Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

by John C. Wright

  (4) Telling stories! Not much to see here either. Lyra tells some stories to the harpies in hell, so maybe something was supposed to happen here. But hell is emptied out and all those spirits die or something, so I am not sure what the point is. For a good example of this message, told correctly, see Bridge To Terabithia, which is a potent and ringing endorsement of the power of the imagination to overcome grief and loss.

  (5) Stay in school! Since the main character is never in a position where book-learning did her a bit of good, and since I assume all the printing presses on her world are controlled by the imprimatur of the Evil Church, this would seem to run counter to that whole Question Authority theme, unless your teachers are not authorities in their subjects. (But in that case, why stay in school?) For a good example of this message, told correctly, see just about any coming-of-age story you can think of, including, shockingly enough, Starship Troopers—young Mister Rico, unlike Lyra, actually gets whipped into shape in boot camp, (no pun intended), and he comes out a better man in the end, due and only due to his education.

  (6) Hating God. For a good example of this message, told correctly, see Atlas Shrugged or read the first three books of Milton's Paradise Lost, whose antagonist, Lucifer, has a much stronger and clearer reason, a non-wimpy reason, for denying and defying God than anything any mushy-headed Pullmanite character can mouth. (We Christians do blasphemy better than you atheists ever will.) Or, if you prefer, read Gather, Darkness by Fritz Leiber for a description of what a real hard-assed theocracy bent on cowing the people through enforced ignorance would be like.

  Is Mr. Pullman preaching against organized institutional religion? Well, Protestants don't like organized religion either, especially American Protestants. So take a number and stand in line.

  Atheists have many perfectly sound arguments they can make against organized institutional religion, and Protestants have also. (We Catholics also have arguments we can make against disorganized religion.) To avoid those arguments and talk instead in a mushy-headed way about the beautiful oneness with the universe that comes when you commit euthanasia on the weak and helpless is simply vile.

  One reader I know said that the description of the slobbery and wretched creature that once was God Almighty in this book reminded him of Gollum. Instead of killing the thing out of pity, as in Old Yeller, and instead of smiting the dying god out of righteous indignation, for hate's sake, as in Moby Dick, and instead of sparing the thing out of pity and not killing him at all, as indeed, Gandalf counsels Frodo to do for Gollum, our author hits upon the perfect plot device to squeeze every iota of non-drama and non-meaning out of what could have been an interesting scene. Will kills God by mistake while trying to help Him. So there is neither pity nor justice in the death: it is just a dumb mistake, a flourish of contempt by the author for his characters, and, I must assume, his audience.

  As with what later happens with the ghosts Lyra kills, God sighs and looks pleased.

  Why the sigh and the smile? Just one more pro-death moment brought to you by the culture wars! I can understand a rational and manly atheism that looks at the abyss of death and does not flinch, reconciled to an evil that no one can avoid. I can understand a religion that promises some farther shore beyond the abyss.

  What I cannot understand is a sentimental and mystical atheism that looks at the abyss of death and calls it good or desirable.

  Many non-Christians, (and some Christians), recoil from the doctrine of Eternal Damnation as an utter abrogation of justice. They ask why any finite crime could be punished with infinite pains? The question is a good one, and deserves a better answer than I can provide in this space: but I will say that divine wisdom may have concluded that a painless oblivion is more unfair, since apparently many more people desire it, yearning for a black nothingness in which to quench their guilt and their hatred toward life, than I could have imagined.

  So the final message is a pro-death one. Here, I cannot advise you to seek out a better, because it is a type of literature I deliberately avoid, as I wish, now, in hindsight, I had avoided The Amber Spyglass.

  Faith in the Fictional War between Science Fiction and Faith

  Is science fiction innately and naturally inclined to be hostile to religion?

  After all, in Foundation, the church of the Galactic Spirit turns out to be a hoax, likewise the messiahship of Muad’Dib in Dune, likewise the Church of Foster in Stranger In A Strange Land, likewise the evil church of evil in Gather, Darkness or The Rise Of Endymion, likewise the church of the rebels in Sixth Column. On the other hand, Christians as a whole are pretty hostile to false prophets and heretics, and Americans, like all good Protestant nations, are pretty hostile to organized Churches. Roman Catholics, on the other hand, would like our church to get organized, and we will get around to that real soon. So are these portrayals of false religions innate to science fiction, or are they merely the dramatic inventions of stories that are not necessarily condemning religion as much as condemning falseness?

  I would say this question breaks into three questions: (1) is there anything innately hostile in SF to religion portrayed as a man-made institution? (2) Is there anything innately hostile in SF to religion portrayed as supernaturally made institution? (3) Is there anything innately hostile in SF to supernaturalism in general?

  All of these are difficult and subtle questions, and I am in the middle of writing a Christian Science Fiction book right now, where Mary Baker Eddy teams up with Nikola Tesla to repel an invasion of the lepers of Mars with the help of a mind-reading lion, called Aslan Is A Slan, so I can deal with these difficult and subtle questions in only the most shallow and trivial way.

  Let us start with a definition: science fiction is the mythology of the scientific age.

  Like all myths, the mythology called Science Fiction must treat with metaphysical questions and questions of the human condition. Being scientific myth, it must cast those questions in terms of a naturalistic idea that scientific progress will open either the Box of Pandora or the Cave of Wonders of Aladdin, or both, such that if the story does not concern some aspect of a change in society or life brought about by a speculated advance in technology, it is not really science fiction.

  This would seem to rule out religion as part of the worldview science fiction uses by definition. If you travel into the future using the time machine of H.G. Wells, you are in a science fiction tale; if you travel into the future escorted by the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, you are in a fantasy. If you turn invisible like Frodo by means of a magic ring, it is fantasy; if by means of chemicals like Griffin the Invisible Man or by cosmic rays like Sue Storm the Invisible Girl, that is science fiction. Your magicians can do everything in science fiction they do in a fantasy, provided only you call your magic ‘parapsychology’ or ‘psionics’ on the grounds that psionics is a natural if unknown phenomenon, whereas magic is a supernatural and unknowable phenomenon (or, technically speaking, a noumenon).

  To craft an SF/F book, we use all the same tools and tricks as a mainstream writer, with one difference. The one thing we do that writers of Westerns, Romances, Detective novels or Pirate Stories do not do is world-building. They use a setting the audience already knows: we invent a new one, even if the invention is no more than the tired repetition of a consensus background many other authors has used, such as the generic ‘space opera space empire’ background adopted by Star Wars.

  So the question becomes whether religion can be part of that background? This breaks into two questions: the natural portrayal of religion, and the supernatural.

  Dune, like all SF that portrays a fantastic or futuristic society in some detail, must portray a fantastic or futuristic religion as well, since religion is one of the great constants of human nature: but the nature of science fiction is inherently interested in the variables in human society, not the constants. So in a period of history where most of the readers are Christian, those of us who want to hear sailors’ stories and travelers’ tales from fictional tra
vel into other worlds and future eons do not want to hear about our own religion.

  We want weird tales. (I suppose if the demographic has atheists outnumber Christians, the atheists who are as imaginative as science fiction readers boast themselves to be will want to hear about Christian worlds, merely because then that to them will have the haunting aura of strangeness.) In sum, fantasy is the weirdness of the Odyssey; science fiction is the weirdness of Einstein.

  Compare Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, where the marriage customs, for example, of the Loonies are as odd and uncouth as the marriage customs of Eskimos, early Mormons or Turks, with the marriage of the Gray Lensman to the Red Lensman in Galactic Patrol by E.E. Smith: the marriage customs portrayed in Heinlein’s book are mind-bogglingly unrealistic, but it is very fine science fiction, because it is a speculation that a change in the environment creates a change in social custom. On the other hand, the marriage in Smith’s book is so realistic it is not science fiction at all.

  Likewise, the conceit in Foundation that the Scientists of Terminus could simply sit down one day and invent a religion of the Great Galactic Spirit, and use their advanced science to perform tricks to befuddle the yokels of worlds, (whose fathers and grandfathers, come to think of it, remembered that selfsame science, and presumably had books or tapes of such things), and that anyone would find such a synthetic religion feasible or believable is itself not believable.

  This theme is a favorite of Sciffy writers, and occurs again in Gather, Darkness by Fritz Leiber, and Sixth Column by Heinlein. Nonetheless, it is perfectly cromulent science fiction, since it is a speculation about a social change caused by a change in technology. (In this case, the tech change must be the invention of the Idiot Cap which makes whole populations really gullible in a fashion only atheists are gullible enough to think could ever happen in real life.)

  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.