Paranormal penmanship

How The X-Files translates into novels

by Randee Dawn Cohen

The truth is, the writing is out there.

Not that you'd know it from listening to X-Files creator Chris Carter. "I wish there were more good X-Files writers," he lamented in a recent interview in Rolling Stone. "There are very few people who have proved they can do it."

At first it might seem Carter just isn't looking in the right places. He shouldn't need FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully to find writers eager to tackle the oeuvre of the hugely popular Fox Television drama. But thus far, only two authors have been commissioned to write novels based on the series, and there are hundreds of wanna-bes floating on the Internet. No, the writing is there. The problem is that Carter -- like any X-Files fan -- wants good writing. And that may be the biggest mystery of all: why is it so damn hard to transfer an hour-long paranoid drama about the pursuit of paranormal events to the written word?

It hasn't been done yet. Not for lack of trying. Kevin J. Anderson, a winner of science fiction's premier award, the Nebula, is the author of (among many others) two X-Files-based novels -- original plots, familiar characters. He is for now the single commissioned pet author of Carter and his production company, Ten-Thirteen. His first novelization, Ground Zero (Harper, $5.99), a story about nuclear destruction's ghosts coming back to wreak havoc, was released in hardcover in 1994 and sold hundreds of thousands of copies both in the US and abroad, where it topped the Times of London's book chart. The follow-up, 1996's Ruins (Harper, $5.99), which involved spaceships and ancient Mayan ruins, entered the New York Times bestseller list and sold even better. Anderson, who had previously written a large portion of the Star Wars novelization series, says the success was not entirely a surprise. (And given the long-running history of novels based on the Star Trek characters, his healthy track record with the Star Wars series was equally predictable.)

"I never had a number-one bestseller before the X-Files stuff," he admits during a phone call. "But I knew it would do as well as it did; I knew there were huge numbers of people who were clamoring for it, and the fans are desperate to know anything about Mulder and Scully that they can't learn on TV."

Still, sales are no indication of quality, and Anderson's books are weak. You don't learn much about either X-Files character beyond a little history (Scully, it turns out, was a nuclear-weapons protester during her wild college days) and fashion taste (Mulder prefers maroon ties). Anderson professes to be a fan of the show, and Ten-Thirteen sent him copies of every program to use as reference, but he talks a better X-Files story than he writes in his books.

"When you have to live inside the characters' heads and write inside this stuff," he explains, "you have to pay attention to, literally, how they talk, how they move, what phrases they use all the time, how they react to each other. Mulder and Scully have a very unusual relationship. It's complicated and it's a very deep friendship and there's sexual tension there, but they're not actually after each other. Mulder has a very clear sense of humor and Scully's is much dryer. It's not just like a stereotype, cliché'd, `here's a strong guy,' `here's a funny guy,' `here's the smart guy.' You know, the Gilligan's Island kind of characterization."

Anderson does find ways to work a great deal of plot and storytelling into a few hundred pages. Having worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for 12 years gave him firsthand knowledge of the inner workings of a nuclear research facility, which makes for Michael Crichton-esque detail throughout Ground Zero. But he couldn't just spin out a story based on his knowledge and someone else's characters, then present it as a finished novel to the publishers. "The X-Files people, they have to okay it," he points out, "and the Twentieth Century Fox people who license it from the X-Files people, they have to okay it, and then the publisher has to go through it. There's all kinds of extra red tape involved in doing a media tie-in book that isn't involved in my own stuff."

Even during the writing process, the owners of Scully and Mulder intervened. "Before I could write about Scully's protesting activities and her early college days, I had to talk with Chris Carter and his assistant and his story editor. I'd say, `This is what I'd like to do, and this is why I'd like to do it, and this is why I think it strengthens the conflict and emotions in the scene, and can I do it, please, please.' And they thought it was a really good idea.

"In a couple of places they made countersuggestions to fit with some of the upcoming episodes they were working on. At the end of Ruins, when Scully's writing her final report, they came back and told me I had to put in a scene that Scully's dog was with her, since we'd made a point that she has a dog in a couple of the episodes last year. So I said, `Okay, fine,' and rewrote the scene. Of course, two weeks before my book was published, they broadcast an episode where Scully's dog gets eaten by an alligator."

Therein lies the problem with Anderson's X-Files books: they end up reading as if they'd been written by committee. He may have the details and the plot elements honed, but the edge dulls under such constraints. There are two main elements to any X-Files adventure: the file itself and the way Mulder and Scully react to it. In Anderson's books the agents come across as merely going through prescribed motions. You won't find any allusions to sexual liaisons between Mulder and Scully in Ground Zero or Ruins, and the absence of such allusions -- the absence of any undercurrent of sexuality -- is apt to leave you feeling unsatisfied.

More rewarding efforts can be found outside the currently approved canon. Prior to Anderson's books, author Charles Grant held the franchise. His Goblins (Harper, $5.99) was published in 1994 and Whirlwind (Harper, $12) a year later -- both as official X-Files novels. Anderson explains, "Those did quite well, even though they were commissioned just as the TV show was starting and nobody knew what they had at the time. But they just threw them out there."

Grant's books are nearly as by-the-numbers as Anderson's, but -- perhaps because they were subjected to far less scrutiny -- they're more interesting. Better explanations of Scully, Mulder, and incidental characters flesh out Goblins and Whirlwind; it's easier to care about this Mulder and this Scully, even if she does get called "Dana" more frequently than feels right. These novels can stand apart from the series . .  almost.

Of course, there's more out there. Unfettered by Ten-Thirteen, publishers, or Fox Television, fans have written hundreds of pieces of X-fiction and posted them on the Internet. These renegade efforts have grown so prolific that fans have created their own awards for them -- the Spookys. This genre even has its own lingo. "Angst fiction" features Mulder dealing with his personal demons; the " 'shippers" (as in "relationshippers") insist on romanticizing the Scully/Mulder friendship.

As in every grass-roots creative movement the talent pool is mixed, but the fans do know what they want, and within some of their efforts the creative heart of X-Files beats stronger than in the sanctioned novels. Anderson and Grant are competent wordsmiths, but when Chris Carter dissociates himself from the X-Files show in another year or two and its producers are left scrambling for good writers, the solutions won't be found within the official canon. As Carter has always maintained, the facts we're looking for will be . . . "out there."