Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (10 page)

They grew up continuing to like childish things, superheroes and space opera, and did not put their childish things away as the elite, with sneers, demanded. They continued to feast on tales of heroes: the childish things were also the noble things.

Young men want noble things, to slay dragons and rescue damsels in distress, to help widows and orphans and win glory. Young women want even nobler things, to be rescued by a handsome prince on a white charger with a heart of fearless gold and a sword of peerless fire. And they want to win the kind of men who win glory.

Many a young man these days, poisoned by the venom of envy called feminism, will deny this, and even more young women. Then the men will go out and read paperbacks about spies or special forces officers who do what knights do, and the women go out and read paperbacks about heiresses kept as wards by scheming guardians who need to be rescued by brooding yet stalwart young barons.

It may be inconvenient to the pretenses on which the modern unfantastical literary fashion is based to say that people like things that they have always liked in stories. But human nature will out. For good or ill, for fair or foul, human nature will out.

And the young men (it was more men than women) found the principalities and the principles they sought in science fiction. And the young women (it was more women than men) found the princesses they sought in the field of fantasy.

The literary are still aghast at the popularity of authors like Robert Heinlein and Anne McCaffrey. But he fed the imagination of the young, and told them how to be good rebels and statesmen in the American Revolution on the Moon, or how to be good citizens and soldiers and good starship troopers, or how to be naughty little messiahs from Mars and get all the girls. And she fed the imagination with the simple and simply satisfying formula of retelling the Cinderella fable over and over again, about the overlooked and ignored young heroine who grows into her greatness. Heinlein and McCaffrey appealed to the reader’s human nature.

Anyone who is unimpressed with sneering atheism will be unimpressed by the famous science fiction works by Margaret Atwood or the fantasy of Phillip Pullman and those of their ilk. Pullman was as blasphemous as Heinlein was in
Stranger In A Strange Land
, but not as funny, and the ending of his
His Dark Materials
was dark indeed and unsatisfying. (Pullman’s hero and heroine end up parted by a law of nature invented at the last minute by a lazy author, which decrees that persons of different earths in the multiverse sicken and die if they immigrate).

It is the kind of thing one reads when a surfeit of happy endings leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and you need a swish of pagan vinegar to wash out all that Christian saccharine endemic to Western civilization. Everyone likes a vacation from happiness occasionally, I suppose.

The miserable and empty universe of the pagans after the Gotterdammerung has slain the cruel but noble gods is a nice place to visit, but no place to set up a household and raise your kids.

The artistic images of the emotional world of the unfantastic fashion are like the melancholic world of the pagans, where fate is deadly and there is no escape, where not even swift Achilles can outrun his doom: Like the pagan world, but lacking the bravery of a Conan who gaily curses great Crom, his god, even while praying to him, and without the dignity of a Horatio who proclaims the sweetness and decorum of dying for the ashes of one’s fathers and the altars of one’s gods.

Gods are as despised as fathers in the one-dimensional world of unfantasy, and nothing is worse than death, simply because the mindless biological process known as life is the only life that there is.

To live in a universe-sized concentration camp ruled by rough tyrants like Zeus and Crom is bad enough. To live in a universe-sized coffin without even a tyrant god as a tormentor is unimaginable.

And, to be sure, those who live in such universes do their best to banish the imagination from their stories, and to write make-believe only about beliefs that require no making: fictional versions of newspapers and diaries.

The majority of human history and the three dimensions of human nature, spiritual as well as mental and physical, are lost on writers who are one-dimensional.

Lest I be misunderstood, or accused of overweening pride, let me hasten to say that Atwood and Pullman are admittedly skilled and worthy of the awards and plaudits they have won. This does not mean they are broad in their choice of subject and approaches. An artist can draw a picture of the rotting skull of a dead dog on a dungheap with maggots and blind worms crawling on its exposed brains with perfect perspective, shading, composition, and balance of light and dark, and yet it is still a picture of a dead dog.

Writers like Pullman and Atwood are like Mr. A Square of Flatland. The spiritual and philosophical dimensions of reality are closed to them.

(Yes, I say these allegedly philosophically deep authors lack philosophy if they lack knowledge of the spirit. Philosophy without theology is a word game for bored schoolboys like Wittgenstein and for dull-eyed egomaniacs like Nietzsche, not a method to tell men how to live and how to die; the modern attempts to draw out the implications of such philosophies have ended in paradox and pettifoggery, and have drawn modern philosophy into well-merited contempt.)

Very well: let us now take it as given that science fiction is in the mainstream again, and fantasy writers like Tolkien occupy the high position once held by Wagner and Shakespeare and other writers who touch on fantastic things, or who put gods or ghosts, Alberich or Caliban, without a blush into their tales.

What now? Whither goes the future of science fiction and fantasy? What is it for? What purpose does it serve?

We know what purpose removing imaginative and fantastic elements from literature served: it was for the admitted purpose of subversion, to denigrate Western Civilization, which is another name for that energetic, frantic, and progress-loving and reason-loving civilization issuing from Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor and the Middle East which is animated by the spirit of the Christian Church, and which dies without it.

Are you surprised, O reader, to hear me call Christianity the spirit and soul of reason and progress? The words have been successfully subverted to refer to their mere opposites. Contrast, if you will, the gaiety and boldness of a civilization that eliminated the slave trade worldwide, despite the economic loss involved, with the grinding passivity of civilizations like those of Imperial China or caste-based India or the tyrannies of the Aztecs and Mayans, where the soul is scraped clean of hope, faith, and charity by a view of the world which promises an endless wheel of eternal reincarnations, without a creation, without a cessation.

Now imagine that same hopelessness without even the inhuman justice of Karma, without the promise of a next life, and you have the image of what a postchristian civilization would be like: rule by a caste of Mandarins without the honesty of admitting it to be a caste system, with as many human sacrifices as the Aztecs—without the candor of calling the many victims aborted in the womb or slain by the slow torture of dehydration in the sickbed of the terminal ward "human". Call that nightmare world what you will, but you cannot call it a fruit of progress or a scion of right reason without telling such lies as makes men lose their souls.

If to usher in the dystopia of a postchristian world was the point of removing imagination from literature, of removing the making from the make-believe, what is the purpose of restoring the imagination?

Ah, one might as well wonder what is the purpose of wonder? What is the purpose of art?

The question has confounded and preoccupied wiser heads than mine, and yet the answer, or part of it, seems clear enough even to a humble inquiry. For if we imagine a world without imagination, we will see what it serves.

Picture if you will some inhuman race of Lunar insects or Martian mollusks or posthuman Morlocks as envisioned by H.G. Wells who are as rational as man, who can plan for the future and perform abstract intellectual operations as mathematics and science might require. They have all the virtues proper to beings of their condition, let us say, and let us grant that they are more admirable than mankind in this area, being more peaceful, perhaps, or showing more compassion for the poor.

But they tell no stories.

Let us say the Morlocks have news reports, and have also a faculty for distinguishing central elements to be left in the report with peripheral elements to be discarded. They can tell stories of things that really happened. But they have no imagination, no ability to mix and match elements from their history and environment and invent a realistic unreality. The Morlocks have no ability (as we Houyhnhnms call it) to “say the thing that is not.”

What would be lacking from their lives? Obviously the question can only be answered poetically, not literally. They would lack that oasis, and fountainhead, and wellspring where we mortal men seek waking dreams to refresh us. They would lack the waters of the Hippocrene that restore the soul or the wine of Bragi that elevates the spirit. They would lack for nothing but nectar and ambrosia.

All stories that are proper stories take place in the mental universe where the supernatural is possible. Even a perfectly worldly story like
War And Peace
or
The Brothers Karamazov
occurs in a mental landscape where the miracles of saints or the visions of the dead might happen, even if they, during the events described, happen not to be encountered; but the wonders and horror of wars that shake the world are encountered, or crimes that question the justice of God do happen.

Stories serve several quotidian purposes. I listed them above: they are fables to instruct the young and epics to preserve the memory of the great, and ghost stories to tell about campfires to give us all a sense of proportion and remind us, (like the charioteers of Caesars during their triumphs and ovations), that all men are mortal. But there is something more that they serve, a purpose which is utterly unworldly, and utterly inexplicable to the Morlocks, who have no imagination, and need none.

We sons of Adam are exiles here on this world. It does not suit us. We are not comfortable here, and those who say they are comfortable in this world of injustice and disease and death are not more sane and more well adapted to the environment than we who dream; they are merely inert in their souls, too dull to hear the horns of Elfland softly blowing.

We tell stories because we are homesick for heaven and afraid of hell. We make stuff up because we don’t know or remember what it might be like on the other side, the unspoiled side, of life.

Here in this world, justice loses, and beauty is weak, and truth is shouted down, and everything goes wrong. But we know, in our souls if not in our hearts, that we deserve better. We deserve and yearn for a world where justice triumphs, and beauty is all powerful and truth cannot be quenched by lies any more than insubstantial shadows can fly from earth to the center of the solar system and strangle the sun. So, to remind ourselves of what we have forgotten, we talk about times in real life when justice triumphed, or the beauty was not marred, or truth could not be hidden. And for the same reason we tell tragedies when the truth destroys men like Oedipus or justice carries out a fearful vengeance on man like Agamemnon; and yes, again, we tell ironic stories, stories that grin like skulls, where all these things go wrong, and innocent men are buried alive or children die in their prayers and leering evil triumphs, and this reminds us that we do not belong in the world where these things happen. As I said above, these bitter stories of horror and despair are a vacation meant to clear the palate, a sour lime and bitter salt after the tequila.

Even those of us who do not believe, in our heads, in other worlds beyond this world, and other lives after this life, show by the types of stories we take for our myths and legends and epics and nursery tales that, in our souls, our dreams are better than our lives. If these dreams come from nowhere and for no purpose, then all dreams are vain, or are opiates, and the unfantasists are right to condemn and eschew them as escapism. They are as right to banish wishful fantasies of Arthurian knights and giant-slaying Jacks and Homeric heroes and shining samurai as they are to scoff at fantastic nightmares of blood-drinking ghosts and haunted cities beneath the sea, monsters in the dark or in the cracks between the ulterior dimensions of timespace.

If the unfantasists are right, there is nothing before the blood of childbirth and after the mud of the grave, and what lies in between is the stingy happiness which the pursuit of meaningless pleasure can find, or vain ambition, or love which is like a drowning couple clinging to each other’s warm bodies in a maelstrom, eager for one last kiss before the storms eat them, and no memory is left.

But if the dreams are echoes of the real primordial disaster that is still reverberating through the cosmos with the fall of Lucifer or the fall of Adam, or if the dreams are whispers through the crack in the prison wall of mortal life from immortal lips outside, then escape is not only our joy, but our duty.

Science fiction looks to the future, or to the extraterrestrial wonders of the present, or to anything odd and above the merely quotidian to inspire and fire our dreams. It requires less faith in the unseen or supernatural than wilder stories told by Shakespeare or Milton or Virgil, because the skeptical imagination cannot be skeptical toward the idea that skeptical inquiry into the roots of nature yields technical and scientific advancements which, by definition, we cannot now, trapped in the present, know. Nor can the scientific curiosity be incurious about the curious things which curiosity might uncover. The very core of science fiction is the certainty that the future is uncertain, that things change, either in progress or regress or both at once, and even the most unimaginative imagination must admit that the future world and extraterrestrial worlds are unimaginable. It offers an escape from the everyday, which even those who hate escapism cannot call escapist.