Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (7 page)

Conan the Barbarian we can imagine strangling a vulture with his teeth while being crucified, because he is the baddest of badasses ever to tread the bloodstained pages of pulp magazines. We cannot imagine Blinknose the Beaver sharpening the sword of his fathers before sending him with a few words of sage advice to face the snake-god of Stygia in the windowless and primordial temple from which the smokes of incense and the screams of victims on moonlit midnights arise.

If the veil between man and nature is ever parted for Conan, and this applies to all the Sword-and-Sorcery I have read, what comes through the parted veil is a monster, an abomination stirred up by the aforementioned sorcery, something to be slain with the aforementioned sword. Conan dwells in a Lovecraftian universe, where the things beyond mortal ken are hostile, unearthly, indifferent, and they do not want to talk to you.

Cthulhu does not want to be your friend.

The Great Old Ones in this respect are more horrible than the Mephistopheles of Faust. They do not want to tempt you, and will make no bargain, signed in blood or no, for your soul.

Now, I am not saying all Sword-and-Sorcery is Lovecraftian, but I am saying the sorcery is more often Eldritch than it is Disney. I don’t think I ever read a single tale of this kind where Elric of Melnibone or Solomon Kane had his fairy godmother turn a comedy relief mouse into a steed for him to ride to war. It is not the kind of thing Arioch, Lord of Chaos, does for you.

But note that Siegfried from the Wagner opera seems to have as many animal friends as Snow White. He plays with a bear that terrifies his foster father, Mim the Dwarf, and he understands the speech of the songbird that warns him Mim means to murder him. A myth has some element that Sword-and-Sorcery is lacking. The common thread here is that Siegfried is like Tarzan or like Romulus and Remus, a man both closer to nature than any civilized man, but also possessed of a glamor or a power due to this innocence.

But note that the opposite of Snow White is seen in these Noble Savages: Siegfried is stronger than the bear, and can play with him as if with a puppy, in rough friendship, but in no way does he domesticate the bear, or set him to cooking or cleaning or sweeping, or even helping him to forge a sword.

Science fiction differs from fantasy and fairy tales in one special conceit: the magic and the wonder in science fiction is confined to those which can be fit into a naturalistic universe, one where only those mysteries of the universe that can be discovered by science are real.

Now, this might not seem like a deep difference. After all, we might ask, what is the difference between a dragon from planet Pern or Velantia and a dragon from the Lonely Mountain or from Neidhöle? What is the difference between a Slan or Lensman or Vulcan who reads minds and an Elf-Queen who reads hearts? What is the difference between the Time Traveler, who visits the Morlocks of AD 807901, and Ebenezer Scrooge, who visits the graveyard in a Christmas of some future year closer at hand?

To travel in time or read minds or deal with dragons are alike in that they are wonders and mysteries, things we cannot do in real life. But the difference is clear and deep: the flying lizard creatures of Pern are extraterrestrials. Fafnir of Neidhöle is supernatural. What Slans or Lensmen or Vulcans do, according to the rules of their own make-believe universe, is a natural effect, either a skill that can be learned, or a native talent no more supernatural than an electric eel’s ability to discharge a shock. The Time Traveler built a time traveling machine, which any competent workman with the Time Traveler’s blueprints and materials could duplicate. The conceit of the story is that Time Machine is just as impossible as a radio would have been in the Bronze Age: something that does not exist but could. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a ghost, a spirit, something science cannot explain nor science worshipers admit possible.

If the Gray Lensman came back to his barracks from a hard campaign of blasting Boskonian space-pirates out of the ether, he could not find a fuzzy animal mopping the floor or polishing his raygun. He could find an underperson or uplifted animal, of course, something from the island of Dr. Moreau changed by science to be intelligent; or he could find any number of fuzzy extraterrestrials. Indeed, a suspiciously large number of extraterrestrials are our all-too-terrestrial fellow earthcritters merely propped up on their hind legs. Kzinti are cats, for example, and Selenites are termites.

Green Martians are Red Indians, and Green Osnomians are Red Martians (who are nudists), and Romulans are Romans, and Klingons are Russians (unless, later, they are Samurai), and Vulcans are Houyhnhnms (who are horses).

But in each case, if the story is science fiction and not fantasy, the reason why the talking animal talks is that some undiscovered but quite natural property of natural science allows for it, such as the natural evolutionary development of intelligence on extraterrestrial worlds.

A second difference is one of familiarity. A talking fox or a talking tree we can easily imagine to be like the trickster from
Pinocchio
or Treebeard from Tolkien. But a Martian is either a monster, something strange and dangerous, or an alien, someone strange whether dangerous or not. Possibly the Martian is a space princess named Dejah Thoris, who happily is both gorgeous and naked, but even she must be alien in the sense of exotic and alluring, if she is to be a convincing Martian.

There is a veil between the human world and the Otherworld in fairy tales which the tale penetrates, and we imagine what life is on the other side. In science fiction the veil is between the human world and other places in time and space and other dimensions, between the natural world we know and unknown worlds equally as natural as our own. They can be extraterrestrial and even extra-dimensional, but they cannot be literally uncanny, nor, in sense that Elfland or the Inferno is, can they be unearthly.

But now we are far afield, so let us quickly return to the point of the appeal of seeing a maiden befriending animals to do human tasks. I hope we are all agreed from the examples above, and many others we can imagine, that the appeal is a longing to be at peace with nature, to cross the gap which even those men who do not believe in the literal Garden of Eden will admit exists. There is something in the human soul that longs for Arcadia, for the Golden Age of Saturn, for the time which modern science says never existed, but all myths report once did exist, when man and nature were one, and beasts were our brothers.

To be sure, there is many a modern myth, spun by Rousseau or Marx and seen in stories like
Dances With Wolves
, about the Edenic times when we were all noble savages. Some of these myths pretend to be scientific, but real science, studying the skull wounds of Neolithic corpses, can tell the murder rate back in the Stone Age was higher than anywhere in the modern world, and that includes inner cities during riots and provinces at war. It should rightly be called not the 'Stone Age' but the 'Homicide by Stone Axe Age'.

Whatever science or pseudoscience says, anyone whose heart is fit to hear fairy tales knows a sense of loneliness and loss which is soothed, but only in part, by the sublime beauties of nature. There is something out there we all want to embrace, and to have it talk to us.

That, by the way, is the point of the appeal of having the fuzzy woodland friends do chores. If Snow White were seen keeping house for the dwarves, but what she did was get a cat to keep the rats out of the grain store, go duck hunting with her faithful hound Greatheart, and hitch up a horse or ox to plough the field, or keep bees for their honey or chickens for their eggs or keep lambs for their veal, then the gap between man and nature is still in place, and the virgin has not lured the wild things over the gap to our side.

No doubt by now some readers are puzzled at my repeated use of the words virgin and maiden, and, if those readers went to public school instead of getting an education, they are not only puzzled but offended. This brings up a second and larger point about woodland creatures working at human tasks, which is, namely, what power does the fairy tale virgin possess which enables her to overcome or ignore the gap between man and nature which afflicts the rest of the Sons of Adam?

It is, of course, her innocence. Much as it appalls the brain-dead zombies indoctrinated by public schools, innocence is better than the cynicism or shared guilt or victimology taught by modern thought, and, if we place faith in the account Moses told the Children of Israel about Eden, it was lack of innocence that drove the parents of mankind out of paradise.

Even more appalling to the zombies, the perfect symbol and image of innocence is virginity. That is a word that is not much in use these days, except perhaps as a badge of shame, for reasons too uncouth to mention in this article.

The odd thing is that even the modern cynics—provided they do not notice or do not admit to themselves what these symbols mean or which longings of sad human nature fairytales satisfy—even they can have hearts fit to hear fairytales. What they cannot do is reconcile this with their heads. They must compartmentalize and separate with thought-tight cells their love of fairytales with the empty and empty-headed cynicism that passes for wisdom in this modern world.

In this regard, let us briefly touch on the masculine side of the question. Why is it that Siegfried and Mowgli and Tarzan have this same Disney Princess oneness with nature, but it has no domestic flavor to it, no sweetness and charm? To ask the question is to answer it: boys are different from girls, and it is only the modern mind, and the perversions encouraged by the modern mind both intellectual and sexual, which have the effrontery to say otherwise.

Where the innocent virgin princess lures nature across the gap of Eden to our side, and heals the primordial loneliness by making companions of the wild beasts, the noble savage prince rips off his shabby cloak of civilization, dons his leopard-skin loincloth, takes his knife between his teeth, and leaps across the gap to the savage side, clawing his way up via dangling vines and man-eating plants to the brink on that far side, there to wrestle apes and strangle lions. If you don’t get the difference, then you don’t understand what makes girls girlish and boys boyish.

Now, let me not be accused of saying that in imaginative tales the girls are cooperative with nature and boys are competitive. That is not what I am saying at all. Both sexes, merely because we all are human, are prone to that sorrow and loneliness which the contemplation of the beauty of nature soothes, in the same way that looking at the photo of a distant loved one is soothing; but it also, like adoring a photo of a loved one, tempts and exasperates the same mood that it soothes. We still feel apart from nature.

The loneliness is not a desire for companionship alone. Dog owners and cat owners have an emotional rapport with their pets. The loneliness is a desire for camaraderie, that is, for speech and communion with other intelligences beside man.

I call it communion because there is more involved in this longing than merely interaction with nonhuman intelligences. In the earliest science fiction story I’ve read that stars nonhumans,
The War Of The Worlds
by H.G. Wells, the Martians are simply monsters. They do not speak and make no bargains with mankind any more than Cthulhu does. Their intelligence involves no community or common ground with man.

And, again, because Science Fiction is a naturalistic genre, one where supernatural events are foreign to the suppositions of the tale, often what is emphasized in a tale starring alien beings is precisely that they are alien. As John W. Campbell, Jr. famously challenged his writers, a truly alien alien would be as smart as a man but not think like a man. For me, the best example of nonhuman intelligence in a story was in
A Martian Odyssey
by Stanley Weinbaum. Tweel the Martian has only limited communication with the human with whom he travels, and the major appeal of the character is both his obvious high intelligence and his sheer incomprehensibility.

The first story, (and best example), I can recall where an alien with a speaking role spoke in a truly alien fashion was
The Moon Era
by Jack Williamson, where an alien called ‘Mother’ was portrayed sympathetically, albeit clearly not human. She was an alien and not a monster.

Oddly enough, the second best example comes from
Heroic Age
, a Japanese anime, where the Silver Tribe were portrayed as both elfin and highly intellectual, whose concerns were understandable, but were not human concerns.

However, the most common use of aliens who are aliens and not monsters derives from
Galactic Patrol
by E.E. Doc Smith. In that background, creatures of different psychology and different morality from man—such as the plutonian Palainians who are as cowardly as Nivens’ Puppeteers, or the placid Rigelians who are morally perfect but too placid and inert to commit heroic acts, or the berserk and bipolar Velantians — all are faced with a common threat, and all are loyal to the ideas of reason and the ideals of civilization and democracy.

Everything from
Star Trek
to the composition of your average party of adventurers in an
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
game reflects this “melting pot” idea of the Galactic Patrol. I cannot bring to mind an example where the underlying tale is not a war story, or an expedition or adventure involving physical danger, because that is the kind of thing where team spirit is both necessary and expected.

In such stories, if the story is done right, the elements or quirks that make each race different from the others are present, but are overcome by their common camaraderie, their team spirit. When it is badly done, the aliens are just humans in stage makeup, and all their differences are on the surface, so there is nothing for the team spirit to overcome.

I should mention that many of the most famous science fiction authors have some of the least convincing aliens. This may be due to the editorial influence of John W. Campbell, Jr., who did not like stories where aliens were superior to humans in any way.