Seven Seasons of Buffy: Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors Discuss Their Favorite Television Show (Smart Pop series) by Gilene Yeffeth Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Gilene Yeffeth
stories of the far future, and tales of elves and magic fall into this category. In their own way, Lord of the Rings, 1984 , and Star Wars are all Alternate World stories.
In “Trespass” stories, a stranger comes to town. Something fantastic—whether The X-Files ’ aliens or Anne Rice’s vampires—invades our familiar world of credit cards and disposable razors. Reality is shown to have cracks and fissures we haven’t seen before.
I must admit, before becoming a Buffyphile I had a deep prejudice against Trespass tales. The techniques that bring Alternate Worlds to life are those that originally drew me to read and write science fiction: the top-to-bottom world building, the ubiquitous and yet subtle exposition, the filtering of a strange reality through a viewpoint character who finds that reality commonplace. This kind of tale was what I considered to be speculative fiction at its most literary, sophisticated, textured, and, most important, subversive. SF allowed me to visit and create worlds that had completely different rules from our own, and that called everything in our “normal” world into question.
On the other hand, Trespass stories felt rather more comfortable, designed for readers who prefer to start with something familiar. And there seemed to be a conservative principle at work in most, a tendency for the alien invader to evaporate at the end of the tale. We’ve all seen this plot, which I call the Elastic Trespass story:
1) “Monsters! I can’t believe this is happening!”
2) “It’s true, there are monsters! Let’s kill them.”
3) “Oh, no! When you burned down the house to kill the monsters all the evidence was destroyed. No one will ever believe us now!”
In the Elastic Trespass, as in a sitcom, everything goes “back to normal” at the end of the episode. A return to an unperturbed, normal, daylight world is always effected. E.T. goes home. It’s as if there’s some sort of natural law at work, a principle of conservation of normality, that makes all the evidence disappear by the story’s denouement. Either all marks of the alien are erased by happenstance, or the characters engage in a frantic cover-up, apparently unwilling to take credit for saving the world.
(A close cousin to the Elastic Trespass is the Elastic Time Travel story, that old chestnut in which time-travelers wind up on the Titanic and no matter whom they tell about the iceberg all they get is “But this ship is unsinkable!” and the ship sinks anyway. History had to happen that way.)
The elastic form of the Trespass story is inherently conservative, saying as it does that the stranger who comes to town is fundamentally unknowable. We can’t incorporate the alien into our normal world, because that would imply that the world can change. So when the Other pops up, our heroes stomp it into the ground, obliterating all evidence of its passage. Like history, middle-class normality is fixed and unalterable, no matter how many fantastic creatures, ancient curses, and mystical portals might exist in the margins.
This principle is especially strong in stories with young protagonists, partly because no one ever believes kids anyway. It’s as if the young adult Elastic Trespass tale is a training ground for adult conformity. children in these stories always hide E.T. in the closet, repress their own memories, and find themselves unable to break the conspiracy of silence that is the adult world. In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, at least one of the kids, George, grows up to “remember” that his trips to Narnia were all a game. He manages to enter adulthood only by repressing the fantasies of childhood. Only they weren’t fantasies; they were alien realities! (Naturally, he’s the one who winds up with the best-paying job.)
When I watched the first few episodes of Buffy with an uncritical eye, the show seemed destined to be trapped in this mold. The vamps conveniently turned to dust when staked, leaving no
In “Trespass” stories, a stranger comes to town. Something fantastic—whether The X-Files ’ aliens or Anne Rice’s vampires—invades our familiar world of credit cards and disposable razors. Reality is shown to have cracks and fissures we haven’t seen before.
I must admit, before becoming a Buffyphile I had a deep prejudice against Trespass tales. The techniques that bring Alternate Worlds to life are those that originally drew me to read and write science fiction: the top-to-bottom world building, the ubiquitous and yet subtle exposition, the filtering of a strange reality through a viewpoint character who finds that reality commonplace. This kind of tale was what I considered to be speculative fiction at its most literary, sophisticated, textured, and, most important, subversive. SF allowed me to visit and create worlds that had completely different rules from our own, and that called everything in our “normal” world into question.
On the other hand, Trespass stories felt rather more comfortable, designed for readers who prefer to start with something familiar. And there seemed to be a conservative principle at work in most, a tendency for the alien invader to evaporate at the end of the tale. We’ve all seen this plot, which I call the Elastic Trespass story:
1) “Monsters! I can’t believe this is happening!”
2) “It’s true, there are monsters! Let’s kill them.”
3) “Oh, no! When you burned down the house to kill the monsters all the evidence was destroyed. No one will ever believe us now!”
In the Elastic Trespass, as in a sitcom, everything goes “back to normal” at the end of the episode. A return to an unperturbed, normal, daylight world is always effected. E.T. goes home. It’s as if there’s some sort of natural law at work, a principle of conservation of normality, that makes all the evidence disappear by the story’s denouement. Either all marks of the alien are erased by happenstance, or the characters engage in a frantic cover-up, apparently unwilling to take credit for saving the world.
(A close cousin to the Elastic Trespass is the Elastic Time Travel story, that old chestnut in which time-travelers wind up on the Titanic and no matter whom they tell about the iceberg all they get is “But this ship is unsinkable!” and the ship sinks anyway. History had to happen that way.)
The elastic form of the Trespass story is inherently conservative, saying as it does that the stranger who comes to town is fundamentally unknowable. We can’t incorporate the alien into our normal world, because that would imply that the world can change. So when the Other pops up, our heroes stomp it into the ground, obliterating all evidence of its passage. Like history, middle-class normality is fixed and unalterable, no matter how many fantastic creatures, ancient curses, and mystical portals might exist in the margins.
This principle is especially strong in stories with young protagonists, partly because no one ever believes kids anyway. It’s as if the young adult Elastic Trespass tale is a training ground for adult conformity. children in these stories always hide E.T. in the closet, repress their own memories, and find themselves unable to break the conspiracy of silence that is the adult world. In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, at least one of the kids, George, grows up to “remember” that his trips to Narnia were all a game. He manages to enter adulthood only by repressing the fantasies of childhood. Only they weren’t fantasies; they were alien realities! (Naturally, he’s the one who winds up with the best-paying job.)
When I watched the first few episodes of Buffy with an uncritical eye, the show seemed destined to be trapped in this mold. The vamps conveniently turned to dust when staked, leaving no
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