Space $19.99!

Where do SF story ideas come from? Sometimes from the most mundane roots and peculiar coincidences.

For example, a few days ago I was flipping around Amazon late at night, looking for something to watch, and was surprised to find that that remarkably cheesy 1970s science fiction series, Space: 1999, is now free to watch on Amazon Prime.

The series, if you don’t remember it, starred Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, and was another product of the creative team of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, who are better known for their marionette shows: Supercar, Fireball XL-5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, etc., etc., etc. (And to be honest, the way Bain’s character was written, she could have been replaced by a marionette and no one would have noticed.) Originally conceived of as a successor to the Andersons’ one-season-and-done serious live-action sci-fi drama, UFO, by the time Space: 1999 finally hit the airwaves it had been completely recast, revisualized, redesigned, and pretty much re-everythinged. 

Would that it had been rewritten, too.

The premise—bear with me—is that by the late 1990s (remember, this series was made and aired in the mid-1970s), there is a permanent human base on the Moon, because the dark side of the Moon is now home to an absolutely enormous nuclear waste dump. In a freakish and never adequately explained accident all the nuclear waste in the dump suddenly goes critical, and the resulting massive explosion blasts the Moon out of its orbit and sends it flying across the galaxy—

—so that the surviving inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, equipped with a supply of “Eagle” transport spacecraft as seemingly inexhaustible as Battlestar Galactica’s complement of Viper fighters—

—can explore strange new worlds, meet life forms and new civilizations, and boldly go…

Eh, you get the idea.

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Now, let’s ignore for the moment the Everest-sized mountain of absurdities required to make this series premise work. Yes, any nuclear blast sufficient to knock the Moon out of its orbit would more likely reduce it to a cloud of gravel. Yes, a massive propulsive force applied to the dark side of the Moon would propel it in—which direction? Come on, you know the answer to this. One guess. Anyone here ever play pool or billiards?

Yes, any force sufficient to accelerate the Moon up to solar system escape velocity in a matter of seconds would in those same seconds reduce the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha to greasy red smears on the floors and bulkheads.

Yes, space is big. Really, really big. So given that the crew of Moonbase Alpha somehow survived the initial explosion, either they will die of old age long before they reach the nearest neighboring star or else the Moon has been accelerated to FTL velocity, in which case how do they slow down long enough to explore all these strange new worlds? (In my mind’s eye I see the Moon flying across space trailed by a long string of poor s.o.b.s in their decidedly non-FTL Eagles, screaming, “Wait! Wait! Slow down! Let me catch up!”)

But, let’s ignore all that for now, and get on to the second part of this idea.

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So I watched a few episodes, in hopes of rediscovering why I thought this series was good back in 1975. I still don’t have an answer for that. The best I can do is blame it on the utter lack of new SF programming on TV back in The Time Before Star Wars. One can only watch Star Trek reruns so many times before one knows all the plots by heart, and then one begins to focus on weird minutiae, like, just how many times does Doctor McCoy say, “I’m a doctor, not a {something else},” (fifteen) and what are all the things he’s not? (A bricklayer, a moon shuttle conductor, a mechanic, an engineer, an escalator, a coal miner, a magician… the list goes on and on.)

Now, the coincidental spark that lit the fuse on this column happened a few days later, when I was working on the SHOWCASE publication schedule for August and September. When I got into the second week of September, it suddenly struck me: as they hammered home in the opening credits for every episode, in the world of Space: 1999, the enormous nuclear explosion that blew the Moon out of its orbit happened on September 13th, 1999.

Which means that in the world of the show, this coming September 13th (Friday the 13th, no less) is the 25th Anniversary of the catastrophe.

And what do we humans like to do with significant anniversaries of horrible events?

We like to talk about them. And write about them. And make documentaries about them.

So, what if…?

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Okay, here’s the pitch. Imagine that you are in the world of Space: 1999, and living on Earth. (Yes, Earth survived. When the Great Cosmic Pool Cue hit the Moon, it botched the shot and missed the Earth.) The initial shock was profound; just think of what moving the Moon would do to tectonic plates and tidal surges. But the massive blast of radiation from the explosion did not sterilize half the world, thankfully, and Earth’s ecosystem survived; humanity survived; civilization survived. Now it’s 25 years later, and people are looking back on that terrible day in 1999 and reminiscing. 

What’s changed? What do people want to talk about? It has been 25 years. Consider:

• An entire generation has grown up having never seen the moon. 
• What’s it done to our culture?
• What’s it done to space programs? Without the Moon as a goal, would we even be trying to fly into space? What has the lack of the lunar mass done to orbital mechanics?  
  
• Has Margaret Wise Brown’s estate authorized a sequel, Goodbye Moon?
• Is Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata still being performed?
• Has Roland Emmerich made a movie about the disaster? If so, what are the critics saying about the movie on Rotten Tomatoes?
• What’s the most batshit crazy conspiracy theory about the catastrophe that’s currently making the rounds?
  
• What has this done to plants and animals that depend on moonlight or lunar cycles?
  
• The ocean tides eventually flatlined. How would National Geographic cover this? (As long as we’re fantasizing life in an alternate timeline, this world is one in which Disney never bought NatGeo and thus never ran it into the ground.)
• How would Vogue cover this? Is this the cover story for the September issue?
  Retro-Chic! The Unisex Bell-bottomed Polyester Pantsuit Look is Back!

The point is, you can be as serious or silly as you like. What I would like is to see is five “stories,” of up to, say, 1,500 words in length (I’m flexible on that), that talk about that day back in 1999, and how it changed your world. I put “stories” in quotes because I think faux movie reviews or science articles might also work well.

I want stories set on Earth. Nothing set on Moonbase Alpha or involving characters from the series. The Moon is gone. We don’t care about those people, except perhaps in memoriam. Or maybe they’ve become the focus of a cult, like Heaven’s Gate. (“The Alphans were here. The Alphans are gone. The Alphans will come again.”) 

If I get enough good stories, I’d like to run them back-to-back in SHOWCASE during the week of September 9th. This will be online publication only—but again, I could be talked into being flexible on that. If this sounds to you like something that would be fun, contact me through the submissions address.

What will we pay for the pieces we select for publication?

Isn’t it obvious? You get one guess.

Categories: Showcase