My comment: I have always wondered why, once they know their game is up, the Political Correctionists continue to pretend that they have some sort of moral high ground, intellectual or moral superiority to the rest of us.

Only slowly has the realization dawned on me that perhaps they cannot help it. They simply cannot stop, long after they know their efforts at pretense are in vain.

There is no point in asking of them. When confronted, they simply lie, and pretend their motives are compassion, or a concern for integrity, or some other jabberwocky.

But they keep doing it. Long after they know that neither they nor we think of them as anything other than mentally slow and morally corrupt loudmouths, they continue hanging around the Church windows of decent people and educated people heckling and strutting, as if asking some hypothetical audience for the moral superiority they cannot earn.

Why continue the charade?

Well, for that matter, why does the devil in Hell continue a war he knows he must lose? Pride makes men do stupid things.

And these poor souls are trapped in a mental prison, a web of word-fetishes, a set of beliefs that forbid them from recognizing the truth about the world, about themselves, on one topic after another, and most of all forbid them from recognizing what their beliefs are or where their beliefs come from.

The various levels of the disease of the soul in them have reached various levels: at first it is merely a revolt against tradition, which is something all lovers of progress see at least some merit in, or against conformity, which all independent thinkers admire.

Then it is a revolt against religious tyranny, then against religious itself, then against reason, then against virtue and honor, then against sanity and life.

The corruption is first of the conscience, then of the rational faculty, then of the passions, finally of the appetites.

They cannot break out of the mental trap. What tool would they use? Reason, the tool we have to distinguish logical from illogical, is after all the first thing they have thrown away. Judgment and instinct and a sense of decency is the tool we use to distinguish decent from indecent. This is corrupted in them, set to a reverse setting, so that they exult in what should shame them, and are ashamed of what should exult them. A subset of this decency is aesthetic judgment, which distinguishes ugly from beautiful: look at a modern art museum to see the corruption of such judgment. Finally, their emotions and appetites are perverted, so that what ever is normal repels them and whatever is grotesque attracts them. To them the highest and most noble calling in life is to destroy life, particularly that most precious life, at the womb, when the child is weak and helpless, and at old age, when grandma is getting to be a burden.

They cannot arrest their addiction to unearned moral superiority because any revivification of their consciences would convert them even if it did not destroy them.

Which shows more clearly a devotion to that death-cult into which modern thinking has descended, now that we have all, out of courtesy and political correctness, lost all respect for religion, for reason, for honor, for reality?

http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-chat/2836721/posts

NORWICH, U.K., January 23, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In remarks that critics have said are disturbingly reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s famous dystopian novel “Brave New World,” a UK ethicist [sic] has argued that since pregnancy causes “natural inequality” between the sexes, women must be liberated from the “burdens and risks of pregnancy” through the use of “ectogenesis”, or artificial wombs.

“Pregnancy is a condition that causes pain and suffering, and that affects only women. The fact that men do not have to go through pregnancy to have a genetically related child, whereas women do, is a natural inequality,” writes Dr. Anna Smajdor in an article that recently appeared in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics.

In her Defense of Ectogenesis, published online December, 2011, Smajdor construes pregnancy as a “medical problem, along with other conditions that cause pain and suffering.” Smajdor is Lecturer in Ethics at the School of Medicine, Health Policy and Practice in the University of East Anglia.

“If there were a disease that caused symptoms and risks similar to those caused by pregnancy, I contend that it would be regarded as being fairly serious, and that we would have good reasons to try to insure against it,” argues Smajdor, who lumps pregnancy along with “diseases” that continue for many months, such as the measles.

For Smajdor, currently “men reap all the benefits of women’s gestation, while women bear the risks and burdens.”

Accordingly, in Smajdor’s worldview, “women are disadvantaged as a group through brute luck, because men can reproduce without undergoing the risks of pregnancy.”

In other words, to be a woman, for Smajdor, simply means to become biologically more like a man. To do this, a woman’s innate and natural potential to procreate, nurture, and bear a new human life must be stripped away and handed over to science and technology. Only when all human beings do not bear children will a genuine equality be more closely approached, she proposes.

“Perhaps not all the dis-benefits of being a woman are attributable to childbearing,” acknowledges Smajdor, “but alleviating these burdens would surely help.”

In Huxley’s “Brave New World” reproduction is taken over entirely by the World State where children are created, “decanted” and raised in “hatcheries” and “conditioning centres.”

For Smajdor, the issue is simply a matter of sex equality: “Either we view women as baby carriers who must subjugate their other interests to the well-being of their children or we acknowledge that our social values and level of medical expertise are no longer compatible with ‘natural’ reproduction,” she concludes.

---

“Who is called Sulva? What road does she walk? Why is the womb barren on one side? Where are the cold marriages?”

Ransom replied, “Sulva is she whom mortals call the Moon. She walks in the lowest sphere. The rim of the world that was wasted goes through her. Half of her orb is turned towards us and shares our curse. Her other half looks to Deep Heaven; happy would he be who could cross that frontier and see the fields on her further side. On this side, the womb is barren and the marriages cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”

To all men of good will, Roman Catholic or no, who believe that the Constitution (or simple common sense) is more important than the odd mixture of self-righteous death-cult and feckless national orgy the sexual revolution ushered into being, and which somehow became the core political stance of the Left in the modern day, allow me to urge you to go sign this petition: http://www.stophhs.com/

The petition reads:

President Obama, in your speech at Notre Dame and elsewhere, you promised that you would provide conscience exemptions for those whose faith forbade their participation in evil.

You have broken that promise by forcing our Church to provide insurance coverage for sterilization, contraception, and various abortifacient drugs. These are practices that for 2,000 years we have taught are intrinsically evil.

You disagree. We understand. But you refuse to respect our right to live out our faith. You have decided to use the coercive power of the state to force your fellow citizens to commit what they believe are evil acts. You have asked the impossible. We cannot be good Americans by being bad Christians.

Turn from your intolerance. Leave in place the conscience exemptions that have served us well since 1973 (42 USC 300a-7 (d)). Vacate the proposed HHS mandate.

If you are not familiar with the case, here is an article.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/289647/religious-liberty-and-civil-society-yuval-levin

Religious institutions are basically going to be fined for holding views regarding contraception, sterilization, and abortion that are different from the Obama administration’s views. For instance, Notre Dame University, which employs more than 5,000 people, is going to be given the choice of either expressly violating its religious convictions or paying a $10 million fine to the federal government. It’s bad enough that any employer with a moral objection has to spend his money this way, but it is especially egregious to compel religious institutions to do so…

As many have noted around here, the fact of the administration’s willingness to do this sheds light on its hostility to (or at the very least its contempt for) religious liberty. But it’s not quite that simple. This incident (and especially the nature of the exemption that the administration was willing to grant, which is essentially an exemption for actual houses of worship but not for other religiously-affiliated institutions) also sheds light on a very deeply rooted problem in our tradition of religious liberty itself—a problem that should cause those of us inclined to seek recourse in “conscience protection” and religious exemptions to pause and think.

The English common law tradition of religious toleration, which we inherited, has always had a problem with religious institutions that are not houses of worship—i.e. that are geared to ends other than the practice of religion itself. To (vastly) oversimplify for a moment, that tradition began (in the 16th century, and in some respects even earlier) with the aim of protecting Protestant dissenters and Jews but (very intentionally) not protecting Catholics. And the way it took shape over the centuries in an effort to sustain that distinction was by drawing a line between individual religious practice (in which the government could not interfere) and an institutional religious presence (which was given far less protection). Because Catholicism is a uniquely institutional religion—with large numbers of massive institutions for providing social services, educating children and adults, and the like, all of which are more or less parts of a single hierarchy—this meant Catholics were simply not granted the same protection as others.

[...]

In this sense, what is at issue in the controversy over the administration’s rule is not just the question of religious liberty but the question of non-governmental institutions in a free society. Does civil society consist of a set of institutions that help the government achieve its purposes as it defines them when their doing so might be more efficient or convenient than the state’s doing so itself, or does civil society consist of an assortment of efforts by citizens to band together in pursuit of mutual aims and goods as they understand them? Is it an extension of the state or of the community? In this arena, as in a great many others, the administration is clearly determined to see civil society as merely an extension of the state, and to clear out civil society—clearing out the mediating layers between the individual and the state—when it seems to stand in the way of achieving the president’s agenda. The idea is to leave as few non-individual players as possible in the private sphere, and to turn those few that are left into agents of the government.

[...]

This approach is especially noxious and pernicious when it is directed at religiously affiliated institutions—both because they deserve special standing and because they do some of the hardest and most needful work of charity and care in our society. We should use every available means to protect those institutions from this mortal danger, and that certainly includes resorting to the language of conscience and exemption. But as we do so, we should not forget that we are dealing with an instance of a larger and deeper danger, and we should do what we can to combat that danger in its own terms. It is perhaps the gravest threat to freedom in American life today.

And fantasy outsells your science fiction project. Young fans think X-Wing fighters make banked turns in space, engines roaring and lasers clearly visible, and that the Force will give the Chosen One mystic powers, rather than – as in the heroes of your day – scientific learning, skullwork and elbow grease.

To such a writer and dreamer the disappointment that 2001 came and went without the Discovery being sent to Jupiter or Saturn was sharp indeed, because he had believed in the dream of space colonization almost from the outset, and had seen it begin with a Moon landing, and end with a whimper. We should have had permanent space stations by now, a Moon base, a manned expedition to Mars.

It comes as a pleasant shock of hope each time someone else speaks out for the dream. This is an article from Robert Zubrin proposing a clever and clear idea to promote a manned Mars mission (excepts below the cut):

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/289775/mars-prize-robert-zubrin

Starting immediately, 10 percent of NASA’s budget would be put aside yearly to accumulate a prize fund. There would be at least two prizes: a $5 billion prize to develop and demonstrate a heavy-lift booster capable of lifting at least 100 tons to low Earth orbit, and a $10 billion prize for the first human mission to Mars…

So to start with, NASA would save a good deal of money by having a heavy-lift booster developed for $5 billion, less than a third of the $18 billion it currently plans to spend over the next six years on its Space Launch System …

This is a novel approach to human space exploration … has a number of remarkable advantages.

… In the first place, this approach renders cost overruns impossible. … Success or failure with this approach depends solely upon the ingenuity of the American people and the workings of the free-enterprise system, not upon political wrangling.

… posting multibillion-dollar prizes for breakthrough accomplishments in space would call into being not only a private space race, but a new kind of aerospace industry, one based on minimum-cost production methods. The existing aerospace industry does not work that way. Rather, the major aerospace companies contract with the government to do a job on a “cost plus” basis, which means that whatever it costs them to do the job, they charge the government a certain percentage more, usually 8 to 12 percent. Therefore, the more it costs the major aerospace companies to do a job for the government, the more money they make. For this reason, their staffs are top-heavy with layer after layer of management bureaucrats, whose sole function is to add to company overhead.

Of course, since the government needs proof that the expenses claimed by the aerospace companies are actually being incurred, vast numbers of accounting personnel are also employed, to keep track of how many labor hours are spent on each and every separate contract.

…  [The aerospace company] would have no incentive to run costs up. .. Furthermore,  their actual base costs would be lower, since their accounting and documentation burden would be much less onerous.

No doubt there would be many people who would be skeptical that a manned Mars mission could be flown for $5 billion — but that wouldn’t matter. If the Mars Prize bill were passed, the only thing that would matter was whether a few investors thought it could. Those interested in making the attempt wouldn’t need to convince a sustained majority in Congress that a humans-to-Mars program could be done cheaply; they would only have to convince a Paul Allen or an Elon Musk.

The level of acceptable risk would also be much higher than is currently the case. Both of these are crucial: The private sector is often vastly more innovative than the government because a consensus is not necessary to start something new, and it is willing to dare the risks required.

But if nobody takes up the challenge, what then? In that case the whole exercise would have cost the taxpayers absolutely nothing.

— Dr. Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Astronautics and of the Mars Society. His book, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, was recently updated and republished by The Free Press.

Onward to Mars!

It seems that a bishop gave a homily at the shrine in Knock in which he reportedly said that godless culture was attacking the Church.

Result: a brain-dead “humanist” decided this was “hate speech” and, you guessed it, attacked the Church by trying to get the bishop brought up on charges.

The being post-Christian Ireland, all this is being treated with great seriousness and nobody is laughing. Prayers for the good bishop and his irony-impaired antagonist would be appreciated.

My comment: One of the articles of faith of modern secular humanism (or whatever its is calling itself these days) is that it has no articles of faith, but instead promotes beliefs that are merely scientific conclusions of objectively verifiable truths. Another article of faith is that Christianity is not the special and particular target of their enmity, and Catholicism even more particularly. Another article of faith is that they are purely rational and enlightened, motivated by pure altruism, and that their foes are purely irrational yet ignorant, motivated by pure hatred and bigotry. Therefore, by definition, whenever worldly men insult or attack the Church, the Church is always the party in the wrong, always the aggressor, always benighted and evil. You don’t want the Spanish Inquisition back, do you?

The Enlightened (or whatever) grow quite irate when you ask them to justify any of their articles of faith. It requires an elaborate mental effort on their part to hide from themselves the fact that they can neither justify their faith with reason, nor admit that they take their faith on faith.

My answer is that I artificially limited myself to fifty authors, lest the list grow beyond all bounds, and I that listed authors by their influence in the field. In my judgment Mr Stasheff did not exert any more influence on the field than, say, Sterling E Lanier or Jack L Chalker or Lyndon Hardy. All these men are fine writers, and put out a workmanlike product, but I would not rank them in the highest echelon of writers who, if you have not read at least once, you cannot call yourself a true SF fan.

Having said that, let me mention a personal reason why I admire the work of Christopher Stasheff. He has a special place in my heart for exactly one scene in THE WARLOCK UNLOCKED. I remember this scene for a reason that will seem absurd to most of you.

It was the only scene that ever told me the facts of life without lying to me about it.

It is a scene where a priest comes across a nymph by the water side.

Thanks to the miracle of the Internet (thanks, Al Gore!) I can print it word for word:

‘Well met by moonlight, handsome stranger.”

She rose up out of the water, dark hair shimmering over her shoulders to cloak her breasts—and that was all that did. Her eyes were large, and slanted; her nose was small, but her mouth was wide, with full, red lips, and her skin was very pale. “How fortunate am I,” she purred, “that hath found a gentleman to company me.” She waded toward him, up out of the water. As she rose, watercress draped itself about her hips in a token tribute of modesty. Father Al managed to wrench his gaze back to her face, feeling the responses in his body that reminded him that priests are human, too. He swallowed thickly, turned his lips inward to wet them, and muttered. “Greetings, Lady of the Waters.”

“No lady I,” she murmured, “but a wanton, eager to do the bidding of a mortal man.” She twined her arms about his neck and pressed up against him.

It ran counter to every demand his body screamed, but Father Al pulled her arms loose, gently but firmly, and pressed her hands together in front of his chest, forcing her body away from his. She stared at him in surprise. “How now! Do not deny that thou dost want me!”

“I do,” Father Al admitted, “but ‘twould be wrongful.” He glanced down at her fingers, and noticed the tiny, vestigial webs between them.

“Wrongful, because thou art a mortal, and I a nymph?” She laughed, revealing small, perfect, very white teeth. “Come, now! It hath been often done, and always to the man’s delight!”

Delight, yes—but Father Al remembered some old tales, of how a water-maid’s seduction had led to death—or, failing that, to a steadily-worsening despair that had surely torn apart the mortal lover’s soul. He clung to the memory to give him strength, and explained, “It must not be—and the fact that I am human and you are not has little enough to do with it; for see you, lass, if thou dost give out favors of thy body where thou art lusted for, but are not loved, thou dost break thine own integrity.”

“Integrity?” She smiled, amused. “ ‘Tis a word for mortals, not for faery folk.”

“Not so,” Father Al said sternly, “for the word means ‘wholeness,’ the wholeness of thy soul.”

She laughed, a dazzling cascade of sound. “Surely thou dost jest! The faery folk have no immortal souls!”

“Personalities, then.” Father Al was miffed at himself for having forgotten. “Identity. The sum and total of thyself, that which makes thee different, unique, special—not quite like any other water-nymph that ever was.”

She lost her smile. “I think thou dost not jest.”

“Indeed, I do not. Thy identity, lass, thy true self, hidden away and known only to thyself, is what thou really art. ‘Tis founded on those few principles that thou dost truly and most deeply believe in—those beliefs which, when manners and graces and fashions of behaving are all stripped away, do still remain, at the bottom and foundation of thy self.”

“Why, then,” she smiled, “I am a wanton; for in my deepest self, my chiefest principle is pleasure sexual.” And she tried to twine her arms about his neck again.

Well, Father Al had heard that one before, and not just from aquatic women, either. He held her hands firmly, and held her gaze, looking deeply into her eyes. “ ‘Tis an excuse, I trow, and will not serve. Some male hath wronged thee deeply, when thou wast young and tender. Thou didst open thy heart to him, letting him taste thy secret self, and didst therefore open, too, thy body, for it seemed fully natural that the one should follow the other.”

She stared at him, shocked, then suddenly twisted, trying to yank herself free. “I’ll not hear thee more!”

“Assuredly, thou wilt,” he said sternly, holding her wrists fast, “for this young swain, when he had had his fill of thee, tore himself away, and tore a part of thy secret self with him. Then went he on his merry way, whistling, and sneering at thee—and thou wast lost in sorrow and in pain, for he had ripped away a part of thine inner self that never could be brought and mended back.”

“Mortal,” she fairly shrieked, “art thou crazed? I am a nymph!”

Father Al had heard that one before, too. “It matters not. There was never a thinking creature made to tear her secret self to bits, and toss the pieces out to passers-by; thus thou wouldst slowly shred thy secret self away, till nought was left, and thou didst not truly exist—only a walking shell would then be left. And this doth happen whenever thou dost open thy body to one who loves thee not, and whom thou dost not love. That breaks the wholeness of thy secret self, for we are made in such a wise that our inner selves and bodies are joined as one, and when the one doth open, the other should. So if thou dost open thy body while keeping thy secret self enclosed, thou dost break the wholeness of thy self.”

“A thousand times have I so done,” she sneered, “yet I am whole within!”

“Nay, thou’it not. Each time, a tiny piece of thee hast gone, though thou didst strive to know it not.”

“Nay, not so—for ‘tis my nature to give my body and retain my self untouched! I am a nymph!”

“This is a thin excuse that thou didst first concoct, when first thy secret self was torn. Thou then didst say, ‘It matters not; I am untouched. This is my nature, to give of my body and not of my soul; mine only true desire is pleasure.’ And to prove it to thyself, thou didst seek to couple with every male that happened by—yet each time, thou wast more torn, and didst need to prove it more—so thou didst seek out more to pleasure thee, quite frantically—though in thy depths, thou knew it pleasured thee not at all. For in truth, ‘twas only an excuse.”

“And what of thee?” she demanded angrily. “Why dost thou rant thus at me? Why dost thou make me stay to listen, when I would turn away? Is not this thine own excuse, for the hot lust that doth throb within thee at the sight of me?”

Touché, Father Al thought. “It is indeed. Yet hath mine excuse done harm to thee? Or me?”

She frowned prettily, searching his eyes. “Nay…none to me. Yet I think that it doth harm to thee—for what is natural to thyself would be to grapple me, and couple here in wildness and in frenzy.”

‘Thou dost read me shrewdly,” Father Al admitted. “Yet though ‘tis ‘natural,’ lass, it is not right—for thereby would a part of me be ripped away, even as a part of thee would.” He sighed. “It is a male conceit that a woman’s self may be rended by a one-night’s coupling, while the man’s is not—but ‘tis only a conceit. We, too, are made all of one piece, body and soul so shrewdly welded together that we cannot give of the one without giving of the other. And we, too, can be rended by a first coupling with a one who loves us not, and may seek to deny that hurt by seeking to lie with every maid we may. Thus is the legend born of prowess male, and many a young man’s soul is rended by the promiscuity that comes of thus attempting to prove himself a legend”—which is to say, a ghost. But if young men would speak the truth, they would own that there is little enough pleasure in it—for loveless coupling, at the moment when pleasure should transform itself to ecstasy, truly turns itself to ashes, and the taste of gall.”

“I think,” she said slowly, “that thou dost speak from hurt that thou hast known.”

He smiled ruefully. “All young men commit the same mistakes; all step upon the brush that covers o’er the pitfall, no matter how loudly their seniors blare the warnings in their ears. I was once young; and I was not always of the Cloth.”

Her eyes widened in horror. She leaped back, looking him up and down in one quick glance, and pressed her hands to her mouth. “Thou art a monk!”

This is from what seems to be a pirate site: http://readr.ru/christopher-stasheff-the-warlock-unlocked.html?page=64#ixzz1lEoiW9iu

This is the first and only scene I ever read in any book in my youth — and I read a myriad of books, sometimes two a day — which told me the truth about sex.

To understand why this scene impressed itself so deeply in my memory (I recalled the basic outline of the conversation four decades later) let me first reveal an unsightly personal bitterness and anger against another author, namely, Robert Heinlein.

Heinlein told me that anything any two or more people of either sex and their dog did in the privacy of their own bedroom, or on the rooftop in view of the neighbor’s kids, was licit, and that the only illicit act in the universe was to express disapproval of the customs of others.

To disapprove of indecent customs was the only sin. Heinlein used the example of cannibalism in STRANGER IN A STRANGE land by doing a ‘Dan Quayle’ the one man decent enough to object to it — that is, he does not discuss the issue, the author merely has the decent man portrayed as a fool and bigot. Heinlein also used the example of an orgy with another man’s wife and daughters in GLORY ROAD and polygamy in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS. In each case, the topic was not discussed, merely Danquayled (if I may coin the term) by having the characters on the side of decency be either innocent fools or stubborn fools. The point was made again in SPACE CADET by showing the contrast between human and Venusian customs, and again in BETWEEN PLANETS and again in PODKAYNE OF MARS.

In no case was the cost of obedience to the customs of strangers mentioned: no heroine was asked to honor the Bedouin custom of veiling women, for example. “When in Rome, do as the Romans” was the whole of the law, but no character is ever shown bowing to the Pope in Rome, which is what Romans do.

Heinlein is not the only one. Ayn Rand, along similar lines, told me and taught me that whatever two people wish to do in the privacy of their bedroom is licit, provided only that each is the manifestation of the highest values of the other, and that their heroic love is true. Marriage is treated as an inconvenience: John Galt not only poaches Dagny from Reardon (and from Frisco D’Anconia), he has the gall to tell him that it is rational for him to like it.

And I believed them.

These authors, and countless others, preached this gospel of self-indulgence to me, and I believed them. Of course, my youthful heat and innate selfishness made me want to believe them, and so I do not blame them for my gullibility. That fault is mine.

But I do blame them for lying to a child. That fault is theirs.

So Christopher Stasheff stands out in my memory as the one man in a world of liars who was kind enough to tell the child the truth. He is, whether he meant to be or not, a soothsayer.

Many, many years would pass, and I would be a father with children, before I realized how I had been lied to. During all those years, that one scene by Stasheff clung in my memory, shockingly nonconformist, bizarre in how unusual it was.

The scene was so startling to me because the monk character promoting chastity is not the Nehemiah Scudder type monstrosity nor the Foster type huckster that all other men of the cloth were portrayed to be in all other books and stories (with the lonely exceptions of Friar Tuck and Aramis the Musketeer). It was also the first time I had ever heard anyone, anywhere, utter any argument of any kind in favor of chastity. The argument against chastity which I heard repeated ad nauseam  was nothing but ad hominem – namely, the unsupported assertion that the motive of those who promoted chastity was either fear of sex or lust to oppress women.

To me, the scene was as startling as INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE must have seemed when it first appeared. The writer was daring enough to portray the dark monster of a thousand tales of nightmare, i.e. a priest, as a good guy. How odd. How original.

Ironically, I did not know the end of the story.

A reader with the vinous name of Dionysus writes:

I doubt I’d have read much science fiction without the influence of Stasheff. He goes way back to–1969–and has continued to be popular into the 21st century. What is more, I think that his popularity helped to put Harold Shea back on the map for many later readers. Also, he is one of the few writers I can think of that openly includes Catholic characters in the far future. He’s also a literate author who brings the Medieval and Renaissance periods alive in a way far superior to the likes of Anderson, Miller, Herbert, and in some ways, even Wolfe. These latter authors give us the Middle Ages and Renaissance as we moderns see those ages (IMO influenced a great deal by Howard and Burroughs); however, Stasheff presents them like the educated of the Middle Ages (especially late-Middle Ages) and the Renaissance would have understood them. That’s important because science fiction can find its origins in those ages. However, I will not labor the argument. I just figured that if Alan Moore is on there, Stasheff should certainly be.

I would say Mike Flynn in Eifelheim pulls off the act of presenting the Middle Ages as an educated medieval would have seen them.

Naturally, as a Roman Catholic myself, I should promote any works that portray the Church in a good light, and throw business toward my follow RC author, and, as a guy who works daily on a computer, I should pray to St. Vidicon of Cathode. (He was martyred in AD 2020 when he was electrocuted in order to keep the Vatican broadcast equipment working so that Pope Clement could send his message to the world.)

Also, had I known that Stasheff collaborated with L Sprague de Camp on the later Harold Shea books, he might have made my list of top fifty essential authors: but, alas, he is not more highly ranked in SF history than de Camp himself, not to mention Murray Leinster or Peirs Anthony or Orson Scott Card or Stanislaw Lem or James Blish or Andre Norton or Bertram Chandler or Brian Aldiss or Harry Harrison or Frederik Pohl or Spider Robinson or George RR Martin (whose excellent SF is overlooked now due to the success of his fantasy) or Somtow Sucharitkul or James White or Connie Willis.

On the other hand, as G.K. Chesterton once famously observed, even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel. Having disqualified myself to answer, let us first, as befits a philosopher, examine the question before attempting to answer.

Let us first say what the question is not. I was not asked my personal favorites: those should be obvious enough from my own writing, which steals shamelessly from, er, I mean, pays homage to writers who shaped my imagination: A.E. van Vogt, Olaf Stapledon, Poul Anderson, Keith Laumer, Roger Zelazny, Jack Vance, H.P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Cordwainer Smith, Ayn Rand, E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis. If you read what I write, you can tell who I like. If you do not read what I write, then why are you reading this essay? There are also authors I admire, but I cannot steal from them because I lack the skill to copy them: Gene Wolfe and J.R.R. Tolkien.

The question is also not about the historical impact of the books discussed. It is not a list of award winners. It is a list of books which I think every devoted science fiction reader should read in order to understand where his favorites fit into the grand scheme of things.

It is embarrassing to wax enthusiastic over some science fictional idea, such as that all the life around us may be an illusion as in the film THE MATRIX, only to discover the idea has been done better earlier (as in the film DARK CITY) and is indeed a tried and true, if not shopworn, trope of the genre, as old as NIGHT OF DELUSIONS by Keith Laumer, THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH by Philip K. Dick, ‘They’ by Robert Heinlein, WOLRD OF NULL-A by A.E. van Vogt, or even ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS by Lewis Carroll.

Contrariwise, it is fascinating to see where certain tales are specific answers to other tales from earlier in the genre, even a rebuttal. The metaphor I propose is that all science fiction books that rise above mere space adventure yarns are attempting to take part in a generations-long conversation about the basic ideas that define the genre. Unlike spoken conversation, the Long Talk takes place at book length, or at least short story length.

What makes a book ‘essential reading’? On the surface, the answer is easy enough: a book is essential reading if all the Cool Kids who read and discuss the genre have read and are discussing it. You need to know what the Cool Kids are talking about to participate in the Long Talk.

Digging deeper, what makes a book something the Cool Kids talk about?  While there are occasional statistical anomalies where a book is praised and discussed for some reason unrelated to the book’s quality, for the most part the books that everyone talks about are talked about because they are great. Even if they are bad literature, they contain great ideas.

I will try to be objective, that is, to give due credit to books I dislike or even despise, in order correctly to portray their place in the genre. But, because I am listing essential books, and not great books, I will pay more (perhaps undue) attention to their predominance in the conversation of ideas I here call the ‘Long Talk.’

What is the Long Talk about?

Science Fiction is the mythology of the scientific age. It is the attempt to wrestle with (or play with) the revolution in human thought that accompanied the scientific revolution.

In science fiction, man is not the exile of paradise seeking to regain his lost immortality, a creature little lower than the angels but the lord of creation. Instead he is the son of pond scum which evolved from ape-man to cave-man, and shall soon — if our nerve fails not — evolve from space-man to superman.

In science fiction, Man is simultaneously the microscopic inhabitant of a tiny world whirling about an insignificant star in a minor arm of a galaxy lost among myriads, and the destined race that will one day rule the sevagram. (And if you don’t catch that reference, there are books on this list you should read.) And yet science fiction cautions that if we do not mend our ways, the far future will not hold Men Like Gods in their shining towers and laboratories who control the secret energies of the cosmos and practice nudism and vegetarianism; instead by the year 802701 AD man will have devolved into pretty and hapless Eloi and troglodyte cannibal Morlocks.  (And if you don’t catch that reference, start at the beginning of this list.)

History turned a corner during the scientific revolution. Our perceptions of past and future changed as did our notion of man and his place in the cosmos. The old image of the universe was shattered. Once the common man was aware that technological change had changed how his lived his life differently from his forefathers, then adventure stories speculating about how differently his posterity would live became sellable. Curiosity about conditions in the new universe prompted speculations and dreams, from wild flights of fancy to sober considerations of what the future held.

There are those who, for perhaps perfectly laudable reasons, want to claim continuity between science fiction and the imaginative epics of former ages, quoting the flights to the moon by Lucian of Samosata, Dante, Cyrano de Bergerac and Ariosto as ancestors to the more sober moon-shots by literature’s first men in the moon: Hans Pfaall, Impey Barbicane, Professor Cavor, Richard Seaton, Kurt Newton, Leslie LeCroix. Nonetheless, spiritual journeys or voyages by hippogriff-back do not take place in the modern, scientific view of the universe. Science fiction cannot be older than the science which inspired it.

I artificially limit myself to 50 authors, and I exclude works set in worlds like Middle-Earth, Narnia, Earthsea, Prydain.

So, first on any list of essential SF reading we must list those who created the genre

• FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley. Listed because it is not just a first, but the first. The principle preoccupation of science fiction is the central theme of this antique work: namely, the role of Man in the scientific conception of the universe.
• FLATLAND by A Square (Edwin Abbott)
• TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA by Jules Verne. Scientific speculation so solid that it later came to pass. Likewise, FROM EARTH TO MOON. Likewise, MASTER OF THE WORLD.
• THE WAR OF THE WORLDS by H.G. Wells. Invented the trope of alien invasion; solid speculation about the nature of Darwinian evolution. Likewise, THE TIME MACHINE. Likewise, THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU. Likewise, THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON.
• ‘The Machine Stops’ by E.M. Forster. An brief and ironic rebuke to Wells.

Verne and Wells are the inventors of Hard SF and Soft SF respectively. Verne invented the trope of describing his fictional machines in sufficient detail to convince the reader they were real. Ironically, the much less realistic Wells (Antigravity metal and time machines are fantasy compared to submarines and aircraft) the fact that he used fantasy science to make telling commentaries on the human question keeps him more readable than Verne.

• VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay. This inclusion on this list is problematical, since this obscure work had little effect on the genre. Nonetheless, it is the single most sustain act of imaginative excess I have ever read, and the first attempt to use science fictional tropes to address philosophical, metaphysical, and religious questions.
• LAST AND FIRST MEN by Olaf Stapledon. First literary attempt to plot the course of future history from the present (1930) through the rise and fall of eighteen distinct evolutions of mankind into new races until some two thousand million years hence. The sheer ambition of the conceit is enough to call it essential reading. Likewise, STARMAKER.
• “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” by Jorge Luis Borges. Included here to provoke an argument on what constitutes science fiction.
• NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR by George Orwell. Perhaps the most sobering dark satire of all time; so sobering some critics do not realize it is a satire.
• A BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley

While the literary giants were treating SF with serious ideas, pulp magazines in America were burgeoning. Those who would stuff our more embarrassing ancestors into the closet when guests call are doing the genre a disservice.

• THE MOON POOL by A Merritt. The transition from ‘Lost Race’ adventures to true science fiction. Also, THE METAL MONSTER.
• A PRINCESS OF MARS by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Invented the Planetary Romance genre. This book is surprisingly mature science fiction, despite its juvenile theme and style. Likewise, GODS OF MARS and WARLORD OF MARS.
• SKYLARK OF SPACE by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith. Invented the Space Opera, or, at least, the large-scale intergalactic adventure tale. Also, SKYLARK DUQUESNE, including merely for the audacity of its final sequence, when whole galaxies are obliterated. Likewise The Lensman Series by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith includes THE GALACTIC PATROL, THE GRAY LENSMAN, SECOND STAGE LENSMAN and CHILDREN OF THE LENS. This is the quintessential Big Budget Space Opera, and the first tale to postulate a peaceful civilization embracing utterly alien species.
• ‘A Martian Odyssey’ by Stanley G. Weinbaum. First depiction of aliens who are not really monsters, and not merely humans. (Albeit that honor is disputed with the Lensman series, see above.)
• ‘With Folded Hands’ by Jack Williamson. Also see LEGION OF SPACE and LEGION OF TIME. See also ‘The Moon Era.’
• ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ by H.P. Lovecraft. Also, ‘A Whisperer in Darkness’ and ‘Shadow Out of Time’. Arguably outside the science fiction genre, these weird tales contain a mythic power of cosmic awe and mystery far beyond their meager literary merit.

The Golden Age writers of John W Campbell Jr did work in short stories and novellas which give these shorter work disproportionate influence on the genre. Unlike their pulp predecessors, more scientific verisimilitude was included in these yarns.

• ‘The Black Destroyer’ by A.E. van Vogt. This story started the Golden Age. SLAN by A.E. van Vogt. A successful depiction of a superhuman by a human author. Also, WORLD OF NULL-A and PLAYERS OF NULL-A. Likewise, THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER. The right to buy weapons is the right to be free. Now largely forgotten, at one time van Vogt was considered one of the Big Three of SF (the other two being Asimov and Heinlein, see below.)
• FOUNDATION by Isaac Asimov, including FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE and SECOND FOUNDATION. The decline and fall of the galactic empire. Also, CAVES OF STEEL, THE NAKED SUN. First example of science fiction detective stories.
• “The Man Who Sold the Moon” by Robert Heinlein. First use of a coherent future history. Also “Requiem” and “Green Hills of Earth” also see ORPHANS OF THE SKY by Robert Heinlein. First use of multi-generation ships. No one can call himself an SF reader who has not read a Heinlein juvenile. Any of them will do, but I suggest HAVE SPACE SUIT WILL TRAVEL, CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY and STARMAN JONES. Also, STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND by Heinlein. For its time, a daring countercultural satire.  STARSHIP TROOPERS by Robert Heinlein. First military SF.
• FOREVER WAR by Joe Haldeman. A counterpoint to the above.
• OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET by C.S. Lewis. This is Lewis’s reply to H.G Wells. Also PERELENDRA and THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH.
• CHILDHOOD’S END by Arthur C Clarke. This is Clarke’s reply to Lewis. It also forms the definitive expression of science fiction’s central myth. Also, 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY. Also ‘Against the Fall of Night’ aka CITY AND THE STARS by Arthur C Clarke. Also RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA.
• CITY by Clifford Simak. Also WAY STATION
• MISSION OF GRAVITY by Hal Clement. Widely regarded as the best ‘world building’ done in an SF tale.
• ‘The Man Who Counts’ by Poul Anderson. A fine Nicholas van Rijn tale. Likewise ‘The Queen of Air and Darkness ‘ Likewise, BRAINWAVE, TAU ZERO or HARVEST OF STARS. You have to read some Poul Anderson to be a SF reader.
• THE STARS MY DESTINATION by Alfred Bester. Likewise, THE DEMOLISHED MAN.
• DINOSAUR BEACH by Keith Laumer. Few other time travel stories attempt to cover all the aspects of what time travel would entail.
• THE BIG TIME by Fritz Leiber. And this is one of the few. I would include CONJURE WIFE or OUR LADY OF DARKNESS on this list, but they are not SF.
• ‘Nightwings’ by Robert Silverberg. No short story better captures the eerie sense of immensities of time.
• RIVERWORLD by Philip Jose Farmer. Or perhaps WORLD OF TIERS instead.
• ‘The Cold Equations’ by Tom Godwin. This is included as the crucial short story that put a period to the Campbellian optimist of the Golden Age.

The Silver Age writers concentrated on literary devices rather than big ideas.

• ‘Repent Harlequin Said the Ticktockman’ by Harlan Ellison. Not being to my taste, I am not sure why this tale is famous, but it is an essential of the genre.
• THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE by Philip K Dick. As above.
• LORD OF LIGHT by Roger Zelazny. Myth and SF blended. Also, NINE PRINCES IN AMBER. Technically not SF, but widely influential on all later multiverse style stories.
• FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury. Likewise, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES and I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC and SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES. Mr Bradbury is lyrical and subtle, and considered one of the ABC’s of SF. (The other two being Asimov and Clarke, see above.)
• STAND ON ZANZIBAR by John Brunner. The quintessential ‘serious’ SF book about problems which history has since shown to be non-problems, such as overpopulation.
• THE JEWEL IN THE SKULL by Michael Moorcock. He has written more earnest works, some dreadfully so, but a science fiction reader should read up at least one of the Eternal Champion stories. Also, ELRIC OF MELNIBONÉ and THE KNIGHT OF THE SWORDS.
• ‘Flowers for Algernon’ by Daniel Keyes. Science fiction so poignant that even muggles read it.
• A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ by Walter M. Miller. Future Dark Ages done right.
• DUNE by Frank Herbert. A sober version of a Swords and Spaceships story, but with everything from messianic prophecies to anti-computer jihads to meditations on ecology thrown in. Also, first Hugo winner.
• ‘Scanners Live in Vain’ by Cordwainer Smith. Likewise, ‘The Dead Lady of Clown Town’ and ‘Alpha Ralpha Boulevard.’ These stories established new ground for SF.
• LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS by Ursula K LeGuin. Lyrical and profound, this book broke new ground in what might be called anthropological science fiction. Likewise, THE DISPOSSESSED. LeGuin rapidly colonized what Cordwainer Smith had pioneered.
• ‘The Dragon Masters’ by Jack Vance. Also ‘The Last Castle.’ Also THE LANGUAGES OF PAO and EMPHYRIO. See especially THE DYING EARTH.
• MOTE IN GOD’S EYE by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. A first contact story the way it should properly be done.
• RINGWORLD by Larry Niven. The quintessential ‘Big Dumb Object’ story. See also ‘Neutron Star’ as the crucial example of how to do a scientific puzzle tale.

The Bronze Age is characterized by a shift from short stories to novels and trilogies, and the influence of media SF on the genre. Thanks to STAR WARS science fiction was hereafter mainstream.

• The New Sun books by Gene Wolfe: THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER, THE SWORD OF THE LICTOR, THE CLAW OF THE CONCILIATOR and THE CITADEL OF THE AUTARCH. Also, URTH OF THE NEW SUN. These are Wolfe’s homage to Jack Vance ‘Dying Earth’ tales. See also ‘Fifth Head of Cerberus’.
• NEUROMANCER by Walter Gibson. Invented the Cyberpunk genre.
• SNOWCRASH by Neal Stephenson. Made Cyberpunk worth reading. See also, THE DIAMOND AGE.
• HYPERION by Dan Simmons. Chaucer in space.
• THE WATCHMAN by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. So I included a comic book on my list. What are you, a snob?

I limited myself to fifty must-read authors, and no doubt overlooked some giants in the field. But, this being the Internet, I can always sneak more names onto the list here below in days to come.

The aliens behind the Monolith in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY are the same as the aliens signaling from Vega in Carl Sagan’s CONTACT. They both are part of the Galactic Overmind seeking the evolutionary transcendence of all life, and to elevate lesser races to maturity, as in CHILDHOOD’S END, also by Clarke.

On a less droll note, I am proposing that these works, and several others, are similar in their mood and theme and treatment of the plot elements, because they tacitly agree on a central myth.

It is a mythic thread that runs through much of science fiction from even before the golden age, and, if I am right about what this thread is, back two thousand years and more. Van Vogt and Heinlein and Asimov have all placed at least some of their stories in the service of this myth, the Great Myth.

1. THE QUESTION

To prove my point that the CONTACT aliens built the Monoliths, please contemplate the following multiple choice question:

Dave Bowman (or whatever the name of the utterly forgettable Discovery Astronaut representing Man was in the scene) discovers the Monolith floating in space near Jupiter (we are using the movie version, here, not the book, which placed it around Saturn). He descends into the Monolith and suffers a beatnik-era lightshow, which is supposed to represent something beyond human experience such as passage through a wormhole (which is explicit in the book). He finds himself in a perfect replica of a bedroom appointed in the Louis XVI-style. Strange shifts of time occur as he sees himself simultaneously at different ages: and as he lies dying, the Monolith appears in the room, and….

1. The Monolith is a teleportation device out from which steps a number of Vulcans, the highly advanced aliens from Epsilon Eridani, whose mastery of mental and scientific disciplines enabled them to build the monoliths, which they send out in attempts to elevate pre-rational species to Vulcan level of sober and dispassionate logic. He offers Bowman membership in a peaceful federation of stars.
2. The Monolith is a teleportation device out from which steps a number of Kzin, the belligerent hunting-cat aliens from 61 Ursae Majoris. They send out the Monoliths to find apelike prehumans of various worlds and teach them how to kill each other with the thighbones of an antelope, in order to jump-start the evolution toward a warlike species who will afford the Patriarchy some sport. The whole point of the indirect approach via Monolith was a cat-and-mouse game, playing with one’s prey. He offers Bowman a choice of weapons.
3.  The Monolith is a teleportation device out from which steps an insane Puppeteer, native of a Klemperer Rosette of dirigible worlds on a long voyage out of the Galaxy, which is doomed. The Puppeteer explains that they evolve animals to intelligence in order to provide possible customers for their trade goods, such as hyperdrives and macromolecular-diamond hulls.  He offers Bowman a catalogue, and explains that for the next nine-hundred-sixty-eight earth-years, they are having a buy-one-get-one-free special on starseed lures, tasps, and slaver stasis boxes.
4.  The Monolith is a teleportation device out from which steps a Ferengi, highly advanced native of the planet Ferenginar. He hands astronaut Bowman a bill for the forced-evolution services which elevated the human race up from hominids. Pay up or the Earth will be sold to the Klingons.
5. The Monolith is a telepathic device that puts Bowman in contact with Mentor of Arisia, a fourfold mind of the highly advanced race who have been controlling human history (and that of many other races) in order to selectively breed for psionic talent, mental qualities of force, scope, drive, and integrity. This breeding program is as part of am eon-long plan to create a galactic Lensman Corps to fight invaders of immense power from another galaxy. Mentor offers Bowman a Lens: a lenticular polychrome of writhing, almost fluid radiance which proclaimed to all observers in symbols of ever-changing flame that here was a Lensman of the GALACTIC PATROL!
6. The Monolith is a telepathic device that puts Bowman in contact with the Guardians of Oa, who inform him that they have been elevating hominids to sapience throughout the galaxy in order to find life forms that are utterly fearless to aid in policing the universe. He is presented with a Power Ring, and assigned to Space Sector 2814.
7. The Monolith is a transportation device built by a federation of space faring worlds. Out from the monolith steps a man in a silver suit named Klaatu. Behind him, a giant robot. He explains tersely that Bowman is to deliver the following ultimatum to Earth: with the development of rocketry and atomic weapons in recent years, Earth has become a threat to other worlds. A race of robots with the power and authority to destroy any aggressor world has been created, and their decisions are final and absolute. Earth must obtain peace now, or face obliteration.
8. The Monolith is a transportation which teleports Bowman from Vega to a world circling a star in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. There in a vast chamber, along with a hominid, a Roman centurion named Iunio, and a little girl named Peewee, he finds that the human race is on trial for its survival. The Tribunal is a mixture of biological and mechanical minds collected of many races from three galaxies. With utterly cold Machiavellian realism, the Tribunal describe that their only interest is not in justice nor injustice, but merely in the safety of its members from possible harm. It is coldly explained that the home worlds of dangerous races are summarily flung into interstellar space, far from their mother sun, so that their populations can die in slow and lingering torture as their atmosphere condenses over hours and days from gas to liquid and freezes solid. They offer Bowman the right to speak in the defense of mankind.
9. The Monolith is a transportation device built on the same principles as the Arroway machine from CONTACT, which transports Bowman though a serious of wormholes to the world near the center of a galaxy. On a beach that seems a perfect replica of Shell Beach (a place he knew as a child) he meets a being that seems to be a perfect replica of his dead mother. She explains that mankind has passed the first test in being worthy to meet with other species, but that the next test will not be for thousands of years.

I am not going to ask the question you think I am going to ask.

The question is not going to be “Which of these answers is most in keeping with the mood and theme and unspoken idea behind 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY?”

I am not going to ask that because the answer is obvious. The best answer of all was not given in the multiple choice test, but in another work by Arthur C Clarke:

10. Bowman learns that the Monolith was seeded throughout the galaxy by the Karellen Overlords of the star NGS 549672. This was done at the behest of the vast Overmind, a collection of group-minds representing the ingathered consciousnesses of all the ancient civilizations of the stars, and that Bowman is the first of many ‘Starchildren’ who will one day surpass all the limits of matter. Soon, the sole remaining human left on Earth will be Jan Rodricks, who, with a profound sense not of fear but of cosmic fulfillment, sees the starchildren sweep as a column of flame to the heavens, and all the elements of the solid earth fade into transparency and nothingness….

2. MEN & MONSTERS & GENII & GODS

Instead let me ask this. “How is it that all of us who are not completely tone-deaf can agree that we do not prefer the version where the Monolith Architects are tradesmen seeking customers or hunters seeking good sport or eugenic stock-breeders seeking war recruits?”

Another way of asking the question is why did all the answers but the last set your teeth on edge?

(And if the answers did not set your teeth on edge, forgive my impertinence, but you need to read more science fiction.)

Surely any reader not tone-deaf sees that the aliens from Vega from CONTACT have the same mysterious grandeur and, yes, transcendent quality as the Monolith Architects.

For one thing, unlike Vulcans and Arisians and Kzinti, the transcendental aliens have no names. They never come on stage. If they speak, their speech is as cryptic as the oracle of Delphi.

This is because bringing them onstage, or having them speak too much, would ruin the awe and mystery. If they must appear, let them be something ghostly, such a dead loved one from your own past.

The other aliens listed here are science fiction aliens, that is to say, beings like us, merely having evolved on other planets under other circumstances. They have different psychologies, as the Puppeteers are great cowards, the Vulcans great stoics, the Klingons are great warriors; but they are mortals, like us.

They are men.

The idea that the Monoliths were built by Ferengi or Kzinti is appalling. They are not even men, but monsters. These aliens are creatures of greed or wrath, no more human than Albrecht the Niflungar or the Nemean Lion.

The idea that the people on the other side of the wormhole will be guys like us, except maybe with big ears or cat heads would elicit, after all the buildup of awe and wonder of the voyage from the early hominids to Jupiter’s inner moons, a groan akin to the groan heard when the Jedi of STAR WARS said they got their powers from micro-organisms in their bloodstream.

The groan is because the idea breaks the mood of 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY. The Space Odyssey (which is also the odyssey of human evolution from apeman to spaceman) cannot end this way. To have monkeys elevated to manhood by monsters would make a cynical joke of the whole story.

The Oans and the Arisians are less like us and more like the fathers and grandfathers and wise old wizards of the galaxy, and the Arisians may or may not have physical bodies at all. But they are on stage too much, they talk too much, they have definite goals and values which humans understand.

They may be like wizards or like genii, but they are not like gods.

On the other hand, the Overmind from CHILDHOOD’S END is godlike, and so are the Monolith Architects from 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY and so are the Vegans from CONTACT. That is the whole point. These are not science fiction aliens, who have specific shapes and come from specific worlds.

These aliens are the stuff of myth.

The myth is that mankind, with the aid of benevolent higher powers, is meant to evolve from apeman to spaceman to superman, and not just to Nietzsche’s idea of a superman, nor that of Siegel and Shuster. A very specific type of superman is here envisioned, even if in the vaguest possible terms: a being of pure thought, pure intellect, who is evolved beyond the sullen bounds of matter.

The superman in this myth is the man science has set free of nature!

3. POOR SUPERMEN

Let me draw your particular attention to the answer where Bowman is hauled before the Tribunal of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, whose moral code consists of no more than a pragmatic assessment of possible danger, followed, if the species flunk the test, by planetary genocide of truly ghastly, nay, Eedocsmithian proportions.

The allegedly advanced aliens of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud obliterate whole worlds, from suckling babe to wizened elder, largest redwood to tiniest bacterium, using an execution method you would not use on a mad dog. (Unless you like locking mad dogs in meat lockers and listen to them howl while they slowly freeze to death).

Doomed worlds are not even allowed to sell their eggs or children as slaves in return for sparing their lives. So the Tribunal aliens are lower on the scale of civilization than ancient Babylonians or the Danish corsairs.

This scene of course is taken from the climax of HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL by Robert Heinlein. More than any other book that I can bring to mind, this Tribunal represents Heinlein’s notion of the superman, the next evolutionary step beyond ours.

Of all the answers, this one I find the least in keeping with the august and mythic impression we get of the Monolith Architects, because the motives and goals of the Tribunal are a slap in the face of the evolutionary myth Clarke and Sagan so carefully evoke.

Heinlein’s notion of a superhuman race is a race which adopts his same blustery tough-talk notions that might makes right and the end justify the means, which no doubt the author merely thinks to be unsentimental common sense, but from which a more civilized soul, not so eager to contemplate genocide, must recoil.

Klaatu and his race of deadly world-destroying robots is a similar idea from the movie DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (the real one); but here this idea has a little more leeway, since at least the Earthlings are told they are on trial, and the death sentence will not be carried out until Earth actually opens fire on some neighbor.

Note the sharp contrast with CHILDHOOD’S END by Clarke. There, the warlike nature of man is contained partly by direct alien intervention and partly by an understandable awe at the discovery of superior alien life. Instead of slowly torturing the mad dog to death via freezing, the Overmind assigns one of their servant races to act as caretaker and jail-warden to mad mankind, and they nurse the next generation of human beings to adulthood, this generation which surpasses all human limits, forms a mass mind, and studies war no more.

The abhorrent Tribunal of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, and the coldly practical Federation of Worlds of Klaatu lack the mythical stature, the transcendental grandeur of the Monolith Architects, the Contactors or the Overmind for the simple reason that they are still mortals like us, and, worse, afraid of us and afraid of our weapons.

But for the Monolith Architects to fear us would be like having the entire NATO military be afraid of a small band of lemurs from Madagascar. It shatters the whole myth.

4 WHAT IS MYTH?

Why is the idea that the Monolith Architects are men like us only with big Ferengi Ears or Kzinti tiger-faces appalling?

The reason this idea appalls is because Arthur C Clarke, although he is known and revered for his hard science fiction tale and their technical accuracy, is not telling a science fiction story here.

He is telling a myth.

The Monolith Architects are not science fiction aliens. They represent the awe of the human for the superhuman.  They embody the wonder we feel at the sight of the stars, knowing they are distant suns, for the most part larger and older than our own, which shine on unknown worlds.

By myth I do not mean falsehood, I mean mythos, an account in symbolic language of ultimate things.

Myths have several telling features. C.S. Lewis, one of the finer myth-makers of the modern world, identifies them in his book AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM:

First, myths have a simple narrative shape. Lewis calls it “a satisfactory and inevitable shape, like a good vase or a tulip.”

Second, the power of the myth comes not from their literary virtues, but from a compelling quality present even in the simplest retelling of them. The usual narrative tricks of suspense or surprise are not needed. Elevated language is not needed.

Third, myths need no character arc. The wrath of Achilles, the jealousy of Othello, and the indecisiveness of Hamlet need to be introduced for the narrative story of these men to be told. This is not true for the story of Orpheus. Orpheus is an everyman who suffers the pain of loss at the death of a loved one. No specific personality characteristics need to be introduced for his story.

Fourth, myth deals with the fantastic, the impossible or preternatural.

Fifth, the experience may be sad or joyful, but it is always grave.

Sixth, the experience is not only grave but awe-inspiring. We feel it to be numinous. It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us.

5 CAVEMAN, SPACEMAN, STARCHILD

Let us look at the narrative structure of 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY: Hominids are elevated to human sapience by a mysterious monolith, and, for good or evil, the apemen learn both human tool-use and human weapon-use. Astronauts discover an enigmatic monolith on the moon which sends a signal to Jupiter. The Discovery pursues the signal to its source, and, after destroying a malign computer murdering the crew, the sole survivor enters the monolith, dies, and is reborn as an infant among the stars of some higher order of being.

It is the starkest possible three-act play of cave-man, space-man, and starchild.

The only element of the plot which is “narrative” rather than “myth” is the homicidal computer HAL 9000; but the book makes it clear that HAL malfunctioned because of a falsehood built into its programming. If we interpret this falsehood as representing all of the mechanistic and deceptive impulses of man, the danger of our own tool-using nature to turn against us by creating tools to which we enslave ourselves, then indeed HAL 9000 is the symbolically-apt antagonist attempting to stop Man from achieving transcendence. Even the death of HAL 9000 is thematically correct for the story. HAL is the antithesis of Bowman; instead of being elevated to superhumanity, HAL 9000 failed the cosmic test of evolution. HAL is reduced to infancy, to idiocy, sings a childhood song, and dies.

But the awe and the point of the story is not the homicidal computer, it is the single narrative of caveman to spaceman to starchild. That is the source of the enduring awe of the tale, and that is what still fascinates about the movie and the book, despite any other drawbacks.

6 GHOST & STRANGE LIGHTS

Even the things that don’t make sense as narrative make sense as myth. The reason why Bowman does not have any personality is that Orpheus does not have any personality. He is all men; he is Man .

The hippy-dippy lightshow at the end is actually stronger in the movie than the much more sensible and pedestrian parallel scene in the book, where Bowman is drawn through a wormhole and sees an long-abandoned alien shipyard. A shipyard, even of unearthly starships, is too prosaic for a myth. It is good SF writing, but bad mythmaking. We all know what a shipyard is. Seeing a group of torpedo-shaped vessels built by aliens is almost comically inadequate against our expectations. If Kubrik had put a star-yard in the film, all would have laughed in scorn. The incomprehensible light-show works as a myth because it is incomprehensible.

And Bowman does not meet or see any aliens, because any alien you can see with your eyes is not worth seeing.

I will point out that in CONTACT the main character, Elli Arroway, does not meet anything that looks like an alien. She meets the ghost of her dead father. Sure, it is allegedly an alien using some technology we do not understand to take on the appearance of her dead father, but the reason why the writer chose a dead father as the image for the aliens to assume, rather than Colonel Klink from HOGAN’S HEROES, (an appearance which would have, in theory, been just as easy for the aliens to assume) was that ghosts of loved ones are spooky and supernatural and loving. To appear as a familiar ghost is in keeping with the transcendental nature of the aliens.

The appearance in he final scene 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY of the bedroom done in the style of Louis XVI is for the same reason. The architecture is strange yet familiar, something from the past. It is haunting. The reason for the sudden slips or shifts in time, where Bowman sees himself in the past and future is again for the same reason: to produce the mood of a myth about the supernatural and transcendental.

7 WE DON’T NEED NO STINKING NARRATIVE

Turning our attention to the other telling signs of myth, I submit that many a science fiction book shares these features, but that 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY displays them tellingly. Indeed, one might even propose it as an epitome or perfect example of the genre, both the genre’s strong points and weak.

There narrative tricks of suspense or surprise are absent from 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY. The astronauts do not know the monolith is an alien artifact that evolves beings to higher states, but the audience knows this from the first scene. Poole and Bowman have no character arc, no personality characteristics. The subject matter is fantastic, impossible and preternatural even for a science fiction story: this is not a mere space adventure.

Elevated language there is none. The book is written in a clean journalistic style without poetry; as indeed most science fiction is.

The tale is clearly grave and sober in its approach. There is not a single joke, not one moment of lightheartedness. It is as solemn as a cathedral lit by candles.

And, as for awe-inspiring, that is what the tale is about. If you are not awed, this story is not for you. We feel 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY to be numinous. It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us.

What was communicated? I submit that it is nothing less than man’s place in the universe, at once humble and exulted.

8 THE GREAT MYTH

What is the myth?

It is one of the central myths, if not the central myth of the modern mind.

C.S. Lewis, who pronounced the eulogy of this myth, mentions the name ‘Wellsianity’ after H.G. Wells, one of its more imaginative proponents; but Lewis himself also called it the Myth of Darwinism, or, more simply, The Great Myth.

After taking pains (which, alas, are always ignored) to distinguish the theory of Darwin, which deals with change to organisms through natural selection, Lewis described this most unscientific myth of Darwinism that has accumulated in the wake of Darwin’s scientific theory, which deals with endless improvements to a golden future.

Even H.G. Wells knew better than to confuse the theory natural selection with the optimistic Victorian myth of ever-upward evolution: his cannibal troglodyte Morlocks of AD 802701 were the product of natural selection, but hardly an improvement.

C.S. Lewis describes the myth in this way:

[This is] a cosmic theory. Not merely terrestrial organisms but everything is moving ‘upwards and onwards’. Reason has ‘evolved’ out of instinct, virtue out of complexes, poetry out of erotic howls and grunts, civilization out of savagery, the organic out of the inorganic, the solar system out of some sidereal soup or traffic block. And conversely, reason, virtue, art and civilization as we now know them are only the crude or embryonic beginnings of far better things–perhaps Deity itself–in the remote future. For in the Myth, ‘Evolution’ (as the Myth understands it) is the formula for all existence. To exist means to be moving from the status of ‘almost zero’ to the status of ‘almost infinity’.

To those brought up on the Myth nothing seems more normal, more natural, more plausible, than that chaos should turn to order, death into life, ignorance into knowledge. And with this we reach the full-blown Myth. It is one of the most moving and satisfying world dramas which have ever been imagined.

The drama proper is preceded (do not forget the Rhinegold here) by the most austere of all preludes; the infinite void and matter endlessly, aimlessly moving to bring forth it knows not what. Then by some millionth, millionth chance–what tragic irony!–the conditions at one point of space and time bubble up into that tiny fermentation which we call organic life. At first everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama; just as everything always was against the seventh son or ill-used step-daughter in a fairy tale. But life somehow wins through.

With incalculable sufferings (the Sorrows of the Volsungs were nothing to it), against all but insuperable obstacles, it spreads, it breeds, it complicates itself; from the amoeba up to the reptile, up to the mammal. Life (here comes the first climax) ‘wanton’d as in her prime’. This is the age of the monsters: dragons prowl the earth, devour one another, and die.

Then the irresistible theme of the Younger Son or the Ugly Duckling is repeated. As the weak, tiny spark of life herself began amidst the beasts that are far larger and stronger than he, there comes forth a little, naked, shivering, cowering biped, shuffling, not yet fully erect, promising nothing: the product of another millionth, millionth chance.

His name in this Myth is Man: elsewhere he has been the young Beowulf whom men at first thought a dastard, or the stripling David armed only with a sling against a mail-clad Goliath, or a Jack the Giant-Killer himself, or even Hop-o’-my-Thumb. He thrives. He begins killing his giants. He becomes the Cave Man with his flints and his club, muttering and growling over his enemies’ bones, almost a brute and yet somehow able to invent art, pottery, language, weapons, cookery, and nearly everything else (his name in another story is Robinson Crusoe), dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I do not know exactly why), tearing his children to pieces in fierce jealousy until they are old enough to tear him, and cowering before the terrible gods whom he has invented in his own image.

But these were only growing pains. In the next act he has become true Man. He learns to master Nature. Science arises and dissipates the superstitions of his infancy. More and more he becomes the controller of his own fate. Passing hastily over the historical period (in it the upward and onward movement gets in places a little indistinct, but it is a mere nothing by the time-scale we are using) we follow our hero on into the future.

See him in the last act, though not the last scene, of this great mystery. A race of demigods now rule the planet (in some versions, the galaxy). Eugenics have made certain that only demigods will now be born: psychoanalysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity: economics that they shall have to hand all that demigods require. Man has ascended his throne. Man has become God. All is a blaze of glory.

And now, mark well the final stroke of mythopoetic genius. It is only the more debased versions of the Myth that end here. For to end here is a little bathetic, even a little vulgar. If we stopped at this point the story would lack the highest grandeur.

Therefore, in the best versions, the last scene reverses all. Arthur died: Siegfried died: Roland dies at Roncesvaux. Dusk steals darkly over the gods. All this time we have forgotten Mordred, Hagen, Ganilon. All this time Nature, the old enemy who only seemed to be defeated, has been gnawing away, silently, unceasingly, out of the reach of human power. The Sun will cool–all suns will cool–the whole universe will run down. Life (every form of life) will be banished without hope of return from every cubic inch of infinite space. All ends in nothingness. ‘Universal darkness covers all’. True to the shape of Elizabethan tragedy, the hero has swiftly fallen from the glory to which he slowly climbed: we are dismissed ‘in calm of mind, all passion spent’. It is indeed much better than Elizabethan tragedy, for it has a more complete finality. It brings us to the end not of a story, but of all possible stories: enden sah ich die welt.

I grew up believing in this Myth and have felt–I still feel–its almost perfect grandeur.

8 THE GREAT MYTH AS THE YOUNGEST GENRE

Allow me to emphasize two points which Mr. Lewis does not dwell upon. First, the clearest, and perhaps the only, expression the Great Myth in the modern day is in Science Fiction. Second, the Great Myth is not futuristic at all, not new, but is an ancient heresy, perhaps the most ancient.

The Great Myth is the core idea of Science Fiction to such a degree that even books that cut against the Great Myth must touch on it.

Perhaps here I am making too bold a claim — since who can define a field as varied as SF? — let me instead merely say the Great Myth is the core of H.G. Wellsian science fiction and his epigones. It is not the Hard SF of Jules Verne we are discussing, but the social and philosophical SF of Wells.

Science Fiction is a new genre, springing out of the industrial and scientific revolutions, made possible by the growth of a world view among the common man that change was possible or inevitable and would change the way we live our lives. Those who live in a classical or heathen world view that promises nothing but the eternal return of the universe again and again to the same conditions has no room for speculation about progress and no curiosity about adventures set in a future world grown strange by technological change.

Some of the earliest Science Fiction were perhaps more bold about the ultimate fate of progress than later, and hence were more explicit in their attachment to the Great Myth.

Olaf Stapledon in LAST AND FIRST MEN explicitly lays out the course of human future human evolution for the next seventeen species of man, and then he did it again for all worlds in STARMAKER and (by no coincidence) the ending in both books is precisely as Lewis here describes—a sorrowful universal death.

Lewis himself addresses the Great Myth, albeit as an adversary, in the dialog between man and eldil (angel) which forms the climax of OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET: he explicitly mocks the myth, both in its ambitions for interstellar colonization and conquest, and in its glorification of the evolutionary metamorphosis of the human race into a greater albeit nonhuman one.

With the advent of John C. Campbell Jr, the Great Myth was somewhat shrunk in scope. Campbell’s magazine ran stories which generally promoted a world view of pragmatic men hopeful of better living through science: the last act of the myth was dropped, so Campbellian tales tend to be about the evolutionary climb, not the conquest by entropy at the end. The transcendental view of the man beyond man was muted, perhaps because the Campbellians regarded the superman as a mystical idea, but traces of the superman still can be seen.

The foremost portrait artist of the superman in during the golden age of SF is, without doubt, A.E. van Vogt.

In SLAN van Vogt portrays the superhuman in one way a human mind can grasp: as a young of one of the species.

Gilbert Gosseyn is introduced in WORLD OF NULL-A as something like a feral child, like Tarzan or Mowgli, a superhuman raised among men, but unaware of his heritage (Gosseyn is later given another origin story, but in the original magazine version of the tale, the clues pointing toward Gosseyn as a feral superhuman).

In WEAPON MAKERS OF ISHER, we see what an adult superhuman is capable of. Captain Hedrock aka Walter S Delany is the immortal man who is the founder of the weapons shops guild is also the founder and prince consort of the Imperial family is Isher. He singlehandedly guides the human race through the Frankenstein dangers of technological growth, and leads man to his ultimate destiny. In the greatest curtain line in science fiction, or at least the most inexplicable, we are told that mankind is the race that will one day rule the sevagram.

What is to be particularly emphasized is that the immortal is not merely superhumanly intelligent, he is superhumanly altruistic, far-sighted, benevolent. He has a particularly laissez-faire attitude toward ruling the human race, and uses the two great institutions in balance against each other, to allow mankind, should man chose it, to be free.

In defiance of the rather cold hearted and hyper rational image of superhumans (of which I smell traces in Heinlein) van Vogt consistently depicted superhumans as having superhuman altruism. The contempt we see in that other superman, Michael Valentine Smith of STRANGERS IN A STRANGE LAND, for the “chumps” and “marks” and loser of the human race, we weaklings who must be swept aside by the glorious course of evolution, is nowhere present in Walter S DeLany.

In nearly all of A.E. van Vogt’s works, one can detect a mystical idea that man and the universe are intimately intertwined, so that one cannot affect one without affecting the other. This idea is explicit in only two stories.

One is the short story ‘Secret Unattainable’ where a machine that bypasses the limits of space and time cannot be used except by souls who have attained a certain level of enlightenment because the laws of nature are intertwined with the moral law, the laws of sanity.

Dr Kenrube, the story’s protagonist, gives the Nazis a machine that bypass time and space, and he promises them that it will destroy them. He says

“Somehow, beneath adaptations, peculiar and unsuspected relationships existed between the properties of matter and the phenomena of life. … Here is your machine. It is all there; yours to use for any purpose—-provided you first change your mode of thinking to conform to the reality of the relationship between matter and life …. It is not that the machine has will. It reacts to laws, which you must learn, and in the learning it will reshape your minds, your outlook on life.”

The second is the novel length work THE UNIVERSE MAKER, where the protagonist Cargill discovers that all reality is an illusion created by the life-energy in order for life to satisfy inexplicable psychological needs for possessions and for revenge. The godhead is nothing more than Cargill and the various other enlightened avatars of the one primal and timeless energy field. The universe is but a game, and the players have forgotten the reason for the play, or even that it is a game and that they are players. In the climax of the novel, Cargill survives the destruction of the universe and recreates it.

Van Vogt may have differed in his belief about this cosmic unity of man and universe from the pragmatism of Heinlein or Campbell, but the belief in the growth of man to superman, to what Wells called Men Like Gods, is as apparent in both. The main deviation between this and the Great Myth is the tragic ending. Van Vogt’s characters are more likely to recreate the universe after its death than to topple when it dies, as Nat Cemp from THE SILKIE or Cargill from THE UNIVERSE MAKER.

The theme of cosmic recreation is present in writers from the Golden Age more famous than A.E. van Vogt.

The Isaac Asimov short story ‘The Last Question’ whose tongue-in-cheek surprise ending is that entropy can indeed be reversed when the ultimate artificial intelligence achieves power and understanding that are literally godlike, and utters the famous words: ‘Let there be light!’

A more egregious example is Robert Heinlein’s THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST, where in an ending only slightly less wacky than the ending of the CASINO ROYALE (the 1967 spoof), all of Heinlein’s friends and characters meet at a party outside of time, having discovered that the universes, all of them, are the creations of their own imaginations. The theme of STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND where all the enlightened turn out to be amnesia-riddled gods, is here made explicit.

The idea is the same as that in THE UNIVERSE MAKER, but without the dignified techno-babble about psychological needs and energy fields.

There are any number of time travel stories by Heinlein and others where the time traveling main character turns out to be his own creator, having made himself by himself, for ever and aye, amen. Heinlein makes no mention of who the deceiver or demiurge is who traps all souls in the meshes of material existence might be, unless ‘The Beast’ of the title is he.

This theme of the material universe as a cosmic deception to be escaped to an awaiting godhead is not rare in science fiction. I recall having seen it or some variation of it in VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay, which mentions a Pleroma called Muspel (very similar to the UNIVERSE MAKER’s energy field) from which all spirits derive, and are trapped, having forgotten their true source and true home, and to which they yearn eternally to return.

I read the AEGYPT series by John Crowley, where the philosophy of cosmic self-deception is laid out in precise yet lyrical terms. Similar themes and ideas form the core of THE GOLDEN COMPASS by Phillip Pullman and THE LITTLE PRINCE by Antoine de Saint Exupéry. These themes are also present in muted form in the movies DARK CITY and THE MATRIX.

There is more here than just typical adolescent power fantasy as we might see in a Conan the Barbarian story. The theme in GOLDEN COMPASS and THE LITTLE PRINCE and VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS concern the escape from a cosmos-wide deceiver, a way to seek release from the material world. In DARK CITY and MATRIX the theme also explicitly promises superhuman powers, godlike powers, to the enlightened once the escape is made.

Now, in this are we dealing with a new myth, or an old one?

9 THAT SAME OLD GNOSTIC HOGWASH AGAIN

Longtime readers of mine will have previously been introduced to Gnosticism, that most ancient heresy attributed (if tradition is to be trusted) to Simon the Magician himself.

It is as old as scripture, perhaps older; it is the heresy that St John denounces in 1 John 4:1-3.

Gnosticism has no Magisterium, so there is no definitive list of its dogmas. Indeed, each Gnostic is urged to create for himself his own personal mythology and inner cosmos. But certain telling features remain across the many variations of the heresy.

First, Gnosticism it proposes a Cosmic Conspiracy theory of cosmic proportions, namely, that the God of the Old Testament, who drove our First Parents out of Eden, is the Demiurge only, the maker of the vulgar and degrading material world, not of the cosmos, which is a more august and grandeur spiritual reality, a Pleroma of disembodied spirits.

Second, there is no resurrection in the flesh for Gnostics. Like Socrates and the Neo-Platonist, the Gnostic seeks a disembodied life as a pure intellectual being, a spirit with nothing to be the spirit of.

Third, Gnostic despise matter. This is because matter is regarded as the source of both evil impulses and deceitful pleasures and the illusions of the senses which draw the soul away from gnosis, the enlightenment.  The idea of resurrection in a glorified body able to have hands with nail-wounds still in them is abhorrent to Gnostics.

Fourth, the enlightenment is in stages, as the freed spirit rises from lower heavens to higher, he will pass through the spheres of Luna, Mercury, Venus, Sol, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and beyond the Sphere of the Fixed Stars to unimagined wonder. Each heaven proposes an archon, or ruling spirit, who impedes the freed soul from its ever upward journey.

Fortunately, the Gnostics also believe that spiritual guides, and more enlightened beings now free of the degrading trap of matter, will aid and assist younger souls to shake off the smoky deceptions of the flesh and rise above the archons. These guides are called daemons.

Finally, Gnosticism is elitist. Only those who possess the secret knowledge will be saved (hence the name—gnosis means knowledge, particularly esoteric and ineffable knowledge).

It proposes apotheosis, or, rather anagrosis: the secret knowledge is that Thou Art God.

Are there parallels between Gnosticism and Wellsianism?

10 THE GREAT MYTH AS THE OLDEST HERESY

The first parallel is the Cosmic Conspiracy.

The main objection to finding a parallel is that there is a Demiurge in Gnosticism, whereas the Wellsian Great Myth has no room for such a Deceiving Spirit because there are no spirits in the Darwinian-materialist myth of things. I submit that there is still a cosmic deceiver in the Darwinian-materialist conceit, but that now it is merely matter in motion, as all things are.

In his eulogy of the Great Myth, C.S. Lewis points out its fatal self-contradiction:

The Myth cannot even get going without accepting a good deal from the real sciences. And the real sciences cannot be accepted for a moment unless rational inferences are valid: for every science claims to be a series of inferences from observed facts. It is only by such inferences that you can reach your nebulae and protoplasm and dinosaurs and sub-men and cave-men at all.

Unless you start by believing that reality in the remotest space and the remotest time rigidly obeys the laws of logic, you can have no ground for believing in any astronomy, any biology, any paleontology, any archeology. To reach the positions held by the real scientists–which are taken over by the Myth–you must, in fact, treat reason as an absolute. But at the same time the Myth asks me to believe that reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of a mindless process at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming.

The content of the Myth thus knocks from under me the only ground on which I could possibly believe the Myth to be true. If my own mind is a product of the irrational–if what seem my clearest reasonings are only the way in which a creature conditioned as I am is bound to feel–how shall I trust my mind when it tells me about Evolution

In sum, in the universe where reason arises from non-reason by a non-rational because non-deliberate mechanical process, all that can be said of reason is that it is a mechanical process: it cannot be said to be true or false, valid or invalid, efficient or wasteful, because none of these concepts have anything to do with mechanical processes.

The mental process cannot even be said to work or to fail. A clockwork only jams or runs slow if there is an observer with free will who looks at the dial on the clockface and makes a mental connection or association (a connection not present in the clockwork itself) between the motions of the hour hand and celestial motions of the sun and the passage of abstract entities called hours. The jam of gears is only a ‘jam’ if the clockwork has a purpose to keep time. But no clock can have a purpose without a clockmaker. When a stream is dammed by a rockslide, the stream is not ‘broken’ or ‘running slow’ in any sense of the word, unless we propose there is a nymph in the stream whose wish to run to the sea has been frustrated. Hence, if mental processes were mechanical processes only, there would be no standard by which they could be judged to be sane or insane. The appearance of purposeful mental process is all illusion, deception, but, paradoxically, there is no one and nothing to deceive.

Notice the role assumed by reason in the Great Myth. It is a deceiver. And it is a ubiquitous and inescapable deceiver.

All thinking creatures by definition are under the illusion that they think, but in reality all thought is merely the by-product of chemical and energetic processes of molecules and electrons, nor more the product of free will or rational validity or intellectual truth than the fall of the final domino in the row once the first is toppled.

Those who truly believe in the Great Myth have three choices: first, and this is the most popular, they can deliberately not think about the paradox, and change the subject when it is brought up.

Second, the true believer can argue that the mechanical process by some unexplained coincidence just so happens to generate thought-output which somehow correlated to what thoughts would be were they true and rational and under the control they seem to be. All thought is an illusion, but somehow the illusion works out as if by divine harmony to agree with the thought-content we would have were we free. Perhaps the irrational universe has a correcting process whereby those who employ the argumentum ad baculum are beaten to death: albeit how this arranges the universe to have a universal rule defining ad baculum as an informal logical fallacy is beyond me. The fact that birds build round nest does not somehow create the rule that pi is an irrational number.

Third, the true believer can dismiss free will as an illusion or define it to be the same as a mechanical process.  The true believers who use this choice either adopt a tone of weary resignation, or they define the belief in free will as a pernicious illusion and the realization that we are all meat robots as liberating: all the old moral codes that chained us in our predemigod days have fallen away. We are now free to use hypnotic-chemical brain-conditioning to improve the race, without any of that unpleasant judgmentalism and rude condemnation that accompanies things like sin and confession and repentance and contrition.

Those of you who have turned the leaves of the obscure science fiction books AEGYPT by Crowley or VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by Lindsay will recognize the character of the deceiver. In Lindsay’s allegory he is a literal character called Crystalman. This is the demiurge of the Gnostics, the creator of the vast trap we call the cosmos or the material world.

In the Great Myth, the demiurge role is played by human reason, the self-deceptive belief in free will.

The other parallels, even if not clear in the myth itself, are certainly clear enough in the science fiction stories discussed here, which I propose gain their power and allure only because of the power and allure of the Great Myth—the two books by Arthur C Clarke foremost.

The second parallel is the lack of resurrection in the flesh.

Note that CHILDHOOD’S END ends with the completely pointless and inexplicable destruction of the Earth. Mankind has ceased to reproduce at replacement levels; and, knowing themselves to be a evolutionary dead end, they gracefully commit racial suicide.

The violent conflict between the Magneto’s Homo Superior and fearful Homo Sapiens as depicted in X-MEN never eventuates. It would have broken the dignified solemnity of the mood: justified opposition to evolution in the name of self-preservation is not part of the Great Myth. Man must pass away gracefully.

This same theme is present in the A.E. van Vogt book mentioned above, SLAN, where it is revealed in the final chapter that old mankind is programmed by nature to suffer infertility, give birth to their replacements, and die off quietly to make room for the supermen.

In CHILDHOOD’S END the literal childhood’s end is when the posthuman children turn themselves into energy beings and fly off to oneness with the Overmind, annihilating the world into a transparent nothingness as they go.

The event is dramatic and striking precisely because it harkens back to Gnostic distaste for the material body. Had the posthumans simply flown away, leaving an empty earth perfectly intact and ready for the old fashioned homo sapiens to use, that would have been a jarring note, even to the point of making a mockery of the Great Myth. The old Titans are not supposed to stick around and live happily ever after once the younger and stronger Gods arise. The grandeur and sorrow of the myth is that the old gods die and are swept aside when the new gods arise.

And the Earth is not destroyed in a crude and material way, blasted by the Death Star, no. That would not be spiritual enough. Instead, the material world fades like a dream.

The third parallel is the distaste for the material world

The Great Myth is rather cramped compared to reality, and has no room for spirits or immaterial things like thoughts, justice, mathematical objects, Platonic forms, Hamlet’s Father, the Ghost of Christmas Present, or even Casper the Friendly Ghost: but it does allow for Superior Beings to be made of energy or have their engrams imprinted on the fabric of spacetime, and this serves in Science Fiction tales as a material substitute for spirits more suited to the naturalistic assumptions of the genre.

The starchild from 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY is, in the sequels, explicitly made a being of energy, not flesh. The Contactors from CONTACT likewise do not have bodies, or, at least, nothing they can show to Eli Arroway, so their spokesman appears as a ghost.

Likewise immaterial, literally ghosts, are the elder Martians in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, even thought Heinlein’s work rejected many elements of the Great Myth — he was too cynical (or realistic, take your pick) to believe in forever upward progress — but he kept this element, no doubt for its simplicity and drama. Making your aliens out of energy is a quick shorthand way to tell the reader that they are advanced beyond the material form.

Everyone from the Squire of Gothos to the Organians to the Q Continuum in STAR TREK follows this same conceit.

Of course, one needs to grasp emotionally if not intellectually the notion that matter is bad and departing from it is good, which is the core Gnostic idea, for this image of energy beings as superior spirits to have any emotional appeal.

Fourth, the enlightenment is in stages. The process is ongoing.

Please note that in both CONTACT and 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY, the enigmatic aliens are initiating a process, not ending it. The starchild is not the finale. The First Contract in CONTACT is not the last contact, but the first in a series of tests as the human race grows to unimaginable and godlike maturation.

Without this crucial element, the awe and wonder is lost: at the end of the story, we readers are left as a man standing at the bottom of a tall mountain, craning back his head and back, seeing glimpses through the cloud and mist of peak rising above peak. And above those snowy peaks, heights even greater. That is the future of the race we are asked to contemplate: measureless grandeur.

Finally, the last parallel is the elitism, and the promise of apotheosis.

The elitism inherent in science fiction tales like this, and, to a degree, forming the moral atmosphere of the whole genre, should be obvious from these examples and countless others: it is not the masses, the poor, the dispossessed, the meek who shall inherit the Earth, but the Slans.

In my whole SF reading career, I have read exactly one short story where the characteristic defining posthumanity was something other than super-high intelligence (and that was a psychic ability to see the future, which that story said was the point of intelligence in the first place). Everywhere else, the superhumans are all supergeniuses, even in a yarn like STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, which does not logically require that Michael Valentine Smith be smarter than average, because he has been raised by an ancient and far superior race of beings.

Science fiction is the perfect place for this conceit to nest, because science is an strictly intellectual effort, and has attracted men of genius and intellectual accomplishment like no other field. The message that the smart folk will be changed into demigods because of their smarts fits nicely in such an environment.

Returning now to the opening question, the reason why the Monolith Architects are the Overmind are the enigmatic aliens from Vega is that these are the Daemons, the spiritual guides of the Gnostics.

The reason why merely science fiction aliens, men like us from other worlds, cannot be daemons is that it violates the basic and elegant structure of the Great Myth, which proposes a hierarchy leading ever upward out of the murk of matter into the intellectual and disembodied perfections of the heaven above the heavens.

11 A CONFESSION

I must confess that, for me personally, the Great Myth has lost a great deal of appeal. The desire to be godlike by one’s own efforts, or even with the help of benevolent but mysterious daemonic powers, seems a losing proposition compared to the promise to be heirs and co-heirs of Christ and children of God.

It is the lie of the serpent of Eden. Abolish your humanity, and you shall be like gods.

To all such, my answer is nicely summed up in a line from yet another science fiction book, URTH OF THE NEW SUN by Gene Wolfe, who has a very different take on what it means to be a superhuman able to bypass space and time.

In one scene, the voice of elitism incarnate, the necromancer Ceryx challenges the hero Severian to a duel of magic.

Ceryx vaunts, “Do you know what it is like to train your will until it is a bar of iron? To drive your spirit before you like a slave?… Yet they are what must be done if you would seize the scepter of the Increate!”

Severian, who already possess the power they are discussing, answers mildly:

“I know nothing of seizing that scepter. To tell the truth, I am certain it could not be done. If you wish to be as the Increate is, I question whether you can do it by acting as the Increate does not.”

Let me tell you my experience with Mormons.

Once upon a time, my middle son flushed a toy down the toilet, and the toy, with a power far beyond that of ordinary toys, managed not only to clog the pipe running under my front yard, but break the pipe during the attempt to remove it, so that my front tree had to be hewn down as if my the cruel Orcs of Orthanc, and all my yard ripped up and despoiled.

Next, the Home Owners Association sent a legal notice saying we had to restore the lawn to good and proper condition forthwith, or face legal penalties. At this point in time my wallet had moths in it, and echoes, but no money. I could not hire a landscaper no do the work myself.

My wife prayed to her God (I was an atheist at the time) and within the same day, two young men, dressed soberly, and with good manners, approached her and said that they were walking the neighborhood looking for good works to do. At first she thought of turning them away, but then realized they were an answer to prayer.

Since they were conservatively and soberly dressed, and spoke politely, and had a shining of grace and good favor about their faces, I knew at once that they were either Agents of the Machine from the movie THE MATRIX or that they were elders from the Church of Latter Day Saints.

I think their names were Elder Younger and Elder Kidd, but let me not be too droll on that point.

The two Mormon boys helped us that weekend with strenuous manual labor and the next and accepting no payment for their good deed. Nor did they lose their good cheer even for an instant.

(By way of jest, I asked my Christian wife if she would consider converting to the Mormon faith because of this event. She looked at me askance, and wonder why, if her God prompted answered her prayers by sending Mormons, why should she switch from hers to theirs?)

So I LOVE the Mormons. I will always be grateful to the Mormons. I respect the Mormons. The Mormons put their time and effort where their mouth is — and actually act like the Christians I know say we should act.

Dear Mormons, any of you reading these words, let me say I am glad your Church had the guts to stand up to the forces of sexual perversion and abomination in the recent elections in California. The Dark Lord who runs this world will have his vengeance on you for that, but God will protect and sustain you through any trouble.

Rome and Salt Lake City are allies in the Culture Wars. We are allies in the war for the souls of man, and souls of the world. No matter how much we disagree on matters of theology, even on crucial matters, the enemy is Satan. I have not lost sight of that fact, and I pray God I do not lose sight of it.

To be sure, the Roman Catholic Church does not regard your beliefs to be orthodox, nor your baptisms to be valid: if I may say it without offense, I do not consider a Mormon to be Christian any more than I consider a Muslim or Jew or Gnostic. The Christ you propose is too alien to orthodox theology to be considered a mere difference of opinion — your Christ is wholly different from mine.

And having said that, let me hasted to add I would that certain public figures who claim to be Catholic were as half as Christian in word and deed as every Mormon I have ever met.

I hope I can be forgiven for treated the request rather lightheartedly, because I am sure that if that reader merely speaks to his grandmother, he will have a sufficient basis of evidence to make up his mind on the issue.

I hope we can agree, in the abstract, that marriage was instituted for the purpose of preventing the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, for promoting domestic felicity, and for securing the maintenance and education of children. The sexual revolution, by promoting fornication and adultery and divorce, decreases the sanctity and the frequency of marriage, and increases the rate of divorce.

Statistically, the best indicator that a couple will end in divorce is if they begin by cohabiting without marriage.

Statistically again, the best indicator that a spouse will commit adultery is premarital sex. In other words, even if fornication were not blameworthy in and of itself, fornication would still be a warning sign telling prospective mates to look elsewhere for marriage partners.

The relationship between adultery and divorce is plain enough, since this is the prime and classical cause for divorce.

Hence, taken these finding together, we see that the sexual revolution by promoting fornication and cohabitation also promotes adultery and divorce. So far in the argument, I make no claim as to cause and effect: I am merely pointing out that the statistics show a correlation.

Divorce and fornication increases the incidence of single mothers raising children which correlates to the number of children from fatherless homes.

Here are some numbers. Children from fatherless homes, according to federal statistics, are

• 14 times more likely to commit rape,
• 32 times more likely to run away from home,
• 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders,
• five times more likely to commit suicide,
• ten times more likely to abuse chemical substances and
• 20 times more likely to end up in prison.

And without the widespread use of contraception, the sexual revolution, which is the attempt to make fornication a normal and socially accepted practice, founders on the imprudence of risking pregnancy. Contraception by design lowers the moral hazard of pregnancy, and this makes the normalization of fornication possible, which in turn correlates to the rise in the social pathologies listed above.