: We can do anything we want, in the sense that we can start making plans to accomplish the goal...

...Put it this way...

...As the host of "Paradox" (Michael Phillips) asks at the end of one episode: "Is technology a blessing or a curse or can we now no longer know the difference...

...The editing is especially canny: Whenever a character is about to react to some painful truth or plea, the camera cuts away, so we are kept within the climate of frustration that all the characters inhabit...

...It's a pronouncement that's become a well-worn coin among our politic i a n s - t h e difference being that Wells took it seriously...

...And why would Joy's class of immigrants uniformly yell "scab" at her when they're benefiting from her strike breaking, and when surely none of them are union workers or even sympathizers...

...Experimenting with tradition since 1898...

...http://www.smumn.edu/academics...

...Faculty are on campus for the twoweek midsummer residency beginning in late June...