Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (2 page)

Readers of science fiction have an advantage of perspective over readers who limit themselves to mainstream books, namely, that any works taking place in a year as yet unborn, or in a world as yet unknown, must concentrate their attention on those things we take for granted; because in worlds to come they may indeed no longer be taken for granted, nor exist at all.

The science fiction reader, as if from the vantage point of some shining skyscraper of the future, can look back through time to this our present, and see what we here might not.

Fantasy likewise occupies a different vantage. A reader of fantasy stands outside of time altogether, as if atop the haunted mountain of far and unvisited Kadath topped by the onyx citadel of the dream gods, or the scarred and smoking slopes of sinister Mount Doom where evil was forged, and he looks from a dreamland or a Middle Earth – where magic lives in all its horror and wonder – into a world, our world, a grayer world, where magic does not.

The main difference between fantasy fiction and realistic fiction is the presence of magic. The main difference between Tolkien-style fantasy and Robert E. Howard-style fantasy is the attitude toward magic.

In High Fantasy, magic is usually not magic at all, but miracle: a wondrous good beyond hope reaching from without the edges of the world. When Gandalf the Gray returns from the dead as Gandalf the White, that is not a Raise Dead spell. There is also, like its shadow, black magic, which has a satanic character and tone. The practitioners are necromancers and witches, and not friendly witches like Glinda or Sabrina or Samantha or Hermione, but cruel witches like Achren or Jadis.

High Fantasy occupies the mental universe where (1) truth is true, (2) goodness is good, and (3) life is beautiful unless marred by sin and malice, and when marred life may yet, not without terrible price, be saved.

That this is an honest, virtuous, and sublime picture of the universe is a high matter for debate beyond the scope of this essay: for now, let us accept for the sake of argument that it is a healthy view of the universe, one suitable for the psychology of human life, and joy.

In Sword-and-Sorcery, by contrast, the magic is malign: Conan kills evil sorcerers with the edge of the sword. There is magic afoot in the world, but it is cruel, and to study it leads one along the paths of madness. Any benevolent magic tends to be the aid of wise men or the caprice of unseen powers as unexpected as a dolphin helping a drowning sailor stay afloat. This is the view of magic the pagans of old had: something that disgusted and terrified even those who indulged in it.

There is not a separate name for the genre that follows Gary Gygax or Michael Moorcock or Jack Vance, but we should note many a story where the magic power is nothing more than an alternate technology, to be used for good or ill as the practitioner sees fit. There is no spiritual element to such depictions at all. Let us call it Sword-and-Magic-User fiction.

In the mental universe depicted by Sword-and-Sorcery or Sword-and-Magic-User, the noticeable thing lacking is a figure like Aslan in Narnia or Elbereth in Middle-Earth. There is no Christ; no Virgin Mary. Men like Conan and (ironically) Solomon Kane are on their own. Elric, Corum, and the like are also on their own: a universe torn between forces of inhuman law and inhuman chaos lacks the sense of hierarchy implied by High Fantasy, where Prince Caspian serves Aslan who in turn serves the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea.

High fantasy has a Roman Catholic flavor to it, whereas Sword-and-Sorcery is somewhat Protestant. Conan in particular represents the rebellion of a healthy barbarian against a corrupt and over-civilized decadence. Truth might still be true, but you are on your own to find it: no authority speaks with authority. Gandalf may come from the Blessed Lands, but not Ningauble of the Seven Eyes.

Again, Sword-and-Magic-User tales are syncretic, polytheistic, disinterested in things of the spirit. Call it Unitarian.

Science fiction is about the magic of the future. It differs from other magical stories because the magic is metaphorical: it concerns the miracles of modern science rather than the miracles of God; the magic of technology rather than the magic of hobgoblins. It differs from other genres because we or our children may one day see scientific miracles come to pass, even as readers of Jules Verne and their children saw in their day such fantastic things as the submarine, the flying machine, the moonshot.

But then again, even among Hard SF writers, we find their most famous works steeped in magic as much as any tale of King Arthur or Achilles; it is merely called by other names. The powers of Paul Muad’Dib or Michael Valentine Smith or the prophecies of Hari Seldon or the luck of Teela Brown are not called magic, but they are. These characters hail from Hard SF classics of the genre. Nor does this differ for softer science fiction: Darth Vader from
Star Wars
can read minds as easily as can Mr. Spock, and can levitate objects as easily as Bill Bixby’s uncle from
My Favorite Martian
.

In Science Fiction the role of magic is ambiguous, and this reflects the ambiguous attitude of the modern age toward all things supernatural.

To be sure, we all tell ourselves that no modern enlightened man believes in magic, and many an enlightened modern treats science as a useful tool by which means he can make for himself what sort of life he pleases: but then again, an unusual number of we modern men substitute an attitude toward science which is indistinguishable from a cult belief, as if science will discover laws of history or psychiatry and tell us the truth about human nature that will set us free; or else it is indistinguishable from an occult belief, as if new discoveries will harness parapsychological or psionic powers, and a New Age will dawn of mystic revelation, or an expression of some life-force or evolutionary end-purpose moving us down the channels of time toward Utopia; or else it is indistinguishable from devil worship, as if science justified or required the extermination of the unfit, the unborn, the unwanted, or the genocide of lesser races in the name of dry-eyed and ice-hearted Darwinism, or looks upon mankind as an expendable raw material out of which to build the superman.

These four types represent the four stages of a path of decay toward the nihilist abyss: the Worldly Man, the Cultist, the Occultist, the Anarchist.

In sum, science fiction precisely reflects both the exhilaration and also the discontent of man in his modern world, particularly his attitude toward the magical and supernatural.

The exhilaration comes from one source: the greater liberty, knowledge, technology, and wealth we enjoy than our medieval and ancient forefathers. The discontent comes from the same source as the discontent of our forefathers, which our greater liberty, knowledge, technology, and wealth cannot assuage, and indeed quite aggravates, namely, the depraved, corrupt and self-destructive nature of human nature.

The writings of Robert Heinlein serve as a perfect example of the Worldly Man, that is, the man who rejects Revelation, and seeks truths nowhere but in practical morals and empirical facts. The attitude portrayed in his writings toward religion is ecumenical neglect and contempt. Christianity is a source of a threat to liberty, as personified by Nehemiah Scudder (who is overdue, since he was predicted to be elected in 2012) but never depicted as a source of any goodness, charity, or beneficial reform.

Other religions, particularly esoteric or even Martian, are worthy of respectful disbelief. The attitude tolerates religion provided it is castrated and kept as a private pastime for lesser beings. One day we will outgrow it.

The Worldly Man is content to mind his own business and seek his own pleasures after his own fashion, and demands his neighbors do the same. The business he minds is to maintain the public peace (as in
Starship Troopers
) and to get laid (as in
Stranger in a Strange Land
).

The virtues needed to accomplish this can be lauded — no one waxes more poetic in his praise of the sacrifices of servicemen than Mr. Heinlein — but those virtues have no metaphysical or theological foundation. For the Worldly Man, “absolute truth” is a question for folk with too much time on their hands.

Ayn Rand does not display this avuncular tolerance for Christianity: the religion is condemned as an unambiguous evil, and its practitioners as hatred-eaten mystics. (Other religions, one assumes, find no more favor in her eyes, but there is only one she condemns.) This is not the impatience of a Worldly Man for the mirage called absolute truth; this is the odium of one who defends an absolute truth against its rivals, or, to be precise, the hatred of a heresiarch for orthodoxy.

Rand is an example of a Cultist amid the science fiction community (and do not tell me Ayn Rand is not a science fiction writer: an inventor discovers the secret of a self-generating power source from atmospheric electricity, and combines in a secret society with other inventors of supermetals and voice-activated locks and mirage-casting ray-screens and with masters of pirate battleships to overthrow the evil world masters who control a sound-wave disintegration ray? John Galt is cut from the same pattern as Doc Savage or the Gray Lensman).

The Cultist takes the science and industry which affords the Worldly Man his pleasures, and scorns his pursuit of mere pleasure: truth, hard truth, absolute truth is the object of the Cultist’s search. Nothing exists but matter and hard facts, and the question of how to organize human life on earth is a deduction from facts. Any opposition or lack of enthusiasm is seen as treason.

Don’t be misled by my example to think I am singling out libertarian writers for scorn. Socialists like H.G. Wells and atheists like Philip Pullman would serve just as well. What gives the Cultist his particular flavor is the humorlessness, the intolerance, and the zeal of his pursuit. I call it Cultic because the poor fool is trying to place a simplistic or mechanistic understanding of the universe in the place of divine revelation: he serves an idol.

The Cultist believes he has discovered the secret to a life of happiness on Earth, and the discoveries always retain an eerie simplicity. I remember hearing one science fiction writer once saying how everything in life would be better if only religion were abolished. Really? Everything? Religion is the source of
all
evils? Cultists of other breeds select a different one, a simple scapegoat whose abolition will usher in the Utopia: for Ayn Rand, eliminating altruism is the panacea; for H.G. Wells, eliminating private property. I can think of at least one feminist SF writer who thinks the abolition of men would do it, or, at least, of all masculinity.

The Cultist, whether he wishes it or not, is always an enemy of virtue. This is because the nature of virtue is a matter of the careful balancing of extremes between two relative evils, and the extreme repudiation of absolute evils. The Cultist is an absolutist, and admits of no balance, no median. The Cultist is bedeviled by the alluring simplicity of his panacea, his one idea, and so compromises with absolute evils as if they were matters of taste. It is no accident that both Heinlein and Rand praise keeping one’s oaths in their writings, and both portray favorably the violation of matrimonial oaths by fornications and adulteries.

In the same way the Cultist rebels against the worldliness of the Worldly Man, the Occultist rebels against the Cultist, and insists that there is more than just a material world and one brief and stoical life lived within it.

Ursula K. Le Guin seems to me to be the most famous and most articulate representative of this stance within the science fiction community: while her books have favorably portrayed an anarchist utopia (as in
The Dispossessed
), she lacks the grinding dogmatism of an Ayn Rand. Note the gentle parable of
Lathe of Heaven
, that no direct solution to problems actually solves them, or the explicit teaching of the relativity of all truth in
Four Ways to Forgiveness
.

I don’t mean the word Occultist here to mean a palmist armed with Tarot cards. I am using the word in its original sense. I mean it is one who believes in a hidden reality, a hidden truth, a truth that cannot be made clear.

In the modern world, the Occultist is more likely to select Evolution or the Life-Force as this occult object of reverence, rather than the Tao. Occultists, in the sense I am using the word, explicitly denounce no religion nor way of life except the religion of Abraham, whose God is jealous and does not permit the belief in many gods, nor the belief in many views of the world each no better than the next.

Postmodernism, which rejects the concept of one overarching explanation for reality, is explicitly Occultic: the truth is hidden and never can be known.

Occultists tend to be more wary of the progress of science and technology than Cultists or Worldlies. They see the drawbacks, the danger to the environment, and the psychological danger of treating the world as a mere resource to be exploited, rather than as living thing, or a sacred thing.

The Occultists believe in undemanding virtues, such as tolerance and a certain civic duty, but even these are relative and partial. There is beauty in his world, indeed, the beauty of nature is often his only approach to the supernal, but that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there is no absolute truth and very little goodness aside from good manners and political correctness.

Of the final stage, the pure nihilism I here call Anarchy, I can think of only one representative in science fiction, Peter Watts, and at that only one of his books,
Blindsight
. As with Heinlein, I am not speaking of the author himself, whose opinions I do not know and refuse to guess. I am merely speaking of the worldview as portrayed in his fiction.

(The nihilist viewpoint is more often seen in fantasy or horror, as in H.P. Lovecraft, where the universe has literally nothing but roaring madness at its core, with crawling chaos serving it).

The Anarchist rebels against the soft mysticism of the Occultist and against the zealous dogmatism of the Cultist, but he also despises the Worldly as weak and inconsequential, if not an enemy.