Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (28 page)

Compare this with the way religion is treated in
Galactic Patrol
, where the Earthmen seem to have some sort of nondenominational Protestantism, and, again, since nothing is different from the world of the reader, the make-believe world does not dwell on, nor even mention by name, the church that the Civilization of the Lens follows.

That is on the one hand. If the writer wants to argue that the natural needs of drama of science fiction make it easy to portray all cults as deceptive, and all space churches as monstrous, he’ll get no argument from me.

Science fiction is naturally inclined to dramatize and glamorize skepticism. It is easy to write about frauds like those of the ancient shrine of the Serapeum, with its speaking tubes and hollow statues. Using modern technology to fool the yokels is a natural thought to anyone impressed with Hollywood illusions or the cunning of stage magic. So the story in
Gather, Darkness
proposes a world of illiterate dupes ruled by a hierarchy of Hollywoodized technocrats. On the other hand, the merely technical difficulties of writing about fraudulent atheist conspiracies or institutions deceptively hiding the evidence of miracles and resurrections might deter the authors into less difficult projects.

No SF writer to my knowledge has written one of these “mega-conspiracies that fool the entire world” books starring an atheist conspiracy armed with high-tech tricks, even though the technique of airbrushing unpersons out of old photographs was invented by a real-life and still-in-business mega-conspiracy, namely, the international communist movement.

It is easy to pick on evil institutional churches in SF for the same reason it is easy to pick on evil institutional businesses, or evil institutional governments. Who wants to read about a benevolent Galactic Empire? We want to hear about Jack the Giant Killer. No one wants to hear about Giant the Jack Killer. To portray a galactic-wide institution, secular or spiritual, as Jack facing a foe worthy of the name of a giant would require rare skill.

On the other hand, the other hand of the argument is purely definitional. Is
Star Wars
science fiction or science fantasy? In the same way that it is abundantly clear that the DC comicverse takes place in a Judeo-Christian background, with orthodox devils and angels coming onstage in the pages of
Swamp Thing
or
The Specter
, it is abundantly clear that
Star Wars
takes place in a vaguely Taoist-flavored New-Age-y universe ruled by a mystical ‘Force.' But Taoism is a religion. The materialistic premise that all supernatural beliefs are merely man-made myths and lies and self-deception cannot be true in the galaxy long long ago and far far away. The Force is not portrayed as parapsychology. It is not studied by mind-scientists and stopped by mind-shield generators: it is practiced by an order of Samurai-Templar style knights with distinctly monkish overtones, and stopped by moral evil called The Dark Side.

So, if we wish, we could simply define any story which took place in a universe that had a supernatural aspect to it as officially out of bounds and ‘not true science fiction.’ This would call for some nicety of judgment, since the miracles performed by, say, Paul Muad’Dib or Michael Valentine Smith might be parapsychology as natural as the mind reading powers of a Slan or a Psychohistorian, or they might be a manifestation of the divine as supernatural as the reincarnation of Gandalf the White. This would also eliminate as science fiction books like
Starmaker
by Olaf Stapledon, which, while criminally unknown and unread in these days, has had as much influence defining the genre as anything by H.G. Wells. Nonetheless, God Almighty comes onstage as a character in the last act of
Starmaker
, and, as befits the weirdness of a science fiction story, He is a cruel or Darwinian god, a weird god not at all in keeping with the expectations or experience of the audience.

Now, I cannot use that definition, since I defined science fiction as the mythology of a scientific age, so I cannot rule mythology as out of bounds for the definition of science fiction. Indeed, I would venture to say that every genre of science fiction except maybe for military SF deals more often with mythical or religious themes than with mundane or worldly ones. When is the last time you read an SF story about the danger of a Negative Balance of Imports or Deficit Spending?

Think of any supernatural miracle or magic, and I bet some reader could name a science fiction book that treats with it. Is the resurrection of Spock so different from the resurrection of Alcestis or Aesculapius? For that matter, Gene Autry is brought back from the dead in a resurrection machine in the serial
Phantom Empire
, and so is Klaatu in
The Day The Earth Stood Still
, and so is everyone who ever lived in
Riverworld
by Farmer.

Tiresias or St. John may have visions of the future, but then again, so does Paul Muad’Dib, or, for that matter, so does Lion-O of the ThunderCats. Professor Pinero in Heinlein’s first published story “Lifeline” knows the day and hour of any man’s death, as does the prediction machine in “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” by Cordwainer Smith as does the time traveler in “Try and Change the Past!” by Fritz Leiber.

Other miracles such as bi-location and levitation show up in science fiction as often as a Star Trek transporter malfunction or an experiment with cavorite.

The transcendence promised by religions both Eastern and Western happens in SF so often that there is a name for it: the Singularity, Transhumanism, even though the book that is one of the earliest portrayals of post-human evolution was purely “parapsychological” (i.e. purely mystical) in nature:
Childhood’s End
by Arthur C. Clarke, which seemingly took its inspiration from
Last And First Men
by Olaf Stapledon.

So, the hostility of SF to supernaturalism, if it exists, exists only in a nominal way. All the supernatural events and themes of mythology are endlessly repeated in Science Fiction, but merely given a different machinery and a different name. A saint healing the blind by means of prayer would not be regarded as a legitimate science fictional speculation in an SF book, but an optic-nerve-regeneration hocuspocusulator invented on the spot by Dr. McCoy at Sector General would be regarded as legitimate, even if it was mere handwavium-powered baloneytronics.

Certainly the things that are the topics and themes of myth appear far, far more frequently in SF than in mainstream literature: I can name seven ‘Chosen Ones’ right off the top of my head (and without sneaking a peak at the TV Tropes webpage) from SF/F movies and books, (Buffy, Harry Potter, Chandler Jarrell, Aenea, Paul Muad’Dib, Neo, Liu Kang), whereas I defy anyone to name a single Chosen One from a Western, a War Story, a Soap Opera or a Detective Story.

As far as I can tell, the only difference between science fiction and fairytales from Elfland, is that the sciencefictioneers have to leave unsaid who chooses the Chosen One, or they call it parapsychology rather than magic or miracle.

So, my answers would be: (1) Is there anything innately hostile in SF to religion portrayed as a human institution? Yes, a little, and for the same reason that there is an innate hostility to human institutions of business and government as crops up in any story where the Big Guy is the Bad Guy.

(2) Is there anything innately hostile in SF to religion portrayed as supernatural? No; the matter tends to be ignored by SF and for the same reason that the supernatural foundations of the Church Militant does not come up in Westerns or in Samurai stories. Readers of weird tales want stories about weird things, not about the things we know from the fields we know. Only a very rare writer—only G.K. Chesterton, in fact—can portray ordinary things as if they are weird, and bring out the fantasy and wonder from our own backyard garden.

(3) Is there anything innately hostile in SF to supernaturalism in general? Yes, definitely. Science fiction writers are fond of saying that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but we make this distinction every time we call one book science fiction and another one fantasy.

Yarns with “science-flavored” magic in them, such as the parapsychologists, prognosticators, or telepaths crowding the worlds of
Starship Troopers
or
Dune
or
Foundation
or
Childhood’s End
or
Slan
or
Star Trek
, technically speaking, are fantasy, because the author has presumed a supernatural background, not a change brought about by technology or the scientific method.

But we science fiction types, despite our love of technology, do not speak technically, and we consider magic to be fair game even in so-called Hard SF like the books listed above, provided someone somewhere in the book clears his throat and drops the hint that the magic powers were discovered by psychiatrists rather than by witches, or that they developed by Darwinian evolution or eugenics rather than were granted by hidden powers of heaven or hell or Elfland.

For that matter, an author like Frank Herbert can call his magic-users ‘Witches’ and get away with being shelved as science fiction, and Sheri S. Tepper can call her mind-readers ‘Demons’ and get away with being shelved as Science Fiction, just as long as someone in the book drops the hint that their magic is caused by genetics rather than consorting with spirits, because ‘genetics’ sounds nice and scientifrriffic, whereas ‘spirits’ smacks of spiritualism.

Science fiction in fact is so seeped with religious ideas and ideals, themes and myths and mysticism, that we should pause in astonishment to consider why anyone is even talking about an alleged hostility. One might as well ponder whether science fiction is hostile to fiction.

The clue is not in the question but in the questioner. Some gullible folk in the last century were persuaded by a book called something like
The War Between Science And Religion
, (I am not willing to look title and author up), and it made the case that Protestants were the Sons of Light and Catholics were the Children of Darkness, and therefore the Catholic Church and her most remorseless Inquisition drove all scientists to England, where they invented everything ever. These evil Inquisitors no doubt included Nicolaus Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Roger Joseph Boscovich, Marin Mersenne, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan, Robert Grosseteste, Christopher Clavius, Nicolas Steno, Athanasius Kircher, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, William of Ockham, and their familiars among the laity Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, Louis Pasteur, Blaise Pascal, André-Marie Ampère, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Pierre de Fermat, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Alessandro Volta, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Pierre Duhem, Jean-Baptiste Dumas, not to mention Pope Sylvester II .

NOTE TO THE HISTORICALLY ILLITERATE:
If you do not recognize more than half the names on the list given above, you are not allowed to have an opinion on any question regarding the history of science, so shut up and sit down.

My guess is that the attempt by the International Roman Catholic Church and our albino monk Opus Dei assassin squads of antiscientific antiscientists to suppress science would be more effective if the Roman Catholic Church would only stop founding schools, universities, and producing top-notch physicists whose work is the foundation of the heliocentric theory, genetic theory, the Big Bang theory, and so on.

Meanwhile, the pro-scientific scientists of the League of Science are busily promoting real science with real scientific advancements, such as the ‘materialistic dialectic’ theory of Karl Marx who discovered the scientific basis of history; the theory that everyone who criticizes Freud, who discovered the science of not having to produce predictions or results, suffers from Oedipal Complexes; and the theory of Lysenko that grain inherits characteristics from the environment by means of class struggle in dialectic opposition to other grain-seeds.

For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Lysenko was the Soviet Master Scientist under Stalin. “Scientific dissent from Lysenko’s theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in 1948, and for the next several years opponents were purged from held positions, and many imprisoned.”

And let me not fail to mention the scientists at East Anglia University who hoaxed their data concerning anthropogenic global warming in a scientific attempt to scientifically fool the unwashed masses into accepting the inconvenient truths of scientifically sciencified science.

I believe the same scientists who discovered that the Piltdown Man was the missing link confirmed these findings which were then peer-reviewed by the magnificent Rachel Carson Institute for the Abolition of Bird-Egg-Destroying Chemicals, that bastion of scientifical integrity.

Naturally, the chief of the League of Science, (all of whom have vowed to destroy the evil science-hating anti-scientists of the Roman Catholic Church), is Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov. He was involved in a controversial attempt to create a human-ape hybrid for the Soviet military. Unfortunately, Ivanov attempted to organize the insemination of human females with chimpanzee sperm in Guinea, but the French Government interfered, no doubt under orders from the Vatican.

That is real science for you! SCIENCE! It can do ANYTHING! It is AWESOME!

NOTE TO THE HUMOR IMPAIRED:
Ilya Ivanov and his man-ape experiments are real. I am not actually writing a book about Christian Scientists and Mad Scientists and Mind-Reading Lions fighting Men from Mars, even though that is a Way Cool idea. There is no Anti-science cabal of Catholic Jesuits and Inquisitors out to kill scientists, and there is no League of Science who use their rocket packs and rayguns to hunt down and burn up Inquisitors and Jesuits even though that would also be Way Cool if it happened. Rachel Carson is actually a scientific fraud, as is Freud, as is Marx, as is Lysenko, as is anthropogenic global warming.