The giant Earthship Ark, drifting through deep space over eight hundred years into the far future, its passengers descendants of the last survivors of the dead planet earth, locked in separate worlds heading for destruction… The Starlost (1973)
Starlost, a Canadian television series, running sixteen episodes in 1973. The premise was interesting – Earth was long gone, the last survivors of humanity had fled in a giant generation ship composed of interlinked domes. But something had gone horribly wrong, an accident had taken out the bridge crew and locked the domes away from each other, and the ship had drifted out of control for four hundred years. Now it was heading on a collision course with a nearby star, and only Devon, Rachel and Garth, three exiles from a rural dome, understood the danger and faced the almost insurmountable task of trying to save what was left of humanity.
Originally, it got off to a great start with names like Harlan Ellison, Ben Bova, Doug Trumbull, Keir Dullea, Walter Koenig and Ursula K. LeGuin attached to it. But things went wrong – Harlan Ellison threw a tantrum, scripts weren’t ready, the revolutionary special effects system didn’t work. The big names departed, leaving the show in the hands of an inexperienced production crew who had no time, no money and no experience. The verdict was catastrophe, one of the worst series ever produced in the sci fi genre.
But was it? I just wrote a book saying different.
Well, it’s done – a project a decade in the making is finally complete and out into the world officially, as of October 15, 2024. STARLOST UNAUTHORIZED, AND THE QUEST FOR CANADIAN IDENTITY, is completed, edited, uploaded everywhere from IngramSpark, to Google, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, Draft2Digital and Amazon (boo hiss). Available in trade paperback, ebook and hardcover. I’m enclosing a couple of links for Kobo, B&N and Smashwords.
It’s funny. I never watched Starlost when it was on. I grew up in northern New Brunswick, we only had one television station – CBC back then, and Starlost was a CTV production. I never even heard of it until years later, when I read Harlan Ellison’s essay on his experiences in Stalking the Nightmare, and came across it in John Javna’s Best of Science Fiction TV (which included a section on ‘The Worst’). What I learned, was that it had been epically bad, a tale of treachery and incompetence resulting in a television misfire. The fact that it was connected to Canada was a footnote in the sheer awfulness of it all. Let’s face it, that yawning gulf between Star Trek and Star Wars, the early and mid-seventies was a terrible time for Science Fiction film and television, Starlost was just the bottom of that bucket.
Of course, I’d grown up in that era, had witnessed and even imbibed the emergence of Canadian nationalism. It kind of hurt that our countries one foray into genre television had been so disastrous. But I got over it. In the eighties, I discovered Decline of the American Empire by Denys Arcand, Faustus Bidgood out of Newfoundland, the works of Guy Madden and David Cronenberg, Salter Street Films emerging in Halifax. It was a revelation, Canadians could do interesting, thought provoking film and television, they could be funny, urgent, insightful, dramatic. Canadiann culture could be more than just coming of age stories set on prairie wheatfields or dour Nova Scotia villages. I never thought about Starlost.
Fast forward a few more years, I was an obsessed LEXX fan, engaged in fandom, writing my LEXX book. For the record, LEXX was a space opera produced by Salter Street Films in Halifax, an aggressively local and Canadian production, it reflected an raucous Maritimes sensibility full of dragonflies, lobster textures, stretched fabrics, and a quartet of flawed characters stumbling through a dangerous universe. It was brilliant.
Anyway, I ended up trading some LEXX VHS tapes to a fan in the United States for some Starlost tapes. A few years earlier, ten episodes of Starlost had been compiled into a series of movies for cable television. These repackaged episodes had ended up as VHS releases. So that’s what was on offer. I confess, I was vaguely curious to see it, having heard so much about it (all bad). I was expecting something awful, a Plan Nine from Outer Space level of disaster.
What I got, was something completely different. A series of episodes that were well written, well acted, definitely low budget, but with intriguing stories. It wasn’t terrible at all. Some of it was average, but some of it was kind of excellent.
And something more…
I saw myself! Not me personally of course, I’m not narcissistic enough for that. But rather, I saw my nation, my culture, my sensibility, reflected in the episodes. I’d grown up in the era of Canadian nationalism, in the era where we had real debates over whether we wanted to be an adjunct satellite of the United States, or whether it was possible to chart our own course. Where we’d been concerned about the overwhelming avalanche of American culture, and unsure what to do about it. Where we had seen America, with its Vietnam War, its Nixon and Watergate, its rapacious soul-less capitalism, its pollution and were repulsed. I’d grown up in an era of ambiguity, of questing and questioning.
And here it was in the episodes. I’d never really thought much about Canadian culture as such, about Canadian sensibility, and the issues of Canadian nationalism had long since flamed out. But here they were animating, driving the stories of a space-ark seven hundred years into the future. I was astonished. Not only was it good, but it was unique, it said interesting things I’d never seen addressed before in that way.
I wrote an essay on that eventually, which brought me to the attention of Norman Klenman, the script editor who had written or rewritten half the episodes. We corresponded. I got on with my life, but I kept coming back to it. I eventually got hold of all the episodes on DVD. Occasionally researched it, or wrote more meandering little essays or reviews. Come covid, I decided to do something with it. Lost the impulse. Got it back. Eventually, I decided to pull it all together. I did a kickstarter, interviewed Gay Rowan and Robin Ward (two of the three stars of the series), and put the book together this year.
I’m not sure that there was a market for a book about an obscure fifty-year old television series with an unjustly infamous reputation. But you know what? Sometimes that’s not the issue. I wrote book because I wanted to read it and no one else had bothered. I wrote the book because I thought it was interesting, and I thought I had something to say.
That’s enough…
CHECK IT OUT ON KOBO
Starlost Unauthorized eBook by D.G. Valdron – EPUB | Rakuten Kobo 9781998453030
CHECK IT OUT ON BARNES & NOBLE
sTARLOST UNAUTHORIZED | Barnes & Noble®
CHECK IT OUT ON SMASHWORDS
Or many other platforms..