The Death of Higher Beings in Science Fiction
According to my Jesuit Confessor, Father Pharisee de Casuist, my vow not to write on my blog except on Friday and only to post a link is not broken if, in the act of posting a link, and quoting an extensive quote, I only make a comment with the intention of explaining what the link means. The difference is in the intent, whether specific or general, ad hoc or in media res, whether per annum or per stirpes, or, as the Schoolmen say, ‘Nemo Intellectia Latine‘ which translates as ‘I don’t know the correct declension for Intellectum.’
So here is the link, followed by a comment:
I happened across this essay by Alexei and Cory Panshin called ‘The Death of Science Fiction.’ The half-joking theory is that Robert Heinlein’s NUMBER OF THE BEAST killed off science fiction.
The authors describe a change between Victorian science fiction and modern science fiction.
By Victorian SF they mean HG Wells and Olaf Stapledon, with their cosmic visions of man evolving into the remotest future, either into diabolic Morlocks, or into the godlike Eighteenth Men.
By ‘modern’ they mean the Hard SF of John W. Campbell Jr. and his three star writers, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and A.E. van Vogt.
The principle difference, so the Panshins argue, was a loss of the cosmic sense of wonder at the appalling sweep of evolution, from deep past to remotest future, and the substitution of the Heinlein’s ‘competent man’ or Van Vogt’s superman, who overcomes by means of his superiority in technical ability or an advanced non-Aristotlian ‘thought system.’
The Panshins go on to argue that a similar cusp occurred between Campbellian Hard SF and the New Wave, which they call (with saccharine crude cuteness) ‘New Head’ SF.
The subject of the essay is the causes behind the the death of Campbellian SF and its rebirth as New Wave.
The bottom line is that the ‘competent man’ SF hero has innate limitations (for what happens when he meets something beyond his competence?). When confronted with those limitations Heinlein (and by extension, the whole Campbellian philosophy) collapses into solipsism, such as is painfully on display in NUMBER OF THE BEAST, both as a theme and as a literal plot mechanism.
I confess I am not persuaded of the main points in the essay, for reasons cramped space and menacing deadlines permit me not to relate. I will merely say that authors write from the viewpoint of narrowly conformist Leftwing piety, not even hinting that any other world view could exist, and so there is no examination of the axioms of their argument. It is presented as a take it or leave it deal. I leave it.
But the essay is rich enough in insights and germs of new ideas that it can be enjoyed even by one skeptical of its persuasive value.
Allow me to quote at length an observation the authors make about superior beings in SF, particularly about Robert Heinlein’s discomfort with them:
… modern science fiction has been most uncomfortable and dishonest where the question of dominant aliens has been concerned. What does the man whose justification in life is his greater command of fact do when faced by a being with a few million years head start? What does the competent man do when faced by the truly superior being?
Jacob Burroughs, in Heinlein’s “The Number of the Beast—” is only expressing the common opinion of most writers of science fiction when he says:
“Supermen or angels would trouble me more than vermin. I know what to do with a ‘Black Hat’—kill it! But a superman would make me feel so inferior that I would not want to go on living.”
So, from the very outset of modern science fiction, the question of superior aliens with a higher grasp of the facts has been avoided. … Isaac Asimov… solved this problem by working around Campbell as he was used to working around his father at home. Not wanting either to cross Campbell or to write stories in which competent human beings kick inferior alien peons around, he wrote in his Foundation stories about a universe in which there were no alien beings at all. …
Heinlein, in his own way, did even worse with the problem. In his classic early stories, his characters—competent in all other circumstances—turn into limp lettuce before superior aliens. They run away. They go mad. They grow gray and old before their time. They turn belly up and die.
At the end of Methuselah’s Children, the centerpiece of the Future History, serialized in Astounding in 1941, the Howard families retreat to Earth after two humiliating encounters with superior aliens among the stars. In the expanded version of the story published in book form in 1958, there is a new ending in which Lazarus Long makes a vow to return to the stars and meet the highest aliens, the gods of the Jockaira, once again on more even terms.
“Someday, about a thousand years from now, I intend to march straight into the temple of Kreel, look him in the eye, and say, ‘Howdy, bub what do you know that I don’t know?'”
Except for the overtones of wise-ass belligerence, this could be a worthy resolve. “What do you know that I don’t know?” might be a very good question to ask a superior alien, if asked in the right way.
But that’s not what Heinlein represents as having happened in Time Enough for Love, his mammoth 1973 book about Lazarus Long, where the gods of the Jockaira are mentioned again. Lazarus is about to share an anecdote when another character interrupts him:
“He’s leading up to how he killed the gods of the Jockaira with nothing but a toy gun and moral superiority. Since that lie is already in his memoirs in four conflicting versions, why should we be burdened with a fifth?”
And Lazarus retorts:
“It was not a toy gun; it was a Mark Nineteen Remington Blaster at full charge, a superior weapon in its day and after I carved them up, the stench was worse than Hormone Hall the morning after payday. And my superiority is never moral; it lies always in doing it first before he does it to me.”
This puff of hot air is hardly a fulfillment of the promise to look the gods of the Jockaira in the eye as an equal. Within the terms laid down in Methuselah’s Children, it must be a lie. That is, higher beings who were capable in the earlier story of lifting large numbers of human beings through the air no hands, stuffing them into a spaceship, and then directing and controlling the ship to a destination thirty-two light years away, simply aren’t plausibly vulnerable to toy guns like the “Mark Nineteen Remington Blaster,” crackerjack weapon though it may have been in its day.
Read the whole thing here:
http://www.enter.net/~torve/critics/Dream/dream1.html
My comment: As a Christian, indeed a Catholic, and a political conservative, I come to an opposite conclusion as the authors about the meaning of the observation, but it is, to me, a new and interesting observation nonetheless.
And a correct observation! In Heinlein’s ‘Goldfish Bowl’ the protagonist goes mad after being kidnapped by superior aliens; in ‘By His Bootstraps’ the protagonist blacks out and comes to himself later wandering the halls screaming merely for having glimpsed a superior being in an image.
There ought to be a name for the syndrome, Archonophobia, or somesuch: madness at the sight of superior beings.
Many an SF writer does not want to introduce superior beings in a tale for the simple reason that readers want the protagonist to solve the problems, not the friendly all-powerful genii. That is just a technical problem in story telling. Here we are a different and discussing a distinct idea that meeting a truly superior being would be the worst thing imaginable for man.
The idea is not unique to Heinlein: in E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s LENSMAN series, the Arisians, who are the very model of benevolent superior and superintelligent aliens, hide themselves from human knowledge, lest the awareness that superior beings exist impose a crippling inferiority complex on poor, developing humanity.
The ‘Ignorance is Bliss’ rule works both to superiors and inferiors. In WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER by AE van Vogt, the one immortal man, who is both morally and mentally superior, lives among man in secret. In SECOND FOUNDATION by Isaac Asimov, the benevolent but all-powerful psionic psychohistorians live in absolute secrecy, going to elaborate lengths to preserve it. In STAR TREK, the famous Prime Directive dictates that humans hide themselves from inferior aliens, lest we unwittingly hinder their Darwinian evolution. (No shipping life-saving vitamins or even crates of oranges to the scurvy wogs of Capella IV!)
I first came across the Prime Directive in a Newberry Award winning book called ENCHANTRESS FROM THE STARS by S.L. Engdahl, where the star-people with Way Cool Mind Powers must stop the White Man with Bulldozers from invading the Quaint Medieval Ren-fair-esque world. I liked the book then and no doubt will read it to my kids.
I am not mocking the ‘Ignorance is Bliss’ rule. (Well, not mocking it too much.) Indeed, I believe something like that happens in real life: I do not think it would be good for us, sinful sons of Adam, to have angels come to visit too often. I and my neighbors from Sodom and Gomorrah would be too tempted to go bang on Lot’s door and breach the laws of hospitality toward them. And if God Himself came down in person, and preached, and healed, and walked among us, I and my neighbors the Pharisees and Romans would be tempted to nail Him to a tree. I think the spiritual reality of life is invisible to most of us most of the time for a good reason.
But there is nothing in Smith, or Star Trek, or Engdahl, akin to the sheer psychotic hatred that Lazarus Long displays in his reaction to the gods of Jockaira — who, it must be pointed out, did no harm to Lazarus or his crew. He hates them with a murderous hatred because they are superior.
I noticed something very odd in the climax scene in HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL. The super-superior aliens examining Kip and the whole human race, are meeting to decide whether or not we are the threat to be destroyed like a mad dog. The aliens are careful to clarify that their code of justice is not based on justice but on self-preservation: they destroy a perceived threat for the same reason a homeowner destroys a nest of scorpions found in the backyard, even if no one has been stung yet. The aliens teleport any dangerous planet into deep space, and let it die without its mother sun.
The logical thing to do is plea that human beings are not a threat. Instead, Kip cheers when a Roman Legionnaire brandishes his spear, and he himself brandishes a spear just as futile, claiming that, if teleported to sunless death, the human race is so inventive and so dangerous, that we would build our own sun, recover, and come back strong enough to kill the entire Vega galaxy.
Sure, Kip, sure. “And if you pull the lever, hangman, I will figure out a way to escape the noose before the end of the drop, get out of the straightjacket like Houdini, slip out from the prison yard, go to Tibet, study kung fu, and come back and kill the the Governor and the state and national militia in hand-to-hand combat while bullets bounce off my ass.” Yodel more psychotic threats. That will prove that we are a rational species able to live in peace with the other races.
I could not figure out what the point was of Kip’s ferocity when at no point in the book previously did he exhibit any such characteristic. But then I ran across a similar passage in STARSHIP TROOPERS, where Juan Rico vows that the human race must overwhelm and trample any lesser races in the galaxy we come across by dint of being the meanest toughest sumbitches in the universe, until some meaner and tougher race of sumbitches comes along, in which case, we are supposed to be killed like rabid dogs. Uh, huhn? As best I can tell, the Vega critters from HAVE SPACE SUIT that Kip is defying are exactly the superior tougher sumbitches that Rico is saying have the right to exterminate us by dint of their superior sumbitchiness. By the Darwinian badass logic of Heinlein, Kip was supposed to defy them, and they were supposed to destroy us.
In my youth I could not fathom the source of the hostility. I think I understand it now.
As a Catholic I am required (indeed, forced by the hypno-narcotic mind-control rays sent out by Vatican satellites) to believe in superior beings, both angellic and diabolic. Even fallen angels rank higher on the scale of being than I do. With this background, I think I understand the psychology involved in Lazarus Long and his murderous hatred of the higher beings of Jockaira:
It is the pride of Lucifer, crying non serviam.
The typical Campbellian SF hero, a man who is all competent at every task from writing a constitution to to building a log cabin to birthing a baby, does not wish to bow the knee and ask for salvation. Even the benevolence of benevolent aliens would be abhorrent because condescending. His is self-reliance swollen from its rightful place to becoming an all-consuming principle.
Like any principle exaggerated to the point of absurdity, it becomes an idol, an object of blasphemous worship, or, in the case of Heinlein’s philosophy, an object of self-worship.
The solipsism preached in NUMBER OF THE BEAST is the auto-deification preached in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. It is, to those who recognize it, that same old Gnostic crap again. And the one thing Gnostics would hate most of all is to meet a real God who is really their Father, and really superior.
Modern men tend to be materialistic, de-spiritualized versions of Gnostics. According to Darwin, your father is not a Creator-god, but an ape, and your grandfather is pond scum. Now one would think that anyone honestly beleiving that view would be delighted to meet his children, men like angels, or his grandchildren, men like archangels. The Transhumanist movement talks this way, and they love the idea of the planet-sized machine-brains running this arm of the galaxy. Or maybe they, or some of them, only like the idea if they get to be the planet-sized machine brain, not to live as subjects of their super-benevolent super-intelligence.
But Heinlein seems to think that anything superior is merely a threat, and, since it is a threat you cannot escape, the only sane reaction is to retreat into insanity, or solipsism.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
