The $500,000 Firefly

By PAUL GRAY.

Sure, everybody talks about how bummed out all the fictional versions of the future seem to be, but nobody does anything about it except Ted Turner. In November 1989, with the elan of someone ordering up cheerier wallpaper, the cable mogul created the Turner Tomorrow Awards for the purpose of inspiring authors the world over to "write about creative and positive solutions to ! global problems within an original work of fiction." The inducement to think happy thoughts: a top prize of $500,000.

In this respect, at least, Turner showed a canny awareness of the literary temperament, which is more obsessed with money than is the Wharton School of Business. Half a million dollars might have cheered up Kafka. But would it have made him write a good book? This is where Turner's idea ran into trouble, eventually culminating in a debacle last week: a prizewinner that was immediately repudiated by some of the big names who had voted for it.

Out of some 2,500 manuscripts submitted, a 55,000-word entry called Ishmael by free-lance writer Daniel Quinn, 55, was picked the best of the bunch. But wait a minute. The next day judges William Styron and Peter Matthiessen claimed that their panel did not want the full award to go to Ishmael -- described as "a series of philosophical conversations between a man and a great ape" -- and charged the Turner organization with misrepresenting their position in its publicity releases. Not so, said Ray Bradbury, another juror, who defended Ishmael and ragged his colleagues: "I think Styron and Matthiessen are literary snobs."

This farcical behavior by otherwise estimable and talented people can be explained quite simply. All literary prizes -- deeming apple A superior to orange B -- are more or less successful struggles with absurdity. The Turner awards were manifestly off the wall from their inception.

Mistake one: good books materialize as mysteriously as fireflies, and the reputable awards cast a net to see what has flickered up during a set period of time, usually a year. In the case of the Nobel Prize for Literature, many seasons of fireflies are admissible as evidence. This is not true of the Turner Tomorrow Awards, which were conceived to conjure up and bless a firefly of their own design.

Mistake two: the ideal panel for literary prizes is a group of harmless but well-read drudges who are happy with modest honorariums and the free coffee and doughnuts served at meetings. The Turner people made the blunder of assuming that prestigious judges would confer glitter on the new awards. They assembled, at $10,000 a pop, a blue-ribbon panel including not only Styron, Matthiessen and Bradbury but Nadine Gordimer and Carlos Fuentes as well.

Big reputations tend to come with big egos, not to mention the truth that any three writers, of whatever fame, will find it hard to agree on where to | have lunch. Add to this mix a $500,000 award that authors are instructed to hand out to someone else and the recipe for dissension is complete.

After the controversy flared in the press, Matthiessen insisted that his quarrel is with the Turner organization and not with Daniel Quinn or Ishmael. "It's not a novel yet," he says of the winner. "It is an extremely clear and lucid presentation of valuable ideas that deserve a hearing." As for Quinn, he calls his victory "a Cinderella story, complete with the stepsisters howling at the side." Whether any of this will affect the Turner Tomorrow Awards is impossible to predict. It's hard to know what the future will bring.

With reporting by Wendy Cole/New York