Themes in Lunatics
Although Rosalyn Hunter is credited as the “writer” on Lunatics and I am credited as the “director”, the reality is a bit more muddled than that. We are highly collaborative in our creative process, as you might expect from a married team. I thought it might be interesting to introduce some of the themes we’re working into the series.
Here’s the first:
Theme #1
“Bridging from Here to There”
Particularly striking in the pilot episode is the idea of going from present day realities into the still science-fictional future of space pioneering. This is a sticky subject, because there always seems to be a significant gap along the way — there’s a gap in the imagination. We want to fill it, partly because we think that if you can’t imagine something, you probably can’t do it. And maybe that’s part of the reason we don’t have space settlement already.
So, we purposely set Lunatics as close in the future as we possibly could and still have the story be believable (we decided this was 2040, after earlier dates strained our credulity). We imagined the circumstances of the world in Lunatics as a direct outgrowth of the world of space politics, space advocacy, and space technology that we know today. We set out to do it with essentially no new technology. This is the colonization plan we could start working on tomorrow — all we’ve done is left enough time for it to be accomplished.
This kind of setting is hard for a science fiction writer. Because not only do you have to know the science so that you can come up with things that should work in principle, you have to know specific technologies and hardware so that you can come up with things that make sense as a natural outgrowth of present-day technology. You have to actually create your story universe in an extrapolative way — which is not done as often as you might imagine in science fiction. Because it’s hard. This is almost a fusion between “science fiction” and technologically-focused “true life” storytelling.
