Force Field (Preview)

It's been a while since I published any fiction here on JfJ, so I wanted to share a glimpse of what I'm working on currently. Hope you enjoy, and as always, comments & emails welcome.

Spaceman Jones, in case you weren’t born on planet Earth, aired originally in 1982 and was a sort of bastardized leftover of Blaxsploitation that ended up being extremely popular with the early-Saturday-morning-rebroadcast-TV crowd. The pilot, which like initially created large waves in the sci-fi world, was an etiology of Jones’ pursuit of inner-peace. Through a series cheesecloth flashbacks, it was revealed that Jones’ seemingly aimless meandering through modern space was supposed to be a sort of atonement for indirectly ending his own family (specifically, Jones’ family was coldly slaughtered by an Argatoadian Spacelord whose son – heir to the Argatoadian throne – Jones had shot dead in a bar fight, Jones’ reputable temper having got the best of him there).

Jones, having witnessed wife, son, and two daughters blasted into dry dust before his very eyes by the business-end of the Argatoadian Lord’s Megawatt Vapulverize Ray, had more-or-less arrived at a personal philosophy of non-violence, which was pretty bluntly communicated in a close up of Jones toward the end of that first episode: Jones, teary-eyed, lip-biting, and choking through the emotion, grunted in his husky baritone, “Violence, man? Violence ain’t the answer to the problems I got.” The pilot set the stage for thirteen more episodes in which Jones took a lot of lip from hostile and oddly racist space strangers and didn’t do too much about it, unless of course he absolutely had to, which happened about every three episodes or so. This led to the season’s finale, where the nation held its collective breath as Jones found the Argatoadian Spacelord pinned beneath the business end of his own (Jones’) Megawatt Vapulverize Ray. In the end cooler heads prevailed and Jones decided to spare the toad-like Spacelord, who was in fact quite-literally toad-like, Argatoadians being little more than poorly-paid extras stuffed into claustrophobic rubber & styrafoam bullfrog costumes. It’s worth mentioning that Spaceman Jones was little more than a debased rip-off of Kung Fu.

                Though the first season was received with sensational public enthusiasm (this was five years after Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back  mind you, and so the American public was not only accepting of but positively slavering for Argatoadian Spacelords and Megawatt Vapulverize Rays), the premise of a passive-minded protagonist could only go so far in the ‘80s. The second season, bolstered by a bloated FX budget and a writer’s room fueled by not-inexpensive cocaine, introduced a wide array of dazzling green-screen effects and computer-generated animations. The most applauded of these  was Spaceman Jones’ to-be signature gadget: a brilliant blue personal force field. When Jones strutted into a rough fringe colony spaceport or sketchy asteroid mining facility or Starspice trading hub (which he did invariably in the first 2-7 minutes of every episode), the force field was his way of saying back off bub, you’ve come close enough. It was his puffed-up chest, his bristled hair, and it came on only under direct threat, of which that second season provided plenty. A thug would raise a fist or Megawatt Vapulverize Ray or hydroelectric-light-drive tuning wrench and with a whir-click from Jones’ brown-leather utility belt the field would snap on: a perfectly-spherical blue bubble bloomed about his body, swirling like cerulean TV snow and hissing like a new record before its first note. As a rule the field came on around minute 11 or so, and by minutes 14-15 the fringe colonists/asteroid miners/spice merchants would devise a way to bypass the field or render it useless, forcing Jones’ hand so that by the end of the episode (minutes 18-21) Jones had no choice but to like return to his roots and whoop some serious ass by way of terrific and technically dazzling massacre.

                The original Jones, a sort of hawk-faced, caramel skinned, and Shakespearian actor, was so outraged by this sudden selling out that he called it quits halfway through reading the first script, which was fine considering there was no shortage of struggling black actors who would gladly play the beloved spaceman, tinges of homicidal mania or no. The replacement Jones had a hard mug and deep-black skin and sported muscles that clearly belonged to a far-large man. He had a sort of lip-curled quality that contrasted with Spaceman Jones’ putative reticence, a snarl that sizzled  behind his translucent blue force field with a similar heat & bite. It was this rendition of Spaceman Jones that inspired 11-year-old Billy Ogvile – shock-white and knob-kneed and thickly-glassed – to construct from disassembled kitchen appliances and spare garage debris his own force field belt.

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