Science Fiction and Simon the Magician
Posted on 26 January 2012
Let me propose a rather long essay and a slightly droll theory:
The aliens behind the Monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY are the same as the aliens signaling from Vega in Carl Sagan’s CONTACT. They both are part of the Galactic Overmind seeking the evolutionary transcendence of all life, and to elevate lesser races to maturity, as in CHILDHOOD’S END, also by Clarke.
On a less droll note, I am proposing that these works, and several others, are similar in their mood and theme and treatment of the plot elements, because they tacitly agree on a central myth.
It is a mythic thread that runs through much of science fiction from even before the golden age, and, if I am right about what this thread is, back two thousand years and more. Van Vogt and Heinlein and Asimov have all placed at least some of their stories in the service of this myth, the Great Myth.
1. THE QUESTION
To prove my point that the CONTACT aliens built the Monoliths, please contemplate the following multiple choice question:
Dave Bowman (or whatever the name of the utterly forgettable Discovery Astronaut representing Man was in the scene) discovers the Monolith floating in space near Jupiter (we are using the movie version, here, not the book, which placed it around Saturn). He descends into the Monolith and suffers a beatnik-era lightshow, which is supposed to represent something beyond human experience such as passage through a wormhole (which is explicit in the book). He finds himself in a perfect replica of a bedroom appointed in the Louis XVI-style. Strange shifts of time occur as he sees himself simultaneously at different ages: and as he lies dying, the Monolith appears in the room, and….
- The Monolith is a teleportation device out from which steps a number of Vulcans, the highly advanced aliens from Epsilon Eridani, whose mastery of mental and scientific disciplines enabled them to build the monoliths, which they send out in attempts to elevate pre-rational species to Vulcan level of sober and dispassionate logic. He offers Bowman membership in a peaceful federation of stars.
- The Monolith is a teleportation device out from which steps a number of Kzinti, the belligerent hunting-cat aliens from 61 Ursae Majoris. They send out the Monoliths to find apelike prehumans of various worlds and teach them how to kill each other with the thighbones of an antelope, in order to jump-start the evolution toward a warlike species who will afford the Patriarchy of Kzin some jolly sport. The whole point of the indirect approach via Monolith was a cat-and-mouse game, playing with one’s prey. He offers Bowman a choice of weapons.
- The Monolith is a teleportation device out from which steps an insane Puppeteer, native of a Klemperer Rosette of dirigible worlds on a long voyage out of the Galaxy, which is doomed. The Puppeteer explains that they evolve animals to intelligence in order to provide possible customers for their trade goods, such as hyperdrives and macromolecular-diamond hulls. He offers Bowman a catalogue, and explains that for the next nine-hundred-sixty-eight earth-years, they are having a buy-one-get-one-free special on starseed lures, tasps, and slaver stasis boxes.
- The Monolith is a teleportation device out from which steps a Ferengi, highly advanced native of the planet Ferenginar. He hands astronaut Bowman a bill for the forced-evolution services which elevated the human race up from hominids. Pay up or the Earth will be sold to the Klingons.
- The Monolith is a telepathic device that puts Bowman in contact with Mentor of Arisia, a fourfold mind of the highly advanced race who have been controlling human history (and that of many other races) in order to selectively breed for psionic talent, mental qualities of force, scope, drive, and integrity. This breeding program is as part of an eon-long plan to create a galactic Lensman Corps to fight invaders of immense power from another galaxy. Mentor offers Bowman a Lens: a lenticular polychrome of writhing, almost fluid radiance which proclaimed to all observers in symbols of ever-changing flame that here was a Lensman of the GALACTIC PATROL!
- The Monolith is a telepathic device that puts Bowman in contact with the Guardians of Oa, who inform him that they have been elevating hominids to sapience throughout the galaxy in order to find life forms that are utterly fearless to aid in policing the universe. He is presented with a Power Ring, and assigned to Space Sector 2814.
- The Monolith is a transportation device built by a federation of space faring worlds. Out from the monolith steps a man in a silver suit named Klaatu. Behind him, a giant robot. He explains tersely that Bowman is to deliver the following ultimatum to Earth: with the development of rocketry and atomic weapons in recent years, Earth has become a threat to other worlds. A race of robots with the power and authority to destroy any aggressor world has been created, and their decisions are final and absolute. Earth must obtain peace now, or face obliteration.
- The Monolith is a transportation which teleports Bowman from Vega to a world circling a star in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. There in a vast chamber, along with a hominid, a Roman centurion named Iunio, and a little girl named Peewee, he finds that the human race is on trial for its survival. The Tribunal is a mixture of biological and mechanical minds collected of many races from three galaxies. With utterly cold Machiavellian realism, the Tribunal describe that their only interest is not in justice nor injustice, but merely in the safety of its members from possible harm. It is coldly explained that the home worlds of dangerous races are summarily flung into interstellar space, far from their mother star, so that their populations can die in slow and lingering torture as their atmosphere condenses over hours and days from gas to liquid and freezes solid. They offer Bowman the right to speak in the defense of mankind.
- The Monolith is a transportation device built on the same principles as the Arroway machine from CONTACT, which transports Bowman though a serious of wormholes to the world near the center of a galaxy. On a beach that seems a perfect replica of Shell Beach (a place he knew as a child) he meets a being that seems to be a perfect replica of his dead mother. She explains that mankind has passed the first test in being worthy to meet with other species, but that the next test will not be for thousands of years.
I am not going to ask the question you think I am going to ask.
The question is not going to be “Which of these answers is most in keeping with the mood and theme and unspoken idea behind 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY?”
I am not going to ask that because the answer is obvious. The best answer of all was not given in the multiple choice test, but in another work by Arthur C Clarke:
10. Bowman learns that the Monolith was seeded throughout the galaxy by the Karellen Overlords of the star NGS 549672. This was done at the behest of the vast Overmind, a collection of group-minds representing the ingathered consciousnesses of all the ancient civilizations of the stars, and that Bowman is the first of many ‘Starchildren’ who will one day surpass all the limits of matter. Soon, the sole remaining human left on Earth will be Jan Rodricks, who, with a profound sense not of fear but of cosmic fulfillment, sees the starchildren sweep as a column of flame to the heavens, and all the elements of the solid earth fade into transparency and nothingness….
2. MEN & MONSTERS & GENII & GODS
Instead let me ask this. “How is it that all of us who are not completely tone-deaf can agree that we do not prefer the version where the Monolith Architects are tradesmen seeking customers or hunters seeking good sport or eugenic stock-breeders seeking war recruits?”
Another way of asking the question is why did all the answers but the last set your teeth on edge?
(And if the answers did not set your teeth on edge, forgive my impertinence, but you need to read more science fiction.)
Surely any reader not tone-deaf sees that the aliens from Vega from CONTACT have the same mysterious grandeur and, yes, transcendent quality as the Monolith Architects.
For one thing, unlike Vulcans and Arisians and Kzinti, the transcendental aliens have no names. They never come on stage. If they speak, their speech is as cryptic as the oracle of Delphi.
This is because bringing them onstage, or having them speak too much, would ruin the awe and mystery. If they must appear, let them be something ghostly, such a dead loved one from your own past.
The other aliens listed here are science fiction aliens, that is to say, beings like us, merely having evolved on other planets under other circumstances. They have different psychologies, as the Puppeteers are great cowards, the Vulcans great stoics, the Klingons are great warriors; but they are mortals, like us.
They are men.
The idea that the Monoliths were built by Ferengi or Kzinti is appalling. They are not even men, but monsters. These aliens are creatures of greed or wrath, no more human than Albrecht the Niflungar or the Nemean Lion.
The idea that the people on the other side of the wormhole will be guys like us, except maybe with big ears or cat heads would elicit, after all the buildup of awe and wonder of the voyage from the early hominids to Jupiter’s inner moons, a groan akin to the groan heard when the Jedi of STAR WARS said they got their powers from micro-organisms in their bloodstream.
The groan is because the idea breaks the mood of 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY. The Space Odyssey (which is also the odyssey of human evolution from apeman to spaceman) cannot end this way. To have monkeys elevated to manhood by monsters would make a cynical joke of the whole story.
The Oans and the Arisians are less like us and more like the fathers and grandfathers and wise old wizards of the galaxy, and the Arisians may or may not have physical bodies at all. But they are on stage too much, they talk too much, they have definite goals and values which humans understand.
They may be like wizards or like genii, but they are not like gods.
On the other hand, the Overmind from CHILDHOOD’S END is godlike, and so are the Monolith Architects from 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY and so are the Vegans from CONTACT. That is the whole point. These are not science fiction aliens, who have specific shapes and come from specific worlds.
These aliens are the stuff of myth.
The myth is that mankind, with the aid of benevolent higher powers, is meant to evolve from apeman to spaceman to superman, and not just to Nietzsche’s idea of a superman, nor that of Siegel and Shuster. A very specific type of superman is here envisioned, even if in the vaguest possible terms: a being of pure thought, pure intellect, who is evolved beyond the sullen bounds of matter.
The superman in this myth is the man science has set free of nature!
3. POOR SUPERMEN
Let me draw your particular attention to the answer where Bowman is hauled before the Tribunal of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, whose moral code consists of no more than a pragmatic assessment of possible danger, followed, if the species flunk the test, by planetary genocide of truly ghastly, nay, Eedocsmithian proportions.
The allegedly advanced aliens of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud obliterate whole worlds, from suckling babe to wizened elder, largest redwood to tiniest bacterium, using an execution method you would not use on a mad dog. (Unless you like locking mad dogs in meat lockers and listen to them howl while they slowly freeze to death).
Doomed worlds are not even allowed to sell their eggs or children as slaves in return for sparing their lives. So the Tribunal aliens are lower on the scale of civilization than ancient Babylonians or the Danish corsairs.
This scene of course is taken from the climax of HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL by Robert Heinlein. More than any other book that I can bring to mind, this Tribunal represents Heinlein’s notion of the superman, the next evolutionary step beyond ours.
Of all the answers, this one I find the least in keeping with the august and mythic impression we get of the Monolith Architects, because the motives and goals of the Tribunal are a slap in the face of the evolutionary myth Clarke and Sagan so carefully evoke.
Heinlein’s notion of a superhuman race is a race which adopts his same blustery tough-talk notions that might makes right and the end justify the means, which no doubt the author merely thinks to be unsentimental common sense, but from which a more civilized soul, not so eager to contemplate genocide, must recoil.
Klaatu and his race of deadly world-destroying robots is a similar idea from the movie DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (the real one); but here this idea has a little more leeway, since at least the Earthlings are told they are on trial, and the death sentence will not be carried out until Earth actually opens fire on some neighbor.
Note the sharp contrast with CHILDHOOD’S END by Clarke. There, the warlike nature of man is contained partly by direct alien intervention and partly by an understandable awe at the discovery of superior alien life. Instead of slowly torturing the mad dog to death via freezing, the Overmind assigns one of their servant races to act as caretaker and jail-warden to mad mankind, and they nurse the next generation of human beings to adulthood, this generation which surpasses all human limits, forms a mass mind, and studies war no more.
The abhorrent Tribunal of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, and the coldly practical Federation of Worlds of Klaatu lack the mythical stature, the transcendental grandeur of the Monolith Architects, the Contactors or the Overmind for the simple reason that they are still mortals like us, and, worse, afraid of us and afraid of our weapons.
But for the Monolith Architects to fear us would be like having the entire NATO military be afraid of a small band of lemurs from Madagascar. It shatters the whole myth.
4 WHAT IS MYTH?
Why is the idea that the Monolith Architects are men like us only with big Ferengi Ears or Kzinti tiger-faces appalling?
The reason this idea appalls is because Arthur C Clarke, although he is known and revered for his hard science fiction tale and their technical accuracy, is not telling a science fiction story here.
He is telling a myth.
The Monolith Architects are not science fiction aliens. They represent the awe of the human for the superhuman. They embody the wonder we feel at the sight of the stars, knowing they are distant suns, for the most part larger and older than our own, which shine on unknown worlds.
By myth I do not mean falsehood, I mean mythos, an account in symbolic language of ultimate things.
Myths have several telling features. C.S. Lewis, one of the finer myth-makers of the modern world, identifies them in his book AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM:
First, myths have a simple narrative shape. Lewis calls it “a satisfactory and inevitable shape, like a good vase or a tulip.”
Second, the power of the myth comes not from their literary virtues, but from a compelling quality present even in the simplest retelling of them. The usual narrative tricks of suspense or surprise are not needed. Elevated language is not needed.
Third, myths need no character arc. The wrath of Achilles, the jealousy of Othello, and the indecisiveness of Hamlet need to be introduced for the narrative story of these men to be told. This is not true for the story of Orpheus. Orpheus is an everyman who suffers the pain of loss at the death of a loved one. No specific personality characteristics need to be introduced for his story.
Fourth, myth deals with the fantastic, the impossible or preternatural.
Fifth, the experience may be sad or joyful, but it is always grave.
Sixth, the experience is not only grave but awe-inspiring. We feel it to be numinous. It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us.
5 CAVEMAN, SPACEMAN, STARCHILD
Let us look at the narrative structure of 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY: Hominids are elevated to human sapience by a mysterious monolith, and, for good or evil, the apemen learn both human tool-use and human weapon-use. Astronauts discover an enigmatic monolith on the moon which sends a signal to Jupiter. The Discovery pursues the signal to its source, and, after destroying a malign computer murdering the crew, the sole survivor enters the monolith, dies, and is reborn as an infant among the stars as some higher order of being.
It is the starkest possible three-act play of cave-man, space-man, and starchild.
The only element of the plot which is “narrative” rather than “myth” is the homicidal computer HAL 9000; but the book makes it clear that HAL malfunctioned because of a falsehood built into its programming. If we interpret this falsehood as representing all of the mechanistic and deceptive impulses of man, the danger of our own tool-using nature to turn against us by creating tools to which we enslave ourselves, then indeed HAL 9000 is the symbolically-apt antagonist attempting to stop Man from achieving transcendence. Even the death of HAL 9000 is thematically correct for the story. HAL is the antithesis of Bowman; instead of being elevated to superhumanity, HAL 9000 failed the cosmic test of evolution. HAL is reduced to infancy, to idiocy, sings a childhood song, and dies.
But the awe and the point of the story is not the homicidal computer, it is the single narrative of caveman to spaceman to starchild. That is the source of the enduring awe of the tale, and that is what still fascinates about the movie and the book, despite any other drawbacks.
6 GHOST & STRANGE LIGHTS
Even the things that don’t make sense as narrative make sense as myth. The reason why Bowman does not have any personality is that Orpheus does not have any personality. He is all men; he is Man .
The hippy-dippy lightshow at the end is actually stronger in the movie than the much more sensible and pedestrian parallel scene in the book, where Bowman is drawn through a wormhole and sees an long-abandoned alien shipyard. A shipyard, even of unearthly starships, is too prosaic for a myth. It is good SF writing, but bad mythmaking. We all know what a shipyard is. Seeing a group of torpedo-shaped vessels built by aliens is almost comically inadequate against our expectations. If Kubrik had put a star-yard in the film, all would have laughed in scorn. The incomprehensible light-show works as a myth because it is incomprehensible.
And Bowman does not meet or see any aliens, because any alien you can see with your eyes is not worth seeing.
I will point out that in CONTACT the main character, Elli Arroway, does not meet anything that looks like an alien. She meets the ghost of her dead father. Sure, it is allegedly an alien using some technology we do not understand to take on the appearance of her dead father, but the reason why the writer chose a dead father as the image for the aliens to assume, rather than Colonel Klink from HOGAN’S HEROES, (an appearance which would have, in theory, been just as easy for the aliens to assume) was that ghosts of loved ones are spooky and supernatural and loving. To appear as a familiar ghost is in keeping with the transcendental nature of the aliens.
The appearance in he final scene 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY of the bedroom done in the style of Louis XVI is for the same reason. The architecture is strange yet familiar, something from the past. It is haunting. The reason for the sudden slips or shifts in time, where Bowman sees himself in the past and future is again for the same reason: to produce the mood of a myth about the supernatural and transcendental.
7 WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING NARRATIVE
Turning our attention to the other telling signs of myth, I submit that many a science fiction book shares these features, but that 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY displays them tellingly. Indeed, one might even propose it as an epitome or perfect example of the genre, both the genre’s strong points and weak.
There narrative tricks of suspense or surprise are absent from 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY. The astronauts do not know the monolith is an alien artifact that evolves beings to higher states, but the audience knows this from the first scene. Poole and Bowman have no character arc, no personality characteristics. The subject matter is fantastic, impossible and preternatural even for a science fiction story: this is not a mere space adventure.
Elevated language there is none. The book is written in a clean journalistic style without poetry; as indeed most science fiction is.
The tale is clearly grave and sober in its approach. There is not a single joke, not one moment of lightheartedness. It is as solemn as a cathedral lit by candles.
And, as for awe-inspiring, that is what the tale is about. If you are not awed, this story is not for you. We feel 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY to be numinous. It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us.
What was communicated? I submit that it is nothing less than man’s place in the universe, at once humble and exulted.
8 THE GREAT MYTH
What is the myth?
It is one of the central myths, if not the central myth of the modern mind.
C.S. Lewis, who pronounced the eulogy of this myth, mentions the name ‘Wellsianity’ after H.G. Wells, one of its more imaginative proponents; but Lewis himself also called it the Myth of Darwinism, or, more simply, The Great Myth.
After taking pains (which, alas, are always ignored) to distinguish the theory of Darwin, which deals with change to organisms through natural selection, Lewis described this most unscientific myth of Darwinism that has accumulated in the wake of Darwin’s scientific theory, which deals with endless improvements to a golden future.
Even H.G. Wells knew better than to confuse the theory natural selection with the optimistic Victorian myth of ever-upward evolution: his cannibal troglodyte Morlocks of AD 802701 were the product of natural selection, but hardly an improvement.
C.S. Lewis describes the myth in this way:
[This is] a cosmic theory. Not merely terrestrial organisms but everything is moving ‘upwards and onwards’. Reason has ‘evolved’ out of instinct, virtue out of complexes, poetry out of erotic howls and grunts, civilization out of savagery, the organic out of the inorganic, the solar system out of some sidereal soup or traffic block. And conversely, reason, virtue, art and civilization as we now know them are only the crude or embryonic beginnings of far better things–perhaps Deity itself–in the remote future. For in the Myth, ‘Evolution’ (as the Myth understands it) is the formula for all existence. To exist means to be moving from the status of ‘almost zero’ to the status of ‘almost infinity’.
To those brought up on the Myth nothing seems more normal, more natural, more plausible, than that chaos should turn to order, death into life, ignorance into knowledge. And with this we reach the full-blown Myth. It is one of the most moving and satisfying world dramas which have ever been imagined.
The drama proper is preceded (do not forget the Rhinegold here) by the most austere of all preludes; the infinite void and matter endlessly, aimlessly moving to bring forth it knows not what. Then by some millionth, millionth chance–what tragic irony!–the conditions at one point of space and time bubble up into that tiny fermentation which we call organic life. At first everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama; just as everything always was against the seventh son or ill-used step-daughter in a fairy tale. But life somehow wins through.
With incalculable sufferings (the Sorrows of the Volsungs were nothing to it), against all but insuperable obstacles, it spreads, it breeds, it complicates itself; from the amoeba up to the reptile, up to the mammal. Life (here comes the first climax) ‘wanton’d as in her prime’. This is the age of the monsters: dragons prowl the earth, devour one another, and die.
Then the irresistible theme of the Younger Son or the Ugly Duckling is repeated. As the weak, tiny spark of life herself began amidst the beasts that are far larger and stronger than he, there comes forth a little, naked, shivering, cowering biped, shuffling, not yet fully erect, promising nothing: the product of another millionth, millionth chance.
His name in this Myth is Man: elsewhere he has been the young Beowulf whom men at first thought a dastard, or the stripling David armed only with a sling against a mail-clad Goliath, or a Jack the Giant-Killer himself, or even Hop-o’-my-Thumb. He thrives. He begins killing his giants. He becomes the Cave Man with his flints and his club, muttering and growling over his enemies’ bones, almost a brute and yet somehow able to invent art, pottery, language, weapons, cookery, and nearly everything else (his name in another story is Robinson Crusoe), dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I do not know exactly why), tearing his children to pieces in fierce jealousy until they are old enough to tear him, and cowering before the terrible gods whom he has invented in his own image.
But these were only growing pains. In the next act he has become true Man. He learns to master Nature. Science arises and dissipates the superstitions of his infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his own fate. Passing hastily over the historical period (in it the upward and onward movement gets in places a little indistinct, but it is a mere nothing by the time-scale we are using) we follow our hero on into the future.
See him in the last act, though not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rule the planet (in some versions, the galaxy). Eugenics have made certain that only demigods will now be born: psychoanalysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity: economics that they shall have to hand all that demigods require. Man has ascended his throne. Man has become God. All is a blaze of glory.
And now, mark well the final stroke of mythopoetic genius. It is only the more debased versions of the Myth that end here. For to end here is a little bathetic, even a little vulgar. If we stopped at this point the story would lack the highest grandeur.
Therefore, in the best versions, the last scene reverses all. Arthur died: Siegfried died: Roland dies at Roncesvaux. Dusk steals darkly over the gods. All this time we have forgotten Mordred, Hagen, Ganilon. All this time Nature, the old enemy who only seemed to be defeated, has been gnawing away, silently, unceasingly, out of the reach of human power. The Sun will cool–all suns will cool–the whole universe will run down. Life (every form of life) will be banished without hope of return from every cubic inch of infinite space. All ends in nothingness. ‘Universal darkness covers all’. True to the shape of Elizabethan tragedy, the hero has swiftly fallen from the glory to which he slowly climbed: we are dismissed ‘in calm of mind, all passion spent’. It is indeed much better than Elizabethan tragedy, for it has a more complete finality. It brings us to the end not of a story, but of all possible stories: enden sah ich die welt.
I grew up believing in this Myth and have felt–I still feel–its almost perfect grandeur.
8 THE GREAT MYTH AS THE YOUNGEST GENRE
Allow me to emphasize two points which Mr. Lewis does not dwell upon. First, the clearest, and perhaps the only, expression the Great Myth in the modern day is in Science Fiction. Second, the Great Myth is not futuristic at all, not new, but is an ancient heresy, perhaps the most ancient.
The Great Myth is the core idea of Science Fiction to such a degree that even books that cut against the Great Myth must touch on it.
Perhaps here I am making too bold a claim — since who can define a field as varied as SF? — let me instead merely say the Great Myth is the core of H.G. Wellsian science fiction and his epigones. It is not the Hard SF of Jules Verne we are discussing, but the social and philosophical SF of Wells.
Science Fiction is a new genre, springing out of the industrial and scientific revolutions, made possible by the growth of a world view among the common man that change was possible or inevitable and would change the way we live our lives. Those who live in a classical or heathen world view that promises nothing but the eternal return of the universe again and again to the same conditions has no room for speculation about progress and no curiosity about adventures set in a future world grown strange by technological change.
Some of the earliest Science Fiction were perhaps more bold about the ultimate fate of progress than later, and hence were more explicit in their attachment to the Great Myth.
Olaf Stapledon in LAST AND FIRST MEN explicitly lays out the course of human future human evolution for the next seventeen species of man, and then he did it again for all worlds in STARMAKER and (by no coincidence) the ending in both books is precisely as Lewis here describes—a sorrowful universal death.
Lewis himself addresses the Great Myth, albeit as an adversary, in the dialog between man and eldil (angel) which forms the climax of OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET: he explicitly mocks the myth, both in its ambitions for interstellar colonization and conquest, and in its glorification of the evolutionary metamorphosis of the human race into a greater albeit nonhuman one.
With the advent of John C. Campbell Jr, the Great Myth was somewhat shrunk in scope. Campbell’s magazine ran stories which generally promoted a world view of pragmatic men hopeful of better living through science: the last act of the myth was dropped, so Campbellian tales tend to be about the evolutionary climb, not the conquest by entropy at the end. The transcendental view of the man beyond man was muted, perhaps because the Campbellians regarded the superman as a mystical idea, but traces of the superman still can be seen.
The foremost portrait artist of the superman in during the golden age of SF is, without doubt, A.E. van Vogt.
In SLAN van Vogt portrays the superhuman in one way a human mind can grasp: as a young of one of the species.
Gilbert Gosseyn is introduced in WORLD OF NULL-A as something like a feral child, like Tarzan or Mowgli, a superhuman raised among men, but unaware of his heritage (Gosseyn is later given another origin story, but in the original magazine version of the tale, the clues pointing toward Gosseyn as a feral superhuman).
In WEAPON MAKERS OF ISHER, we see what an adult superhuman is capable of. Captain Hedrock aka Walter S Delany is the immortal man who is the founder of the weapons shops guild is also the founder and prince consort of the Imperial family is Isher. He singlehandedly guides the human race through the Frankenstein dangers of technological growth, and leads man to his ultimate destiny. In the greatest curtain line in science fiction, or at least the most inexplicable, we are told that mankind is the race that will one day rule the sevagram.
What is to be particularly emphasized is that the immortal is not merely superhumanly intelligent, he is superhumanly altruistic, far-sighted, benevolent. He has a particularly laissez-faire attitude toward ruling the human race, and uses the two great institutions in balance against each other, to allow mankind, should man chose it, to be free.
In defiance of the rather cold hearted and hyper rational image of superhumans (of which I smell traces in Heinlein) van Vogt consistently depicted superhumans as having superhuman altruism. The contempt we see in that other superman, Michael Valentine Smith of STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND, for the “chumps” and “marks” and loser of the human race, we weaklings who must be swept aside by the glorious course of evolution, is nowhere present in Walter S DeLany.
In nearly all of A.E. van Vogt’s works, one can detect a mystical idea that man and the universe are intimately intertwined, so that one cannot affect one without affecting the other. This idea is explicit in only two stories.
One is the short story ‘Secret Unattainable’ where a machine that bypasses the limits of space and time cannot be used except by souls who have attained a certain level of enlightenment because the laws of nature are intertwined with the moral law, the laws of sanity.
Dr Kenrube, the story’s protagonist, gives the Nazis a machine that bypass time and space, and he promises them that it will destroy them. He says
“Somehow, beneath adaptations, peculiar and unsuspected relationships existed between the properties of matter and the phenomena of life. … Here is your machine. It is all there; yours to use for any purpose—-provided you first change your mode of thinking to conform to the reality of the relationship between matter and life …. It is not that the machine has will. It reacts to laws, which you must learn, and in the learning it will reshape your minds, your outlook on life.”
The second is the novel length work THE UNIVERSE MAKER, where the protagonist Cargill discovers that all reality is an illusion created by the life-energy in order for life to satisfy inexplicable psychological needs for possessions and for revenge. The godhead is nothing more than Cargill and the various other enlightened avatars of the one primal and timeless energy field. The universe is but a game, and the players have forgotten the reason for the play, or even that it is a game and that they are players. In the climax of the novel, Cargill survives the destruction of the universe and recreates it.
Van Vogt may have differed in his belief about this cosmic unity of man and universe from the pragmatism of Heinlein or Campbell, but the belief in the growth of man to superman, to what Wells called Men Like Gods, is as apparent in both. The main deviation between this and the Great Myth is the tragic ending. Van Vogt’s characters are more likely to recreate the universe after its death than to topple when it dies, as Nat Cemp from THE SILKIE or Cargill from THE UNIVERSE MAKER.
The theme of cosmic recreation is present in writers from the Golden Age more famous than A.E. van Vogt.
The Isaac Asimov short story ‘The Last Question’ whose tongue-in-cheek surprise ending is that entropy can indeed be reversed when the ultimate artificial intelligence achieves power and understanding that are literally godlike, and utters the famous words: ‘Let there be light!’
A more egregious example is Robert Heinlein’s THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST, where in an ending only slightly less wacky than the ending of the CASINO ROYALE (the 1967 spoof), all of Heinlein’s friends and characters meet at a party outside of time, having discovered that the universes, all of them, are the creations of their own imaginations. The theme of STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND where all the enlightened turn out to be amnesia-riddled gods, is here made explicit.
The idea is the same as that in THE UNIVERSE MAKER, but without the dignified techno-babble about psychological needs and energy fields.
There are any number of time travel stories by Heinlein and others where the time traveling main character turns out to be his own creator, having made himself by himself, for ever and aye, amen. Heinlein makes no mention of who the deceiver or demiurge is who traps all souls in the meshes of material existence might be, unless ‘The Beast’ of the title is he.
This theme of the material universe as a cosmic deception to be escaped to an awaiting godhead is not rare in science fiction. I recall having seen it or some variation of it in VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay, which mentions a Pleroma called Muspel (very similar to the UNIVERSE MAKER’s energy field) from which all spirits derive, and are trapped, having forgotten their true source and true home, and to which they yearn eternally to return.
I read the AEGYPT series by John Crowley, where the philosophy of cosmic self-deception is laid out in precise yet lyrical terms. Similar themes and ideas form the core of THE GOLDEN COMPASS by Phillip Pullman and THE LITTLE PRINCE by Antoine de Saint Exupéry. These themes are also present in muted form in the movies DARK CITY and THE MATRIX.
There is more here than just typical adolescent power fantasy as we might see in a Conan the Barbarian story. The theme in GOLDEN COMPASS and THE LITTLE PRINCE and VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS concern the escape from a cosmos-wide deceiver, a way to seek release from the material world. In DARK CITY and MATRIX the theme also explicitly promises superhuman powers, godlike powers, to the enlightened once the escape is made.
Now, in this are we dealing with a new myth, or an old one?
9 THAT SAME OLD GNOSTIC HOGWASH AGAIN
Longtime readers of mine will have previously been introduced to Gnosticism, that most ancient heresy attributed (if tradition is to be trusted) to Simon the Magician himself.
It is as old as scripture, perhaps older; it is the heresy that St John denounces in 1 John 4:1-3.
Gnosticism has no Magisterium, so there is no definitive list of its dogmas. Indeed, each Gnostic is urged to create for himself his own personal mythology and inner cosmos. But certain telling features remain across the many variations of the heresy.
First, Gnosticism it proposes a Cosmic Conspiracy theory of cosmic proportions, namely, that the God of the Old Testament, who drove our First Parents out of Eden, is the Demiurge only, the maker of the vulgar and degrading material world, not of the cosmos, which is a more august and grandeur spiritual reality, a Pleroma of disembodied spirits.
Second, there is no resurrection in the flesh for Gnostics. Like Socrates and the Neo-Platonist, the Gnostic seeks a disembodied life as a pure intellectual being, a spirit with nothing to be the spirit of.
Third, Gnostic despise matter. This is because matter is regarded as the source of both evil impulses and deceitful pleasures and the illusions of the senses which draw the soul away from gnosis, the enlightenment. The idea of resurrection in a glorified body able to have hands with nail-wounds still in them is abhorrent to Gnostics.
Fourth, the enlightenment is in stages, as the freed spirit rises from lower heavens to higher, he will pass through the spheres of Luna, Mercury, Venus, Sol, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and beyond the Sphere of the Fixed Stars to unimagined wonder. Each heaven proposes an archon, or ruling spirit, who impedes the freed soul from its ever upward journey.
Fortunately, the Gnostics also believe that spiritual guides, and more enlightened beings now free of the degrading trap of matter, will aid and assist younger souls to shake off the smoky deceptions of the flesh and rise above the archons. These guides are called daemons.
Finally, Gnosticism is elitist. Only those who possess the secret knowledge will be saved (hence the name—gnosis means knowledge, particularly esoteric and ineffable knowledge).
It proposes apotheosis, or, rather anagrosis: the secret knowledge is that Thou Art God.
Are there parallels between Gnosticism and Wellsianism?
10 THE GREAT MYTH AS THE OLDEST HERESY
The first parallel is the Cosmic Conspiracy.
The main objection to finding a parallel is that there is a Demiurge in Gnosticism, whereas the Wellsian Great Myth has no room for such a Deceiving Spirit because there are no spirits in the Darwinian-materialist myth of things. I submit that there is still a cosmic deceiver in the Darwinian-materialist conceit, but that now it is merely matter in motion, as all things are.
In his eulogy of the Great Myth, C.S. Lewis points out its fatal self-contradiction:
The Myth cannot even get going without accepting a good deal from the real sciences. And the real sciences cannot be accepted for a moment unless rational inferences are valid: for every science claims to be a series of inferences from observed facts. It is only by such inferences that you can reach your nebulae and protoplasm and dinosaurs and sub-men and cave-men at all.
Unless you start by believing that reality in the remotest space and the remotest time rigidly obeys the laws of logic, you can have no ground for believing in any astronomy, any biology, any paleontology, any archeology. To reach the positions held by the real scientists–which are taken over by the Myth–you must, in fact, treat reason as an absolute. But at the same time the Myth asks me to believe that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming.
The content of the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the Myth to be true. If my own mind is a product of the irrational–if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel–how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution
In sum, in the universe where reason arises from non-reason by a non-rational because non-deliberate mechanical process, all that can be said of reason is that it is a mechanical process: it cannot be said to be true or false, valid or invalid, efficient or wasteful, because none of these concepts have anything to do with mechanical processes.
The mental process cannot even be said to work or to fail. A clockwork only jams or runs slow if there is an observer with free will who looks at the dial on the clockface and makes a mental connection or association (a connection not present in the clockwork itself) between the motions of the hour hand and celestial motions of the sun and the passage of abstract entities called hours. The jam of gears is only a ‘jam’ if the clockwork has a purpose to keep time. But no clock can have a purpose without a clockmaker. When a stream is dammed by a rockslide, the stream is not ‘broken’ or ‘running slow’ in any sense of the word, unless we propose there is a nymph in the stream whose wish to run to the sea has been frustrated. Hence, if mental processes were mechanical processes only, there would be no standard by which they could be judged to be sane or insane. The appearance of purposeful mental process is all illusion, deception, but, paradoxically, there is no one and nothing to deceive.
Notice the role assumed by reason in the Great Myth. It is a deceiver. And it is a ubiquitous and inescapable deceiver.
All thinking creatures by definition are under the illusion that they think, but in reality all thought is merely the by-product of chemical and energetic processes of molecules and electrons, nor more the product of free will or rational validity or intellectual truth than the fall of the final domino in the row once the first is toppled.
Those who truly believe in the Great Myth have three choices: first, and this is the most popular, they can deliberately not think about the paradox, and change the subject when it is brought up.
Second, the true believer can argue that the mechanical process by some unexplained coincidence just so happens to generate thought-output which somehow correlated to what thoughts would be were they true and rational and under the control they seem to be. All thought is an illusion, but somehow the illusion works out as if by divine harmony to agree with the thought-content we would have were we free. Perhaps the irrational universe has a correcting process whereby those who employ the argumentum ad baculum are beaten to death: albeit how this arranges the universe to have a universal rule defining ad baculum as an informal logical fallacy is beyond me. The fact that birds build round nest does not somehow create the rule that pi is an irrational number.
Third, the true believer can dismiss free will as an illusion or define it to be the same as a mechanical process. The true believers who use this choice either adopt a tone of weary resignation, or they define the belief in free will as a pernicious illusion and the realization that we are all meat robots as liberating: all the old moral codes that chained us in our predemigod days have fallen away. We are now free to use hypnotic-chemical brain-conditioning to improve the race, without any of that unpleasant judgmentalism and rude condemnation that accompanies things like sin and confession and repentance and contrition.
Those of you who have turned the leaves of the obscure science fiction books AEGYPT by Crowley or VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by Lindsay will recognize the character of the deceiver. In Lindsay’s allegory he is a literal character called Crystalman. This is the demiurge of the Gnostics, the creator of the vast trap we call the cosmos or the material world.
In the Great Myth, the demiurge role is played by human reason, the self-deceptive belief in free will.
The other parallels, even if not clear in the myth itself, are certainly clear enough in the science fiction stories discussed here, which I propose gain their power and allure only because of the power and allure of the Great Myth—the two books by Arthur C Clarke foremost.
The second parallel is the lack of resurrection in the flesh.
Note that CHILDHOOD’S END ends with the completely pointless and inexplicable destruction of the Earth. Mankind has ceased to reproduce at replacement levels; and, knowing themselves to be a evolutionary dead end, they gracefully commit racial suicide.
The violent conflict between the Magneto’s Homo Superior and fearful Homo Sapiens as depicted in X-MEN never eventuates. It would have broken the dignified solemnity of the mood: justified opposition to evolution in the name of self-preservation is not part of the Great Myth. Man must pass away gracefully.
This same theme is present in the A.E. van Vogt book mentioned above, SLAN, where it is revealed in the final chapter that old mankind is programmed by nature to suffer infertility, give birth to their replacements, and die off quietly to make room for the supermen.
In CHILDHOOD’S END the literal childhood’s end is when the posthuman children turn themselves into energy beings and fly off to oneness with the Overmind, annihilating the world into a transparent nothingness as they go.
The event is dramatic and striking precisely because it harkens back to Gnostic distaste for the material body. Had the posthumans simply flown away, leaving an empty earth perfectly intact and ready for the old fashioned homo sapiens to use, that would have been a jarring note, even to the point of making a mockery of the Great Myth. The old Titans are not supposed to stick around and live happily ever after once the younger and stronger Gods arise. The grandeur and sorrow of the myth is that the old gods die and are swept aside when the new gods arise.
And the Earth is not destroyed in a crude and material way, blasted by the Death Star, no. That would not be spiritual enough. Instead, the material world fades like a dream.
The third parallel is the distaste for the material world
The Great Myth is rather cramped compared to reality, and has no room for spirits or immaterial things like thoughts, justice, mathematical objects, Platonic forms, Hamlet’s Father, the Ghost of Christmas Present, or even Casper the Friendly Ghost: but it does allow for Superior Beings to be made of energy or have their engrams imprinted on the fabric of spacetime, and this serves in Science Fiction tales as a material substitute for spirits more suited to the naturalistic assumptions of the genre.
The starchild from 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY is, in the sequels, explicitly made a being of energy, not flesh. The Contactors from CONTACT likewise do not have bodies, or, at least, nothing they can show to Eli Arroway, so their spokesman appears as a ghost.
Likewise immaterial, literally ghosts, are the elder Martians in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, even thought Heinlein’s work rejected many elements of the Great Myth — he was too cynical (or realistic, take your pick) to believe in forever upward progress — but he kept this element, no doubt for its simplicity and drama. Making your aliens out of energy is a quick shorthand way to tell the reader that they are advanced beyond the material form.
Everyone from the Squire of Gothos to the Organians to the Q Continuum in STAR TREK follows this same conceit.
Of course, one needs to grasp emotionally if not intellectually the notion that matter is bad and departing from it is good, which is the core Gnostic idea, for this image of energy beings as superior spirits to have any emotional appeal.
Fourth, the enlightenment is in stages. The process is ongoing.
Please note that in both CONTACT and 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY, the enigmatic aliens are initiating a process, not ending it. The starchild is not the finale. The First Contract in CONTACT is not the last contact, but the first in a series of tests as the human race grows to unimaginable and godlike maturation.
Without this crucial element, the awe and wonder is lost: at the end of the story, we readers are left as a man standing at the bottom of a tall mountain, craning back his head and back, seeing glimpses through the cloud and mist of peak rising above peak. And above those snowy peaks, heights even greater. That is the future of the race we are asked to contemplate: measureless grandeur.
Finally, the last parallel is the elitism, and the promise of apotheosis.
The elitism inherent in science fiction tales like this, and, to a degree, forming the moral atmosphere of the whole genre, should be obvious from these examples and countless others: it is not the masses, the poor, the dispossessed, the meek who shall inherit the Earth, but the Slans.
In my whole SF reading career, I have read exactly one short story where the characteristic defining posthumanity was something other than super-high intelligence (and that was a psychic ability to see the future, which that story said was the point of intelligence in the first place). Everywhere else, the superhumans are all supergeniuses, even in a yarn like STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, which does not logically require that Michael Valentine Smith be smarter than average, because he has been raised by an ancient and far superior race of beings.
Science fiction is the perfect place for this conceit to nest, because science is an strictly intellectual effort, and has attracted men of genius and intellectual accomplishment like no other field. The message that the smart folk will be changed into demigods because of their smarts fits nicely in such an environment.
Returning now to the opening question, the reason why the Monolith Architects are the Overmind are the enigmatic aliens from Vega is that these are the Daemons, the spiritual guides of the Gnostics.
The reason why merely science fiction aliens, men like us from other worlds, cannot be daemons is that it violates the basic and elegant structure of the Great Myth, which proposes a hierarchy leading ever upward out of the murk of matter into the intellectual and disembodied perfections of the heaven above the heavens.
11 A CONFESSION
I must confess that, for me personally, the Great Myth has lost a great deal of appeal. The desire to be godlike by one’s own efforts, or even with the help of benevolent but mysterious daemonic powers, seems a losing proposition compared to the promise to be heirs and co-heirs of Christ and children of God.
It is the lie of the serpent of Eden. Abolish your humanity, and you shall be like gods.
To all such, my answer is nicely summed up in a line from yet another science fiction book, URTH OF THE NEW SUN by Gene Wolfe, who has a very different take on what it means to be a superhuman able to bypass space and time.
In one scene, the voice of elitism incarnate, the necromancer Ceryx challenges the hero Severian to a duel of magic.
Ceryx vaunts, “Do you know what it is like to train your will until it is a bar of iron? To drive your spirit before you like a slave?… Yet they are what must be done if you would seize the scepter of the Increate!”
Severian, who already possess the power they are discussing, answers mildly:
“I know nothing of seizing that scepter. To tell the truth, I am certain it could not be done. If you wish to be as the Increate is, I question whether you can do it by acting as the Increate does not.”
1. I loved the Kzinti one, but partly because it has a mythic element to it too, of gifts turning out to be tainted. The fairies uplift you, but now they have a price to pay. There is also the hint of a transcendent element, in the implied echo of God laughing.
2. Your Golden Transcendence is not untouched with your Great Myth, in my humble opinion.
“Your Golden Transcendence is not untouched with your Great Myth, in my humble opinion.”
Your humble opinion matches my own: THE GOLDEN AGE was my representation of the Great Myth (though I had not read this essay by Lewis before I wrote my book) and even included hints of the twilight of the gods at the end, for the plot conflict between the Nothing and the Golden Oecumene was a philosophical disagreement about the proper attitude to have toward entropy.
By book was based on Olaf Stapledon’s LAST AND FIRST MEN, and by copying his theme, I needs must copy his mythic intent.
The scary thing about the Kzintosh society is that it is very much like the outline given in Nietsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, or, to use an AD&D metaphor, what a working society would look like if the aligment of the culture (if not all of its members) was Chaotic Evil.
Did you ever question this ‘great myth’ while you were an atheist? Or was it after your conversion that you dropped it?
Also, why do yout think this myth is so popular with some people? Granted, I know the idea of becoming a god may not seem so unattractive, but what about the whole universe going dark? Death on the ultimate scale. Existance itself fading into nothingness. I’m sorry, but that is a MAJOR con IMHO, and would be enough to keep me away from such a myth. Granted, had I been raised to believe in such things, I might have just went along with it. But I could never see me ‘converting’ to such a myth as that one.
Last but not least, you bring up Wolfe’s Severian saga. A friend told me the books were gnostic, or influenced by that belief. I said Wolfe was a Catholic, so I’m not sure if that was intentional. He then pointed me out to this book
http://www.amazon.com/Lexicon-Urthus-Dictionary-Urth-Cycle/dp/0964279517/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327636023&sr=8-1#_
and told me to read it. I never did however. Was he right? Does Wolfe’s Urth saga have gnostic themes in it? It has been sometime since I read them, your memory of them may be fresher than mine.
“Also, why do yout think this myth is so popular with some people? Granted, I know the idea of becoming a god may not seem so unattractive, but what about the whole universe going dark? Death on the ultimate scale. Existance itself fading into nothingness. I’m sorry, but that is a MAJOR con IMHO, and would be enough to keep me away from such a myth.”
I imagine it would be compelling to someone who already believes that, factually, that is how things will end as a logical outcome dictated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. To such a one, mythologizing such a fact gives it emotional weight. Additionally, myths allow one to feel part of a larger whole, which is fairly important to some people. If one is going to die, and everything one loves with it, it is better to be part of some grand and noble failed effort than a mean and pointless one. Better to die in the streets of Rome as a citizen fighting for his beloved country than as a mercenary.
On another hand, its sorrowful nature needn’t make it any less compelling to everyone. I admit that I myself tend to resonate with sorrowful myths more easily. Such as the short tale in Pan’s Labyrinth, about the rose that grants eternal life but none dared brave the poisonous thorns to claim it. Mr. Wright has suggested in other works on this blog that to the pagan, joyful things are temporary and sorrow is everlasting rather than the other way around; I suspect there is some pagan core deep within me that has not yet been baptized, so to speak.
Sorrowful myths resonate with me as well, and a last stand against oblivion also resonates with me. But this myth is different. While Lewis described it in an attractive way, this ‘great myth’ just seems hollow to me. I could never see myself actively choosing to beleive this myth over another. And yes I get you point about the pagans, but still…I don’t know, it just feels like a different thing to me. The norse Ragnarok ends in tragedy as well, yet it does not seem hollow to me. Tragic, yes. Banal/hollow/pointless no. Given the choice between the two, I’d choose the Norse myth over the ‘great myth’ anyday.
Ah, well, if you’re talking about the comparing of two myths than certainly, the Great Myth is hollow. But to an atheist, it is about the only grand myth to which one can subscribe without compromising on one’s beliefs about the universe. Thus it’s no surprise that we find atheists buying into the myth, since to live without myth is rather dull.
Odd you should ask, since I just yesterday started my annual rereading of SHADOW OF THE TORTURER.
Having not heard what your friend said, I can only speak to the way your phrased the question here: there is nothing remotely Gnostic in Wolfe’s New Sun cycle. The elements of gnosticism include (1) cosmic deception (2) amnesiac gods (3) distaste for matter (4) the endlessness of the process of salvation (5) the elitism of secret knowledge.
(1) Severian’s world is surrounded with deception, but unlike in A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS at no point is it discovered that Erebus is actually the good guy and The Conciliator is the bad guy.
(2) Severian has a perfect memory. He is not god. He is granted supernatural powers (or super-high tech, take your pick) as part of a mission of salvation which sends him back to Earth.
(3) The only Earth he destroys in URTH OF THE NEW SUN is the old earth; a new world arises in a fashion oddly similar to that in the play of Dr Talos. Severian does not turn into an energy being to accomplish his mission.
(4) The central purpose of Severian, and, indeed of the whole course of history of the Commonwealth, is the rectification of an ancient sin, so old as to be forgotten, of the days when mankind ruled the stars. The myth says we ruled it badly, creating servants who surpassed us, and, out of a mercy indistinguishable from cruelty, seek to elicit our repentance and renewal.
I am a fairly imaginative man, and I cannot think of a more clearly and directly opposite myth to the myth of the ever-upward evolution of 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY. The story are that runs from caveman to spaceman to starchild is the direct opposite of the story arc that runs from Eden to Golgotha to New Jerusalem. Severian’s epic follows the second arc rather than the first: Severian is attempting to undo a primordial catastrophe, not to lift us by our bootstraps into the higher heavens.
(5) Severian is not a member of the elite either by birth or intellect or special chrism. Indeed, by starting the tale as a member of the despised and feared Guild of Torturers — and a loyal member at that (!) — he occupies the least elite rank imaginable. Even a beggar or a whore is more highly regarded than a tormentor. He knows no secret knowledge.
So, no. I regard the attempt to read Gnostic themes into the New Sun books to be utterly vain and risible. It is like trying to find pro-Christian themes in THE GOLDEN COMPASS. These books are the opposite of that.
Put it to the test: reread SHADOW OF THE TORTURER side by side with reading A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by Lindsay. I think the contrast between Severian and Maskull could not be sharper, or the contrary nature of the Autarch and Krag.
“Having not heard what your friend said”
What I told you he said was pretty much verbatim. He basically informed me the books were gnostic, and that he read that in or got that idea from the book I linked to in my last post. Like I said I never read that book, so I’m just going on his word that it’s author thinks gnosticism played a part in Severian’s tale. From what you have said however, I think not. Thank you for taking the time to point those things out to me. From the way you describe it, I’m bemused over how anyone could think the saga gnostic. Though I’d rather not buy that lexicon to find out. Next time I see him (my friend) I will point those things out to him, see how he responds to it.
Since we were on the subject of the Urth of the New Sun books, I’d like to ask you:
Do you think they will ever make it on to the silver screen? I would like to see it happen, would you?
“Did you ever question this ‘great myth’ while you were an atheist? Or was it after your conversion that you dropped it?”
I do not see how anyone in the generation after the Great War could continue to believe the Great Myth: man as he grows in power and wisdom also grows in his ability to do evil. Evolution is just as likely to lead to the Morlocks of Wells as to the Organians of Roddenberry.
I did think that universal entropy would snuff the stars like candles as the great and everlasting night fell across the cosmos, and still do.
I did hope that an improvement in the morals and the rationality of the species over a long period of time would lead to technical improvements, and perhaps even to the creation of some child species, a posthuman race greater than us in intelligence — but I never believed that this intelligence, if not combined with wisdom and compassion, would be anything other than deadly to us.
So, to answer your question, I was much closer to the compassionate A.E. van Vogt view of what the future should hold, including whatever race man we created to be our children, than the callous Robert Heinlein view.
You can see traces of all this, or explicit expression of it, in my book THE GOLDEN AGE. I did not think that the rise of the posthumans would wipe out the humans. The whole point of that book was to say that that interactions between man and superman would be a non-zero-sum game, each receives the benefit of the other, even if they are unequal in mental acuteness.
Mr Wright wrote- “…I was much closer to the compassionate A.E. van Vogt view of what the future should hold, including whatever race man we created to be our children, than the callous Robert Heinlein view.”
Heinlein was a much harder writer to peg pre-WWII. His ‘compassionate A.E. van Vogt view of what the future should hold’ take was the obscure short ‘supermen’ novel LOST LEGACY (Super Science Stories, November 1941, as by Lyle Monroe).
In the penultimate twelth chapter, humanity’s forces for “good” finally engage those of “evil” and, indeed, win the opening round of what portends to be a prolonged engagement. Heinlein then ends his tale with the short chapter below.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“—and the Truth Shall Make You Free!”
THE GLOBE STILL SWUNG ABOUND THE SUN. The Sea-
sons came and the seasons went. The sun still shone
on the mountainsides, the hills were green, and the
valleys lush. The river sought the bosom of the sea,
then rode the cloud, and found the hills as rain. The
cattle cropped in the brown plains, the fox stalked
the hare through the brush. The tides answered the
sway of the moon, and the gulls picked at the wet
sand in the wake of the tide. The earth was fair and
the earth was full; it teemed with life, swarmed with
life, overflowed with life—a stream in spate.
Nowhere was man.
Seek the high hills; search him in the plains. Hunt
for his spoor in the green jungles; call for him; shout
for him. Follow where he has been in the bowels of
earth; plumb the dim deeps of the sea.
Man is gone; his house stands empty; the door
open.
——
A great ape, with a brain too big for his need and a
spirit that troubled him, left his tribe and sought the
quiet of the high place that lay above the jungle. He
climbed it, hour after hour, urged on by a need that
he half understood. He reached a resting place, high
above the green trees of his home, higher than any
of his tribe had ever climbed. There he found a broad
fiat stone, warm in the sun. He lay down upon it and
slept.
But his sleep was troubled. He dreamed strange
dreams, unlike anything he knew. They woke him
and left him with an aching head,
It would be many generations before one of his
line could understand what was left there by those
who had departed.
It is interesting the way that this myth both takes its justification from science, at at the same time rejects science. Science teaches that evolution favors the most survivable, not the most intelligent. Science teaches that life on Earth has a tenuous existence, at constant threat from potential solar storms, massive meteors, or nearby super novae, any of which could potentially sterilize the planet at any time.
Also, this notion that beings of “pure energy” are somehow superior is ridiculous from a scientific standpoint. Science teaches that energy is closely related to matter. It has mass. They seem to think that energy is somehow invulnerable since energy is never destroyed, but matter is never destroyed either (although matter can become energy and the reverse). Life is in the organization of the matter and it is the organization that is vulnerable. Scientifically, one would have to assume that energy life would also be in the organization, and that energy life is even more vulnerable to disorganization than matter is. What would be the advantage of being made out of pure energy? Scientifically, it’s hard to come up with one.
From a “Scientific viewpoint”, the only thing that comes to mind is the ability to travel at the speed of light. But we are not Vulcans, and many “Scientific” things are just our hopes and fears recolored. I think it’s clear what everyone who talks about “Pure Energy Beings” is talking about Souls…..
“I think it’s clear what everyone who talks about “Pure Energy Beings” is talking about Souls…..”
Or, perhaps, angels.
Hmmmm…. maybe that is the answer to the question of why orbits as observed seem to be slightly off orbits as predicted. Maybe the vast numbers of guardian angels surrounding us are skewing the results.
How many angels does it take to skew an orbit, anyway?
I think it might be possible to write a story about such aliens, merchantile, militaristic, what have you — if they didn’t realize what they were doing, and the humans see more than they meant to be there.
And perhaps Buddhism also teaches the Great Myth? You get to Nirvana by rising above ordinary humanity, and ceasing to desire anything. And, while the Buddha assists in this process, you get there by your own efforts.
There are parallels with Buddhism and Gnosticism and between Gnosticism and the Great Myth to be sure.
Like Gnosticism, Buddhism posits a great deceiver, Maya, the illusion of the world: but the Great Myth of Darwin posits that technical progress will free us from our animal nature, not that renunciation of desire and self with destroy the illusion of the world.
Buddhism, like Hinduism, is circular. The Darwin Myth is more like the Rangnarok of the Norse.
I cannot envision a Buddhist version of 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY. Maybe some more imaginative author can pen such a work. But 2001 (Wellsian) looks remarkably like A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (Gnostic) to me in the theme and mood.
Promise me, Mr. Wright, that you won’t pull this kind of Asimov with your own sets of novels. It would be more the hodgepodge which is the Dark Tower than the curious continuity which is Foundation, Empire and Robots.
I make no such promise. Any day now, the impulse will strike to make Phaethon of Rhadamanth the brother of Phaethusa of Chaos, merely sent to different parts of the multiverse at the behest of Oberon of Everness.
Noooo!
You are right. They should not be siblings. They should be long-lost loves.
If they are Greek Gods, they are almost certainly both, especially in the Everness Mythos where everyone is several different things at once. Especially as Daphne and Phaethon deserve each other and I would never inflict Phaethon on Amelia.
Oberon being their father is the weak link. Oberon is a gnostic demiurge, not a platonic one. They would need another father. Possibly a Montrose?
It would seem, given the theme, that Oberon is the Platonic Gnostic Demiurge, yes?
Oberon in Everness boasts of being the Demiurge.
Not siblings, but clones. Now, whether Phaethusa is the gender-flipped clone of Phaeton, or vice versa, I leave up to wiser heads to decide.
But please – no long-lost loves. I hate that tripe with a passion. Soul-mates need not be lovers, they can be family, friends, colleagues, mentor and pupil, and even more.
I agree – leave Daphne with Phaeton and Amelia with whomever she ends up with
“Not siblings, but clones. Now, whether Phaethusa is the gender-flipped clone of Phaeton, or vice versa, I leave up to wiser heads to decide.”
Due to Time Shenanigans they are gender-flipped clones of each other, of course!
If we are being serious about it?
Phaeton is Amelia’s father. The Nothing Machine was/is Saturn. The Cosmos is a universe that the Nothing Machine created inside the Black Hole (he was truer to Daphne than anyone else). Phaeton took the name Helion in the civilization he setup around Cygnus X, a collection of stars that has besieged the Black Hole.
It would make relative sense. Oberon was Zeus. Assume Everness took place sometime around the first Clinton administration? Zeus fell in that war, which the rising of Acheron was only one extension of. This would assume the Orphans as younger than Wright seems to want IIRC, assuming that they were captured around the same time. This would require actually believing Boggin that Amelia was roughly 14, which is plausible if she was not made a newborn infant but is otherwise rather suspicious.
IIRC there is nothing official in Orphans of Chaos that says the events of Everness DIDN’T happen.
Count to a Trillion is probably the hardest to integrate. It’s not the future of Everness, and not the past of the Golden Age. However there are implications that multiple worlds are going on in the Chronicles of Chaos. Count to a Trillion could be one such world. Ours is Mulciber’s, so perhaps Count to a Trillion takes place in Mavor’s?
Not having read beyond the first Chaos book, and having read none of the Golden Transcendence thingy, I must bow out of this discussion, except for one parting remark:
NERDS.
Despite a few pedantic hiccups in the storytelling, it is my Authoritative Opinion To Which You May Not Disagree that The Golden Transcendence is far better than Orphans of Chaos and way more interesting than the Guardians of Everness.
(Count to the Eschaton might unseat his first triplet, but it ain’t all published. Besides, where Count to a Trillion has a million great ideas peppered throughout, concentrating, if anything, on two or three of the least interesting in the whole book, The Golden Transcendence has a uniquely well-realized conceit and a deep, deep world.)
How kind of you to say so.
Ooh. That did sound bad, didn’t it.
Good sir! If it sounded cold, it wasn’t supposed to be withering. I didn’t mean to sound like I didn’t love reading the books, because you and The O’Floinn — THE WRECK OF THE RIVER OF STARS, especially — are my favorite authors still writing. Please understand that my criticisms do not in any way reflect how much I enjoy reading your novels as Critical Quality and Personal Enjoyment are two utterly separate metrics.
Please accept my apology.
Hm, I would say that Orphans is actually my personal favorite of Wright’s books. They were my first of his, and I found the speculations in that series very interesting. Honestly I never really liked the Golden Age characters as much. Not that they weren’t good, just never liked them as much. Wright is very hit or miss with his characters for me, I either love them or get annoyed by them. The best ones of course cause me to love and hate them all at once.
I was under the impression that Mary was referring to my saying, quote, “NERDS.” To which I say, someone who reads science fiction in his spare time and is somewhat physically incapable of NOT thinking up science fiction stories of his own, is probably not going to unironically use that word as a pejorative.
CPE correctly deduced whom my comment aimed at.
Nonsense — Amelia has a dolphin form, and a centaur form, and obviously a Phaethon form too. It got separated when the Olympians took her hostage.
Of course Phaeton and Amelia are siblings…all you need for that to be the case if for Helion to be the same person as Hyperion…and most of the myths about them are the same.
History seems to show that if you want to teleport self and others, levitate, set up a food or drink replication process, read minds and hearts, heal things that have no business healing, or know all kinds of stuff, the quick road is to be the clumsiest and least bright member of a religious order, or to spend a lot of time feeling like even God won’t talk to you, or to work hard at personally feeding and clothing your local poor. (And not to be particularly impressed with any of the cool stuff, either.)
So there’s your supermen, whom neither Nietzche nor Wells would have liked much: St. Martin de Porres, St. Andre Bessette, Ven. Solanus Casey, St. Joseph of Cupertino… those kinds of people. If you want to be some kind of Time Lord, apparently it pays to be a hermit or an anchorite; the inside of a cell is bigger than the outside.
“If you want to be some kind of Time Lord, apparently it pays to be a hermit or an anchorite; the inside of a cell is bigger than the outside.”
Oh, well said. Well said.
Or be a 6th century Irish saint who went into voluntary exile to Scotland and Northern England, converting the Picts and living on the island of Iona. From the Life of Columcille by Adomnán (7th century abbot of Iona):
“Of the angelic splendour of the light which Virgnous — a youth of good disposition, and afterwards made by God superior of this Church in which I, though unworthy, now serve — saw coming down upon St. Columba in the Church, on a winter’s night, when the brethren were at rest in their chambers
ONE winter’s night the forementioned Virgnous, burning with the love of God, entered the church alone to pray, while the others were asleep; and he prayed fervently in a little side chamber attached to the walls of the oratory. After a considerable interval, as it were of an hour, the venerable Columba entered the same sacred house, and along with him, at the same time, a golden light, that came down from the highest heavens and filled that part of the church. Even the separate recess of the side-chamber, where Virgnous was striving to hide himself as much as he could, was also filled, to his great alarm, with some of the brilliance of that heavenly light which burst through the inner-door of the chamber, that was a little open. And as no one can look directly at, or gaze with steady eye on, the summer sun in his mid-day splendour, so Virgnous could not at all bear this heavenly brightness which he saw, because of the brilliant and unspeakable radiance which overpowered his sight. The brother spoken of was so much terrified by the splendour, almost as dreadful as lightning, that no strength remained in him. But, after a short prayer, St. Columba left the church. And the next day he sent for Virgnous, who was very much alarmed, and spoke to him these few consoling words: ‘Thou art crying to good purpose, my child, for last night thou wert very pleasing in the sight of God by keeping thine eyes fixed on the ground when thou wert overwhelmed with fear at the brightness, for hadst thou not done so, that priceless light would have blinded thine eyes. This, however, thou must carefully observe – never to disclose this great manifestation of light while I live.’
This circumstance, therefore, which is so wonderful and so worthy of record, became known to many after the saint’s death through this same Virgnous’s relating it. Comman, sister’s son to Virgnous, a respected priest, solemnly assured me, Adamnan, of the truth of the vision I have just described, and he added, moreover, that he heard the story from the lips of the abbot Virgnous, his own uncle, who, as far as he could, had seen that vision.”
Wow, all I knew about the guy was that he used the eye of an evil demon snake as a magnifying glass!
University College of Cork hosts CELT (Corpus of Electronic Texts) which includes translations into English; a resource I would heartily recommend for anyone tempted to incorporate Celtic themes and/or mythology into their writing. At least it will give an authentic flavour to such attempts, unlike modern ones which are all too like re-writing the “Iliad” in the manner of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (why, no, I haven’t forgotten or forgiven the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode, “Up the Long Ladder”, involving drunken feckless Irishmen and their fiery, feisty daughters IN SPAAAACE!!!!).
There are two versions of lives of Columcille; one is Betha Choluim Chille (On the life of Saint Columba, Three Middle-Irish Homilies: Whitley Stokes (ed), Calcutta 1877) and the other, from which I took the above, is the Life of Saint Columba, Founder of Hy. (Written by Adamnan, Ninth Abbot of that Monastery: William Reeves (ed), First edition Edmonston and Douglas Edinburgh 1874).
The episode which I thought everyone knew has to do with the Lough Ness monster:
“ON another occasion also, when the blessed man was living for some days in the province of the Picts, he was obliged to cross the river Nesa (the Ness); and when he reached the bank of the river, he saw some of the inhabitants burying an unfortunate man, who, according to the account of those who were burying him, was a short time before seized, as he was swimming, and bitten most severely by a monster that lived in the water; his wretched body was, though too late, taken out with a hook, by those who came to his assistance in a boat. The blessed man, on hearing this, was so far from being dismayed, that he directed one of his companions to swim over and row across the coble that was moored at the farther bank. And Lugne Mocumin hearing the command of the excellent man, obeyed without the least delay, taking off all his clothes, except his tunic, and leaping into the water. But the monster, which, so far from being satiated, was only roused for more prey, was lying at the bottom of the stream, and when it felt the water disturbed above by the man swimming, suddenly rushed out, and, giving an awful roar, darted after him, with its mouth wide open, as the man swam in the middle of the stream. Then the blessed man observing this, raised his holy hand, while all the rest, brethren as well as strangers, were stupefied with terror, and, invoking the name of God, formed the saving sign of the cross in the air, and commanded the ferocious monster, saying, ‘Thou shalt go no further, nor touch the man; go back with all speed.’ Then at the voice of the saint, the monster was terrified, and fled more quickly than if it had been pulled back with ropes, though it had just got so near to Lugne, as he swam, that there was not more than the length of a spear-staff between the man and the beast. Then the brethren seeing that the monster had gone back, and that their comrade Lugne returned to them in the boat safe and sound, were struck with admiration, and gave glory to God in the blessed man. And even the barbarous heathens, who were present, were forced by the greatness of this miracle, which they themselves had seen, to magnify the God of the Christians.”
And the anecdote about the horse, when the time came for Columcille to die:
“Thereafter he went to bless the barn, and he said to his servant Diarmait that on Saturday night he would depart unto heaven. After that the venerable old man, Colombcille, sat down on the edge of the path, for weariness had come to him, though his wayfaring had been but short; seventy-seven years was his age at that time. Then came unto him the nag which the monks had in the island, and weeps in the breast of the cleric, so that his raiment became wet. The servant, Diarmait, sought to drive the nag away from him. ‘Let him be, O Diarmait,’ saith Colombcille, ‘until he sufficeth himself with tears and sorrow in lamenting me.’”
For a novel project I’ve been working on for some time — conceived as an answer to Dan Brown and all his clones/imitators, or as I describe it, “the Anti-Da Vinci Code, where the Church is the *good* guy and the conspiracy history doesn’t require all the historians to have lied or been deceived” — I had to work out a phenomenon of “magic”, i.e. direct reality-changing via will, which was compatible both with Catholic theology about miracle-working and human nature yet sufficiently controllable by its human possessors to allow sorcery and witchcraft to be explained as abuses of the same gift. Peculiarly, part of integrating practical miracleworking into faithful Catholic practice involved a fundamental admission of its comparative irrelevance to salvation except insofar as it made it harder to achieve; as one elder of the secret miracleworking order tells my protagonist, “We are the people most likely to go before God and say, ‘Did we not cast out demons in your name?’, only to be told, ‘I never knew you; get away from Me, brood of vipers!’”
One of the great temptations of the Gnostic myth is that its promise of increased power appeals far more to those who resent their limits than those who are content to do what they can within them. The trap of this kind of thinking became one of the themes of the novel as I worked on it.
That is a fascinating conceit, though I would rather it avoid the trap of trying the be the anti-Da Vinci Code. Even supposing it doesn’t, let us know when it’s done.
Octavia Butler did a really good job with the aliens coming to Earth to be eugenics traders, in the literal sense of trading some of their genes with ours. Great book.
(No criticism of your thesis is intended, btw. Makes sense to me.)
I haven’t read the book. Are her aliens the transcendent aids to higher evolution that the Karellans in Clarke, or the Monolith Architects are?
Brr. I hope not, if that’s the series I think. The one where the aliens blended their DNA with ours without asking first — or at least, without asking in such a way that they were understood. Man, I had horrible nightmares for two nights in a row after that one. I finally decided that it was better not to sleep until I’d forgotten it.
I don’t know how anyone can read that woman. There’s literal nightmare fuel in every piece of fiction by her I’ve ever even begun reading. She is a great artist, but not of art I can endure.
No, it’s not that black and white*. The new “humans” are something else, not comprehensible entirely to their parents, as those in Clarke’s Childhood’s End; but there is no indication that they are necessarily better. The genetic trade is so the aliens don’t become stagnant. I found the books fascinating – the aliens are truly alien rather than just a singularity event which brings PROGRESS! (TM)
Her books are often total nightmare fuel, but that only really bothered me in Parable of the Sower.
* Yes, this is a pun. All of her books are about race relations.
11. The Monolith is a teleportation device out from which steps a man with greasy black hair and a perpetual half-smirk. “Hello, Mr. Bowman,” he purrs. “I was waiting for you. I have a question for you: what do you want?”
12. The Monolith is a teleportation device out from which rings a repetitive, metallic echo. Out steps a pale-faced man with a cane. “I believe I am expected,” he says precisely. “If you wish to be permitted to continue on the path you have embarked upon, you must submit to my inquisition. If at any time you find this intolerable, you may return to your planet and never reach for the stars. Now let us begin. Tell me: who are you?”
No! Not B5!
I don’t catch either reference, I am afraid. You have outgeeked me.
It is from Babylon Five. For me, it was a series that started out very well, and ended very badly. At least, I think it did. Towards the end, with just a fe episodes to go, having followed the whole thing from the beginning, I realized I couldn’t care less about the show, and I couldn’t be bothered spending a few more hours to find out how it ended.
I found the show’s writing deteriorated, as did the acting (several characters were miscast, I thought) and, above all, it became undramatic. It began with the Shadows rising again, the old threat to peace in the universe, with an intrepid few gathering together, preparing once more to fight the darkness. It was good versus evil, on a galactic scale. That was cool. That was dramatic. Then it turns out the evil side is not evil, nor is the good side good, but merely two opposing yet equally valid philosophical belief systems. Who is supposed to get worked up over that? It is undramatic. It is nothing. It was rather like Moorcock, chaos vs law. One of the major climaxes of B5 was a scene where the humans and the other younger races reject both the angels and demons, in favour of finding their own path. Man carving out his own destiny. It was laughably ham handed and very badly handled.
I suppose Babylon 5 was an antithesis yet companion of Clarke: Instead of the Elder Races leading us to glory, they are rejected, and instead man finds his own way to glory. The end, however, was the same. Humans become, near the final episodes, rather god-like, or Vorlon like(one of the races that were kicked out by humans earlier). I imagine that meant it was time for us to get kicked out by some upstart whippersnapper race.
I thought the departure of the elder races was the graduation ceremony of the younger, the coming-of-age, and they moved on to greater things leaving the old homestead to us.
This is also an ancient theme with mythic overtones that is often seen in SF. In the last book of E.E. Doc Smith’s LENSMAN series, the Arisians depart for a higher plane of existence and appoint mankind and other young races as their successors and heirs. Bab5 may have been deliberately following the trope established by the first and greatest of space operas.
Opposing but equally valid can be interesting if both sides are distinctly good and they are incompatible. It is usually tragic, but tragic can be interesting.
If they are both shades of gray, the reaction is Meh.
And if they are both nasty, the reaction is “Why can’t both of you lose?”
Do any examples of your first case come to mind? I can only think of Serenity, but that doesn’t quite work — more of a well-done Lawful Neutral versus the scrappy Chaotic Good, unless I’m misinterpreting the value of the antagonist’s capitulation.
Not immediately. It’s hard to pull off because you either have to work out a reconciliation that doesn’t make the conflict look cheap, or stage a tragedy.
“And if they are both nasty, the reaction is “Why can’t both of you lose?””
That’s what happens in B5.
A lot of the problems with the later seasons came from the show thinking it was getting cancelled. they had to rush the end of the war in the fourth season because they didn’t think they were getting the fifth, and then when they did get that last season they had to make up the boring telepath rebellion story to fill the gap where the war was supposed to go. There are some great parts to the last season, though, like the death of Londo.
I am one of those people who thinks B5 is the best scifi show ever, though I don’t think the level of competition is particularly high – Firefly didn’t have enough time to really stretch, and Battlestar had an even worse last season without B5′s excuse. Indeed, Battlestar could’ve learned from B5 as the latter was plotted completely* from day one. AKA the Final Five Dartboard.
Also, it wasn’t that the Shadows and Vorlons had an equally valid system, exactly; it was that they were both too ideologically focused that they’d forgotten their purpose.
*Okay, there’s no way Sinclair wasn’t dropped because the actor sucked like a Hoover. But otherwise.
“Okay, there’s no way Sinclair wasn’t dropped because the actor sucked like a Hoover.”
Ooooh. Oooh, I say! That’s not my opinion
No disrespect to Bruce Boxleitner, whom I remembered fondly from “Bring ‘Em Back Alive” and “Scarecrow and Mrs. King”, but I pretty much ended up hating Sheridan. I preferred Sinclair as a character (and I thought the actor did a good job with him) for the same reasons I pretty much gave up watching “Earth: Final Conflict” after the third season. I gave the second season a chance, though I disagreed with dropping Boone, but in both cases the rationale seemed to me to be the same: a younger actor, a more extroverted character, and heroics out the wazoo.
I *liked* that Sinclair was only a Commander, not a Captain, and that his career had stalled due to the mysterious events with the Minbari; I didn’t like that Sheridan was a diplomat’s kid, all golden-boy upward trajectory to his career since he joined up, captain of the only ship to take out a Minbari battleship and win the only victory of the war.
In the case of both Boone and Sinclair, I *liked* the quiet, understated delivery of the actors. I realise that for television, the producers wanted a more traditional type of hero (younger, handsome in a particular manner, loudly declaiming stirring speeches, running around as an action hero, romancing the ladies, and with no element of doubt about his complete and utter White-Hat status).
Give me the choice between a Jesuit-schooled Martian-born Commander who’s suspected of being soft on the ex-enemy and a Big Shiny Captain War Hero, and guess which one I’ll pick
I agree that the character is potentially more interesting, but the actor just didn’t do a good job, imo.
Both were references to major events in the show Babylon 5. I mentioned them because there are threads in the story which are similar to the themes used by Clarke in 2001. B5 is IMO the best SF TV show ever aired. A space opera complete with Elder Races, galactic diplomacy and war, and a cast of characters which I found highly compelling. My favorite part was how tightly plotted it was; casual tidbits would turn out to be significant much later, sometimes in another season. I also enjoyed the hat tips and references which the creator threw out, for instance, a telepathic police cop named Bester. I don’t want to start an argument in a thread which already has a purpose, so I’ll just say that Mr. Bear and I have deeply different interpretations of the 4th season.
Deeply different indeed. I know people who thought B5 was the best sci-fi show ever. To me, I thought it started well and ended poorly. I mention that to them and I tend to get the same reaction I do when I say I found the LOTR movies to be frustrating. But, like you, I won’t hijack this thread for a tanget.
I have to admit, I’m on the side of those who think B5 started out well then went off the rails. Much of that, I imagine, was down to the replacement of Sinclair by Sheridan which threw the plot arc off the rails and necessitated JMS re-writing chunks of what he had intended to happen on the fly.
I can see why the producers and other Powers That Be wanted to replace the character (quite apart from whatever issues the actor himself had with the show), but I much preferred Sheridan to Sinclair (whom I found eminently slappable; I was cheering on Garibaldi when, in later seasons, he objected to Sinclair setting himself up as a Little Tin God on the station – one of the best lines ever on TV was when he said “You’re not the Pope; hell, you don’t even look like her”, but of course, poor Garibaldi got put through the wringer for daring to oppose the One True Saviour).
There were wonderful elements in it, though: G’Kar’s evolution from the way he started out (again, to quote Garibaldi, “Hot pink is your colour, Mr. Ambassador”) to his spiritual awakening, themes of good and evil, redemption and forgiveness, how religion will survive into the future and isn’t the preserve of fanatics and simpletons, even Marcus’ virginity, which was in complete contravention of this TV Trope trope (warning for time-sink and danger of not surfacing for several hours if you visit the site and clicky the linkys) and really did hark back to amour courtois and chaste romantic love. All the geeky love with references to Lord of the Rings and King Arthur and Alfred Bester and casting Walter Koenig and much, much more. Zathras
Disappointng elements – Sinclair (oh, how I cheered when he jumped off a cliff! Oh, how disappointed I was when he survived!)
How the Good and Evil sides turned out to be (or were turned into) merely Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. Lennier’s fate – I’m still divided over whether that was cruel to poor Lennier, or a really original twist on the Arthurian mythos where Guenivere remains faithful to Arthur and Lancelot betrays himself. The telepath sub-plot which got too ridiculous for words (all the jokes about the explosion being caused by the build-up of hair spray which they used to maintain their silky locks and flowing manes made me laugh, anyway).
So – damn good cherry pie but not, I submit, the greatest SF TV series ever. Still, way better than the Battlestar Galactica reboot (now them’s fighting words?)
I mostly agree with you, Deiseach. Replacing Sinclair early was a misstep on JMS’s part, though he claimed to have run out of arc potential for him. Much as I admire Bruce Boxleitner’s acting chops, he grated on me. But it was in a reasonable way: he grated on me rather like certain career officers I worked for back when I did that sort of thing, so I found it convincing. The weak telepath arc was part of the generally weak fifth season, for which I mostly blame the network that canceled the show early and forced season 4 to be condensed(or so I heard). However, I thought the true nature of the two sides in the war was a good development and followed out of what we already knew, so we can’t agree on everything, it seems.
What scifi show(s) is better than B5, in your opinion?
You’re mixing up Sheridan and Sinclair (after the first mention, at least). It’s true that Boxleitner wasn’t great – he could be pretty hammy – but Michael O’Hare was AWFUL. Just go back and watch a tiny bit of the first season – he can’t be convincing saying a single line! I’ve never met anyone before you who thought he was better. The strength of the acting was always in the aliens, anyway – they tended to get Shakespearean actors for them, and cast studio-approved fashion models for the human officers (okay, I have a soft spot for Ivanova, but she could be cringe-inducing too).
I love Lennier’s fate – the line “All love is unrequited” is a quotable quote imo.
Scholar – good to find another B5 fan.
Ah, I have to agree on Michael O’Hare’s acting, but it is the character of Garibaldi I liked. I did think he had a valid point about Sheridan getting too full of himself. Technically, they were committing treason by breaking the chain of command and commandeering the station as an independent entity. I know that Earth Alliance was corrupt, but a soldier does not get the choice to say “I’ll obey this commanding officer but not that one”.
Also, he was turning out to be “My way or the highway”, which was exactly what he complained of with the Earth government; no room for dissent. Now, yes, the situation they were in meant that for survival, they had to all hang together or else hang separately, and that kind of shades-of-gray conflictedness added depth to the show, but I did think he was unjust to the officers and enlisted men that he told “Obey me unquestioningly or be considered a traitor”; there was plenty of reason for a lower-rank to think “Hang on, I swore an oath to the government, which he is not; if he can break the chain of command, what makes the chain of command on here any more untouchable?” He didn’t persuade so much as dictate, and to me anyway, the character seemed a bit too secure in the notion that he *was* the specially chosen hope of mankind.
Re: the Vorlons and the Shadows – yeah, that’s a YMMV situation. Again, to my taste, angels and demons in a war for the immortal souls of the incarnate species is much scarier than Sufficiently Advanced Aliens sharing the same basic goal (uplifting the younger races) but having a spat over what methods to use: war or uniformity.
I think you’ve finally put a finger on vague misgivings I had about B5. I watched the show religiously when it was (haphazardly) broadcast, and even though I was cheering for Sheridan, I thought Garibaldi had the right of things – and boy, did he suffer for it.
I was very much engaged at the time by the Sufficiently Advanced Vorlons & Shadows, but I never thought they were anything more than symbolic angels & demons. (But boy, I’d love to see a series about the actual war between actual angels & demons…)
My misgivings about season 5 were not vague at all. It was terrible. Replacing Ivanova with Lochley was a nail in the coffin. And the less said about Crusade, the better.
But – Omegas had spun sections, and Starfuries were delightfully inertial.
Oh, Season Five: I don’t even think about that one. And to be fair to Tracey Scoggins, she was picked for how good she would look in her underwear (which I thought was a dreadful slap in the face to the actress herself, the actress she was replacing, and the whole presentation of female characters and officers on the show to that point, not to mention the female viewers).
The problem is, I think, the dark arts of televisual sales, where (a) a show has to run to enough episodes for syndication and (b) milking the cow till it gives up the ghost, whereupon they switch to flogging a dead horse. That means shows keep on to the bitter end, even when they’ve passed their logical finishing point and climax. Think of how they dragged out the X-Files.
“(But boy, I’d love to see a series about the actual war between actual angels & demons…)”
There’s always Frank E Peretti’s THIS PRESENT DARKNESS and sequel. (Although the sequel was better.) Simultaneously about people fighting with evil, and about angels and demons killing each other with swords.
My interpretation of a lot of Sheridan’s character development(which I agree, was mostly aggravating) was intentionally so, and reflected the Vorlon influence over their human champion. After all, a xix-century man traveled through time and space specifically to determine that Sheridan and Delenn were Chosen Ones. To my mind, his unshakeable arrogance mirrored Mr. Morden’s unshakeable smugness as the ambassador of the Shadows. I consider the character flawed by design. And yes, what happened to Garibaldi hurt. I didn’t see it as his come-uppance though.Also, I’d like to apologise for turning this comments section into a mess. My not knowing how to use the reply function is why we have two threads discussing B5 right now. Mr. Wright, if it’s possible to merge threads 9 and 10, that may make this section more readable.
I’d like to think that interpretation was correct, but the only trouble is, nobody else ever said “Boo!” to Sheridan, and poor old Garibaldi ended up abused by everyone.
Also, I think what they did to Lyta Alexander was scandalous, and that *was* good writing: the way she wasn’t given any help when she left PsiCorps (I’m thinking how they kicked her out of her quarters when she hadn’t a steady income because the station had to become self-supporting so they wanted to rent out her rooms, only that left her with no place to go, and they wouldn’t get involved with a rogue telepath for reasons, so she was basically driven into the arms of the Vorlons and what they did to her) and left to sink or swim after all she risked for The Resistance. Good job of showing the greyer, grubbier side of the heroic rebellion and how with the best intentions, people do get sacrificed for The Cause.
I’d forgotten about Lyta’s fate – it’s been so long since I’ve watched the show. I may have to go back and rewatch the whole thing. There seems to be undercurrents I’d missed.
(At the time of original broadcast, I was distracted by the implied/stated relationship between Lyta and Susan…)
“Ah, I have to agree on Michael O’Hare’s acting, but it is the character of Garibaldi I liked.”
I’m a little confused – Jerry Doyle played Garibaldi, and did it very well, I thought (the best of the human characters after Bester, probably). I love his character too, and I think it’s important that they show reasonable dissent against Sheridan and let him have character flaws even as a golden boy. I don’t think we’re supposed to view Garibaldi’s pain as deserved for opposing Sheridan, either. After all, he was under (minor) telepathic conditioning.
Another important point – Garibaldi has a fair amount in common with the creator of the show. He’s an ex-Catholic named Michael, and his personality fits JM Straczynski’s better. I think that JMS sees himself at least as much in that character as in Sheridan (who has the other initials, JS). So I think you’re supposed to like him.
Oh, great. “Do I contradict myself? Very well then; I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
In other words, I remember the characters better than the actors who played them, and I haven’t re-watched the show in ages. So to stop confusing everyone, my final opinion:
(1) I preferred Sinclair to Sheridan. That’s the first Commander, who became an Ambassador to the Minbari, and then went off for mysterious reasons that are spoiler-ish if anyone hasn’t seen the show yet, not the hot-shot full Captain who replaced him and became Saviour of Humanity and other equally spoilerly things which should not be revealed to ruin the enjoyment of those who may be contemplating their first viewing of the series.
(2) That character was played by Michael O’Hare, whose acting style I liked as pleasantly downbeat and understated.
(3) Garibaldi was indeed played by Jerry Doyle. I liked Garibaldi, and felt he got the short end of the stick, and that his fate was oddly vindictive (and to me, anyway, felt like “Serves him right for daring to question Saviour of Humanity, Chosen One Sheridan”).
(4) Jerry Doyle was a bit stiff and awkward in the first season, so his acting wasn’t the greatest out of the box (but he did get better, I think, as time went on and Garibaldi got a bit of development). He struck me (the actor) as a sort of Bruce Willis circa “Moonlighting” type, and that either annoys you or you can tolerate it.
(5) Mira Furlenn was great all the time
I’m a little in love with Mira Furlan myself.
Garibaldi doesn’t end all bad – he takes over one of the biggest Earth companies in the universe (if that makes sense) and is thus one of the richest and most powerful humans by the end of the series. He’s happily married with a daughter and dies peacefully (unlike most of the B5 characters). Plus his hologram stops a propaganda campaign.
I need to rewatch the series now.
I don’t think there’s been (or ever will be, unless we get some kind of genius fanboy who knows when to stop flogging a dead horse and can put his foot down to kill the franchise) the unimpeachably perfect SF show.
Every one has had some flaws – from the way they turned Star Trek into a movie and then tv franchise, to whatever is most recent. Every one has had excellent parts, too.
Babylon 5 had great parts and not-so-great parts. More great parts than not-so-great parts, I will grant. And it’s much easier to say which is in the running for Worst SF TV of All Time – I submit the Sci-Fi/Scyfy/Skiffy/Whatever they’re calling it this week Channel’s version of “Flash Gordon”. What they did to the Hawkmen – ouch!
I agree with that, but I asked for what you thought was the best, not the perfect, show.
SF TV & movies are always inferior for me because I compare them to SF books, and those always win.
Oh, I can’t answer that one.
Well, I can, but in a purely emotional, ‘my first love’ way. Star Trek (the original). Yes, despite all the cheesiness (and by the bye, popular notions of hammy acting and how Kirk always got the girl and poor effects are Flanderization; Kirk wasn’t always skirt-chasing, there were good performances, and the effects from the 60s were still way better than equivalent productions on this side of the Atlantic, if you compare the dreadful special effects the BBC used in the 80s for “Blake’s Seven”).
Now, leaving aside guilty pleasures such as “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” and “The Tine Tunnel”, or notionally SF but really comedy or drama or romance such as “My Favourite Martian” and “Mork and Mindy”, and ones that aren’t SF at all, but contain SF elements like “The Wild, Wild West”, “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” and anthology shows like “The Twilight Zone”, it’s actually kind of hard to pick “the best television SF show”, because firstly, what do we mean by the best (is it looking appropriately futuristic, is it the plots, is it how enjoyable to watch it was, is it pure SF and not the mix of SF and comedy or SF and romance, or Science Fantasy) and secondly, even really good series had the inevitable decline when they ripened and wee kept on past their peak. As well, I can only comment on shows that I have seen (for example, I’ve never seen “A for Andromeda”). All that being said:
“V” – the original series, until they started getting silly with the aliens being reptiles and shots of them eating rodents.
“The Invaders”.
“The Outer Limits” – again, the original and not the remake.
“Doomwatch” – an obscure and short-lived English series from the 70s which I saw in re-runs in the 90s (I think).
“Quatermass” – again, another 70s English miniseries based on the character of Professor Quatermass, from 50s BBC tv series such as “The Quatermass Experiment” and “Quatermass and the Pit”
“Star Trek” (original) and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”. “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was fine “Star Trek:Voyager” was a mess because they didn’t know what to do with a good idea, and I point-blank refuse to even think about “Enterprise”.
“The X-Files” – until it went on too long and got too convoluted.
“Earth: Final Conflict” – first season definitely, second season okay, rest of them – forget it!
Oh, and forgot to include “Blake’s Seven”, in which the plucky band of rag-tag rebels do not, in the end, overthrow the totalitarian dictatorship (depressingly realistic because one ship against an entire empire is not a fair fight), there is some unflinching examination of where exactly do you draw the line between a freedom fighter and a terrorist, and the Evil Overlady proves why the female of the species is superior to Evil Overlords by not needing a list of “Things Not To Do” and wins by superior intellect, sheer blood-thirsty ruthlessness, and absolutely fabulous fashion sense.
Some good choices there. I still like B5 the best (although Twilight Zone, if it counts as SF, is in a whole ‘nother league).
I couldn’t finish Blake’s 7. It had some interesting elements, but there was just too much crap.
One of the things that impresses me about “Blake’s 7″ was how oddly prescient in a totally unintentional way they were.
For example, in order to discredit Blake, they set up a show trial but not on political grounds. No, they want to ruin the very notion of the rebellion in the minds of all right-thinking people, be they Alphas or Deltas, so they make it a criminal trial.
What crime do they decide to stitch Blake up for? Paedophilia, complete with child witnesses traumatised by implanted fake memories of abuse.
At the time (late 70s/early 80s) neither the “Satanic panic” about ritual child abuse nor the whole dreadful scandal of clerical child sexual abuse or even the ‘recovered memories’ controversy about false memories of abuse being implanted/encouraged by over-zealous therapists or psychologists had come to the fore and I didn’t understand why the writer(s) picked that particular one (other than, perhaps, to underline how destructive and wicked the Federation was).
But think about today’s climate: if you wanted to pick the very crime to drag down a controversial figure, could you think of a better one than accusations of child abuse? The campaign in 2000 by the English “News of the World” newspaper against paedophiles exploited the natural human abhorrence of the crime and the element of mob hysteria in a cynical attempt to boost circulation because nothing could be better calculated to inflame and engage the public.
So Terry Nation knew what he was doing even if he didn’t know in what manner how genuinely prophetic of the future he was being.
And those would indeed be fighting words… if I could ever bear to watch further iterations of Star Trek after the neutering that was The Next Generation. I was put off from the first by the replacement of “where no man” by “where no one” – it spoke everything about the emasculation of the original. It was as if the presentation of the male was engineered by Germaine Greer.
Did later versions improve?
I liked Deep Space Nine, but funnily enough, part of that was because back in the day (from the Original Series), I had a notion that I’d like to see A Day In the Life of a Space Base Commander.
The bases were always presented as being a bit dull and humdrum, nothing at all like the glamour of a starship, and it amused me to think of a day where everything (from tribbles to imminent warp core breach to Cyrano Jones and Harry Mudd both turning up at the same time) happened, and order was only restored at the last minute before a starship turned up to resupply and for shore leave.
I thought it would be funny to see the starship crew leaving in the end with an attitude of “Yeah, it’s nice to visit for a bit of R&R, but I couldn’t serve there – too boring!” when we’d seen a day full of chaos and excitement behind the scenes.
Then they came along with DS:9 and I was a happy bunny
I am strongly reminded of Teilhard de Chardin, whom I read and enjoyed as a boy. I was also reading Clarke and other similar SF writers.
Would you comment on Chardin?
Just the other day read something about Process Theology (or, to be fair, one woman’s interpretation of same) which made me think “Hang on, haven’t I read something similar in “Hyperion” by Dan Simmons?” and then I found out that Simmons is interested in/influenced by de Chardin.
I’d have been more impressed by Process Theology lady if I thought she’d read “Hyperion” but alas, I think it was just a happy coincidence. And I wasn’t any too impressed with Process Theology as she described it, anyhow; I can see how de Chardin got into trouble, though there probably was a lot of misinterpretation of his ideas. He did fall for the Piltdown Man hoax which I think betrayed an over-eagerness for the evolutionary support for his speculations, but I do think he acted in good faith and was genuinely deceived there.
de Chardin is one of the main suspects in the Piltdown hoax.
This post interests me a great deal and is very well written. The Great Myth of science fiction overlaps with certain New Age myths and beliefs, and I’m chiefly interested in understanding the fundamental differences (and parallels) between Christian myth/theology and between the various incarnations of the “Great Myth” in sci-fi and New Age philosophy.
I tend to see the parallels between the evolutionary open-ended climb “onward and upward” and between the monastic pilgrimage of a Christian, spiraling upward to God, “evolving” spiritually in our walk. http://www.thomasmertonsociety.org/celtic.htm. I can see how the Aliens in these stories represent “Angels”, the “Overmind” basically representing God, the deceiver “Satan”, Pure Energy bodies (souls). Don’t the morally inclined versions of the Great Myth tend to require humanity in some form or another to confess their sins and repent? Isn’t the Great Myth of moral progress a misguided reflection of the Christian aim of life: to conform or imitate to the image of God in Christ (theosis), who dwells within us? Are we talking about the difference between theosis and apotheosis? Or is the chief difference the means by which this is achieved? In the Great Myth, a long history of Nature’s interaction with mankind’s ancestors ends in a “revelation” from above (the monolith) giving us the ability to replace our own nature through technology/science. In the Great Myth rendered real in the Bible, we have a long history of God’s interaction with mankind’s ancestors ending in a revelation from above (the Incarnation/Cross/Resurrection) giving us the ability to partake in the divine nature through Christ.
Sorry for the rambling, it’s hard for me to communicate what I would like to here.
Off-topic but something to cheer us all up; link courtesy of Fr. Z’s blog – the first Lego man (and Canadian to boot) in Space! (or near enough, anyhow):
http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120125/toronto-lego-man-space-120125/20120125?hub=TorontoNewHome
Your reference to the fate of the wormface planet in Heinlein’s book is in error. The planet is not hurled into interplanetary space, it is exiled from normal space by being rotated 90 degrees from our dimension (think Krypton’s Phantom Zone).
Although Kip fears the prospect of freezing to death without a sun, the wormfaces are an interplanetary species with presumably sufficient technical knowledge to harness their planet’s core heat and nuclear fusion to survive for many, many generations to come. Following the rotation I imagine the Queen Mother to immediately being plotting like Napoleon on Elba, “I’ll be back, oh yes!”
I’m puzzled that you find such a sentence “cold” and “Machiavellian”. We are talking, after all, about a species that considers humans good for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
But along the lines of your reaction to their fate, perhaps the early gnostics were similarly troubled by the Demiurge’s genocidal actions in the story of Noah and the ark.
My mistake: I thought that the rotation was through hyperspace and back down into normal space far from anywhere. But you are a correct: the Mother Thing says the doomed planet is sent into a place at right angles to our normal sense impressions.
“Following the rotation I imagine the Queen Mother to immediately being plotting like Napoleon on Elba, “I’ll be back, oh yes!””
Ironically, Kip actually threatens the Tribunal in words like these. Considering what the terms of the trial are, namely, to discover and destroy species that form threats, uttering belligerent threats was perhaps the poorest possible defense to raise.
“I’m puzzled that you find such a sentence “cold” and “Machiavellian”. We are talking, after all, about a species that considers humans good for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
Ah! That is exactly my point. The Tribunal did not condemn the Wormfaces for their acts of war against the Earth, or making soup out of Fatty and Skinny. That might have been justice. The Tribunal did not wipe out Wormhome (or whatever their planet might be called) because all flesh was corrupt and their world filled with violence. That might have been Old Testament Wrath Of God type stuff. They announce that their purpose was to eliminate threats to themselves.
I am confused. How are we to judge a species if not by their actions and/or explicit threats? If they start killing people just outside of our neighborhood watch zone, should we not deal with them *before* they hurt a member of our club? I would argue that both the invasion of the Sol system and the kidnap of a galactic beat cop were the actionable evidence that the Wormfaces were a threat to neighboring systems. Certainly their representative’s unrepentant rant is proof of that they are not trustworthy neighbors.
On the other hand, Earth is not being tried because Kip and Peewee were in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s being tried because it has atomic power, spaceflight capabilities, and (according to Kip’s unwitting testimony) a long and bloody history of war and other atrocities. Yet even with the clear evidence that Earth *might* be a threat at some time in the future, our planet is not rotated. Instead we are given a small Galactic CARE package and warned to clean up our act over the next few hundred years. Our potential as a threat has been identified, but our actions so far have been local and not threatened our neighbors. Ergo, we get off with a warning.
In other words, the Tribunal does indeed act (partly) because of the invasion of Sol. That act is a demonstration of intolerable behavior. The fact that the victims aren’t yet members of the galactic club is irrelevant to the main point. Or so I read it.
Why are the humans “put on trial” at all? In any rational system of justice, the accused is only tried for committing a specific crime. Here, the race is put on trial for having a specific character.
The dramatic impact of the scene depends on the unexpected shock of the aliens behaving in this ruthless Machiavellian fashion, that is, that the ends justify the means.
When asked about the justice of the trial, Kip is sharply rebuked and told that what stands before him is NOT a court of justice. Here are the exact words:
In other words, the Tribunal explicitly denounces the idea that it is acting out of a concern for justice.
I will also note that in the scene, Kip contemplates speaking up on behalf of the Wormfaces and urging mercy, and then, scoffing, rejects that notion on the grounds that a Black Widow Spider cannot change its nature. Ironically, the defiance that Wormface hurls at the Tribunal is exactly the same as that Iuno the Roman and Kip himself hurls at the Tribunal, mere belligerence.
In other words, Kip buys into the concept the mercy is foolish and self-defense justifies planetary genocide; and yet when the logic of genocide condemns the human race (who have done acts as vile as the Wormfaces, including cannibalism). Instead of having Kip say the only thing he could say that would serve as a defense — namely, that human beings do not form a threat — he threatens the Tribunal.
The author flinches back from his own conclusion. The only logical thing for the Tribunal to do is destroy mankind — for Heinlein cannot write a story where we man form no threat, because Heinlein is so proud of our being the baddest badasses in our Arm of the Galaxy. Neither can Heinlein write a story where mankind offers mercy or pleas for mercy, even though mercy is the only thing that forgives the warlike nature of man.
Had I written the scene, I would have had Kip urge mercy against the enemy, and have that be the only reason why the race of man is spared, because only that shows that mankind is human, and not merely a self-aware killer apes.
“The author flinches back from his own conclusion. The only logical thing for the Tribunal to do is destroy mankind”
Hmm, no. That’s *your* conclusion. As I mention elsewhere, it seems clear that Heinlein and the three galaxies authorities are making a distinction that you won’t acknowledge: the Tribunal is concerned with species that show they are threats *to their neighbors*, not those who are only screwing up their own planet. (Note that the only evidence offered regarding the wormfaces is their invasion of the Sol system and their response to the local cop, the peacefulness or warfare of their homeworld is not considered.)
When Green Monkeyman vouches for the humans he notes that he is considered civilized by his peers despite the fact that the young of his race routinely injure and sometimes even kill each other. Through their actions, such as cooperating with the Mother Thing, Kip and Peewee have demonstrated that humans at their current state of development (a worldwide federation rather than the world wars of the past) can be reasonable rather than hostile to their galactic neighbors. And unlike the wormfaces, humans have yet to show interstellar aggression. They are evaluated and found to need supervision rather than exile from the rest of the galaxy.
So yes, the Tribunal is concerned with the security of its members. (Indeed, its functioning along the lines of the United Nations Security Council is explicitly mentioned.) But no, dropping the interdimensional hammer is not its only possible response. Or to put it another way, the Tribunal is not trapped in Aristotelian, either/or thinking.
No, sir, that is not *my* conclusion, that is the only possible conclusion from the logic as given, twist as you might to escape from the conclusion. If the Tribunal were only concerned with planets that threaten their neighbors, Earth would not be on trial at all. The ability of the humans to cooperate with the Mother Thing is not an article of evidence brought up at the trial, nor is the humans submission to a single world government. Reread the scene.
Hey, thanks for the vote of confidence! But I actually have recently reread the work in question. Consequently this response will be longish to address your specific assertions above.
“the only possible conclusion from the logic as given”
Well, obviously Heinlein and I disagree, so another conclusion is hardly impossible. If Heinlein had thought your conclusion was ineluctable, he could have just as easily had the kids returned to Earth after the wormfaces were rotated, with a scroll that explained the rules of the Three Galaxies and a membership application. As it is, he has the Moderator state this is the third time Terrans have been evaluated — hence a guilty verdict isn’t automatic. Do you really think Heinlein such a poor craftsman that he would send in a book manuscript knowing he had obviously painted himself into a corner and not bothered to make the trivial fix?
“If the Tribunal were only concerned with planets that threaten their neighbors, Earth would not be on trial at all.”
Earth has been already been evaluated twice before without rotation. (Get a checkup every 80,000 years, need it or not.) It is only being examined again ahead of schedule because of the previous trial. This is explictly stated in the text. What I’m saying is that our planet would only be *found guilty* if it were determined to be a clear threat to others.
“The ability of the humans to cooperate with the Mother Thing is not an article of evidence brought up at the trial, nor is the humans submission to a single world government. Reread the scene.”
What is implied in the trial scene is made explicit before. When Kip is healing and the Mother Thing asks him for what will become his trial testimonies, she first asks him for an account of how he got mixed up with the wormfaces — and for much of the adventure he and Peewee are helping the Mother Thing. When he finishes that account, she asks him “to dictate everything I knew about Earth, its history, and how we work and live together.” Later on the Professor Thing and Kip talk about government:
“Oh, they had government, but it wasn’t any system I’ve heard of. Joe knew about democracies and representation and voting and courts of law; he could fish up examples from many planets. He felt that democracy was ‘a very good system, for beginners.’”
From this it should be clear that our system of government (and much else) is indeed part of his second testimony. It isn’t spelled out in gory detail because the readers already know these things and why slow things down with redudant exposition? The full, unexpurgated versions of Kip’s testimonies are explicitly called up in the human trial and integrated by the Moderator. (Reread the scene? Harrumph.) You might argue those parts aren’t the deciding elements of the verdict or were left out for some unexplained reason, but that is never stated in the text and hence would be your speculation rather than my poor reading skills.
I meant no insult by asking you to reread the scene, nor was I claiming your reading skills were any better or worse than mine: I mean only that what you are possibly remembering is your interpretation, and this interpretation make assumptions to put the Tribunal into a more favorable light than the text actually supports.
Besides, I only asked you to reread the scene because you said you did not recall where the humans are called immature. If you do not recall, it is not odd that you should be asked to prime your memory. Here is the exact quote:
The Green Ape makes similar remarks, urging the Tribunal to give humanity more time. So not only is the human race called immature, this is the sole grounds on which the race is spared.
According to the stated rules by which the Tribunal operates, what is the distinction between the Wormfaces and the Humans such that they die and we are spared? This is the finding:
How do we differ from the Wormfaces? We even eat our own kind.
The deduction that it must be the willingness of Kip and Peewee to cooperate with the Mother Thing is the deciding factor is an guess on your part, but it seems to be repudiated by the text. Here is the exact quote:
The other defenses raised by Kip, that our art and poetry are worth preserving, are not answered.
And here is the verdict as stated:
The concern is only about the danger the human race poses, first to itself, and next to its neighbors.
Now, I read this verdict — and here I admit I am freely interpreting — as the verdict the cold opposition of nature, of history, of Darwinian evolution places in the path of mankind. I believe the author was being symbolic here, and this voice was the cold voice of the universe warning us, all his readers, that mankind must overcome the danger it poses itself and others, and must grow to maturity, before it is too late: hence the reference to progress and a journey upward. This is a common theme in Campbellian SF, and an idea that weighed heavily on the minds even of non-SF readers in the Atomic Age.
It makes fine emotional sense, and as art I cannot recommend it strongly enough. The scene is gripping, even tear-jerking. Imagine one boy trying to justify the right of mankind to survive, but knowing our grim history.
I would even list it as one of the best scenes in any SF book ever. Not only would I put this book in my 50 essentials, but, why, I have. That is why I wrote the list above.
The scene is artistically brilliant. Logically and legally and philosophically however, the scene is a cheat, a bit of slight of hand.
Nonetheless, I do indeed think Heinlein painted himself into a corner by proposing a scene where, logically, the humans should have been wiped out. Instead of carrying through with the logic of what he established, he fudges the result, does some hand-waving, and hopes the reader will not notice. Most readers do not. I did not in my youth.
If the scene establishes the rule that the vigilante committee obliterates without warning any race which poses a future threat, then the ONLY defense is to be a race which does not pose a threat. The scene as written does not offer that as a defense, but the opposite. It gives the much more emotionally satisfying David-and-Goliath defiance of the tribunal:
Emotionally satisfying but illogical. The logical thing for the Moderator to say is not ‘It is possible that you will’ but ‘Since it is possible that you will, we will rotate your world into the core of your star obliterating all life instantly. Thank you for giving us the warning. We grok that you are chumps.’ “
Whoops, I clicked the wrong link apparently. That was a reply to David_Ellis.
Damn, some guys in dark suits and glasses just arrived at my front door, ramsacked the place, and confiscated my nerd card. I have read none of those three books ( 2001, Contact, nor Childhood’s End). I’ve been told I have one month to correct this inexcusable oversight. I challenged them to name the writer of Dimension of Miracles or What Mad Universe, but they would not hear me.
You tried to invoke Robert Sheckley to stop functionaries mindlessly pursuing their ill-conceived regulations? Surely a tactical error.
Tactical error? They barged into my apartment in the middle of the night! I had no time to plan I simply blurted out the two things that came to my head. In desperation I’d catch them on obscurity, surely the inclusion of Fredric Brown would stymie most. But they would not even give me a hearing.
The elitism inherent in science fiction tales like this, and, to a degree, forming the moral atmosphere of the whole genre, should be obvious from these examples and countless others: it is not the masses, the poor, the dispossessed, the meek who shall inherit the Earth, but the Slans.
This part of the article I find especially questionable. I’ve seen at least as many egalitarian versions of these stories as elitist ones. Bowman isn’t made into the Star Child for his superior qualities….he does so because he’s the human who showed up on the alien’s “doorstep”….any human would have done. In CHILDHOOD’S END, it’s the entire last generation of humans who merge into the Overmind. In CONTACT, the whole human species is welcome to join the galactic civilizations when they mature enough.
In THE HARVEST by Robert Charles Wilson (a particular favorite of mine in this subgenre), aliens arrive and invite the entirety of the human species to upload and join their transcendent group mind. In much singularity fiction (which one might call the Myth on speed), the whole human species uploads or otherwise becomes superhuman (Greg Egan, for example, has written many stories set in such a world). One could list examples all day and not come to the end.
I think you’re trying to form fit The Myth into the gnostic mold when, on this particular, it doesn’t match up. Not that I’m saying Gnosticism and Neo-platonism and similar religious/philosophical movements aren’t similar to the thematical trends in SF that you’re trying to describe but in this particular SF’s techno-trancendentalism differs from what has preceded it in it’s frequent egalitarianism.
The Great Myth, I should have said, in the above rather than The Myth.
I agree with your analysis.
I would also extend it to the mentioned Heinlein book, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Earth is not excluded from possible membership in the Three Galaxies collective, it is merely deemed immature. The collective membership at the trial doesn’t show any signs of a “Only Slans need apply” criteria for membership.
“Earth is not excluded from possible membership in the Three Galaxies collective, it is merely deemed immature. The collective membership at the trial doesn’t show any signs of a “Only Slans need apply” criteria for membership.”
The two sentences contradict each other. The concept that certain planets are ‘immature’ is innately elitist, in this case, it is progressive elitism, holding that being of lower status is something time will cure, or you can grow out of. Reflect for a moment on how condescending it is for one planet to call another immature.
Had the Three Galaxies been a Church, do you think they would have turned away children planets on the grounds of immaturity? Or would they send a Livingstone to the poor backward tribesman of Earth to baptize them, and make them equal members?
“The two sentences contradict each other. The concept that certain planets are ‘immature’ is innately elitist, in this case, it is progressive elitism, holding that being of lower status is something time will cure, or you can grow out of.”
It seems to me that you’re stretching the term ‘elitist’ quite a bit, to the point where making practically any distinction would count. If a youngster wants to drive a car (and hence potentially put other citizens at risk of death or injury) do you consider it elitest to require candidates be at least a certain age (a proxy for maturity), have correct knowledge of the rules of the road (“Three Galaxies. One Law”), and technical proficiency (vision and driving tests)? So far as I know in this country we don’t outlaw people from driving based on race, gender, or sexual preference, nor do we prevent people from operating motor vehicles on their own property. (I would argue the three galaxies membership rules are similar.) You don’t get a license if you’re legally blind, however.
If you grant the DMV critieria aren’t elitest, then I’d suggest the three galaxies collective isn’t elitist either. If you argue that the DMV requirements are elitist, then I would be curious as to what criteria you would use. Presumably requiring any license would be elitist, as is requiring voters to be citizens living within certain boundaries and be older than 17.
Rather than making a spiritual argument, I think Heinlein’s ending of the book is his indirect commentary on earthly politics. He’d lived through two world wars, the League of Nations followed by the UN, and the Korean “conflict”. One lesson to be learned is that if a world (or galactic) government is to function, it is not enough that it provide a discussion forum and hope everyone will agree on what terms like “justice”, “truth”, and “freedom” mean. Sooner or later you’re going to need governance that relies on the use of force to resolve disputes. Hence his recurring device of a worldwide federation governing Earth.
So when to use force? Police are trained to shoot someone who advances on them with a knife because a person so armed is potentially only a few seconds from killing them. (And contrary to the movies, they are trained to shoot center mass rather than try to wound someone in the arm.) They are not trained to avoid taking action until a suspect actually kills someone. Similarly, if a race like the wormfaces invades a neighboring system and refuses to drop its weapons when challenged by the local cop (ie, the Mother Thing), and effectively screams “Come and get me, copper!” it gets rotated. If a species shows evidence of willing to work with the galactic police (as Kip and Peewee do) and obey the rules, its planet isn’t rotated. (Note that the wormfaces have no witnesses on their behalf while Kip and Peewee get two.)
As for “Had the Three Galaxies been a Church…”, I don’t think such analogies are useful in a work that isn’t making spiritual claims. I understand your wanting to place fiction within a larger spiritual framework; I just don’t think that was what Heinlein was writing about in his book.
You assume the very point in dispute. I am calling it elitist to analogize a world with lower technology to a youth or immaturity: the elitism is in assuming that a world is less wise, less able to govern itself, less worthy of dignity and honor, on the grounds that it is less concerned with technology or more warlike or whatever it is you are using as your scale of “maturity.”
Your analogy with the DMV just assumes the very point I am asking you to question. You are a spaceman, and you land in a world like that of, say, ancient Athens, and you come across Socrates, a man wiser and smarter than you, even though his house does not have indoor plumbing and does have slaves working there. If you think of him as a child not to be trusted on the grounds that he does not have plumbing but does have slavery, you being condescending and elitist.
Let us not conflate age with maturity. Suppose that the Tribunal of the Three Galaxies had not been millions of years old, but only decades old, and that the civilization of Earth, stretching back four or five thousand years was older than they were. Assume everything else in the scene is the same. Do you see the condescension of a high-tech world calling a low-tech “immature”? Civilizations are not living organisms that go through a growth phase. Indeed, often it happens that the current generation is less wise and less civilized than their forefathers. Do you see the elitism in a current generation calling their wiser elders “immature” and treating them as children?
I understand Mr Heinlein’s contempt for concepts like truth and justice very well. It is that he would attribute his jejune and juvenile realpolitick to higher beings I find absurd. The idea that because not all men agree on what these terms means ergo we should govern ourselves without truth and justice is rank folly. I submit that he learned the exactly wrong lesson from history.
You are also misreading the book. I took the trouble to look up and type out the exact quotes. The Tribunal is NOT punishing the Wormfaces for their invasion of Earth. That would have had some color of justice to it, for then there would be a specific crime that offends the moral law that all rational creatures (no matter what they pretend) cannot help but know. The Tribunal is not a court of law. It says so. It is a vigilance committee: its express purpose is to assess possible military threats to itself and obliterate the enemy by surprise attack using overwhelming weapons.
It is the same as if the United States became aware of two bronze-age level nations at war on another continent, or two stone-age level tribes, and, in order to prevent the rise of a later technical civilization with the ability to threaten us, nuked them instantly, killing every organism within their national boundaries. And then justified the dark deed on the grounds that they would “immature” and that we are “mature” and therefore have parental authority over them.
You also miss the point of my analogy with a Church, and I am sorry I was unclear. I was not placing the work in any spiritual context: I was pointing out that Churches send missionaries to primitive farmers and herdsman and tribesmen for the purpose of asking them to join as equals, and that the difference in tech level, or the difference in social or legal organization, simply does not matter. I would have used another organization as an example, but I cannot think of any institution that is more blatantly egalitarian and less condescending.
Well, I’m pretty sure the use of “immature” is mine alone, the term most often used for Earth of the future in Heinlein’s book is “barbaric”. This is not a reference to an inability to speak Latin, but rather a reference for our recurring practice of killing each other. I used maturity as a way of extending a psychological term (the ability to postpone gratification in expectation of a greater reward later) to an entire species. I see a history of states warring with each other over resources, territory, and who believes in which god as a sign of immaturity. If you want to use another word, that’s fine with me.
In any event, I don’t read the book as promoting Three Galaxies membership as being strictly a matter of technical development. That aspect is simply a matter of practicality: why would a organization spanning three galaxies be interested in the affairs of civilizations that don’t have interstellar space flight capabilities? It’s not like they’re an intergalactic religious organization that feels the need to convert all sentient beings to their way of thinking.
“It is the same as if the United States became aware of two bronze-age level nations at war on another continent, or two stone-age level tribes, and, in order to prevent the rise of a later technical civilization with the ability to threaten us, nuked them instantly, killing every organism within their national boundaries. And then justified the dark deed on the grounds that they would “immature” and that we are “mature” and therefore have parental authority over them.”
Again, I don’t see anything in Heinlein’s novel that claims the Three Galaxies claim a parental authority over anyone. They just assert a right to self-defense. I’ve never read anything by Heinlein that indicated we should be meddling in other countries at all, he was more in the libertarian mold.
The problem isn’t with two “immature”/”barbaric”/”primitive” countries battling each other. Nor is it a matter of their technology alone. It is the combination of violent behavior with advanced technology that leads to threats going beyond their borders. If those two states are upwind of me and they start tossing nerve gas, anthrax, and the like back and forth, I’m going to look at options like tactical nukes as a matter of self defense. (Admittedly, focusing a giant orbital mirror might be better and eliminate fallout problems, but you go to war with the tools you have.)
Heinlein’s book, like Asimov’s Foundation books of the same era, anticipates a future when science has advanced to the point where it can be used to forecast trends not years but centuries in advance. Why wait for a violent empire to dominate dozens of worlds if you can stop them before that happens? Game theory indicates you shouldn’t take that chance. (For a more recent examination of the problem, try “The Killing Star” by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. Talk about a book giving you nightmares…)
“I understand Mr Heinlein’s contempt for concepts like truth and justice very well. It is that he would attribute his jejune and juvenile realpolitick to higher beings I find absurd. The idea that because not all men agree on what these terms means ergo we should govern ourselves without truth and justice is rank folly. I submit that he learned the exactly wrong lesson from history.”
Hmm, I don’t recall Heinlein ever referring to the Three Galaxy members as “higher beings”. More advanced in government and technology, certainly. I read the trial scenes as an endorsement of diversity and a lesson in humility for humans.
I also see no contempt for truth, merely a realization that it’s folly to count on agreements as to what justice means. As an example, consider the century of Palestinians refusing cohabitation with Jews in a two-state solution to the conflict. After a century, why in the world should we anticipate the Palistinian politicians suddenly accepting a solution that doesn’t start with the Jews drowning in rivers of their own blood? Accepting that Israel has a right to exist has always been a sticking point.
In contrast to “justice”, when it comes to truth the Moderator takes pains to obtain all pertanant data before making its decision, even if that means waiting for character witnesses to be subpoened from another galaxy. As it notes at the beginning of the human’s trial, it has not been found in error in more than a million years. What is that if not an author supporting the concept of truth in a legal, if not a philosophical, context?
As an attorney, I can assure you there is no such thing in law as a right to preemptive self-defense. By definition, whoever strikes first is the aggressor, not the defender.
Imagine if some beings even higher, a federal of Three Galactic Clusters let us say, saw that the Three Galaxies might one day be a threat, and obliterate them in preemptive self defense. By their own standard of preemptive self defense, they form an unavoidable threat to others, and so they should be destroyed.
It violates simple justice, common sense, Kant’s categorical imperative, the Golden Rule and the Eightfold Path, not to mention the maxims of the Norse Havamal, the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Code of Hammurabi. You don’t kill the accused before he commits the crime of which he is accused.
Do you really need to have an in depth argument on why it is wrong to kill the innocent? Or, in the case of the Wormfaces, to kill the guilty on some grounds OTHER than their guilt?
How is the attack on the Wormface planet different from the attack on Pearl Harbor? There was no declaration of war. The Wormfaces were not even given the simple courtesy we civilized men give condemned prisoners, a last cigarette, a last confession of sins, a chance to kiss their hive-mother adieu. The Wormfaces are treated with utmost contempt, as if they were the black widow spiders Kip condemns them as being: mere vermin in the chickenhouse to be killed as quickly and efficiently as possible.
I will tell you how it is different: it was more successful. It is because the Tribunal has power, mere power, power enough to make it unaccountable, that it can act with such callous disregard for justice and chivalry and honor. If the Wormfaces has turned out to be a client state of the Organians or the Metrones or some other races of beings equal in power to the Tribunal, the power fantasy of obliterating a world without any repercussions would have been exploded as hollow.
Heinlein’s philosophy is one of consequence-free consequentialism. He both holds that evil means (planetary genocide)is justified by good ends (galactic peace) AND he holds that acts and omissions (Kip scorns mercy for the Wormfaces) do not have logical repercussions (the merciless are shown no mercy).
Reread the scene. Whether he uses those words or not, the scene is calculated to impress the reader with the greater wisdom, not merely the greater power, of the aliens. I draw your attention to the boast of the Tribunal that is has not make a mistake in a million years. Such perfection is meant to show a superhuman mental scope.
To condemn as folly the search for justice on the grounds that some interested parties behave unjustly is a contempt for truth, on the grounds that it places truth beyond the pale, beyond agreement.
If I say, “this is unjust” I am making a statement about reality. I am making a statement that is either true or false.
But if I say, “I feel ill-used; I feel the same way a man who is treated unjustly feels” I am making a subjective statement only, a psychological report of my feelings. The Tribunal outlaws statements of the first type, objective statements about justice. It is left only with statements of the second type.
You will find that “what constitutes a threat” upon examination turns out to be a more nebulous concept than “do as you’d be done by.”
This is the arrogance of a fool who thinks that justice can be deduced from statistical analysis of facts. It is the folly of thinking that all reality is simple, binary, and can be reduced to empirical measurements. It is the contempt of the ignorant technocrat for truth and virtue and beauty and justice, and all the things where the technical approach makes no sense.
Yes, so the Tribunal carefully checked twice, discovered that human beings are just as dangerous as Wormfaces, and obliterated the one world and not the other, innocent and guilty alike, sparing no one, not even those who would have surrendered: not even Lot was spared, not even Noah.
To use the example you mentioned, it would be like the United States nuking the Palestinian settlements on the grounds that the Palestinians failed to agree on what justice was, therefore granting us the right to act without justice, and to destroy them before they threatened us. This is an appealing concept, especially since 2001, when Islamic terrorism has been transported worldwide. Think of the deaths which would not have taken place had only we committed genocide against an unruly race of people. Nonetheless, the concept is illogical: it proposes a standard that would condemn anyone who uses it.
This is what is being held up as superior and superhuman reasoning at work. As a grown-up, I don’t find the scene convincing. The philistine contempt for mercy a voiced by Kip, likening the Wormfaces to spiders who cannot help but be vermin, is particularly repellent.
Since I have not read THE HARVEST by Robert Charles Wilson, I cannot make any comment on that. In no sense am I trying to support a general theory that applies to all science fiction. That is why (in the sentence you quoted) I speak only of science fiction stories “like this” i.e. like CHILDHOOD’S END.
“One could list examples all day and not come to the end.”
Possibly, but I cannot think of a single one, aside from the short story I mentioned, where the superman is not super-intelligent.
“I think you’re trying to form fit The Myth into the gnostic mold when….”
Perhaps it would be better if you did not speculate on my motives. It is annoying, and those of your camp seem not to be able to express themselves without speculating on the motives of others.
“… on this particular, it doesn’t match up. Not that I’m saying Gnosticism and Neo-platonism and similar religious/philosophical movements aren’t similar to the thematical trends in SF that you’re trying to describe but in this particular SF’s techno-trancendentalism differs from what has preceded it in it’s frequent egalitarianism.”
I cannot think of a single example of a story starring a posthuman or promising ‘the singularity’ which is egalitarian. On the other hand, I am not well read in anything written after about 1984. My comments are restricted to Campbellian science fiction of the Golden Age: that is why I mentioned certain authors and stories by name and spoke of them.
I just happened to read that series and I was wondering how much would it fit in this model.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith%27s_Brood
Another -probably better- example that comes to mind is Pohl’s Heechees (specially The Foe)
You read a Frederik Pohl book and remembered something about it afterwards? My hat goes off to you. I read that series plus some others and I cannot remember one iota about any of them. I do remember the flatest characterizations imaginable, but that is about it.
I must admit I tend to focus on the SF concepts XD
If you look earlier, I mentioned it in comment #8. I don’t think it fits, or at least is a much more complex version than any of the Golden Age novels mentioned. I recommend the series highly, especially the first book, Dawn.
This whole discussion got me wondering what I would do if I were before the Three Galaxies collective. I’d lie my teeth out of head and try and sell them on something like the “concubine vector,” e.g. that the human race could be sold on (bribed to) profitable servitude and by that route brought into a long term relationship of peaceful cooperation, thereby avoiding any hostility that might make us a threat. I might’ve drawn a parallel with our domestication of animals and that destroying us would be wasting a perfectly good resource, perhaps one that could be turned on future threats. If I could sell them on the plausibility of this line of reasoning, I could then point out my ability to convince members of my own species to the bargain and offer myself as an intermediary.
But then I’ve just positioned myself to know something of their plans, so that as I head back to Earth, I can gather together the smartest and most dangerous people on the planet who, under the guide of being the vanguard and loyal servants of our new overlords, can very carefully study their strengths and weaknesses as the rebellion-in-secret. The most likely route would be the play the races off one another, start a war between them, and bring the collective crashing down from the inside. Out of the ashes, we take their tools and weapons, establish our own empire and make their remnants our footstool for a few (hundred) generations to ensure they were nice and civilized once we handed them back their freedom.
Yes, that is a “Count to a Trillion” reference there. Waiting for the second installment…
I suppose COUNT TO A TRILLION can be considered what would happen if Blackie DuQuesne and Richard Seaton were hauled before the Three Galaxies Tribunal. Of course, my elfs are different, er, I mean, my aliens have a different motive than the Three Galaxies, and so act differently.
Volumes Two and Three are in the hands of the publisher. Volume Four is being written: I am up to page 80.
The crucial scene for me was when Kip decides not to plea for mercy on behalf of his attackers. Here is the quote:
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, and thought as a child, and this filth actually seemed like perfect common sense to me. Why, of course of course people were just the programmed machine-by-products of their genes and upbringing, and bad men were bad because they are like spiders who cannot help it. Of course it is cool to sneer at Sweetness and Light as being unrealistic and…
.. This is hell itself talking. Sure, mercy is silly until you need some yourself…
And then not one page later, our entire race is on trial for survival, and our representative did not show the Tribunal that we are merciful creatures. Kip and Iuno (with the fullthroated approval of the author) hurl THE SAME defiance at the Tribunal that the Wormfaces did. Iuno even THROWS A JAVELIN AT THEM.
At which point, the huge voice intones solemnly, “Ow! SH*T! I was going to vote not-guilty, but that damn javelin is stuck in my thorax-sack. D*MN! Well, we could tell you human to be good little killer apes and please stop attacking people. A human can’t help it — but that’s the point. Rotate the Earth into zero-space! Your mom is now a snowcone, Earthling.”
Had I written it, I would have had Kip plead for the Wormfaces, and the Tribunal said coldly,
“Because and only because you plea for you enemies, we are convinced that there might, perhaps, maybe be a tiny spark of sanity and decency in your primitive and disgusting species. The Vorgon constructor fleet is already in position to turn your world into a garbage pit for the chicken bones left over from our picnic on Alpha Centauri — but now we will spare your miserable lives, earth slugs, because you show an advanced concept despite your inability to practice it.
“The Wormfaces were never on trial here. You were. Why else do you think we would have you in the room, hairless apes?”
That would have been a surprise plot twist, would have made sense of what was happening in the plot, and been, unlike Heinlein’s little speech about stepping on intelligence races like spiders, not naked and open in its applause for evil.
To be just, Kip does also request to be returned to Earth if the verdict should go against them, which none of the aliens did.
This means Kip has the same spirit of unity and love of homeland as the Wormfaces. He is as brave and bold as any pagan, whose spirit of stoic courage I would be the last to deny. I am nonetheless repulsed as a grown up hearing his juvenile rejection of goodness and virtue and truth as “sweetness and light.”
Not to pick nits, but we do not know if the Wormfaces asked to return and die with their hive-mates because their fate is not onstage.
I always felt Kip should have spoken up for the Wormfaces in an appeal for mercy (okay, I was an earnestly Catholic twelve year old when reading it) because their fate was appalling – the cruelty of the slow death their planet would undergo horrified me, and yes, they were dreadful, but as a completely different species, wanting to eat humans was wrong as one sentient species eating another, but not at all comparable to cannibalism, and we too were a fallen sinful species.
I could see why Kip didn’t want to, didn’t even think of it, but I did think that the vengefulness would rebound on humanity, and when it was our turn to be rotated in spatial dimensions – well, who was there to speak up for us, when we hadn’t spoken up for our enemies? And the threats didn’t impress me: when someone is saying in a cold, rational, pragmatic manner that your species is violent and murderous and dangerous because of that and so should be put down for the greater good and the safety of others, how does it help matters to threaten retribution and destruction? What was so different about Kip’s defiance by roaring threats of murder and revenge as his last words, and the Wormface’s last words being defiance and assertions of superiority and justification of their deeds?
So this is why Shakespeare is a better writer than Heinlein?
PORTIA
Then must the Jew be merciful.
SHYLOCK
On what compulsion must I? tell me that.
PORTIA
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.
Shylock makes the same response as Kip: why must I be merciful? Who’s going to make me? Why should I? and Portia responds that there is no compulsion or forcing here, that’s the point of mercy.
Part of my annoyance with the scene in this otherwise charming book is, first, as a child I was utterly taken in, and second, that “sweetness and light” stuff that Kip dismisses includes, among other things, Shakespeare.
And Kip’s adventures in outerspace do not bring him back a better person, but a worse. Seeing the higher beings “rotate” the Wormface planet into lingering death no doubt encourages Kip to throw the milkshake into the face of Ace rather than to turn the other cheek and wait on his customers with becoming grace and humility.
Unless they learned the lesson we had taught them, and the very quislings and collaborators we thought were learning to be civilised were in turn secretly plotting our downfall from the inside
Yes, I was actually replying to thread #8, but something went wrong with the “nesting” (a fitting term XD)
(It may be a problem with this browser, lotdw – it has happened again)