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What Voyage Means To
Me
by
This is not a story, but some
thoughts about what Voyage means to me, and why after all these years,
that something which started out as a fascination with the sea (and an enduring
crush on David Hedison) continues to have resonance.
I am a professional writer in
New York City, with five novels in print; I've had many plays and musicals
produced, and have written four screenplays, as well as countless poems and
songs. So you might say I've spent my life in storyland.
Lately I have been reading -
no, devouring - the Voyage stories online - stories by Linda and Jane, Theresa
and Teela, Winnie and Deb, and countless others. And I keep asking myself, "Why
Voyage?" What is it about that show, about that world, that continues to
inspire these fine people to sit down and add their imagination to the
increasing number of stories about the men (and women) who sailed off in that
sleek silver submarine, that silent, glistening repository of hopes and dreams?
After some late-night
pondering, I think I may have a few answers. For the women, some of the answers
are obvious: the men. Hubba hubba. For me, of course, it will always be
Lee Crane - it is possible David Hedison is the best-looking man who ever lived
- and could there be anything more attractive to women than a man who is
fearless, a leader, clearly an Alpha Male, but also sensitive and funny? Not to
mention self-sacrificing, resourceful, and resolutely loyal to crew and
country? But I can't deny the appeal of the others - the brilliant, caustic,
short-tempered Admiral Nelson, whose sarcasm often hid his deep concern for his
Captain and crew. Chip - stern, taciturn, with his New England drawl; perhaps
without Nelson's brilliance or Crane's quick resourcefulness, but loyal and
brave to the end - in short, the ideal XO. Adorable Sharkey, with his hangdog
face, a little dim perhaps, but down to earth, brave as a lion, and always good
for comic relief. Home economics, indeed. I can see him slaving over a pot of
boiling water, bringing out a single poached egg with relief and triumph.
Quick-tempered Kowalski, so sly, always the ladies' man, Patterson with his
golden retriever puppy eyes, or Riley, with his Irish looks and surfer lingo,
and Sparks (oh, that hair). And how could our intrepid crew survive without the
constant, patient ministrations of the redoubtable Dr. Jamison, whose role in
fan fiction has become so important? I hope Richard Bull has read some of the
stories; I think he would be pleased. And, of course, the countless nameless -
and named - crew members who sometimes doubled as villains an episode or two
later. The guest stars deserve their own tribute, so I won't spend time here on
them, except to say - what a lineup! The very sound of Alfred Ryder's voice
will always strike terror into my heart, and what a great job Robert Duvall does
as a creepy alien, and Carroll O'Connor - and everyone else. The quality of
acting is superb. And when women are featured as guest stars, they are not just
eye-candy - they are spies and designers and scientists - intelligent,
accomplished people.
And the science fiction
itself - a world in which submarines can also fly, people are turned into
amphibians who swim underwater without the need for oxygen, wondrous things live
undiscovered at the bottom of the ocean, and unquiet spirits roam the earth in
search of long lost love. It is a world of imagination, of terror and wonder.
Well, then, what else? Isn't
that enough? Yes, but clearly there is something else - call it the X Factor -
that has made the Seaview glide so persistently through our dreams all these
many years. The whole is, in some mysterious way, greater than the sum of its
parts. I think the answer is to be found in something that is peculiar to a
certain kind of science fiction: life on the Seaview represents, in many ways,
all that is best about humanity: loyalty, courage, service, compassion,
self-sacrifice. As the anniversary of September 11th approaches, I have
occasion to think about these values, because I saw them at work day after day
in this poor, exhausted city I live in.
There is a nobility in this
idealized world (life on a submarine has never been that good, anymore than life
aboard a spaceship ever looked like the Enterprise) - and week after week, we
would tune in to find not so much the havoc wreaked by Irwin Allen's latest
rubber monster, but to find out how our brave crew will overcome their own fears
and limitations to triumph once again over whatever curves Nature has thrown
them. I still feel the thrill of terror I felt as a child when Captain Crane
enters the reactor room to shut it down in order to save the ship, knowing it
means certain death to him. Last fall countless New York City firefighters,
police, and EMS workers did the equivalent when they rushed into the burning
towers, knowing they might never come back. Their stories, and the stories of
the heroes of Flight 93, will be told now, over and over, to succeeding
generations.
Kenneth Burke has said that
stories are equipment for living. Well, what better equipment could we ask for,
than to watch these men of the Seaview battling unimaginable challenges, all the
while maintaining their compassion and concern for each other? Sure, the
monsters are silly, and the plots got even sillier later on, but we still
watched, and down deep, a little voice inside us said, "If they can do it, we
can."
And so we returned to our lives - to the
relentless, injurious march of time, to intrusive, controlling parents, and
sulky, demanding children, and car payments, and abusive bosses, to contract
disputes and leaky basements - and we knew that these were our monsters - but if
the men on the Seaview could maintain their courage and humor and compassion,
somehow it made everything a little easier. The allegory is clear, and needs no
refinement - the self-enclosed society of a ship or a submarine is its own
world, and can represent our own. If they can do it, we can, we said, and we
marched on to meet our deadlines and our car payments and the demands of the
people in our lives, and it all felt a little richer, a little more possible,
because we had just spent an hour of our life watching 125 men stuck together
inside a metal hull come through once again more or less intact - and we had
seen the triumph of the finer aspects of our common human nature.
Now, of course, we have
terrorists to consider - creatures really very much closer to Seaview's dark
villains than we might care to believe; our monsters have human faces these
days. They stare at us from FBI photographs nightly on the news - only those
haunted images remain, captured in the chilling blankness of their eyes. But
still the Seaview stories inspire us, and once again, it seems somehow to us -
as we watch our heroes struggle against overwhelming odds - that if they can do
it, we can.
Carole Bugg's short fiction has appeared in numerous St. Martin's
Press and Doubleday anthologies.
Her first novel, The Star of India, (St. Martin's, 1998),
received good reviews from Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal, The
Boston Globe, and Ellery Queen Magazine, among others; her second novel, The
Haunting of Torre Abbey, received a coveted starred review in Kirkus.
Who Killed Blanche Dubois?, the first book of her original Claire Rawlings
mystery series for Berkley Prime Crime, appeared in November of 1999 to glowing
reviews, as did the second book in the series, Who Killed Dorian Gray?
The third installment, Who Killed Mona Lisa? has been recently released.
The 1992 Winner of the Eve of St. Agnes Poetry Award, she is also
the 1996 First Prize winner of the Maxim Mazumdar Playwriting Competition and
the 1992 Jean Paiva Memorial Fiction award, which included an NEA grant to read
her fiction and poetry at Lincoln Center. A finalist in both the 1996 McClaren
and Henrico Playwriting Competitions, she has read her work at Barnes and Noble,
The Knitting Factory, Mercy College, and the Gryphon Bookstore in New York City,
and has received grants from Poets and Writers, as well as the New York State
Arts Council. Her story "A Day In the Life of Comrade Lenin" received an
Honorable Mention in St. Martin's Best Fantasy and Horror of 1993, and
she was a winner in the 1996 Writer's Digest Competition in both the playwriting
and essay categories. Her plays and musicals have been presented in New York
City at The Players Club, Manhattan Punchline, The Van Dam Street Playhouse,
Love Creek, Playwrights Horizons, the Jan Hus Theatre, the Lakota Theatre, The
Open Book, The Genesius Guild, First Look Reading Series, and Shotgun
Productions, as well as the Alleyway Theatre in Buffalo. She was a 1998
Fellowship Candidate at Manhattan Theatre Club, and was sponsored by The Paper
Mill Playhouse for a TCG Playwriting Award. She holds a B.A. with Honors in
English and German from Duke University. Her agent is Susan Schulman.
Any comments can be directed
to Carol
Bugge. |
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