The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/When Genres Collide: Difference between revisions

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 Mailer’s treatment not only shares science fiction artifacts with Norton’s novel but, at the same time, emphasizes the political corruption and treachery central to both Norton’s and Ballard’s stories. In “Thirteen to Centaurus,” Dr. Francis purports to be a member of the starship crew but, in fact, is one of the researchers assigned to observe the thirteen test subjects who believe they are on their way to another star. Moreover, the entire population of the earth apparently is aware of the experimental ruse and only later exhibits the moral courage to demand the termination of the project. Dr. Francis vindicates himself in the end, but Mailer’s Anderson Stevens, the President’s most trusted technical advisor, remains duplicitous for much of the narrative. Stevens, we learn, has known all along that the entire solar system was polluted with radiation and is thus uninhabitable, yet conceals this singularly important finding, believing that “the general despair would be too great and would paralyze the best efforts of his own men to find another solution.”{{sfn|Mailer|1953|p=275}} He also conceives of, and conceals, the unimaginably audacious plan to explode the earth as a way of increasing the thrust of the spaceship’s acceleration and, in perhaps the ultimate treachery against his country and the president he serves, first recommends it to the Russians. Mailer notes the eventual extent of this treacherous secrecy as “hundreds and then thousands” of scientists and engineers working on the spaceship project conceal, from a worried public, the impossibility of surviving on Mars as well as their own efforts to construct a vehicle for escape. “So an atmosphere of secrecy and evasion began to circle about the capital,” Mailer writes, “and the mood of the nation was effected.”{{sfn|Mailer|1953|p=276}} Unlike the complicit public in Ballard’s story, the citizens of Mailer’s narrative remain completely unaware of the situation and powerless to voice an objection, surviving in an environment of unease and suspicion nearly as caustic as the poisoned air around them.
+Most of Stevens’s plans are as suspect, technologically, as his unaccountable secrecy and duplicity are ethically. Mailer’s science, indeed, is wonky throughout the treatment and no doubt would have been subjected thoroughly to Campbell’s editorial pen had Mailer submitted the work to ''Analog'' rather than ''Esquire''. Mailer, at various points in the story, suggests that nuclear fallout produced by detonating atomic weapons on our planet would inevitably spread throughout the solar system. In fact, any such radiation would remain primarily in the Earth’s atmosphere, nor would enough fallout be produced by any number of nuclear explosions to corrupt other planets. The scientists in Mailer’s treatment also suggest that, to reach another star, all the thrust producing momentum must be generated during the initial ascent, not considering that, once in the vacuum of outer space and away from atmospheric resistance, the amount of propulsion necessary to maintain or even increase that momentum is virtually negligible. Such a questionable determination also extends to the construction of the starship’s hull. “No metal existed,” Mailer writes, “which could withstand the heat of the excessive friction created by the extreme velocity necessary to blast a ship through the atmosphere and out beyond the gravitational attraction of the sun and its planets.” Stevens’s plan to dig a ten-mile long tunnel into the Earth’s surface to increase the rocket’s momentum, while later revealed as a ruse to test a more nefarious proposal, is similarly misguided. The scientists theorize that “the tunnel would act like the muzzle of a rifle and fire the rocket as if it were a shell,” and “taking advantage of the earth’s rotation about its own axis and the greater speed of its rotation about the sun, the rocket ship might then possess sufficient escape velocity to quit the gravitational pull of the sun and so move out to the stars.”{{sfn|Mailer|1953|p=276}} Gregory Benford, an astrophysicist and award-winning science fiction author, dismisses the idea as scientific gobbledygook. “Even using a ramp to accelerate,” Benford says, “like [the film] ''When Worlds Collide'', is little help unless you have very low thrust. Von Braun laughed, I hear, at the idea.”
+Mailer, whose research skills and attention to detail is inarguable, certainly could have verified scientific details of his treatment if they were important to the goals of his work, but apparently they were not. His primary intention here, aside from developing his familiarity with an important aspect of film production, is to offer his warning about the dangers of too much secrecy, too much governmental good intentions that go awry amid human frailty and misguided decisions. Mailer’s language at times even appears to violate the rules he lists for a successful treatment, with emphasis on evocative and poetic expression at odds with his notion that the form should be devoid of character introspection and rhetorical style. “Perhaps we shall find a way to drive a tunnel into the center of the earth,” the Russian Premier says at one point, “in order to burn all impurities out of ourselves.”{{sfn|Mailer|1953|p=276}} Mailer assumes the role of prophet rather than technical expert in a medium of communication intended for a readership of film producers creating an after-all commercial form of art rather than a population anxious for prophecy. “Assume then,” Mailer advises in a headnote to the treatment’s appearance in ''Cannibals and Christians'', “that the errors in reasoning and/or judgement you have detected for yourself in these pages are equaled only by the numerous errors you failed to detect. That, scientist and friends, is bound to be the measure of the error in the next prophecy.”{{sfn|Mailer|1966|p=380}}
+Reading Mailer’s story, whether in that 1953 issue of ''Esquire'', or reprinted in the 1966 collection ''Cannibals and Christians'', or now, in ''The Mailer Review'', the challenges of filming Mailer’s action with the film technology available in the mid-twentieth century seem nearly insurmountable. ''When Worlds Collide'' and ''The Day the Earth Stood Still'', both released to theatres in 1951, did admirably well representing one spaceship and one robot, each, with the special effects technology of the time. ''This Island Earth'' (1955) ranged a bit wider, with credible aliens, a flying saucer, and action transpiring on two different planets, but the lower budget and pulpy action eventually intrudes, leaving the impression of a film intended for a Saturday afternoon matinee rather that an example of mature cinematic science fiction. Even the early 1960s television dramas ''The Twilight Zone'' and ''The Outer Limits'', while frequently offering stories with significant themes and philosophical implications, suffered at times from unconvincing visual effects. Mailer’s tunnels, ten miles deep into the earth, his cannon-fired missiles and his massive starships, certainly would have required a budget beyond what even his impressive literary stature could have commanded at the time. The only apparent option would be to present the drama as more of a stage play, restricted to the characters’ interaction as they describe fantastic events occurring off-screen. This approach, however, would inevitably eliminate the sense of grandeur, the perception that we are witnessing events of a cosmically-significant and mythical nature. Mailer was working outside genre, incredibly so, and ''The Deer Park'', written just a few years later and adapted by Mailer into a play produced at the Lucille Lotrel Theatre in early 1967, is more consistent with his body of work. So, why did Mailer choose a science fiction context for his treatment at all?
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 {{cite magazine |last=Ballard |first=J. G. |date=April 1962 |title=Thirteen to Centaurus |url= |magazine=Amazing Stories |volume=36 |number=4 |pages=24–47 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite magazine |last=Campbell |first=John W. |date=February 1959 |title=Non-Escape Literature |url= |magazine=Astounding Science Fiction |volume=62 |number=6 |pages=5–7, 161–162 |ref=harv }}
-* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=April 1953 |title=The Last Night |url= https://prmlr.us/mr19mail |magazine=Esquire |pages=151, 274–280 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1966 |chapter=The Last Night: A Story |title=Cannibals and Christians |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |pages=380–397 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=April 1953 |title=The Last Night |url= https://prmlr.us/mr19mail |magazine=Esquire |pages=151, 274–280 |access-date= |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Nevala-Lee |first=Alec |date=2018 |title=Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction |url= |location= |publisher=HarperCollins |ref=harv }}
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