Nightfall and Night Lamp
Posted on 27 February 2012
Science Fiction is a particularly adroit tool for examining human nature, more adroit than, say, the allegedly realistic modern novel, because it allows the author to introduce the changes society is likely to suffer as various technologies, speculative or fantastic to us now, make their advent on Earth. Only the least thoughtful of science fiction writers can introduce such staples of the genre as the superhuman, the robotic or artificial intelligence, the non-human alien, and not lay bare his own foundational assumptions about what it means to be human.
Such unthoughtful science fiction writers will treat, for example, robots merely as comedy relief characters, with all the same foibles and follies as a Bob Hope. The comedy-bot might be shown quaking at the threat of having an apelike alien rip his arms off if he fails to throw a game of holographic chess, but a thoughtful science fiction fan might wonder why a machine would fear the loss of a limb any more than an automobile would fear a tire change. The more thoughtful science fiction fan might wonder why the robot was programmed by his software designer to be craven. An even more thoughtful science fiction fan might conclude that the robot manufacturers and owners receive a cheap yet hollow pleasure from bullying servants designed to cringe. (The most thoughtful science fiction fan of all will notice that the robot being threatened is shaped like a Hoover vacuum cleaner, and has no arms to rip off in the first place.)
Because science fiction allows the extraterrestrial or artificial human or superhuman onstage, it more easily asks and answers the question what it means to be a man, because a contrast between human and nonhuman forces the question to the fore. The science fiction writer almost has no choice but to betray his view of human nature. The thoughtful science fiction writer makes it even more clear.
In this essay, let me discuss two of the more thoughtful, Isaac Asimov and Jack Vance. The contrast is informative, since Asimov can aptly be taken to represent the views of John W. Campbell Jr., whose ANALOG was one of the most influential magazines in the genre; Jack Vance along with Cordwainer Smith appeared in the pages of GALAXY magazine under the editorial hand of Frederick Pohl, and owes more to the fantasies of Clarke Ashton Smith or Lord Dunsany than to the technophilia of Gernsbeck or can-do optimism of Campbell.
If Isaac Asimov champions the world view common to ‘Hard SF’, Jack Vance can serve if unwillingly as the champion of the world view of ‘Soft SF’, and, contrary to the terminology, I propose to show that Soft SF is more realistic than Hard, at least as far as human characters are concerned.
I have never been convinced of the view of human nature which comes across as the central conceit of Isaac Asimov’s novels and stories. Asimov’s CAVES OF STEEL proposes that living in overpopulated warrens would make men agoraphobic; in THE NAKED SUN, he proposes likewise that living in robot-run hermitages would make men phobic of being in the same room with another human being. The most famous of these is ‘Nightfall’ were men raised in a world whose many suns shed eternal sunshine go mad at the first dusk in a thousand years.
On the other hand, I have heard reviewers and critics and commentators say, either with a chortle of delight or with a moue of scorn, that the societies depicted in Jack Vance tales, such as NIGHT LAMP or EMPHYRIO or CITY OF THE CHASCH, are overcomplicated, delicate, ridiculous, as fantastical as a Faberge Egg—and I have heard it so frequently, that I cannot bring a single contrary comment to mind. The most famous of these is ‘The Last Castle’ which concerns a society of aristocrats so haughty and settled in their ways that they cannot bring themselves, even at the expense of their own survival, to do the necessary, sober, and dirty work of defending themselves from a revolt among their slave-creatures.
It has always struck me that Jack Vance’s fantastic societies, and the odd ways of the odd men of the odd worlds he has shown us, are not any more fabulous or unusual than real tribes and nations and civilizations which have lived here on Earth, and that his view of man is, at the root, realistic to the point of cynicism. Only the vocabulary he uses to express it is fantastical, and this is the root of his humor, acrid and dry as it is. Jack Vance has mastered the technique of having his characters utter the most selfish and vicious of sentiments in tones of lofty erudition.
It has always struck me that Isaac Asimov is portraying a view of man so mechanically puppet-like and so unrealistic as to be little more than an intellectual exercise. His human beings operate according to simple and unbreakable laws, as obvious and mechanical as his famous Three Laws of Robotics.
There is a famous story, at least, famous among science fiction readers, that Isaac Asimov’s ‘Nightfall’ , one of the most often reprinted short stories in SF, had it origin this way: According to Asimov, John W Campbell Jr prompted Asimov to write the story after discussing a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote:
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!
Campbell’s contrariwise opinion was: “I think men would go mad.”
And the rest is history. Asimov did as credible job with the idea, and added or invented as much scientific sounding nonsense as he needed to make Campbell’s ridiculous conceit seem sound. The short story is well constructed, even masterful, as the various scientists begin to uncover an appalling truth about their civilization on a world in a multiple star system that has never known night. By the time the gripping final paragraphs arrive, the spell is complete, and many a reader, even years later, is convinced that people actually would go mad at their first sight of stars.
Of course the conceit is ridiculous and is meant to be. Campbell was being a contrarian, and he meant to be.
Campbell is not just twisting the nose of Emerson or biting his thumb at the divine hand who designed the stars. The whole point of good SF is to create that sensation which Copernicus must have felt when he realized that the Ptolemaic model was wrong, and that the stable earth was spinning and careening around a heliocentric solar system, or the sensation many readers still feel reading Einstein for the first time: a paradigm shift.
Campbell’s paradigm shift was the opinion of Freud and BF Skinner and other gentlemen sometimes called scientists, whose speculations in recent years have finally begin to come into well deserved derision, namely, that man is merely a bag of chemicals whose contents are programmed by heredity and environment.
By this modern if not postmodern theory, there is no reason why the stars look sublime to us. It is an accident of genetics, or a blind by-product of cultural or natural forces, or arbitrary. The theory is, if you change the environment, such as to place man on a world with no nightfall, the stars if seen once each thousand years would be as horrific to them as the rising the cryptical and primordial R’Lyeh one each thousand years is to us.
But, of course, men in real life don’t act this way. When Leeuwenhoek first looked in a microscope and discovered that tiny animalcules, too small to see, swarmed and multiplied in every drop of water, every grain of sand, he did not go gloriously mad, and rage through the rainstorm screaming to his neighbors that the living creatures were everywhere, in everything. When Cardinal Bellarmine in a famous (and utterly fictional) event, refused to look through the telescope of Galileo, it was not because Galileo, seeing the four satellites of Jupiter, realized that the skies were not the comfortable perfect spheres of Ptolemy, but instead were vastnesses filled with thronging bodies, asteroids and alien earths. Galileo went shrieking and gibbering from house to house, warning that the skies were horrific voids, and Cardinal Bellarmine, wisely avoiding the sanity-shattering truth, recoiled in terror from the telescope. That is exactly what never happened.
In both cases, men were fascinated by the intricacy, glory and beauty of creation, revealed to their awe inspired eyes by science. The men of Venus would feel the same way when the clouds parted, or the men of Asimov’s fictional world whose nightfall was only once in a thousand years. Despite what you may have heard about the Renaissance Church, the Vatican continued to support the astronomical sciences before and during and after Galileo, and does so to this day.
Now, one might object that the natives of Asimov’s fictional world of Lagash were not human beings but aliens, and therefore they well might have the quirk of psychology aforementioned. Maybe so, but if so, the tale lacks all emotional impact, and means as little to us as a tale of some beach-dwelling aliens on a world with a dozen large moons, who once in a thousand years see the tides go out, and, upon viewing the shipwrecks and sunken cities and beached whales and coral stands of the sea-bottom, due to their psychopathological fear of sea-mud, all go suddenly mad.
We earthmen think the stars are sublime, almost too beautiful to be described. That is a fact of human nature. ‘Nightfall’ only has that Copernican sense of disorienting paradigm shift if we agree with the unspoken premise that we earthmen think the stars are sublime because and only because of our environment.
Asimov wrote a short story along similar lines to ‘Nightfall’ called ‘Strikebreaker’ , in which a visitor from Earth to an asteroid colony Elsevere discovers that the family in charge of the waste recycling has gone on strike, which threatens the ecology and the life support of the colony. The visitor understands that the recycling officer and his family are shunned, not permitted physical contact with any other colonist due to the irrational custom of the colonists. The officer is on strike to overturn this cruel law. Nonetheless, the visitor descends into the forbidden recycling area, operates the controls, recycles the sewage, and saves the colony. In a grotesque display of ingratitude, the colonials inform him by message that he must exile himself forthwith without seeing or touching anyone else, since he is now untouchable and ritually unclean.
Asimov himself, in an introduction to this tale that he penned for an anthology, wonders why this story dropped without a ripple into the public readership when ’Nightfall’ had made such a splash. My own theory is that ‘Strikebreaker’ lacks the central element of the vertigo of Copernicus which is the emotional core of ‘Nightfall’ : the message that the beauty of the stars is merely an arbitrary preference, like driving on the right rather than the left side of the highway, and would be horror rather than sublimity when seen through other eyes. By way of contrast, ‘Strikebreaker’ has nothing like that. The prejudice against the sewer worker is nothing extraordinary, since it is modeled on the rules against the Dalits or Untouchables of India, and, more to the point, and more offensively to American tastes, the prejudice wins and the visitor from Earth is merely a chump.
But please note that, as in other Asimov stories, the prejudice in ‘Strikebreaker’ is treated in a mechanical fashion, as if it were one of the Three Laws of Robotics. The visitor from Earth is not a member of the shunned caste of waste workers, and has formed no human relationships, no friendship, and no romance, and no guest-host relationship any one of which would create a natural conflict with the carrying out of the rule, nor is he extended any professional courtesy due to his status, nor is there any concern for any reaction, retaliation, or souring of the relations between Earth and the colony. It is simply a given, as bland and simple as a clue in a logic puzzle: anyone who operates the sewer controls is shunned. End of story.
The story is clever but shallow, like most stories of its type. The characters are simply machines, and any prejudices implanted by their environment are part of their programming. No one from the colony questions the wisdom of the bias against untouchables any more than any Asimovian robot ever questions the wisdom of their prime directive against harming human beings. Robots simply go insane when presented with simple moral choices, such as whether it is allowable to amputate a man’s arm to save his life, or shoot a sniper before he shoots, or even arrest a drunk.
NAKED SUN and CAVES OF STEEL and other tales of Asimov have a similar mechanical view of human nature. Standards and norms and the definition of sanity (so runs this view) are all the product of environment. Change the environment, and human nature changes.
Ironically, the Asimovian attitude of mankind portrays man as particularly unsuited for scientific endeavors. If sanity is a by-product of environment, to land Man on the Moon or float him in freefall is paramount to blasting his sanity. All colonists of alien worlds would be mad things to us. This is hardly an argument for space exploration.
Let us contrast this with Jack Vance, whose societies, at first blush, seem much more baroque and rococo, too intricate and absurd to exist.
Here is Mr. Vance’s account of the origin of his Nebula Award winning ‘The Last Castle’, taken from the preface to that tale in BEST OF JACK VANCE:
The germ of this story was contained in an article dealing with Japanese social interactions. As is well known, Japanese society is highly formalized—much more thoroughly so in the past than during the relatively egalitarian times since the last war.
During the nineteenth century, when a samurai deigned to converse with a person of lower rank, each used markedly different vocabularies, with honorifics precisely calculated to the difference in status. When the person of lower degree discussed the samurai’s activities or intentions, he used a special convention. Never would he pose a simple question such as: “Will your lordship go boar-hunting tomorrow?” This would impute to his lordship a coarse and undignified fervor, a sweating, earnest, lip-licking zeal, which his lordship would have found offensively below his dignity. Instead the underling might ask: “Will your lordship tomorrow amuse himself by trifling at the hunting of a boar?”
In short, the aristocrat was conceded sensibilities of such exquisite nicety, competences of such awful grandeur, that he need only toy with all ordinary activities, in a mood of whimsy or caprice, in order to achieve dazzling successes.
So, “The Last Castle” concerns a society of somewhat similar folk, and examines their behavior when the society is subjected to great stress.
We will see the same stratified and over-refined society again in such works as ‘The Moon Moth’ and NIGHT LAMP.
What is interesting, if not alarming, about reading of such societies, civilizations where form counts for more than content, where practical matters of life and death are subordinated to ritualized or stereotyped responses or ceremony, is that such portrayals are not unrealistic. One need only crack open a history book to read of periods of decay and collapse, or unfold a newspaper to see the warning signs of similar corruption in the current world.
Now, not every Jack Vance story takes place in the midst of polities ossified to the point of collapse. The tale NIGHT LAMP, one of his later novels, does indeed end on a world of antiquated aristocrats living in somnolent splendor on a world outside the galaxy, so that the blazing spiral of the Milky Way shines down on their untended arbors and empty mansions in an otherwise starless sky; but it begins on a world of solidly middle-class sentiment, but whose obsession with microscopically nuanced distinctions of elevation between rival social clubs leads to brutality.
The point here is that the natural human tendency for hierarchy and subordination will not be abolished by the presence of technical competence. It is common feature of stories in the tradition of Campbell to assume that scientific progress equates to social enlightenment or egalitarianism. Vancean stories make no such unrealistic assumption.
You see, dear reader, the Vancean assumption is the opposite of the Asimovian. The assumption is this: Despite the changes of technology and environment and culture, human nature will not change.
Allow me by way of illustration to pull a single paragraph, curiously memorable, out the voluminous work of Jack Vance to make my point.
The book CITY OF THE CHASCH concerns one Adam Reith, stranded on the far world Tschai orbiting Carina 4269 after his space vessel is shot down by missiles issuing from an unknown source. Here he finds a world inhabited by four technologically sophisticated but inhuman species, each in continual hostility with the other three, and each of which has bred and mutated human beings as servant races, and humans have adopted, insofar as they can, the outlook and psychology of the aliens. The plains and steppes and islands of Tschai are occupied with various independent cities and tribes of men who exist somewhere between the Bronze Age to Victorian Age levels of technology, but no advance beyond early railways or simple radio is permitted by the space-travelling aliens. Hence we have a planetary romance of the Edgar Rice Burrough style, but with a more reasonable conceit than most for having high tech energy weapons alongside rapiers and cutlasses, or having galleons and cogs and caravels plying the winedark sea beneath the silent antigravity platforms of air-rafts and stratospheric craft.
The peculiar genius of Jack Vance is showing servant-races of man, cruelly adapted to the purposes of their nonhuman masters, and reacting with the typical human psychological trick of making their own subservience a matter of ceremony, cult, and cant. The Chaschmen, for example, despite the physiological improbability of the event, regard themselves as the larval stage of the Chasch, and wear false craniums to better to resemble their thickset and pangolin-scaled alien masters. The Chasch, to better aid the humans in the convenient self-deception, plant their eggs in the corpses of newly dead human slaves, and claim to be the reincarnations or evolutions of each specific dead man. (The Dirdirmen have a different myth to explain their subservience to the Dirdir, claiming the two species to have evolved from the two halves of a primal egg on the Dirdir homeworld of Sibol; the Wankhmen may have a more clear-eyed view of their own circumstance.)
In this scene, Adam Reith has disguised himself as a Chaschman, and enters their city to reconnoiter. When he is discovered, he desperately eludes pursuit, and while seeking escape through the humbler quarters of the wield alien metropolis, chances upon the following:
His attention was attracted by a tavern in the basement of a tall building. From the low windows came flickering red and yellow light, hoarse conversation, an occasional gust of bellowing laughter. Three Chaschmen came lurching forth; Reith turned his back and looked through the window down into a murky taproom, lit by firelight and the ubiquitous yellow lamps. A dozen Chaschmen, faces pinched and twisted under the grotesque false crania, sat hunched over stone pots of liquor, exchanging lewd banter with a small group of Chaschwomen. These wore gowns of black and green; bits of tinsel and ribbon bedizened their false scalps; their pug-noses were painted bright red. A dismal scene, thought Reith; still, it pointed up the essential humanity of the Chaschmen. Here were the universal ingredients of celebration: invigorating drink, gay women, camaraderie.
There is simply nothing parallel to this in anything in Isaac Asimov that I have read, and I have all of his published science fiction works. Asimov shows no twinge of awareness that the claustrophobic human beings of CAVES OF STEEL nor the hermetically isolated hermits of THE NAKED SUN would quaff gin and rum toddy in their hours of relaxation, or seek the company of fair coquettes, or play the lute, or dream great dreams, even if those dreams are shaped by the psychoses of their insane societies.
Again, contrast is key. Isaac Asimov more than other Hard SF authors regarded mankind as a machine open to a technical fix. It is telling that the peoples of his worlds of Lagash and Elsevere talk and act like 1950 middle class Americans, except for the one change in their psychology caused by the one crucial counterfactual which forms the hook of the story. There the contrast is used for the opposite purpose and drives toward the opposite result as in a Vance yarn: against the bland off-white hue of a culture no different from those of the readers of the time, the one jarring stroke of the social insanity or social inanity gleams like a comet.
Jack Vance paints vivid landscapes of ornate and odd civilizations, with customs as strange to us as those of Tibet, and whether he means to or not, shows the essential similarity of human nature across cultural divides. To be sure, Vance is a master of the fine and ancient art of exaggeration, and the dry drollery of such exaggeration is part of the appeal. The Brahmins of Boston live in rigid conformity to artificial customs, as those of India, but none so rigid and so artificial as those of the worlds of NIGHT LAMP and ‘The Last Castle’.
But the art of fiction is the art of exaggeration. If you want to read carefully balanced accounts giving each side due proportion, then read a newspaper (preferably an old-time newspaper from the days before newspapers became addicted to exaggeration and hence became fictional themselves). Exaggeration is unrealistic, but it is not unreal.
It is to be noted that Jack Vancean heroes are often understated, even to the point of being laconic. Against the multicolored landscape and roaring spectacle of strange or eerie absurdity, the wry but competent Vancean hero does his work without drawing attention to himself. Rarely does the protagonist voice or advance philosophy or world view alien to that of his readers, or, if he does, he will preach pragmatism, this-worldiness, a desire to avoid excess.
For my taste, the ordinary man in an extraordinary circumstance is the very definition of adventure and romance.
The concept that ordinary men are as they are, and ordinary virtues a common man is called upon to exhibit in extraordinary times, merely because they were so programmed by the arbitrary or unintentional mechanics of their environment is the very definition of the unadventurous and unromantic.
Aside from the initial sugar-rush of that vertigo of Copernicus, the tale the tells men that they are machines, all their adventures and romances mere illusion and folly, all their deepest beliefs absurd, is a tale that holds no drama, offers no insight, attracts no fascination, rewards no rereading, drains joy, strangles laughter, and gathers darkness.
One can imagine a young man first tasting deeply of the wine of poetry reading the words of Emerson which opened this essay, and walking out of doors at night in some place far from the lights and noise of the city, gazing at the dark high dome of the stars with fresh awe and an awakened sense of spirit, and the greatness of the architect who placed them there, suns mightier than our own, immensely far away, numberless, bright, almost appalling in their transcendent beauty.Such a man could stare at the sky for a lifetime, and still not see all there was.
One can likewise imagine a young man first reading this tale by Isaac Asimov, looking up at the stars he once thought divinely beautiful, and seeing neither hope nor meaning in them, merely something which, if some twist of matter in his brain had been connected by blind change to other molecules, would drive him mad. There would nothing further for him to see.
> Soft SF is more realistic than Hard, at least as far as human characters are concerned.
This is a trick statement…as the hard SF you reference (Asimov, although also Hal Clement, Robert Forward, and others) have ** NO ** human characters; they have only Expositors with human names.
…which is to say, yes, we’re in total agreement on this point.
As the years have gone by, I have found Asimov less and less readable. But that was the Style back then. Nerdy kids in the Cult of the Cerebral enjoyed stories in which icky emotions were absent and in which the heroes were nerdy cerebral guys.
Amen.
I feel the same with much of golden age science fiction. Curiously, I usually find “soft SF” more readable than “hard SF” no matter the era.
Even extremely thin characterization can be humanly realistic — or not.
I still remember the Clement novel in which a woman asks some aliens whether they all have a word for “luck” and ponders how none of them say no, and then, at the end of the novel, when they plan a return to the planetoid they were investigating throughout the novel, she observes that many aliens are coming not from interest in the planet, but in her pregnancy, and there is talk about curiosity where babies come from.
“The Chasch[men], for example, despite the physiological improbability of the event, regard themselves as the larval stage of the Chasch, and wear false craniums to better to resemble their thickset and pangolin-scaled alien masters. The Chasch, to better aid the humans in the convenient self-deception, plant their eggs in the corpses of newly dead human slaves, and claim to be the reincarnations or evolutions of each specific dead man.”
Interestingly, while I have no trouble at all believing in the human ability to accept and incorporate this myth into their perceptions, my suspension of disbelief falters greatly when asked to believe that the Chasch indulge this myth to the extent of individual Chasch having to pretend to be a former member of a slave species whenever ceremonially necessary. I try to imagine humans pretending to be transmogrified cows because they have eaten a burger, for the sake of bovine peace of mind, and can’t quite grasp it.
It’s been too long since I read that book (if I have; I chugalugged Vance one summer, to the detriment of memory) for me to be sure.
But I believe the aliens are going by the Ghostbusters Theological Principle: “If they ask you if you’re a god, say yes!” In the animated series, the Ghostbusters broadened this principle to claiming ghosthood when outnumbered by ghosts. Danny Phantom followed a similar rule.
Now, given that most gods have some very uncomfortable sorts of backstories, and that ghosts tend to have drawbacks to their lifestyles (or undeathstyles), I’m not sure that this is always a good principle, even under the “All’s fair in love and war” rules. But once one begins, it’s difficult to stop.
I had the same response. That’s not the right pscychology of mastery. The right psychology is to never stoop, never truckle, never placate, certainly not institutionally.
But I can see two justifications for it. (1) the Chasch are inhuman, and their practices are inscrutable. (2) its a comment on the essential humanity of everyone in the master-slave relationship, such that the master is suborned by his slave’s psychological need.
Well, suspension of disbelief is produced by art, not by my inaccurate and too-brief description of a scene I did not quote. The Chasch psychology differs from that of human beings.
Also there is nothing in the book to suggest that they pretend to retain memories or associations or relationships with their loved one after the alleged transmogrification.
Also, historically, master-servant relationships have not always been relations of unmixed exploitation. There is some mutuality involved. Riders often like their horses. If horses were intelligent, horsemen might play along with a myth or ‘noble lie’ to help control the species.
“Riders often like their horses. If horses were intelligent, horsemen might play along with a myth or ‘noble lie’ to help control the species.”
Maybe, but I can’t say it seems likely to me: the very affection and empathy that would motivate a desire to make an intelligent servant species as happy as possible via a noble lie, and which would make it possible to invent a convincing lie and sell it, would seem to me to be the self-same things that ruled out the ability to justify such a lie in the first place. I can imagine, with difficulty, a single rider who likes his horse well enough to go to the effort of creating and playing along with a consoling myth for him, and who understands his mount well enough to come up with a convincing myth, but who is condescending enough to have no problem lying to him; it’s imagining enough such riders to build a society on where I fall down.
Humans have certainly sold other humans on belief structures that conveniently established or preserved self-serving power hierarchies in many times and places, but in all such cases it has been at least possible for most of the belief’s teachers, as well as its learners, to espouse those beliefs honestly themselves. Even the Communism of the Soviet Union was honestly believed in by most Party members both high and low at one point — it was a very brief point, before it gave way to a forcefully-compelled pretense that was far more for the outside world’s benefit than for ordinary Soviets, but it did happen. It’s a lot easier to sell a myth when you believe it yourself, and it’s just hard to imagine an entire alien species in that position. (Yes, adults sell kids on St. Nicholas as “Santa Claus”, i.e. the whole Night Before Christmas panoply, all the time — but we neither expect the kids to believe that imagery forever, nor expend time and effort on trying to make them do so.)
Now mind you, I could be wrong; I’d be interested to hear counterexamples.
As for that, Mr Jack Vance has perhaps the most negative view of religious belief I have ever seen portrayed in any books. He regards it all as mummery and flummoxing chumps, priestcraft, fraud, powerlust. He perhaps (here I speculate) considers all leaders of all institutions not to believe whatever myths they tell their followers, so he does not regard it as absurd or even unusual to portray aliens pandering to a convenient myth to control their beloved slave race.
Heinlein’s Lazarus Long thought much the same, as I recall, though his contempt seemed a little bit more in the benignly anarchic “if it floats your boat, fine, just leave me out of it” mode. Whether that represents Heinlein’s own opinion or not, I couldn’t say.
Your description of Vance’s book did remind me of a critical interpretation of feudal Christianity. The three estates were supposedly equally valuable, but like the Chasch, medieval noblemen used Christianity as a convenient myth to give peasants an illusion of fellow-feeling without needing to give them any tangible benefits, politically or economically.
I’m not saying that I personally subscribe to this, only that the perspectives seem similar.
I have never seen any religion, polytheist or monotheist, depicted in a Vance tale as anything other than a hive of self-interested deception, nor philosophy as anything other than piffle and mooning. I would say that the perspectives are quite similar.
Have you ever read Sharon Shinn’s Archangel? You wouldn’t approve of everything in it, but it’s the story of a theocracy where the miracles are obviously advanced tech — and the theocrats are the good guys.
I have never read, nor indeed, ever heard tell of it, I am afraid.
I think you would like it.
There is a Chinese ideogram, which, IIRC, now means “prime minister” and once meant “prisoner of war.” The transitional meaning was “slave” –which, since in China you had peasants to work the fields, meant household slave. A few generations of that, you might well have a trusted advisor on your hands.
Do you mean Cardinal Bellarmine, not Cardinal Bellamy, or was the cardinal in the story (which I have read, but never saw a name given to him) named Bellamy?
“Galileo went shrieking and gibbering from house to house, warning that the skies were horrific voids”
You know, that might actually explain why Galileo got himself into so much trouble by managing to pick fights with every supporter he had (from the Jesuits up to the Pope) so that they stood by and let him handle the Inquisition by himself (and I do get the impression that there definitely was an element of “Hah! Thinks he’s so smart, does he?” when he got asked to come in for that little chat), besides being accused of stealing the idea of the telescope from a Dutch inventor (most modern histories of science now tactfully put it that Galileo improved upon the original design, unlike how I learned it back as a sprat, that Galileo invented the telescope – and he certainly seemed to claim as much himself for the financial benefits).
I don’t dispute his contributions to science, but he definitely did seem to have a chip on his shoulder about acknowledging any inspiration he may have gotten from others. Being driven mad by the vast expanses of the chaotic universe is as good an explanation as any
A lot of early scientists seem rather credit-obsessed to modern eyes, perhaps because our norms and methods of assigning credit and rewarding original work were still in their infancy. Newton’s “shoulders of giants”, for example, wasn’t intended as a becoming modesty, the way it’s usually read nowadays. It was a direct insult to Hooke, who had accused Newton of stealing his results. Hooke was short; so Newton was saying “If I was inspired by anything other than my own genius, it sure wasn’t you, shorty.”
It is, however, how Bernard of Chartres, who actually coined the phrase, intended it.
It is curious how some expressions are used differently through the ages. The earliest known example of “sitting on the shoulders of giants” dates from the 13th century by Peter Olivi and he said it as a sign of modesty.
Maybe the expression was used in most cases as an expression of humility, and Newton was an exception to that rule… Newton was a neurotic and unsocial man or so I have heard.
That seems unlikely, since the quote comes from a letter to Hooke, at the end of a sentence which begins by warmly praising Hooke’s contribution to optics.
Daniel, I had not heard of Peter Olivi, but for what it is worth, Bernard of Chartres used the phrase a century and a half earlier (he died in the 1120′s).
Galileo’s pride was his downfall, just remember how he mocked defenders of Geo-centrism even though he was ordered to make a fair and balanced portrayal of both Geo-centrism and Helios-centrism in his writings.
Many people forget that Galileo was refuted in his lifetime by prominent astronomers and for good reason; he had little, if any, physical evidence to support Heliocentrism.
Never was there a man so gifted at making enemies of friends, nor at implying self-credit for the works of others. Late Moderns tend to believe he invented the telescope, the scientific method, performed the First Experiment, and for all I know built the Pyramids and the Grand Canal.
Scheiner saw the sunspots before Galileo ever looked. There was a German telescopist whose name escapes me at the moment, who saw the moons of Jupiter one day after Galileo but believed he had seen them first because he used the Julian Calender and Galileo used the Popish Gregorian Calender and the dates were mixed up. Grassi meticulously examined the Comets of 1618 and concluded they had non-circular orbits from beyond the moon – an argument against the Copernican system; Galileo, who had never looked at them, declared that comets were emanations in the earth’s own atmosphere. (That flamewar was the one that alienated the Jesuit astronomers.) Despite repeated entreaties Galileo never sent a telescope to Kepler – and never mentioned Kepler in his writings. In his Dialogue, he pitted the Copernican system (with its twenty epicycles) against the Ptolemaic system (which had more), even though by then no one took Ptolemy seriously. The Tychonic system answered all the objections – and was computationally equivalent to the Copernican system. But even by then, Kepler was getting street cred for his elliptical system.
There are some useful accounts of much of this here: http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/extracting-the-stopper/
with much else of interest elsewhere on his site.
I think I do mean Bellarmine. I will make the correction. Thank you.
You’re welcome. It’s certainly not down to any superior historical knowledge on my part, just for some odd and inexplicable reason I seem to recognise Cardinal Bellarmine (or I should say, St. Robert Bellarmine) when I encounter him.
The only bright point in the mess that was the movie “The Exorcist: III” came for me when, in a scene involving the detective walking through either a Jesuit church or a residence, he passed by in a fleeting shot a statue, I went “Hey, that’s Cardinal Bellarmine!” and the pride I felt at recognising a saint’s statue that I’d only seen for a micro-second kept me going for the remainder of the film.
(Anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, don’t bother: it’s not even bad enough to be so bad, it’s good. Considering they hired Brad Dourif, George C. Scott and Max von Sydow to speak the lines, it was a waste of all their talents.)
Or perhaps David Bellamy, who also doesn’t look through telescopes? : )
The story may have a germ of truth to it, in that Cesare Cremonini (professor of natural philosophy at Padua, so Galileo’s colleague) dismissed Galileo’s claims as ridiculous, and said that the whole affair gave him a headache. Or was it looking through the telescope and not being able to see a thing that gave him a headache? I cannot remember. At any rate, there is no record of his refusing an invitation to look for himself.
There is no reason why Bellarmine should ever have been so invited. He only got involved with Galileo six years later.
I wonder if the reason Cardinal Bellarmine’s name became attached to the Galileo story in that fashion (i.e. irrational theocrats who hate science so much, they won’t even look at evidence that contradicts their holy books) is because he was involved with controversy with King James I and he was known throughout Europe as a defender of Papal authority, so for Protestant propaganda purposes in later centuries, it suited them to cast such a figure in an obscurantist light?
The first time I read Asimov was when I turned thirteen. It was the second foundation and I was repulsed by Asimov’s conceit that human behavior was determined and reducible to mathematics, the notion just seemed so false to me even then. I ended up rooting for the “Mule,” he seemed more vivid than the “good” characters (the ones convinced that humanity can be determined through algebra and slide rulers). And he was breaking havoc on the plans of the psychohistorians and since I did not like their goals to begin with, that was another plus in favor of the mule.
Mr. Wright might not like this, but I think that a skimpy interest on characterization and drama/suspense is endemic to science fiction. Most authors of science fiction are interested in gadgets and science first and drama, people and suspense second. Asimov was just a very a salient example of science/mystery at the expense of humanity and drama.
I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I would suggest that it is one of the great temptations of SF writers to oversimplify character because the great theme of SF is “how do New Ideas (knowledge, technology, discovery) change people and society?” In order to simplify the paradigm shifts of the New Ideas — both for the sake of manageable stories and for cathartic drama — generally the incredibly vast and complex scope of actual human response has to be, not reduced so much, but distilled to somewhat broader and more exaggerated strokes.
Asimov’s psychohistory is actually a good example, in that when it was first introduced, Hari Seldon was very explicit that it only worked on a sufficiently large scale, like that of a Galactic Empire. If Asimov had played more with the idea that as the stakes got more local and more personal the psychohistorical predictions got less reliable, the series overall might have been more human.
Still, the Mule himself is the perfect example of that Black Swan event — the single lone unpredictable mutation skewing everything because of how it changes the statistical laws of interaction. (I still remember the breathtaking horror of the scene in FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE when the Seldon Plan update, for the first time in four hundred years, goes completely off the rails.)
I may be mistaken, but as I recall the series the Second Foundation was created in part to ensure thar Seldon’s predictions came true by subtly influencing history through mind control. So while Seldon’s psychohistory was supposed to be fairly accurate, he also had his thumb on the scale.
I would say that science fiction is just too diverse to say that, but it probably applies to certain “greats” of the genre. I have read a serious and interesting comparison of Heinlein to Stephanie Meyer a while back.
http://laviniashadows.blogspot.com/2010/09/concerning-robert-heinlein-and.html
Now, my thoughts? Science fiction probably is somewhat predisposed to weaker characterization, but that has less to do with the genre than the rather peculiar group that seemed to dominate science fiction for a while, which had some rather atypical priorities for a group of fiction writers. They definitely produced work that was influential, foundational, and even good/great, but it was a rather peculiar sub-genre. Older science fiction (Frankenstein comes to mind for some reason) didn’t have that, and when the genre became more mainstream we saw more varied works where characterization took center stage.
I would be the first to admit that I haven’t studied science fiction in years, so I am probably completely wrong.
Not like it? I agree with it wholly. Detective stories are also skimpy on characterization, because the readers are interested in the murder. Likewise, action-adventure stories are skimpy on characterization, because the readers are interested in the action and adventure.
These also impose rather hard limits on the types of characters that can be used. A mystery needs its detective, and its suspects, and all those have to have some traits to fit those roles. Similarly, hard SF needs someone who can handle the science, or you end up with Pern and everyone thinking you write fantasy.
Really? I love Asimov’s work, especially the foundation series. I mean I didn’t actually like the Second Foundation (the group) that much but especially with the trilogy written after his death I thought everything ended up making some sense and ended fairly well.
I love this piece. Our Greek Civilization teacher in high school told us that the Greek social, artistic and, above all, philosophical development, could be partly explained by the fact that they are able to look at the sea from almost everywhere in Greece, and at the stars most nights of the year. It is also no coincidence that monotheism took root in dry regions where the stars and shooting stars are more awesome than anywhere else.
The conceit that intelligent creatures would go mad in seeing the stars once in a thousand years is ridiculous, particularly if they can form an idea of the event in advance and know that it does not mean the end of the world. Even in the regions that rarely have clear skies, everyone loves the stars.
Thalatta! Thalatta!
Dear Mr. Wright:
Very good, interesting essay. Considering how little I’ve read of Jack Vance’s work, I can’t really comment about any of his stories. Except this, I agree with your preference for stories of the kind written by Vance over what Asimov wrote. I long ago came to dislike Asimov’s work because I thought it too plain and colorless. Your essay helped to clarify why I don’t care for Asimov’s work: thin characterization and a bleak view of human nature.
As you already know, my sigle most favorite SF writer is Poul Anderson. It’s my view that Anderson was able to write combining both the “hard” and “soft” strains of SF. Stories based on solid scientific fact or speculation and technological development AND showing a deep concern for character development. One example of a story by Anderson which asks question about human nature and proposes very “Vancean” answers being “The Sharing of Flesh.”
Sincerely, Sean M. Brooks