Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (16 page)

The Softliners are now alienated; everyone hates Dalton; he is cashiered and sent off to oversee a junkyard of old Naval hulks on the dusty dry and dismal frontier planet of Grassroots.

Act Three is a reprise, the same theme in a minor key. The scene opens but three months later. Dalton quite by accident discovers strange signals from space, investigates, and gives chase to a one-man Hukk scoutship, which pancakes into the ground while attempting to evade him. Aboard is a dead spy and Hukk plans for invasion. (The Hukk, as Dalton predicted, interpreted the peace treaty rewarding their aggressive behavior as an invitation for further aggression.)

Dalton attempts to tell the local mayor of Grassport, but when His Honor discovers him to be none other than the disgraced Admiral Dalton, the Mayor dismisses Dalton as a lunatic, and recommends sitting tight, doing nothing, and letting the all-wise Terran bureaucracy handle everything.

With no further ado, Dalton breaks into the arsenal, abducts the local recruitment officer, Sgt. Brunt, and heads out to the location where the Hukk are landing their assault boat. With the aid of some rifles set on autopilot, and some sniper skills, Dalton damages the boat, and kills half a dozen Hukk officers and crewmen before Brunt, betraying Dalton, wanders into the kill zone waving the white flag.

Dalton pretends to surrender, and then draws his holdout pistol, threatening to shoot through Brunt to kill the Hukk Captain cowering behind him. This Captain had been part of the Grand Fleet which surrendered to Dalton previously off Luna, and remembers him, therefore both fears him and trusts him, and agrees to terms.

The Hukk agree to withdraw if and only if they can save face: that is, Dalton must agree never to reveal that they actually set foot (in their case, set claw) on the frontier planet. Dalton agrees, even though that means he faces scorn from the mayor for ringing a false alarm, and possible criminal prosecution from the militia for breaking and entering and stealing their rifles.

At this point arrives the expected reward for virtue: Brunt turns out to be a Major in Naval Intelligence, specifically sent to the planet to keep an eye on Dalton. Now that it has been proved that Dalton was right about everything all along, was honest and being slandered all along, the Navy Intelligence Corps is willing to embrace him with open arms, let bygones be bygones, and give him his old career back.

Dalton says, “I’ll think about it.”

The four-word ending impressed me as a child and impresses me more as an adult, albeit now I see the melancholy, the painful sorrow, beneath that brief and stoic sentence. It means that the Naval Intelligence Corps is no more to be trusted to protect a man’s conscience than is the Senatorial staff, the bureaucrats, the State Department, or the Joint Chiefs who form the backdrop of corruption and compromise against which Dalton shines so brightly, and so alone.

It means there is no reward for virtue. None.

It means virtue is not its own reward, virtue means merely getting a boot in the teeth when a man is already beaten into the ground.

As a youth, I was too sunny and filled with the milk of human kindness to be able to comprehend such a bitter moral to the story. I just thought it meant Dalton did not need the approval of his peers, that he was a nonconformist (as was I, and all of my generation. We were nonconformists together, in perfect lockstep, each careful to be a nonconformist exactly like all the others). Like I said, I did not get it.

Dalton is a martyr. He is a witness to a higher moral code than any code found in this life. But, since this is a science fiction story, and since it was written in the seventies, no introduction of any religious theme would have been welcomed here. It would have been against the mood, which, as I said, is Noir in its purest and darkest form.

It is Noir, but is it science fiction?

The story of
The Glory Game
contained no science fictional speculations at all. It was in that sense a very conservative book, dwelling on what was the same in human nature in all ages past and present. It could have been set in any setting with the same impact.

But if we define science fiction to include only those tales that have scientific speculation as the center of their plot, we are defining science fiction to exclude my genre, Space Opera, which is defined as an adventure story in a vaguely Science Fiction-flavored setting.

The rule of thumb is a thought experiment: imagine the same story set in the present, on Earth, or in the historical past. Eliminate the scientific speculation present. If the story can still be told, it is not SF. In SF the speculation is the heart of the story. If you can tell the same tale on the sailing ship
Enterprise
or from the viewpoint of plucky rebels fighting the Roman Empire or the Spanish Empire rather than the Galactic Empire, then the tale is not SF properly so called.

On the other hand, this is a crisp and clear definition, very serviceable to fans of Analog, and other ‘Nuts and Bolts’ types, so I dare utter no protest against it.

The definition clearly works for Hard SF. Let us take three examples from Heinlein, Asimov, and Clark, by common consensus, the hardest of Hard SF writers, or at least the most famous.

There is no story in
Stranger In A Strange Land
if Mike the Martian is not from Mars, does not have psychic powers, and was not raised by a more advanced species than man. The science fictional speculation about what a higher civilization would be like which stands to industrial, monogamous and monotheistic civilization as the civilization stands to primitive polytheist and polygamous savages is the core of the book.

The same story being told about, let us say, a castaway infant raised in the jungle wilderness returning to his family in London could not contrast the shortcomings of civilization with future splendors of the orgy-ridden nudist communism which Heinlein, (and apparently every heresy since the dawn of time), has seen as the futuristic or utopian superior of civilized virtue. Such a story can, however, contrast the shortcomings of civilization with the noble savagery of more primitive times — such is the point of
Tarzan
and
A Princess Of Mars
and Conan stories and countless others.

The story is innately progressive, showing how the next step in evolution, the superman, can throw aside his clothing and his marriage vows as easily as he throws aside the curse of Adam saying he must toil for his bread. The superman lives without sin and without law. And without clothing.

By contrast,
Starship Troopers
, (a book I myself far prefer), could have taken place anywhere, anytime, since it is only a story of boot camp and a series of lectures on civic responsibility. Nothing would have been lost by making Mr. Rico into a grunt storming Normandy Beach, or a footslogger in Caesar’s Gallic campaign, or an Apache brave learning the rough and manly discipline of the warband. Only the props and backdrops would change, not the plot and theme.

Here we find an inherently conservative message in an inherently conservative story, that is, the tools of war change, but men don’t.

Likewise, there is no story in
Foundation
without the Seldon Plan, (and, to be blunt, precious little with it), that is, without the science fictional speculation that human history is subject to predictable laws just like the gas laws.

The story is a story about social engineering. A mathematician and a group of academic intellectuals decide to save civilization by manipulating history, and their plan leads to a Second Empire. The idea of giving votes to plebeians simply never comes up.

By contrast,
The Stars Like Dust
could have been written as a historical novel concerning the declining Roman Empire facing the Golden Horde.

Likewise again,
Childhood’s End
is a book I take to be the quintessential science fiction book. It is almost a myth, not a novel, since the main characters are all utterly forgettable. There is no story aside from the central conceit of a more advanced species aiding, (or forcing), mankind up the next step of the ladder of evolution to the realm of the superhuman. The concept of the ladder of evolution where supermen stand to men as men stand to apes is pure Science Fiction, indeed, is almost the definition of Science Fiction.

The Overlords fulfill all the Progressive dreams in one fell swoop. As the gigantic saucers hover over the cities of man, there is suddenly one world government, an end to war, and (oddly, considering the world is about to be destroyed) no more bullfighting nor cruelty to animals. And that silly mental disease called religion is brushed airily aside in a paragraph: man is too grown up for gods. Then in the climax of the book, the children of men become gods, man goes extinct, the world is obliterated, and the children of men fly off as pure spirits to merge with the Galactic Overmind also known as the Pleroma, the disembodied paradise of the Gnostics. The destruction of the material world and a life of pure and disembodied intellect was the central concept of Neoplatonism and every other heresy since the dawn of time. Think of it as taking nudism to the ultimate extreme.

By contrast, uh… I cannot think of a single novel or short story by Arthur Clarke which was not science fiction, that is, a story that could have been told in some other milieu without losing its point.

I warned the reader that this would not be a book review but an exploration of another chain of thought to which rereading this book led me. Here below is that chain of thought. And, for better or worse, it is a long one.

The theme of the book, as I said above, is abnormally clear, because Laumer skillfully has left out anything which might detract or delay from emphasizing that theme. This story is as sharply pointed as a fable by Aesop. The point is the answer to the question famously asked by Socrates, but surely asked by all men in all ages when they reach a certain age, whether it is better to be seen as evil while truly being good, or to be seen as good while truly being evil?

The question divorces the reward of virtue from the reality of virtue, at least, in the view of the world where the only reward is the esteem and applause of men. Tan Dalton does what is right, come hellfire or floodwater, and does not flinch at paying the price in terms of esteem lost, prestige ruined, career savaged, character slandered—and he does not get the girl in the end.

The setup of the paradox of seeming rather than being good is simple enough: Dalton is presented with two political parties, a stupid party and an evil party, both of whom have a dumb and cowardly answer to a not-very-complex question, but a question that requires bravery and fortitude to answer. He cannot in good conscience join with either party, and so he is isolated, despised by both, and scorned by all. In other words, he is given for his goodness the exact same reward rightly given to evil men.

One thing that particularly delighted me both as a child and as a man about Dalton’s answer is the pragmatic idealism of it. Pragmatically, it is unwise either to overreact or underreact to the aggression of an ambitious but weaker alien menace. But whether it is unwise or not, it is
unfair
on idealistic grounds not just to Mankind, but to the Hukk aggressor also, to meet aggression with a reward, because it confuses them into a false picture of the world, one where they can make many small piecemeal attacks with no fear of massive, overwhelming, or, (in this case), genocidal retaliation.

Now surely no one raised in a Christian nation, (even one that is culturally Christian if not officially), is unaware of the answer to the Socratic question. The non-Christians who, for whatever reason, accept Christian value judgments as valid can see in the example of Christ on the cross, or Socrates drinking hemlock, the reward of being good rather than looking good. Until very recently, the picture of a man willing to make any sacrifice to do the right thing, despite any slander or false accusation, was a paramount ideal of our civilization.

The self-aggrandizing hucksterism of a Cassius Clay was not a mainstream ideal, nor was success at any cost, nor did anyone listen to smirking cads who said that winning was not everything, but the only thing.

Even children were taught the ideal of seeking the reward of virtue not in the opinion of the fickle world: Superman is garbed as a drab and mild mannered reporter who cannot even get a date, no worldly reward comes to Clark Kent for his good deeds; Spider-Man is hated as a menace by the city he saves, so if anything, his reward is even less. These are the men upheld, and rightly so, as heroes to our children. Glory Hounds like Booster Gold or Gilderoy Lockheart are rightly portrayed as distasteful, comedic, or villainous.

We are a society that by tradition—Christian tradition—mistrusts those who seek the good opinion of society. How alien this is to the caste system of the Hindu or the Mandarin philosophy of Confucius cannot be overemphasized: in those systems, position in society was identical with virtue. The shame of losing face was the evil, of losing family honor, or getting caught.

On that level, the self-sacrifice of our clean-cut Naval hero in our short adventure novel is nothing extraordinary except perhaps, (as I said), the clean clarity of the point. It is what we Westerners expect. In a happy ending, the merit of the hero is finally rewarded with an overdue recognition, perhaps an apology and a reconciliation. In a tragic ending, the merit of the hero is undiscovered until after his death, if ever.

But, again, the ironic twist of the last four words—“I’ll think about it,”—is that of a man who is not eager to accept the alleged reward his overlooked merit has finally earned.

I call it ironic because Dalton is not a Christian who believes in God, nor even a Socratic philosopher who believes in a transcendent ideal of truth worthy of such self-sacrifice. He is just a competent man trying to do a difficult job made more difficult by the evil and stupidity of his political superiors.

I call it ironic because there is a second note or overtone behind this main note of self-sacrifice, the note of Noir cynicism, of hardheaded pragmatism, of dry-eyed unsentimentality which would seem to undermine the idea of self-sacrifice in any form.