From Rick Riordan to Dan Simmons, the popularity of Gods, Goddesses and Mythology, especially but not limited to Classical Greco-Roman and Norse mythology seems as fresh as ever. What is the appeal and power of mythological figures, in and out of their normal time? What do they bring to genre fiction?

My answer, as well as the answers of SFF people less longwinded than I, are here:

http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/05/mind-meld-what-is-the-literary-appeal-of-gods-goddesses-and-myths/

One of those answers is from my wife. Compare and contrast!

This is from Locus Online News:

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America named Gene Wolfe the recipient of the 2012 Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. Wolfe has written many novels and short stories, and has previously won two Nebulas, five World Fantasy Awards, and six Locus Awards, among others. Wolfe also won the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2007.

The award, given for “lifetime achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy,” will be presented at the 48th Annual Nebula Awards Weekend in San Jose, CA, May 16-19, 2013. Previous recipients of the award include such luminaries as Ursula K. Le Guin, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Connie Willis, Anne McCaffrey, and Joe Haldeman.

The Golden Age by John C. Wright?

I am reading this book for AP lit, but there is no sparknotes or anything for this book. Does anyone know any website or book or anything where they have the book summarized or analyzed by chapter? Thanks!

So a teacher in advanced placement literature assigned one of my books in school? For kids to study? For credit??

I am flattered, very much so, but, come on, folks! Did the schoolchildren run out of Dickens and Shakespeare to read?

My work is fine, and I am proud of it, but is this the best use of the student’s limited time and attention span? How about anything on any topic by G.K. Chesterton instead? I seriously think Chesterton wrote at least one article on everything in the cosmos at one point.

If you want to read good science fiction, how about HYPERION by Dan Simmons? Then force the young scholars to read CANTERBURY TALES by Chaucer and show the comparisons.

Oh, maybe I should write up the cheat notes myself! That way, I can assure their accuracy, and be certain that my masterwork will be treated with the respect, nay, the groveling admiration it deserves!  I much choose my words carefully. Let me see…

“The story is set so ridiculously far in the future that author does not have to worry about being realistic. It is so far in the future, that the main character, a ripoff of a Robert Heinlein dude named Pheatherbrains or something like that, lives in an English mansion with a butler who is a part time Penguin. And the main character talks like an imitation Jack Vance character.

“He is missing part of his memory because of a wild drunken weekend, because there is a party going on lasting a thousand years. Then there are some exciting scenes where a lot of weird people sit around a table and talk and talk, but later there is a very exciting scene where even more people sit around and talk.

“I think one of them was a cube. And then Featherbrains loses his mind, or misplaces it, and turns out to be someone else, unless that’s actually him. He gets stabbed by Harlequin, who is a cute girl working for the Joker. Or maybe his name was Scarface or something.

“Then there is this big Giant Gold Starboat called the Phoenix Arizona, and more robots, and Pheatherbrains goes out and gets a job, and I think they turned off the sun after Featherhead has an argument with his Dad, named Helium, who is another version of him.

“And there was a girl. And a war.

“This soldier named Aching also turns out to be him. I think at one point everyone is him.

“Everyone gets married at the end. I love happy endings!

“The author is a very philosophical person who always talks about himself on his blog, and he was making a very deep and important philosophical point in his story: There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Launch of a Giant Gold Starship. They cost plenty.”

John C. Wright’s THE OLDEN AGE, with Princess Daphne and the Phoenix Exultant pictured on the cover. She does not look that old to me.

.

I would think it was more funny if it were not so painfully true.

Hm. I think I feel a screed coming on. Uh oh. There is no time to set this in any logical order, so I will merely don my coat of camel hair, eat by breakfast of locusts and wild honey, and speak as the spirit of ire moves me:

Make no mistake, we cannot prevail over the death cultists of Mohammedanism until we prevail over the culture of death of the Left. Of the two religions that hate Christianity and call America the Great Satan, Political Correctness is more pervasive and more persuasive. In part, this is because one of its religious dogmas, never to be questioned, is that it is not a religion and it has no dogmas: it is merely the truth believed by all right-thinking non-child-eating non-bigots.

Now that the Left has successfully undermined marriage and church and family bonds and the basis of true friendship (which is honor and good character) the atomized individuals have no friend but television, and so all their friends, that is, television, tells them that Leftism is the truth believed by all right-thinking non-child-eating non-bigots. And everyone they know — on television — agrees.

Television also tells them they are smarter than us, people who read.

It also tells them the way to win arguments is to mock the person of whoever holds the contrary opinion, and wait for the live audience to applaud, because that is the way arguments are won on show on television.

A second dogma is that Political Correctness does not exist. Talk to one of the cult. They don’t know what the word means, because only bigoted baby-eating wrong-thinkers like Emmanuel Goldstein use the word. So it does not mean anything and it does not exist. The first rule of Fight Club is never to talk about Fight Club.

And besides, everyone has their own version of Political Correctness, Right as well as Left, except the Right does it more and they are paranoid for thinking it exists because it does not because no one does it. And it is wrong to define your terms. Never, ever, ever define your terms because that is just labeling, and its is stereotyped, and sexist and racist and agist and homophiliphobonormative-ist.

(I wish I were satirizing this. No. I have heard a Lefty tell me both that PC does not exist, AND that everybody does it. He went on to say that everyone commits adultery and perjures himself under oath — I will leave you, dear reader, to deduce from the internal evidence in what year the conversation took place. Political Correctness changes with history and season and fashion, you know, since it is an eternal truth that there is no eternal truth.)

Which leads me to the third dogma, which is that all logic lies, and logical people are coldhearted and lack compassion, because A really is equal to not-A if you really, really want to believe it hard enough. You make your own reality. Believe in yourself. If you clap, Tinkerbell will live again.

(Again, I wish this were satire. This conversation happened this week. Oy.)

A fourth dogma is that the intellectual illiterates who cannot use logic, or be bothered to crack a textbook on history or economics, or bother to donate money or time to charity, are our moral and mental superiors. Their lack of education and inability to follow a simple three-step syllogism is what makes them so smartificer than the rest of us. That, and their lack of courtesy, common decency, self-control, honesty and honor. Because on television the cool kids, the rebels, the guys who don’t think, they are the ones who win all the arguments and fist fight and get the girls. And all your friend would not mislead you, right?

You can trust television because television says you can trust it, right? And C.S. Lewis was a sexist racist anyway!

See how it works? It is simple.

Ruin the educational system in the name of federal compassion for the children, accuse those who give more to charity (namely, the working poor, the middle class, the Christians) of being cold-hearted. Applaud those who give the least to charity (namely, the idle poor, the rich, the Politically Correct) as being compassionate for their willingness to take more money via taxes from us and give it to the idle poor.

Disintegrate the bonds of faith, the standards of decency, the definition of marriage, and heap opprobrium on men of good character, and praise villains and mass murderers and sexual deviants as heroes and martyrs, and you will eventually get a generation that has no character, no faith, no reason, no logic, no courtesy, no honor, and no ability to distinguish true from false, valid from invalid, reality from television but which has but loads and loads of self-esteem and a selfish sense of entitlement. They will have so much self esteem that they will never listen again to a logical argument or a scientific proof, because their self-esteem tells them that no one is smartasticer than are they.

And once you have made a whole generation into selfish, whining, inflated-egoist know-nothings, they will beg for chains, and riot when they do not get them.

Here’s a couple of John C. Wright Official Fanboy Questions that I’ve been wondering about, and since this is a post regarding your actual work (as opposed to other topics, like eschatology, morality or Catwoman), I felt here might be an apt place to ask them, should you feel like answering:

1) Who would win in a fight: Lord Mavors (assuming he didn’t automatically decree the outcome of the battle to be in his favor) or Marshall Atkins (assuming he restricted his number of lives to 1)?

ANSWER:

There is little surprise if the question were answered WITHOUT the restrictions specified, because the answer would be too obvious: Mavors would win the fight because he would decree the outcome.

Atkins has as many powers as a Telchine, but he is a natural creature bound by the laws of nature, whereas Mavors is a supernatural creature who gets to write or tweaks the laws of nature: Which, for him, are more like suggestions or guidelines, really.

Generally speaking, fantasy characters usually have the advantage over science fiction characters, because fantasy characters occupy worlds which are basically alive, that is, the rules of fantasy worlds usually have a fate, or a spirit, or a pantheon which determine the outcome based on some idea (right or wrong) of proper conduct, merit or justice.

Fantasy stories are based on magical thinking, where things work because they should work, not because they do. In a fantasy, true love’s first kiss will break the spell because the good fairies are living spirits devoted to seeing that true love triumphs. In a science fiction story, the correct application of pharmaceuticals will waken the Sleeping Beauty in a coma whether Doctor McCoy flirts with Nurse Chapel or not, because the colder laws of science fiction only care about whether you do your job correctly, not about your personal life or the state of your soul.

As a theological point, the Holy Church has held since the days of the schism of the Donatists, that any immorality on behalf of the priest does not invalidate his sacraments. If a thieving or evil or even heretical priest blesses your marriage vows, your marriage to your wife is still valid. The laws of nature of a science fiction world abide by the same principle. Church thinking, despite what you may have heard, is the mere opposite of magical thinking.

Which is why the Church is not fond of witchcraft or psychics, but allegedly enlightened progressives often are.

Look at how many mind-readers, fortune-tellers and empathic healers end up in (ahem!) science fiction stories versus how many Jesuit or Monastic scientists, and then compare the number of Jesuits or Monks in real life who made lasting contributions to science versus the number of witches, or scientologists or true believers in psychic powers. Then ask yourself why the stories do not reflect the reality.

But now we have wondered far afield, and not addressed the question actually asked. What is the outcome of the duel if it be fought WITH the restrictions specified? Ah, but this is a difficult question. Let me answer it last.

2) How intelligent is Exarchel compared to, say, the Sophotechs in your “Golden Age” trilogy? Would he be equivalent to a Rhadamanthus-level Sophotech (million cycle capacity, I think it was?), or is Exarchel’s intelligence even greater than that?

ANSWER: During his first appearance in COUNT TO A TRILLION, the xypotech Exarchel is far less intelligent than the household Sophotechs of the manorials of the Golden Oecumene. By the time of his final appearance in CONCUBINE VECTOR (not yet published), Exarchel occupies a system of three-dimensional rod logic crystals filling the entire diamond core of the gas giant Jupiter, and this permits a computational volume far in excess of even the largest Earthmind mainframe of the Golden Oecumene.

3) If you could live in any of your own fictional universes – assuming that none of the “bad stuff” of those universes (e.g. Morningstar, interstellar war, cruel wind-god headmasters, etc) were present – which of your own fictional universes would you choose to live in with your family?

ANSWER: That is an easy question to answer. I would rather live in the Star Trek universe. There is no war nor race-hatred in that future, nor poverty, nor misery. Most important of all, the swinging gals with 60′s hairdos wear cute miniskirts in space. The delicious alien eyecandy babes (including a green Yvonne Craig and a pregnant Julie Newmar) are inter-fertile with humans, and no laws of miscegenation, or customs against fornication, stand in the way of the full indulgence as if of the houri of the paradise of the Mohammedans.

Hold it. Did you say live there with my family? Never mind! I am not bringing my pretty eighteen year old daughter into any universe with shirtless Captain Kirk in it.

A more serious answer might be to say that the Golden Oecumene in THE GOLDEN AGE would be the best place to raise a family, especially since the medical science of the age could cure everything, even death. But it is a libertarian utopia, where all vices whatsoever are permitted, ergo a utopia that only creatures possessed of utopian levels of moral prudence and perfection could live in without destroying mind or soul or marriage. What indeed would my wife say when, during my first hour in the libertarian utopia, I brought home my first pair of fully-functional Catwoman and Batgirl sexual fetish robots? What would my father confessor say?

Aside from that, I cannot answer the question. The ‘bad stuff’ is an integral part of each story I invented. It is as if you were asking whether I would prefer to live in the world of Tim Powers ON STRANGER TIDES or Gene Wolfe’s PIRATE FREEDOM, but without any piracy.

4) Why have there not been any flying cars in any of your novels?

ANSWER: There are no flying cars in my stories because my stories are satires. For satirical purposes of gross exaggeration, I assume that in the future a technology will be invented to allow for the safe and efficient mining of natural gas.

Under the unrealistic, nay, comical assumptions of my make-believe future I assume that the number of drill rigs will drop by 75%, and that the ‘Greenhouse Gas’ emissions, compared to those produced by petroleum, will drop precipitously.

What makes the assumption satirical is that I also assume that well-meaning and civic minded conservationists will be buffaloed by the hysterics of a few shrill shills, and that this technology will be hindered or stillborn, creating the ironic situation where the Western Nations will be sitting atop a bottomless treasure house of an environmentally-friendly source of fuel, and will be so frightened and bewildered by the claims of overpopulation guru Paul Erlich and malarial genocide perpetrator Rachel Carson, that the foolish future generations would prefer to starve in the midst of abundance.

And ergo there would be no flying cars because everyone, for no good reason, but only due to political hysteria, is out of fuel.

Now this satire is so outrageous, more absurd than the flights of fancy of Ron Goulart or Jonathon Swift, that I can convince no editor to buy it. No one would believe rational human beings could do such a thing.

4) (continued) I also notice a distinct lack of gorillas and planets being destroyed, which are two of the criteria you mentioned are vital to a good sci-fi story.

ANSWER: Several planets, indeed, the entire solar system of Eta Carina are destroyed in a spectacular (yet, ironically, astronomically accurate) double hyper-supernova explosion in my short story ‘Far End of History’ which is a sequel to THE GOLDEN AGE appearing in the NEW SPACE OPERA 2 anthology.

Several planets, arms of the galaxy, timelines, and at one point the entire multiverse is destroyed in NULL-A CONTINUUM, my tribute and sequel to A.E. van Vogt’s WORLD OF NULL-A and PLAYERS OF NULL-A, and one galaxy is teleported into the midst of another galaxy at right angles.

I do not, however, have any stories where a gorilla is destroyed along with a planet. That is what you meant by ‘gorillas and planets being destroyed’ right?

(1) (Again!) WHAT ABOUT THE ANSWER TO THE MAVORS Vs ATKINS DUEL? Who would win in a fight: Lord Mavors (assuming he didn’t automatically decree the outcome of the battle to be in his favor) or Marshall Atkins (assuming he restricted his number of lives to 1)?

ANSWER:

This is similar to the question of whether the Invincible Iron Man could beat the mighty Thor if Tony Stark were not wearing his armor assuming Thor in his flying chariot pulled by goats, magic hammer in hand, came upon Tony by surprise while Tony was drunk and naked tightly wrapped in an eatable -chocolate sleeping bag with two hot stewardesses in a small aircraft during a thunderstorm. The answer is that Pepper Potts would kill him before Thor had the chance. Get away from those stewardesses, Tony!

In other words, you are asking how well Mavors could perform in a fight if his means of fighting, his main magical power, were taken away from him.

The duel would go something like this: the hooded Graeae sisters warn Mavors he is fated to die. Bravely he takes up his shield of linden wood embossed with brass, and his iron-headed pilum or javelin, stands atop Mount Aetna, and looks rights and left to the cloudy horizons, as far as his immortal eyes can see.

Atkins, perhaps sitting in a Morris chair on the dark side of the moon, gets the coordinates from the Earthmind, raises one finger, and commands his obedient handweapon to fire a nanotechnological package of neutrinos at ninety percent of the speed of light through the core of the moon, from earth to moon, through the core of the Earth, upward through Mount Aetna, and he hits Mavors in the heel, the one spot his mother failed to dip him into the river Styx to make him invulnerable.

All the electrons in Mavors’ physical body are turned into positrons, and a total conversion reaction takes place when they interact with the electrons in the environment, not to mention the eruption of Aetna is triggered with the bolt from Atkins’ hand-weapon travels through it.

Mavors, now in Hell, asks his uncle Hades, the Rich One, to let him out. (Your question only limited Atkins to one life, not Mavors).

Lord Hades, blind, stands leaning on his white cane, with a three-headed canine monstrosity as his seeing-eye dog, smiling coldly but not answering.

Lady Proserpine, the Maiden, the underage yet nubile Queen of Hell, mocks Mavors for letting himself get killed by a mortal man. Mavors complains that Atkins is not a mortal, but a Talos, a made thing, an object which only thinks it is a man. He tells Proserpine that her husband’s realm will never receive the soul of Atkins, who is as undying as Endymion, and he returns her mockery for mockery.

Proserpine flies into a teenaged snit, and complains to her mother, the Lady Abundance, of old called Demeter, who then alters fate and destiny, and arranges the future so that Atkins willingly turns himself into a small planet covered with greenery in the Eta Carina system, which explodes in an outrageous yet astronomically accurate double hyper-supernova, which takes him out of the fight. (You did not specify that no Olympian could use his fate-commanding power to decree the outcome, only Mavors).

The glancing-eyed Lady Cyprian, called Aphrodite, out of playfulness arranges to have the reincarnated version of Atkins fall in love with his dread and dreaded enemy, Dark Lady of the Silence Oecumene, no doubt one who looks like the Catwoman. Technically, this puts Atkins in violation of the terms of the duel, because he was limited to one incarnation.

Atkins loses the duel but wins at love, so he is not complaining. Not that he would complain anyway.

Meanwhile, Mavors cuts some sort of political deal with Hades and Prosperine, who is supporting the claim of Proserpine to the throne of heaven (if you recall, Lord Terminus, Zeus, was Dead, slain by Demigorgon) and manages to crawl back to the world of sunlight through the Orphic gate near lake Avernus.

Seeking R&R, he jauntily marches off to have his adulterous tryst with the love-hungry Lady Cyprian, when lo and behold, just as they are both unclothed and getting frisky, a golden net woven by the cunning of Lord Mulciber and of three annoying dwarfs from Norse mythology, drops on them both, interrupting their consummation, and trapping them in an embarrassing and perhaps non-missionary position.

The paparazzi, led by Trismegistus Lord Hermes (also back from the dead) snap photographs. Mavors is mortified, knowing his junior officers, non-coms and enlisted men will tape copies of the luscious front page photos to their footlookers, while Cyprian bound in the meshes and naked as a jay-bird, giggles and makes flirty eyes at Hermes, flattered by his wisecracks. The birth of Hermaphrodite, child of Hermes and Aphrodite, is inevitable.

So Mavors wins the duel and loses his pants and his dignity, and life just sucks for him. But does not complain either. Some men just don’t whine. There are not many like that these days, and they are getting rarer.

SCORE: 1/0 or 0/1 depending on how you count it. So Hades wins! Hades always wins.

Lord Hades did not even lose that famed lottery to divide the world with his brethren. Of three kingdoms of sky and sea and underworld, his is the only kingdom which ever increases and never decreases — until the day the White Christ comes to harrow the virtuous pagans from the miserable gloom.

             Lunar Sacrament of Conciliation

The silences of the Moon never grow familiar.

Father Reyes y Pastor was standing on the lunar surface in the graveyard, hands folded and hood bowed, three score and more tall steles marking the burial mounds looming above him, when something touched his shoulder. He expected to hear a footstep when someone come up behind him, and no amount of time on the surface could undo that ingrained and inherited expectation from his nervous system.

His surprise carried him a dozen yards.

Reyes vented air from his wrists and boots to soften his fall. The deceptive elfin gravity did not make a tumble any less dangerous; a man fell at one sixth the acceleration as on earth, but a cut or bruise to the suit could be disastrous.

He landed in a crouch, and the dust formed a curtain about him. In the gloom he saw a hooded shape among the steles, dark in an Hermetic garb, masked against the vacuum, but wearing the tabard of the Senior Landing Party Member, and the gleaming number 2. It was Del Azarchel, and he held up a hand in the sign for radio silence, all four fingers touching the thumb in a not-quite-closed fist, and the attention light from his chest was focused on the glove, making it visible.

Two weeks had passed since last they met, and the time was dusk, and so the sun was setting over the eastern rim of the crater-wall. (By a convention older than Galileo, on the Moon, the direction of sunrise was the west.) The setting sun was neither reddened nor flattened, there being no atmospheric diffraction here. The floor of the crater was filled with shadow black as ink, but the cliff walls and peaks to the east were dazzling like magnesium flame, and this lightscatter was enough to make out the silhouette among the steles.

Del Azarchel hopped toward him in eerie silence, clouds of white dust rising and falling with abrupt vertical motion in the airlessness at each footstep.

Reyes y Pastor waited, still in a crouch, his gauntlets touching the gritty surface beneath him, shockingly cold now that the sun no longer shined directly on it. He looked at the approaching figure, clicking his goggles through several energy bands and interpretative sequences, as if that would reveal some clue. No one came outside the base environs without cause, no more than a crewman would disembark from a submarine. Reyes wondered if he had been blamed for some terrible failure of the Great Work, and was now to be murdered. Was there another cause for such secrecy and solitude? But no: had not Reyes been promised the Eighth Millenium to reshape mankind? Del Azarchel would not rescind his promises.

Reyes y Pastor resigned himself. He simply could not understand the workings of the mind of the someone whose intelligence was between fifty and one hundred points higher than his.

Del Azarchel drew out a wire and extended it toward him. It was a phone wire. Reyes plugged in. Del Azarchel’s voice was tinny, and seemed to come from behind him.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two hundred eighty five years since my last confession.”

And with these words, the dark figure sank to his knees onto the sub-zero lunar surface.

Reyes was happy that a mask was blocking his expression. This was the last thing he would have expected. Slowly he stood and slowly made the sign of the cross in above the hooded head of the kneeling figure. “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Speak and ease your burden. Of what sins do you accuse yourself, my son?”

“Monstrous sins, both done, and sins I have in contemplation.”

“Sins not yet committed cannot be absolved. List your past sins that you repent. To repent means to turn away from them, and to avoid the occasions where they may tempt you again.”

“I have murdered all the Hermeticists, and spared only you five, of whom I have need.”

Reyes was aware of the wild feeling of supremacy, as if he had passed a test all his fellows had flunked; but he was also ashamed of this feeling. “Murder? They were victims of augmentation accidents. Unexpected divarifications, logic loops, Turing halt states …  You need not to confess mere feelings of guilt where no real guilt obtains, my son.”

“It is a sin of omission. I ran the specifications to see what would be needed for a human brain to be correctly carried both into emulation, as with Exarchel, and into augmentation, as with me. I was able to reverse-engineer some steps of Rania’s work, and make guesses about others. And I knew they would fail. I knew they were weak. I could have stopped them with a command; I could have interfered with their experiments; I could have merely showed them my results of my trial runs I ran on your ghosts which my Exarchel has consumed. I know the secret. Or part of it.”

“What is the secret, my son?”

“You have to care about something in reality more than any electronic nirvana can satisfy. Once you have the power to edit yourself, to alter and adapt nerves and glands and all that affects and influences thought, you need something greater than yourself to which your self and soul is dedicated. Without that greater thing, you regard all things as lesser, including, now that it is within your power to shape as you would, your own mind and being. If you live for nothing, you are just a worm that turns and eats itself. That is not the whole of it, but that is what I know. This was a new form of life, Learned Pastor! A machine life, that can replicate itself like a virus in any electronic system. Whoever fails the test must go extinct. They were all weak.”

Reyes y Pastor blurted out, “These were not just my friends, my flock, and my brothers, they were our comrades in the Great Work! They were the only men we knew from the world Einstein’s relativity stole from us—they! But you liked Zacuto, and Pereira, and Falero! Falero was like a brother to you!”

There was a scratching noise in the phone wire, and Reyes realized this was a sob of grief. Was Del Azarchel crying? Reyes would have been less surprised to hear a statue cry.

“I knew the risks my men, my beloved men, were taking when they attempted augmentation. Each time a man died, I told myself he would be the last. And yet they kept failing me. All of them were failures. Only you five, de Ulloa, D’Aragó, i Illa D’Or, Coronimas, and you, had the ability.”

“This means you will augment us to your level? We will all become Posthumans?”

“Yes. The computer power needed to emulate every brain cell, every atom, in the human nervous system is immense. Here on the Moon we have only enough emulation mainframe space to keep one of us augmented at a time: the other will have to remain in hibernation. One of the processes I deduced from Rania’s work will enable us to de-augment, to undergo kenosis, and return to base human topology when system space is not available. However, I have already set the next industrial revolution on Earth in motion.

“The nation-states and princedoms are even now falling into the habit of emulating and augmenting their leaders, princes, leading scientists and thinkers, even popular artists. The emulations can only last a short while, years rather than decades, but as long as the human donator remains alive, he can upload his personality and memories again and again to keep the Iron Ghost sane.

“Those peoples and nations who do not seek refuge under the administration of the Reign of Ghosts will fall under the administration of the Giants, who are even now coming of age, because only a superintelligent being can keep pace with a superintelligent being. Under such a system of government, how much computer space do you think the Earth will create?

“Even the most conservative estimates say there will be acres upon acres of large scale thought-houses in every major city. Then there will be room enough for the five of us to remain awake, and at apotheosis capacity, all at once.

“Ah! But you are wondering whether, as more and more people create upload copies of themselves, immortal upload copies, how soon it will be before the whole world is devoted to one electronic nirvana, a paradise of unreality? How can the Darwianian process continue unless the useless eaters of bread and the useless consumers of power die back? This involves my second horde of sins, the one I have not yet committed.”

Reyes was so elated hearing that he was to achieve posthuman greatness, that he almost did not hear what Del Azarchel was saying.

Reyes sobered. “My son! If you yet intend to do these sins, then you have no firm purpose of amendment, and have not repented of them.”

“I repent that they are necessary.”

Reyes y Pastor felt a sensation like insects walking across his face. Sweat was beading on his brow, despite the temperature his shipsuit maintained. The fear was like ice burning in a line down his chest.

“Tell me, my son.”

“The sins I contemplate and have committed is murder by the thousands and tens of thousand, murder by the millions, that the base stock of humanity be culled. The Hylics must die, of course. It would not be right to have allowed the Hermeticists to be decimated, without forcing the common people to suffer the same risks, and die at the same ratios. I mean to destroy nine parts of mankind in order that one tenth might survive and prosper, and become the seed of posthumanity. Without this, the Hyades will overwhelm Earth in the One Hundred and Tenth Century.”

Reyes y Pastor felt a disquieting sensation, like sickness in himself. “You are speaking of the cusp nexus occurring at the next crisis interval in our calculations? The calculation you showed us cast the genocide in terms of a hypothetical, assuming a continuing energy crisis against demographic shifts…”

“Ah. I also wish to confess the sins of bearing false witness. I have systematically falsified data fed to the Hermetic Order. The cliometric calculations show that cusp to be inevitable.”

Father Reyes wanted to wipe the cold sweat from his face, but this, of course, is one of the things one cannot do in a vacuum mask. “It is not inevitable if you repent of it.”

“It is inevitable because I have decreed it so. One the rod-logic diamonds in all the cities of Earth have achieved a certain critical mass, I intend to coat the biosphere with Aurum Vitae, and reduce any organisms not needed in the neural net to more useful elements. Montrose’s only possible countermove is something he would not dare to do, since to destroy the computer mainframes of an entire world—by a decade from now, it will be world utterly dependent on emulation technology for both government and economic control functions—would be to trigger global collapse, leading to the same outcome.”

As suddenly as stepping on thin ice and being plunged into arctic waters, the fear and terror in the mind or Reyes broke through. Somehow the emotion was transformed. He was not merely awed by the grandeur of the project, but in a sadistic way, thrilled. It was the next step of human evolution: a dinosaur extinction level event.

And he was to be one of the extinguishers, not one of the extinct.

The small part of his mind reminded him of he duties of his office. Reluctantly, he said, “It is an abuse of this sacrament to pretend to confess a crime not yet committed, nor can it be absolved. While within the seal of the confessional, you stand to me in the relation of son to father, because I speak with the voice of the Father and in His place while I act within His will—It is within my power to charge you and compel you not to do this act. By mortal sin a man excommunicates himself from Church, and from hope of salvation! Look in your conscience. You know what you intend is evil, an enormity beyond reckoning! Swear not to carry through with this! Swear upon your hope of heaven!”

Del Azarchel stood. “I have no need of heaven to house my soul, if I achieve physical immortality through the posthumanification process. I shall endure in one form or another for as long as this universe. Such a thing is not beyond my grasp…”

These were words of defiance, but they lacked all strength. Perhaps it was the tinny connection, but the voice of Del Azarchel was wavering.

Reyes y Pastor felt a pang of anger. Pastor knew what the indifferent equations of cliometric calculus predicted; he knew the deadline, while immensely far away as far as mortal men were concerned, was claustrophobically close considering the evolutionary gulfs to be crossed before Hyades descended. How dare Del Azarchel give up so easily? Was all his hero worship for this great figure, his admiration akin to idolatry, to be betrayed?

Reyes had once seen the Virgin Mary in a dream while he was emerging from suspended animation. Montrose, who invented the biosuspension process, had said the process halted all brain activity, and therefore no dreams could have taken place.

So perhaps it was not a dream. The Queen of Heaven had been larger than worlds, and the stars and nebulae were no more than lights the votive angels and archangels raised to glorify her. The moon was beneath her feet, and in the gleam of the many suns that gathered near her like fireflies, she smiles.

It was the most profound and heartbreaking thing Reyes ever had seen. He could tell no one of it, since to try to capture the magnificence of dreams in words was like a child bringing a snowflake into his mother’s kitchen to show her its beauty.

Reyes had vowed that no matter what he did in life, he would earn the grace to attain heaven at his death, so that, if for no other reason, he could behold that pure and holy lady once again.

So said one part of his heart.

But he also had his pride as an intellectual, as an academic, as a Hermeticist.

The common muck of mankind deserved death—was that not the general doom decreed for all Adam’s children? How would an act of genocide to decimate all the lands of Earth be so different from the Great Flood of Noah? It was practically the same as doing the work of the Lord, merely by other, and more efficient means.

And a loving God would not expect a man, especially a man of such superior intelligence as Reyes y Pastor, not to do anything necessary, commit any crime, forsake any oath, to preserve the human race in its new an inhuman form that Darwin demanded, so as to oppose the descent of the Hyades? Of course not. The Father knew all, and forgave all.

With a wormy, loathsome sensation as bitter and painful as a man pulling out his own heart and bowels, Reyes y Pastor condemned that strange image from his dream which was not a dream, and blotted out the smile of the Virgin from his mind.

“But of course—” his voice was hoarse, his mouth unexpectedly dry, “You also have the duty imposed by history to save mankind. Darwin makes certain demands upon us, and it is entirely within keeping with, ah, with common sense, that a man must do what is needed to preserve the race. Even if that means changing the race to something unthinkable.”

Del Azarchel moved one leg, so that he was upon one knee, not both, as if he were about to rise up. “What is this? You are a man of the cloth. It is your business to talk me out of this. Tell me of the hellfire.”

Reyes y Pastor begged in his heart to his heart for forgiveness, but with his lips he said, “The talk of hell in the Holy Scripture is meant to be metaphorical. All the enlightened and progressive thinkers agree. It is literary device to represent the burning flames of the conscience. Of course, as a being superior to human beings, your conscience should be evolved to the level beyond good and evil, as befits you.”

“Odd that you would say so. The more intelligent the augmentation makes me, the more logical and inevitable venerable ideas like hellfire seem. Almost as grim and inevitable as a cliometric calculation.”

“A loving God could not create a hell.”

“A loving God must have some place to put those exiles who reject His love, souls to whom the fires of that love are pain, because they hate it. Will you betray your own office, your oath of priesthood, everything, to counsel me to commit this deed? I was expecting the opposite from you.”

Reyes y Pastor turned up his oxygen gain and drew a deep breath. “My son, despite all your intelligence, your heart is clouded. Listen to me. Do you know how Benaiah the son of Jehoiada served King Solomon, wisest of the wise? He fell upon Joab while Joab was clinging to the horn of the alter, begging for mercy and demanding sanctuary. All this was done at the King’s commandment. And am you not wiser, in your augmented state, than Solomon ever was?”

Del Azarchel said softly, “It is the memory of Captain Ranier Grimaldi that haunts you. We mutinied and murdered him, in order to use his body for the raw materials to make Rania, and find a way to come home again. Your hands are bloodied as well as mine. How can bloodstained hands touch the Eucharist, or lave me in the water that absolves of sin?”

Reyes said blandly, “The doctrine of ex opere operato as first explicated by St. Augustine during the Donatist heresy makes clear that the individual impurities of the Episcopal officer do not impede the power of the sacrament coming through the office. Christ can absolve sins through me, polluted as I am. There is but one question here.”

“Ask it.”

“The genocide of man you have degreed, the mass extinctions—”

“Yes?”

“Does victory rest on the other side of them?”

Del Azarchel said, “Then you will absolve me of the evil I do if good comes of it?”

“No, my son. The sacrament of confession cannot be used in this way. As a priest and ghostly father I can do nothing for you. But I am also an Hermeticist, one of the rare to survive the expedition to the Diamond Star, and one of the even more rare to have survived the baptism of fire you ignited. And I say that Darwin will absolve you, for the process of evolution is the process that, through evils produces good, and through death, life. Rise up from this cold and lifeless dust! The penance I impose upon you is that you shall succeed in being the savior of mankind, and save the race from the Hyades. You shall not fail! Nor shall we fail you. You are right to demand we call you master, for we have no hope of salvation outside you.”

Del Azarchel slowly rose. He was perhaps an inch or two taller than Father Reyes, but something in the poise of his mask, something imponderable in the way he held himself, it was if he was looking down at the priest from a very tall height indeed.

“How soon can you medically ready yourself for the augmentation sequences? I have lived long enough in the isolation of my posthumanity. I need equals about me, not pets, men worthy to take their place at my round table, which has no head and no foot. It has been very lonely.”

Arm in arm, they glided as if walking on air back toward the buried fortress.

Meanwhile, Peter Singer of Princeton University publicly advocates killing children up to age two, if the parents so desire.

As a science fiction writer, I often try to imagine the extrapolation or exaggeration of current trends, much like George Orwell did exaggerating the evils of totalitarianism, for the purpose of magnifying the flaws to see the details otherwise lost. Writers are somewhat at a loss, as George Orwell was, when the real evils of what they are exaggerating are larger than the exaggeration can exaggerate.

In my recent book, I trying to think of a more outrageous exaggeration of certain aspects of our culture, as its wooly-headed mysticism, its sexual crassness, its selfish violence, its collectivism. I could not. That good and kind people — most Liberals are good and kind people, or seek to be seen as such — would, by their silence, defend such appalling abominable practices, worse than the sacrifices of the Aztecs, is incomprehensible to me.

I cannot exaggerate the evils of having mothers kill their own helpless babies under the knifes of learned men who vow the vow of Hippocrates, or once did. I cannot exaggerate it since it seems to be an absolute: the very bottom floor of hell.

In no story about detectives solving a murder or heiresses wondering what baron to wed will you find anything told from the point of view of a nonhuman intelligent creature. All other genres, from Westerns to War Stories to Historical drama to mainstream tales about college professors cheating on their wives, are told from within the human realm of human nature and can never leave it. In science fiction and in science fiction alone is there an opportunity to step outside the human realm, and turn, and look, and to see the mask of man from the outside.  Only in science fiction can we speculate on what humans look like to intelligent nonhumans.

Science fiction has this unique property because it is the only genre where the readers will accept the introduction of props, settings and characters which do not exist now on Earth or at any time in the historical past. All other genres are restricted by their readers to the confines of the real; and, as a matter of fact, extraterrestrial intelligences do not exist now on Earth or at any time in the historical past. By definition, a story with a nonhuman extraterrestrial character is science fiction.

A broader question is how well (if at all) we humble human authors can invent and readers can imagine anything from a point of view other than a human one.

If the task is absurd or impossible, then this unique aspect of science fiction is trivial.

If the task is feasible, and can be done and done well, then this unique aspect of science fiction grants the genre a profound purpose—a purpose far deeper than the mere telling of tall tales about earthmen fencing four-armed green Martian savages to rescue a kidnapped space princess.

If the task is feasible then science fiction is the only place to go, the only vantage where to stand, to look at mankind, because it and it alone steps away and turns and looks at humanity from the outside.

Before we address that broader question, the gentle reader may be contemplating at least two objections to the bold statement that examining man from a viewpoint outside man is unique to science fiction.

The first is that fantasy stories, myths, fairytales, Aesop’s fables and stories about animals, from Lassie to Black Beauty to Bambi, involve imagining what human beings might look like seen from the viewpoint of gods or sprites, ghosts or talking animals, or dumb animals. It would be odd indeed to classify BAMBI or FINDING NEMO or HAPPY FEET as “science fiction” and yet the audience for those tales sees human beings only from the beast’s-eye view. In the oldest poem in the West, THE ILIAD, many a scene is told from the coign of vantage of the Olympian gods. The far-famed Wagner’s Ring Cycle is told mostly from the point of view of gods and dark elves, giants and river nymphs, valkyries and so on: Indeed, in the first opera of the cycle, DAS RHEINGOLD, there is not a single human character on stage at any time.  The first objection, then, is simply that the statement is not true: many stories look at man from outside.

The second objection is subtler: all stories by their nature take the reader out from his own personal viewpoint. That is the core of what the story-telling imagination is, and what it does. Reading GONE WITH THE WIND as if by magic transforms the reader into the rich and willful daughter of a slaveholding Irish plantation owner; WAR AND PEACE transforms the reader into any number of Russian nobles and serfs in the midst of the Napoleonic wars; in SIEGFRIED, we become a young hero raised by a treacherous dwarf, destined to forge his father’s sword to slay a dire dragon, and win the love of an exiled goddess and the gold the world craves; in BAMBI, we become a deer; in WATERSHIP DOWN, a rabbit.

The second objection, in other words, is that science fiction is not only not unique in taking us outside our own viewpoint, but that this act of imaginative self-departure is ubiquitous and essential to all story-telling. If the reader can look at the world from another set of eyes, what does it matter whether the reader is transformed for an hour into a Southern Planter, a Russian Boyar, a Germanic Hero, or an English Hare?

Science fiction (so the objection runs) is doing something no different from any other genre, and indeed, does something less useful, because, unlike Southern Planters and Russian Nobles, the Vulcan scientist or Klingon warrior or green-skinned Orion slavegirl simply does not exist.

Imaging life from the point of view of a stranger or an enemy may have the benevolent real-world side effect of increasing my sympathy and brotherly love for him, and affirming our common humanity. Whether or not there is any common humanity with the Mollusk Men of Mars, or the Sorns, or the Tharks, or the Old Ones, there is little point in the reader learning how to step by an act of imagination into the shoes of these inhabitants of the Red Planet, because neither do they exist, and even did they, none of them wears shoes.

In sum, the second objection is that looking at ourselves from outside is what all story telling does, so science fiction is not unique; and looking at ourselves from the point of view of characters who resemble real people serves a useful real world purpose of engendering empathy with others.

The answer to the second objection is simple: Empathy is engendered by the care and skill of the portrayal, no matter who is portrayed. Whether or not the person portrayed is real or unreal means nothing.

Scarlet O’Hara of Tara is no more nor less real than Thweel the Martian. Both exist in the imagination only. Both have a relation to reality that is symbolic or emotional. When the nonhuman creature of the Genii in Disney’s ALADDIN yearns for the manacles to be struck from his wrists, and his bondage to end, all spirits longing for liberty understands precisely how he feels, because the emotion is the same in the real as in the unreal circumstances. When the completely unrealistic Siegfried, raised by a magical dwarf in a cave, yearns for the mother he has never known, it is not less poignant than the similar yearning by Oliver Twist, because both are orphans. When Bambi suffers the same loss and longing when his mother is shot by hunters, no skeptic is so foolish as to object that this scene is not moving and melancholy on the grounds that, unlike Siegfried and Oliver, deer cannot put their emotions of filial love for their mother into words, nor can they weep tears.

The answer to the second objection, in other words, is that it is the act of exercising the imagination which is the beauty and the justification for story-telling.

By the nature of imagination, the thing imagined is not real. It can be closer to reality or less close, more realistic or more fanciful, but this degree of realism has little or nothing to do with how well the scene draws the reader out of himself, and how firmly he finds himself planted in the shoes of an orphaned boy or, for that matter, an orphaned fawn.

A realistic scene portrayed without craft or genius does not engage the imagination and therefore fails as an exercise of the story-telling art; an unrealistic scene, even one involving magical beings or talking animals, which is told with craft and skill does indeed engage the imagination, and does indeed accomplish the feat that story-tellers are commanded by the muses to attempt.

The answer to the first objection is not so simple, for it involves a subtle distinction between what seem to be twins.

How is a Martian different from a Dark Elf?

Why is imagining life from the point of view of Tars Tarkas of Mars argued to be unique or profound, when imagining life from the rabbit’s-eye view of Fiver of Watership Down requires a more sustained effort of imagination? The objection is even more biting when we consider that Tars Tarkas is something of a stock character, the noble savage from a warlike tribe, whereas Fiver is a three-dimensional person.

The difference here is partly definitional. A story which was a solid speculation on how a nonhuman intelligence like a rabbit would be shaped by the biology and psychology of a rabbit, its needs and way of life, if done as a scientific speculation, would indeed be science fiction.

Likewise a man who wrote a story about an angel but who paid careful attention to the particulars of how a purely intellectual being, each one unique to its own species, and wrote a solid and logical speculation about the powers and limitations of such a being, extrapolating from what we know to what we do not know, he would not be writing a story like MICHAEL or THE BISHOP’S WIFE or IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, which are fantasies. What he would be writing would be science fiction in all but name.

I dare not pause to dwell on the vexatious question of where the misty and ever moving boundary between fantasy and science fiction lingers. For the purpose of this essay, let us agree that both fantasy and science fiction are voyages into the unknown.

They take place outside the circle of light where the real world and the real historical past rest comfortably. To one side sleep the twilight forests of elfland, and dim shapes, half-familiar, of shining fawnlike beauty or wormlike winged horror are glimpsed in the deep shade among the fireflies. To the other side the blazing towers of Futuropolis rear, with jetpacks and rocketplanes soaring up into star-filled infinities, and countless ages yet to come. Both are beyond the walls of the known world.

But the difference, if I may be permitted an oversimplification, is that the bridge leading to the science fiction story is primarily intellectual, a matter of speculating from the known to the unknown. The mystic bark floating downstream to a story in elfland is primarily emotional, a matter of myths, images, remembered echoes of things once beloved, now lost.

Hence the real difference between a Dark Elf, or any denizen of a fantasy tale, and a Martian, or any citizen of science fiction, is whether an act of imagination is needed to understand, indeed, to sympathize with him.

Let me use Albrecht from the opening scene in Wagner’s DAS RHEINGOLD as an example. He emerges from the dark underworld into the river depths, and spies the nicors playing in the water, the jolly and lovely Rhine-Maidens. Overcome by lust and longing, woos them in his awkward way, sneezing, and is repulsed with that sadistic mockery only truly lovely women know how to command. In his frustrated rage, mingled with greed, he vows to foreswear love, and to use the gold he steals from the unwary mermaids to forge a magic ring to conquer the world.

There is no emotion in Albrecht’s Dark Elfin heart which I myself have not felt. (Indeed, earlier this week, I stole atom bomb codes being guarded by nubile yet disdainful coeds disporting in the local swimming pool).  My point here is that, whether the scene takes place beneath the Rhine, and involves magical gold and curses or no, none of the nonhumans has any nonhuman emotions or motives. Indeed, as in most myths, the motives have a simple directness to them: lust, greed, hate, powerlust.

The service mythical heroes and elves and pagan gods do us, the audience, is showing human emotions writ large.

Contrast this with what happens when a science fiction tale handles contact with aliens. Even in stories that, while well told, do not reveal that spark of genius which surely characterizes Wagner, we will nonetheless find in them something the fantasy story lacks.

Let me use an example from STAR TREK. In one scene in Deep Space Nine the greedy Quark the Ferengi is speaking with the deceptive Garak , a spy for the Cardassians. The fall to discussing human beings in general, and Federation in particular, who are their only hope. The scene is worth quoting at length.

QUARK
And the worst part is, my only hope for salvation… is the Federation.

GARAK
I know precisely how you feel.

Quark suddenly gets an idea.

QUARK
Here, I want you to try something
for me.

Quark pulls out a glass and fulls it with a foamy brown liquid.

QUARK
Take a sip of this.

Garak looks skeptically at the drink.

GARAK
What is it?

QUARK
A human drink. It’s called root beer.

GARAK (eyes it suspiciously)
I don’t know…

QUARK
Go ahead. Aren’t you just a little bit curious?

Garak hesitates a beat, but then takes a sip. He immediately makes a face.

QUARK
What do you think?

GARAK
It’s vile.

Quark is glad that someone agrees with him.

QUARK
I know.
(searching for bad things to say)
It’s so bubbly and cloying and happy.

GARAK
Just like the Federation.

QUARK
But you know what’s really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you start to like it.

GARAK
It’s insidious.

QUARK
Just like the Federation.

There’s a long beat as the two aliens share their
common bond.

GARAK
Do you think they’ll be able to save us?.

QUARK
(defeated)
I hope so.

Quark takes a sip of the root beer, then shudders.

The show BABYLON FIVE, from which DEEP SPACE NINE took its  inspiration in its later season,  had a scene making a similar point, when the aliens discussed that the human capacity for making communities, for forging bonds of friendship with those unlike themselves, was the source of their unique strength.

Even in very simple books, space operas and adventure stories, merely by having an alien on stage, the author has to make a decision about what he thinks would make a nonhuman different from a human.

In A PRINCESS OF MARS by Edger Rice Burroughs, John Carter is transported by occult means to the dying planet Mars, where the barbarians struggle over the ever shrinking pool of resources amid the ruins of a once-proud civilization. The Green Martians live in a communal, communistic lifestyle, and, since they raise their children in common, have neither families nor any human affections nor emotional softness. Hence, odd as it sounds for a swashbuckling adventure story, John Carter’s advent on Mars is the coming of a man who understands the value of sympathy, charity, and follow-feeling. In other words, man’s charitable nature was what this author chose to contrast against the cruel Martian nature.

In the Lensman series by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, while it is a space opera and hardly concerned with finer nuances of character development, the author there again is forced to decide what makes human distinct from the various aliens of the galaxy. Mankind is braver but less subtle than one race, the plutonic Palainians; less focused in intellectual power than a second, the dragonish Valentians, but also much more stubborn; and more immoral and erratic than a third, the bovine and placid Rigelians, but possessed of a drive and vigor they lack. Larry Niven did a similar thing with his cowardly Puppeteers and his warlike Kzinti.

The earliest example that comes to mind is WAR OF THE WORLDS by H.G. Wells. Even though the Martians had not a single word of dialog, and no character from Mars was named, the contrast was made and the statement was made about human nature. It was a statement that was so strong, and so persuasive, that most science fiction readers, if not the general public, takes it for granted these days.

And yet is is a controversial statement indeed, and one not to be accepted unskeptically: Wells made the humans helpless before the Martians by reason of their lesser intelligence and technical sophistication. The Martians were alien only in the sense of having what H.G. Wells thought made civilization superior to savagery and man superior to beast: cold and ruthless scientific intelligence.

(And the earthlings prevailed only due to the greater adaption to the Earthly environment, disease germs and all: considering the number of white men who were wiped out by native diseases when establishing colonies and based near the equator, we can see this is sound speculation.)

The silliness of having Martians neither attempt to negotiation and find a mutually beneficial arrangement, or take quarantine procedures, would seem to belie their allegedly superhuman intellect. But this is because H.G. Wells did not identify some other element of human nature, such as, for example, our greater moral insight or more rational law codes, as offering the superiority of civilization to savagery, or man to beast. Nor did he, as a modern nihilist writer might do, propose that savagery was nobler than civilization, and beast equal to or better than man.

H.G. Wells concept of cold and scientific big-brained aliens is perhaps the most commonplace stereotype of science fiction; but even at its more stereotyped and thoughtless, it is nonetheless a statement about human nature.

There is a difference, after all, and a profound one, between viewing man as halfway between ape-man and superman, and viewing man as halfway between the beasts below him, over whom God granted him dominion, and the angels above him, whom men fall on their faces in fear when they behold.

It is a difference between viewing life as a Darwinian war directed (despite that there is no person doing the directing) toward the end of ever upward evolution; and viewing life as a lawful hierarchy.

Now, again, the gentle reader may wonder in what way the contrast between Men and Martians differs from the dwarves and elfs and giants of fantasy stories. For after all, are not dwarves more greedy for gold than man, and yet less bold; are not elfs more gay and perilous, yet less sober; are not men smaller and wiser than giants?

And again I say the difference, while subtle, is real. I am not talking about a mere contrast of picking one human characteristic and saying this nonhuman or that has more of that characteristic, and hence less of its opposite.

No, indeed. What these science fiction writers did and do, even those whose work is pedestrian, provided the work is done in a workmanlike fashion, engage in some, even if small, intellectual speculation about how the alien psychology is a logical extrapolation of its nature, and in so doing, if only inadvertently, the writer makes a statement about human nature. The giants and elves and dwarfs of fantasy and myth have human natures, human emotions, and deal with life in a human way, even when there seems no reason for them to do so.

Why, praytell, do the fairies in MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM have a King, when the fairies neither toil nor spin, nor set boundary stones for land, nor have disputes over property, nor make wars upon each other? What does Oberon do?

To be sure, there are countless exceptions and counter-examples. There are science fiction writers who took some mythic creature like a dragon and planted it on a far world and called it an extraterrestrial. But it is still a dragon. And there are fantasy writers who, less concerned with the ancient forms of fantasy, extrapolated the characteristics of nonhumans beings, and invented speculative reasons for their customs and behaviors based not on myth or symbolism but on rational speculation.

It would be perhaps too facile if I were to claim the first category are ‘really’ fantasy books dressed up in science fiction drag, and the second were ‘really’ science fiction books disguised in the whiskers and boots of fantasy.

Instead, I will make a humbler claim. Books of the first type, no matter how skillful or unskillful they are written in other areas, are not doing what science fiction does best when they treat of the logical implication of nonhuman intelligence, and books of the second type are doing what science fiction does best, even if the book is not shelved with the science fiction.

In even something as simple and humble as a role playing game, where there are other races than man to be encountered and played, the game designer or dungeon master is constrained by the nature of the genre (since the rule-bound nature of such games encourages logical rather than mythical or symbolic thought on the topic) to establish in what physical and mental statistics the baseline homo sapiens differs from Kzinti or Elves or Robots. If most moderators tend to make Mankind the jack of all trades and master of none, that moderator, whether he knows it or not, is making a statement about a view of human nature that his game portrays. If another moderator makes the humans the more warlike, or the most fecund, or the most civilized, or the least magical of the various nonhumans, once again, the story told by that game setting makes a statement and offers an insight (if only a trivial one) into human nature.

A Western can and will make a statement about the nature and the contrast between Cowboys and Indians; likewise a Whodunnit will make a statement about the nature of criminals and detectives, or, in the case of the detective stories simple enough for me to follow, about the nature of criminals who dress as ghosts and the teen sleuths and their talking dog.

But science fiction, even humble stories, hack stories, adventure yarns or space operas, provided they are done with proper workmanlike attention to detail—all science fiction stories except the very worst and laziest can and must, the when a nonhuman intelligence comes on stage, make a comment about human nature itself.

In terms of the useful benefit to building up sympathy with one’s follow man, I myself can think of nothing more useful than the contemplation of those things universal to all men, and the contrast with the inhuman.

The Address:

Prospero Books
9129 Center St.
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(703) 257-7895

May the Fourth be with you!

In the year 10,500 AD Montrose finds himself unexpectedly awakened to discover that his hibernation chamber has been found and dug up by the dominant civilization of this time- and, with it, those of thousands of others from across the ages who, disaffected with their own eras, chose to sleep away the millennia in cryonics facilities maintained by Montrose’s agents. Now, Montrose must recruit aid from the wildly diverse array of post-humans who have been awakened with him in order to free himself and continue his struggle. And the fleet from Hyades is not far away…

I liked this book a lot. I love the whole concept of the series, with its vast scope in both space and time and, and Wright executes it well. The central conflict between Monrose and the Hermeticists is interesting, there’s some exciting action sequences, and Wright incorporates a lot of interesting and inventive ideas into it and into the larger backdrop it’s set against.

Much of the book is episodic in format, with people of different eras telling their own stories as Montrose meets them and recruits them into his planned rebellion. We encounter a bewildering array of post-human species and cultures, from the militaristic, eugenicist Chimera, to the almost mindlessly hedonistic Nymphs, to grotesque beings that can incorporate parts of other organisms into themselves, to group-mind beings, and more. Interspersed, and sometimes intersecting, with these are stories of Montrose’s periodic awakenings during each era to counter the machinations of Hermeticists.

Most of the post-humans are pretty interesting, and the way the author presents them makes them more compelling. Some of them initially come across as caricatures or stock archetypes- the Proud Warrior Race, the Innocent Hedonists, the Hive Mind, the Embodiments of What the Author Thinks Is Wrong With the World- but they have more depth than that. Many of them are monstrous, morally and sometimes physicaly, but they are not monsters; Wright does a good job of portraying all of them with at least some degree of dignity and sympathy, and the book is much stronger for it.

Menelaus Montrose is a highly enjoyable, likable protagonist, and its enjoyable watching him put his talents to work to understand and survive the situation he’s thrust into upon being awakened. I thought his characterization was effective in portraying a man with a naturally idealistic temperament hardened by his youth in an impoverished, violent, borderline post-apocalyptic world ravaged by decades of religious conflict and biological warfare. He works well as a primary viewpoint character, since he comes from something at least vaguely resembling the world as we know it.

His personality and disposition- hopeful without being saccharine or Pollyanna-ish, strongly concerned for others, trying to think of himself as just a person unlike any other despite his augmented intelligence and the godlike stature he has gained in myths of the legendary “judge of Ages” created by his periodic and sometimes dramatic returns over the millennia- provides an interesting contrast in tone with the setting of the series. (As do many of the other characters, to a lesser extent.)

The galaxy revealed in Count to a Trillion is a terrifying, brutal place, with relationships between species governed by utterly amoral considerations of economics and game theory. The purpose of the human expedition to the civilization in M3 is not to appeal to their sense of mercy or justice, but to the same calculations laid out in the monolith explaining why we are currently nothing but the Hyades civilization’s chattel.
Interstellar invasions are staggeringly costly endeavors even for races millions of years beyond us, and it’s far more efficient to interact peacefully with a species if they can make plans and commitments on the vast timescales required for a galaxy-spanning civilization limited by the speed of light.

The pitiful insignificance and vulnerability of the human race amongst such vast, superior, ancient, and utterly uncaring powers is almost Lovecraftian, cosmic horror by way of hard science fiction. The history of humanity and posthumanity across the millennia is scarcely kinder. The Hermeticist’s create and then discard sapient human species as they try to shape humanity into something that they think will survive the arrival of the invasion from the Hyades, each failure consigned to extermination by its successors.

The contrast between the warmth and humanity of most of the characters and the cold heartlessness of their world (the very first scene even begins with the protagonist encased in a cryonic hibernation chamber) is very effective at making both stand out, and adds a lot to each.

I greatly enjoyed The Hermetic Millennia and would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in hard science fiction, space opera, or stories about transhumanism, though you should definitely read Count to a Trillion first. I greatly look forward to the next book in the series, The Judge of Ages.

Read the whole thing here: http://vastandcool.blogspot.com/2013/04/book-review-hermetic-millennia-by-john.html