Lee ate back at the Sirius globe, but Pascual insisted on his remaining in a biosuit until they had thoroughly checked him out. And they wouldn't let him eat Earth food, although there was as much local food as he wanted. He didn't want much.
“You've thinned out too much,” Marlene said. She was sitting next to him at the galley table.
“Ever see a fat Sirian?” He meant it as a joke; it came out waspish. Marlene dropped the subject.
The whole ship's company gathered around the telescope and the viewscreen that would show an amplified picture of the telescope's field of view. Stek bustled around, making last-minute checks and adjustments of the equipment. Rassmussen stood taller than everyone else, looking alternately worried and excited. Everyone, including Lee, was in a biosuit.
Lehman showed up at Lee's elbow. “Do you think it will work?”
“Driving the telescope from the ship's computer's version of the instrument's tape? Stek seems to think it'll go all right.”
“And you?”
Lee shrugged. “The people in the caves told me what I wanted to know. Now this instrument will tell us where they came from originally.”
“The home world of our ancient enemies?”
“Yes.”
For once, Lehman didn't seem to be amused. “And what happens then?”
“I don't know,” Lee said. “Maybe we go out and see if they are still there. Maybe we reopen the war.”
“If there was a war.”
“There was. It might still be going on, for all we know. Maybe we're just a small part of it, a skirmish.”
“A skirmish that wiped out the life on this planet,” Lehman said.
“And almost wiped out Earth, too.”
“But what about the people on this planet, Sid? What about the people in the caves?”
Lee couldn't answer.
“Do we let them die out, just because they might have been our enemies a few millennia ago?”
“They would still be our enemies if they knew who we are,” Lee said tightly.
“So we let them die?”
Lee tried to blot their faces out of his mind, to erase the memory of Ardraka and the children, and Ardra apologizing shamefully and the people fishing in the morning â¦
“No,” he heard himself say. “We've got to help them. They can't hurt us anymore, and we ought to help them.”
Now Lehman smiled.
“It's ready,” Stek said, his voice pitched high with excitement.
Sitting at the desk-sized console that stood beside the telescope, he thumbed the power switch and punched a series of buttons.
The viewscreen atop the desk glowed into life, and a swarm of stars appeared. With a low hum of power, the telescope turned slowly to the left. The scene in the viewscreen shifted. Beside the screen was a smaller display, an astronomical map with a bright luminous dot showing where the telescope was aiming.
The telescope stopped turning, hesitated, edged slightly more to the left, and then made a final, barely discernible correction upward.
“It's locked on.”
The viewscreen showed a meager field of stars, with a single bright pinpoint centered exactly in the middle of the screen.
“What is it, what star?”
Lee pushed forward, through the crowd that clustered around the console.
“My God,” Stek said, his voice sounding hollow. “That's ⦠the sun.”
Lee felt his knees wobble. “They're from Earth!”
“It can't be,” someone said.
Lee shoved past the people in front of him and stared at the map. The bright dot was fixed on the sun's location.
“They're from Earth!” he shouted. “They're part of us!”
“But how could ⦔
“They were a colony of
ours
,” Lee realized. “The Others were an enemy ⦠an enemy that nearly wiped them out and smashed Earth's civilization back into a stone age. The Others built those damned machines on Titan, but Ardraka's people did not. And we didn't destroy the people here ⦠we're the same people!”
“But that'sâ”
“How can you be sure?”
“He is right,” Charnovsky said, his heavy bass rumbling above the other voices. They all stopped to hear him. “There are too many coincidences any other way. These people are completely human because they came from Earth. Any other explanation is extraneous.”
Lee grabbed the Russian by the shoulders. “Nick, we've got work to do! We've got to help them. We've got to introduce them to fire and metals and cereal grainsâ”
Charnovsky laughed. “Yes, yes, of course. But not tonight, eh? Tonight we celebrate.”
“No,” Lee said, realizing where he belonged. “Tonight I go back to them.”
“Go back?” Marlene asked.
“Tonight I go back with a gift,” Lee went on. “A gift from my people to Ardraka's. A plastic boat from the skimmer. That's a gift they'll be able to understand and use.”
Lehman said, “You still don't know who built the machinery on Titan.”
“We'll find out one of these days.”
Rassmussen broke in, “You realize that we will have to return Earthward before the next expedition could possibly get anywhere near here.”
“Some of us can wait here for the next expedition. I will, anyway.”
The captain nodded and a slow grin spread across his face. “I knew you would even before we found out that your friends are really our brothers.”
Lee looked around for Grote. “Come on, Jerry. Let's get moving. I want to see Ardraka's face when he sees the boat.”
This is one of the pieces I write occasionally for
The Writer
magazine. It is also an example of the frustrations of working for magazine editors.
When I edited
Analog
and, later,
Omni
, I made it my policy to buy only what I wanted to printâand then to print what I had bought. I did not believe it to be the editor's job, or right, to mangle the author's prose. If I wanted changes made in a manuscript, I asked the author to make them. It's up to the author to decide if he or she wants to rewrite to suit editorial whim, or take the manuscript to another market.
Maybe it was just laziness on my part. I didn't want to rewrite pieces before publishing them. Maybe it was because I am fundamentally a writer, and I resent having editors muck up my proseâespecially after they have bought the piece and I no longer have any control over what they are doing to it.
The editorial changes made in “Symbolism in Science Fiction” were not serious. It is unfair, really, for me to complain about them here. But since this was originally written for writers, especially new writers, perhaps this is the best place to post the warning: Beware of editors editing!
Having posted that notice, I now invite you to read what
I had to say about the uses of symbolism in science fiction.
Â
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Nobody writes about the future.
Even in the farthest-out science fiction stories, set millions of years from now on weird exotic alien planets, the science fiction writer is really writing about the world and people of today. The far-future settings, the alien creatures and strange worlds are all
symbols
that replace everyday realities with fantastic inventions.
One of the great strengths of science fiction is to combine symbolism with extrapolative power, thereby producing the ability to examine the world of today by creating a set of symbols that sketch out a future world which is a reflection of here-and-now. Such stories usually are based on a simple question: “If this goes on ⦠how will it change the world and the people in it?” The writer takes a trend from today's worldâtransplant surgery, for example âand exaggerates the situation, stretches it as far as the imagination can reach, then builds a story around that extrapolated society. In this manner, science fiction can produce powerful social commentary. Jonathan Swift, George Orwell, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and many other writers have held up mirrors to their own societies by writing incisive stories based on that question, “If this goes on ⦠then what?”
In such stories the setting, the background, the gadgetry, even the characters themselves, become symbols that stand for the things and people of today's world. For example, Swift's
Gulliver's Travels
is a savage satire of the English society in which he lived. Knowing that a direct attack on his “betters” would get him thrown in prison, or worse, Swift created a series of fantasy worlds in which he could lampoon the people and social customs he saw all around himâwhile keeping his neck from the chopping block.
Many Russian science fiction writers use that tactic today. It is not healthy to criticize the government in Moscow, or the “progressive” society of the Soviet Union. But a story set on the planet Mars, a hundred years in the future, can satirize government red tape and bungling with virtual impunity. Mars (the Red Planet, you know) becomes à thinly veiled symbol for the USSR. Even though the Soviet authorities see through the disguise, they usually leave the writer in peace.
“The government keeps one eye closed,” a Russian writer told me. Even in a society as tightly controlled as the Soviets', there have to be some ways to let off steam, to ease the pressures of oppression; in its way, science fiction serves that purpose in Russia.
It has served similar purposes here. In the McCarthy era, where almost any criticism of American society was pounced upon as evidence of communist subversion, science fiction writers were among the few who fought back. Ray Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451
was a powerful warning that witch-hunting and book-burning destroy not only freedom and democracy, but the human spirit as well.
By creating future worlds and scenarios, science fiction writers can also reaffirm the values of today's society in ways that ordinary fiction cannot. Much of Robert A. Heinlein's work throughout the 1950s and well into the 1960s, for example, was nothing less than an affirmation of the traditional American values of individual freedom over the threatening dangers
of foreign invasion, collectivism, and oppression. The true villains of
The Puppet Masters
are not alien invaders from a moon of Saturn, but the hostile hordes of Russian and Chinese communists whom many Americans saw as a threat to the United States in the 1950s.
But not all of science fiction has a political slant to it, nor are all science fiction stories written specifically to be social commentary. Certainly the field has its share of sheer adventure tales, out-and-out “space operas” that make no pretense of social importance.
Yet, if we look deeper into such stories, we see that even here, symbolism is at work on every page. The symbols are no longer politically inspired. Nor are they symbols in the psychological sense, necessarily, where objects or characters represent hidden thoughts from the writer's subconscious mind. Certainly the psychological symbolism is present; no human being can create a work of fiction without the subtle guidance of the subconscious, and such psychosymbolism is sure to leave an imprint that a trained observer can detect. But the symbolism that is specific to science fiction is of a more conscious, rational, deliberate type.
Take a look at a space operaâeven one as shallow as the motion picture
Star Wars
. Inevitably, such stories deal with a young man leaving his home and parents (often they are adoptive parents) to seek his way in the large world beyond the limits of his youthful environment. Frequently the young man is actually a prince, or some other potentially powerful figure, yet does not know it. The story becomes, then, a tale of his discovery of himself and his own abilities. This is an old, old tale: the voyage of self-discovery, the fictional (or mythological) treatment of the transition from adolescence into adulthood. Every culture on Earth has such tales. They tell the youngsters two
things: one, that the turmoil of adolescence happens to everyone; and two, that at the end of the turmoil lies the new world of the successful adult.
In recent years science fiction and its companion field of fantasy have seen the growth of tales of young women's transition from adolescence into adulthood. Written mainly by women, this trend reflects the growing power of the women's movement in modern society.
While the underlying psychological symbols of such tales are very much the same, whether they are science fictional space operas or the mystical spirithaunted ordeals of a primitive tribe, in science fiction the trimmings and trappings of the tale deal quite consciously with modern technological society. Spaceships replace spirit-voyages. Laser guns replace magic amulets. And the hero's challenge usually requires him to learn how to use science and high technology for the purposes of good, against an enemy who would use such knowledge for the purposes of evil. In the less technological and more fantasy-oriented women's stories, dragons, unicorns, and even bloody swordplay are very much in evidence. But often they are “explained” in terms of the physical, biological, or social sciences.
Vonda N. McIntyre's novel
Dreamsnake
, for instance, utilizes biochemistry and anthropology where a typical space opera would use astrophysics and electronic engineering.
One of the major reasons for the tremendous popularity of science fiction among teenagers is that it speaks powerfully to the young reader in terms that today's adolescents instinctively react to, mainly because the symbols it uses are symbols that the teenagers recognize and respond to, even though the recognition may be unconscious. Science fiction is not the “escapist” literature that some critics believe it to
be, a genre which allows the reader to forget about the trials and troubles of today's world. Just the opposite. Science fiction examines today's world much more closely than any other form of fiction. Only those critics who fail to understand that the settings and gadgetry in science fiction are symbols of today's reality see the field as “escapist.”
It's powerful stuff, symbolism. Like a whisper that can be heard only inside one's own mind, it speaks directly to the reader. It cuts through the visible lines of the story and evokes an unconscious, emotional response deep inside the reader's psyche.
To write science fiction (or any fiction) effectively, the writer must be aware of the symbolic: how to create it, how to recognize it, how to use it.
Symbolism need not be so subtle that only a trained analyst can spot it. In Frank Herbert's classic
Dune
, it is obvious to even the most casual reader that Paul Atreides symbolizes all the messiahs that human societies have longed for since the beginning of time. As he metamorphoses into the godlike MaudâDib, he transforms the society around him. Herbert is clearly telling us the message of the messiah, that the only way to save the world is to change it, that we cannot become godlike without the pains and turmoils of basic, wrenching change. The planet Arrakis, the desert world called Dune, becomes a world-sized symbol of change; by altering it from a wasteland to a new Edenâa change that we instinctively feel is good and beneficialâMaud'Dib destroys the society and the people that we have come to admire.
Symbols can be used in many ways. In my own novel
Colony
, the very idea of a huge, man-made habitat floating in space equidistant between the Earth and the Moon became a symbol of the vast gulf between the extremely rich and the desperately poor. The symbolism was quite conscious and deliberate.
Hanging there in space, built by a consortium of the wealthiest multinational corporations on Earth, the space colony is so far away from our world that only the very richest people can afford to go to it. In fact, it was built by the leaders of the powerful corporations specifically to be a haven for themselves and their families, a place where they can live in comfort, safety, even splendorâwithout being threatened by the masses of billions of unruly poor people on Earth.
The space colony becomes a symbol within a symbol, because terroristsâwho claim to be fighting to help the poor peopleâdecide to destroy the colony as a symbolic act of their hostility to the very rich and all their privileges.
Another form of symbolism runs through
Colony
. The hero of the novel is a “perfect man,” a genetically engineered test-tube baby who has never been on Earth. Born in the space colony, he has never left its comforts. Physically as strong and healthy as it is possible for a human being to be, David Adams carries within his head a miniature implanted electronic communications device which puts him in direct contact with the colony's computerized library. In other words, here we have an Adam in Eden, physically perfect and secure, possessed of all the knowledge he wants.
Except for knowledge of Earth. Naturally he leaves the colony, escapes to Earth, and learns of how the rest of humankind lives.
Like the space colony itself, David Adams is a symbol of the best that modern science can achieve. The colony, though, because it is a lifeless structure of metals and minerals, symbolizes what technology can achieve. David, a living example of human perfection, symbolizes what
we
must be if we are to use our technology for the betterment of the human condition.
In a more recent novel of mine,
Test of Fire
, a slightly different form of symbolism showed itself. In this story, much of the Earth has been destroyed by a gigantic solar flare which set the sunlit half of our world afire. While civilization on Earth has sunk to almost a medieval level, the small human outpost on the Moon was virtually untouched by the solar flare, because it was dug deep underground. The lunar outpost is
almost
self-sufficient; not quite, it still needs certain critical supplies from Earth. And the pitiful remains of civilization on Earth need the technology and scientific knowledge of the lunar pioneers.
The novel deals with this dichotomy and its resolution. But there is a powerful message in this novel, one that I did not really recognize until the book was nearly finished. Underlying the obvious point that humankind needs both the natural environment of Earth and the technological knowledge of science in order to survive, is a deeper point: once the human race has established self-sufficient colonies in space, then the continued survival of humankind no longer depends on what we do on Earth.
Many life forms have appeared on Earth, lived their allotted eons, and then perished into extinction. We human beings now have the power to destroy ourselves with nuclear war or ecological catastrophe. The Sun might one day explode, or some other natural calamity could wipe the Earth clean of human life. But if we have established self-sufficient colonies elsewhere in space, the human race will endure. That is the ultimate justification for space exploration. By expanding into space, humankind can escape the fate of the dinosaurs. A race that has space flight has racial immortality.