problem is that many people may resist believing, at some level of their consciousness, that this strange realm is actually what travelers report it to be, preferring to believe that it is really similar to Earth, that it will serve as a colorful new playground for stories about cowboy and Indians, or cops and robbers. The films that cater to this illusion, the space films, may be better regarded as fantasies; the films that seek to counter this illusion by depicting space as it truly is, the spacesuit films, are science fiction precisely because the truths they present are still not widely accepted.
Before World War II, science fiction predicted the atomic bomb, but after two of them were detonated with catastrophic results, stories about atomic bombs were no longer viewed as science fiction; everybody now believed in the atomic bomb. Science fiction also predicted space travel, which has been regularly occurring for nearly forty years, yet stories about space travel continue to be regarded as science fiction because people still do not really believe what space is truly like. And so, as long as people can listen to the dramatic “swish” of the Enterprise without protesting, as long as they imagine that Star Trek and similar programs represent a plausible future for humanity, there will remain a need for true science fiction stories to remind them of the ominous silence, and lethal power, of outer space.
13. H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 14.
14. Robert A. Heinlein, “Shooting Destination Moon,” 1950, Requiem: New Collected Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand Master, edited by Yoji Kondo (New York: Tor Books, 1992), 120.
15. Phil Hardy, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies, 1984 (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Woodbury Press, 1986), 125. Later quotations in the text are to this edition.
16. Destination Moon (George Pal, 1950).
17. Gene Roddenberry, cited in Stephen Whitfield and Roddenberry, The Making of Star Trek (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 116, ellipsis Roddenberry. The book was actually written by Whitfield, with occasional inserted comments from Roddenberry.
18. Judy Burns, cited in Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman, Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages (Boston and New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1995), 72.
19. Tom Hanks, cited in Paul Brownfield, “Fly Him to the Moon” [interview with Tom Hanks], The Los Angeles Times, Sunday Calendar Section, April 5, 1998, 92. Later page references in the text are to this edition.
5. THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON: ROBERT A. HEINLEIN’S PROJECT MOONBASE
Whenever I teach one of my infrequent science fiction classes, I begin by showing my students two short films: Project Moonbase (1953) and La Jetée (1962). These films, I explain, exemplify the two extreme points of the spectrum of science fiction: the juvenile melodrama and plodding didacticism of Project Moonbase, and the avant-garde lyricism and haunting imagery of La Jetée. And those works prepare my students rather nicely for the final movie I show, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)—a film, after all, that is not unlike two reels of Project Moonbase spliced on to one reel of La Jetée.
However, the announced reasons I offer my students for showing Project Moonbase are disingenuous; for if my only objective was to display the cinematic equivalent of the original Gernsbackian paradigm—adventure stories with scientific explanations and logical predictions—there are any number of movies that could serve that purpose, including Destination Moon (1950), Riders to the Stars (1954), and Conquest of Space (1955). But while those films have their momens, only Project Moonbase fascinates me—because it is the only piece of celluloid I know of that even partially reflects the writing style and idiosyncratic philosophy of its noted co-author, Robert A. Heinlein.
Of course, this movie has generally not been valued—or even noticed—by filmgoers, Heinlein scholars, or film critics. After being thrown together from an unsold television pilot entitled Ring Around the Moon, written by Heinlein and producer Jack Seaman, the film was only briefly released, and has been rarely seen since; the only time it has been shown on television, I believe, was as part of the Canned Film Festival series of avowedly awful movies hosted by comedienne Laraine Newman. One scholar who prepared a definitive Heinlein bibliography, Marie Guthrie, reported that she had never been able to see the film.
Also, unlike Heinlein’s earlier film Destination Moon, Project Moonbase did not become a Heinlein short story or the subject of a Heinlein article; indeed, by all accounts, Heinlein was dissatisfied with the film and to my knowledge never mentioned it in print. Most critical studies of Heinlein—including Alexei Panshin’s Heinlein in Dimension (1968), George Slusser’s Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land (1976), and The Classic Years of Robert A. Heinlein (1977), and Joseph D. Olander and Martin H. Greenberg’s anthology Robert A. Heinlein (1978)—do not even mention the movie, while H. Bruce Franklin’s usually thorough Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (1980) dismisses it in less than a page.
In reference books and studies of science fiction films, Project Moonbase is similarly neglected, either omitted altogether—as in books ranging from John Baxter’s pioneering Science Fiction in the Cinema (1970) to James Gunn’s The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1988)—or subjected to brief criticism: in Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction (1978), John Brosnan summarizes the plot and comments that “it’s not a very good film,”20 and in his entry on the movie for The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993) Brosnan says that its “ambitious idea...is undermined by melodramatics, poor performances, and sets designed for tv.”21 John Stanley’s Revenge of the Creature Features Movie Guide (1988) finds the film “uninteresting” and “pseudo-scientific,”22 and Phil Hardy’s The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies (1984) complains of its “melodramatic plot” that “contains everything that the makers of Destination Moon tried to avoid.”23 Just about the only positive comment on Project Moonbase comes in Bruce Lanier Wright’s Yesterday’s Tomorrows: The Golden Age of Science Fiction Movie Posters, 1950-1964 (1993), where, after repeating some familiar criticisms, he says that the film “deserves points for a more adult approach.”24
A recurring theme in these curt commentaries is that Project Moonbase does not display any of the influence of Robert A. Heinlein: Stanley asserts that Heinlein’s “style and themes are not to be found” in the movie (271); David Wingrove’s entry on the film for his Science Fiction Film Source Book (1985) says the film “has little of the zest of Heinlein’s written work of the period”;25 Brosnan in Future Tense suspects that “not much remained of Heinlein’s original” in the shooting script (77); Wright says that “The movie’s overall tone bears little resemblance to Heinlein’s literary work” (28); and Hardy concludes that “the film lacks the sense of confidence that even Heinlein’s worst novels have in abundance” (141).
Still, Hardy does concede that the film is “only of interest for a few of the odd quirks that Heinlein introduced” (141); and while I would agree that Project Moonbase is a terrible movie by conventional aesthetic standards, my own argument, based on repeated viewings of the film, would be that this film is far
