Certainly Rosny, as rigorous evolutionist, does not minimize the immensity of the transhuman gulf. Altruism remains an improbable bottle in the evolutionary sea, and Rosny understands this. Yet he uses the possibility of a posthuman narrator to startle us into thinking that a purely material transfer may be feasible in strictly evolutionary terms. Altruism, in fact, plays a similar role in many endgames in later SF. An altruistic act, for example, is at the center of Heinlein’s much later novel Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1958). Here young Kip stands before a cosmic bar of justice. The judges rule to wipe out humanity as a dangerous species, condemning the entire human race to “rotation,” to total annihilation. Kip’s first act is to blurt out his defiance of this judgment. In doing so, he does little more than affirm the judges’ conviction that humanity is dangerous because it is unpredictable by nature. Nonetheless, they offer Kip the individual the option of staying with them, in a sense of becoming the Last Man. He refuses and insists on being sent back to share the fate of the rest of humanity This altruistic act stops the inflexible judges cold in their tracks. Their “logic” is so confounded by Kip, his response is so inconceivable, that they suspend their judgment. Kip finds himself in Targ’s position, if for different reasons. By refusing to save his own life, he becomes, in the eyes of the alien judges, the redeemer of a species whose collective acts have proven powerless to prevent their annihilation. It is Kip’s sole act, as much a statistical improbability as the passage of Targ’s genetic material, that gives all human beings a reprieve, more time to evolve and possibly to avoid their future fate by acquiring, in this interim, the power to challenge and defeat their judges. The fact that Kip’s single altruistic act results in such sweeping consequences can be dismissed as a juvenile fantasy. Read in the light of Rosny’s Last Man, however, the foundation of Heinlein’s narrative can be understood to be a very real, if highly speculative, evolutionary concept.
Rosny and the Logic of Hard SF
Rosny is important in the history of SF because of his rigorous adherence to the scientific vision of evolution, and his ability to construct complex narratives that reject humanist for pluralist visions of evolutionary history. He is perhaps the first writer to launch the master narrative of SF, which traces the evolution of humankind through its technological and environmental transformations, up to the ultimate challenge of transhuman possibility. It is the same master narrative, elaborated (and in the end possibly betrayed) by writers from Bernal and Clarke to the cyberpunks, that could be said to define SF in the twentieth century. Of all his achievements, however, Rosny is finally important as the inventor of a science-fictional manner of thinking. It was Rosny who first created, in Un autre monde, La Mort de la Terre, and other works, a genuine logic of hard SF. Rosny was first to adhere to what became, for later SF, a material imperative. His narratives ground all possibility of figurative interpretation in the literal, material fact of what is stated. Thus, in the final paragraph of Targ’s story, the reader cannot dismiss the past tense, and its denoting of a posthuman narrator, as “convention.” We cannot simply reject the logic of space and time (and grammatical tense) in favor of conventional “suspension of disbelief.” Rather we are asked to take the situation as literal fact, and then to work, in extrapolative fashion, within the parameters of material logic to find some physical means of explaining the existence of this narrator, and from there to identify the vector that has permitted vital communication between two profoundly different chemical kingdoms and histories. Rosny’s bequest to later hard SF writers may be the transhuman problem; more than that, however, his legacy is a particular way of reading narrative, in a purely literal manner. Rosny offers future writers a new way of thinking; he asks them to look beyond metaphors and conventions to the physical facts of the narrative. Let us look briefly at how Rosny’s logic works in two narratives that rewrite the Last Man story in very different scientific climates: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953) and Gregory Benford’s Timescape (1980).
As noted, Rosny’s use of tense makes us define as posthuman the narrator who speaks in the last lines of La Mort de la Terre. And by the same token, Rosny asks us to conceive an audience for this narrator, hence to find a motive for posthumans wanting to listen to this terminal story. By the time of his Childhood’s End, Clarke is clearly aware of the problem Rosny raised: that the conventional Last Man narrative is illogical, and that he must devise a new narrative strategy to tell it. He is also aware that readers will ask why anyone would want to hear that story, if humanity has already transcended itself and become something totally other. In the novel, human children suddenly opt out of the adult world and become the catalysts that convert all earthly matter, animate or inanimate, into the “Overmind.” The novel could end here, for the Overmind is so radically other that, logically, it neither hears nor cares about any story humankind could tell. At the very most, the Overmind might be interested in humankind’s creation myth. But that is not the story told. Instead we have the story of humankind’s demise, a story that logically no longer has a human audience. Clarke understands the paradox, but he persists in wanting a Last Man and his story. He also understands that this Last Man must have a listener within the text. And he creates one—the Overlords.
If we follow Clarke’s logic, humankind is simply the match that starts the fire, the spark that transforms everything on Earth into transcendent energy. Nothing we call “human” passes into the Overmind. At the same time, however, Clarke keeps open the possibility that some aspect of the human might survive, might be passed on to someone somewhere. Clarke thus creates an alternate narrative to that of the Overmind, one in which such a transhuman transfer might be possible. His protagonist, Jan, successfully schemes to be taken to the Overlords’ planet in the belly of a whale they transport to their museum of cosmic species. He does so knowing that when he returns from this near-the-speed-of-light adventure, all that he knows and loves will be gone. But he does not imagine that he will find even the Earth dying, and himself the sole witness to its destruction. Jan tells his story. But now he has a declared listener, for the Overlords are there, located between his dying words and the cosmic void, taking in his words, recording them for some obscure posterity.
Rosny’s Last Man narrative retells the myths of human destiny, exhausting them, until Targ stands as purely material entity before his evolutionary future. Clarke seems to follow a similar logic. Step by step, the story of Jan both evokes and demythologizes the Christian narrative. Jan has a role like that of Jonah, and perhaps his avatar, Christ. If so, Jan’s death may offer hope of “salvation” to someone or something; indeed, if his words then become the “gospel,” they too must be saved. The Overlords (their name suggests the pride that goeth before a fall) are an advanced yet inexplicably reprobate intergalactic race. If the Overmind is a God entity, then they, like Lucifer’s fallen horde, are its emissaries, must do its bidding. As a race they have been passed over by a process that reminds us of election, a process that has chosen humankind instead of them as its vehicle for transcendence. The Overlords remain curators of a Cuvier-like inventory of extinct or dead-end species. What they collect from Earth, however, may offer them a way out of eternal damnation. Transporting the whale, they catch Jan, and literally place him, the Christ-Jonah figure, at the center of their world. He thus becomes their potential savior, his words the Logos that might allow them to escape from evolutionary stagnation.
All of this, however, we learn, like the Overlords’ horns and tails, is preevolutionary apprehension, earlier humankind’s superstitious vision of what is now revealed as secular scientific reality. In fact, humankind’s relation to the Overlords is more like that of Pascal’s rational man to the overbearing universe. They are powerful, and have vast technological superiority over humankind. Yet it is because of its rational (here para-rational) faculties that humanity, however physically weak, finds the way to Overmind. Once the Overmind forms, Jan’s final words, his Logos, are meaningless to it. Yet f
or the Overlords, might not these words, like Targ’s parcelles, contain a code or some information that would open up, to Overlord cryptographers, a path to evolutionary destiny? Might not these words, as with Targ’s legacy, someday become flesh, giving the Overlords the means to become human, or at least let them incorporate some aspect of our otherwise lost species, putting them on an evolutionary path toward eventual access to Overmind?
Gregory Benford, in his novel Timescape (1980), again takes up the Last Man challenge.28 It would seem at first that the science Benford deploys—communication faster than the speed of light and the physical possibility it raises of an infinite number of worlds—abolishes any need for a transhuman experience. In such a universe, the iron laws of causality seem to be circumvented, election and evolution are reduced to localized phenomena within a larger “timescape.” Even so, in this highly flexible space-time net, with its infinity of apparent doors and escape hatches, the fact remains that if there are many worlds, each of these worlds must end, each must have its Last Man. Localizing the Last Man problem has not made it go away. If there is a myriad of Last Men, each must face the same problem Targ and Jan face: they all hope somehow to transmit something of humanity across the barrier of finality, to create the continuity that defines the transhuman moment. In Benford’s novel, Targ’s final moment has been multiplied by x. Each space-time world out of infinitely many has been localized. The question has become: as each world ends, how can the words of its Last Man breach the gulf of its causality? In such a universe, is it meaningful to speak of a trans-anything? Is the timescape nothing more than a bundle of disconnected particules?
In Timescape, the not-too-distant Earth of 1998 is dying from ecocatastrophe, one caused this time wholly by humankind. Two Cambridge scientists, Gregory Markham and John Renfrew, seek to avert disaster by using tachyons, particles that move faster than light, to send messages to the scientists of the past, warning them of the impending danger, hoping to get earlier humankind to alter the course of things before it is too late. They succeed in communicating this information to a scientist in 1963, Gordon Bernstein, and in the nick of time the process is halted, Earth is saved. But the question is: whose Earth is saved? Apparently, at the instant the message from the future is received, the time line splits. Bernstein’s Earth of 1963 will trace its own path, in which there will be no diatom bloom, and no assassination of John F. Kennedy. The world of 1998, however, the sender of the message, remains the world of ecodisaster and Kennedy’s assassination; it must go to its doom.
It seems at first that possibilities for new worlds are infinite. In the dazzling flux of tachyons, each instant divides into its own universe, new worlds without end. There is no longer a need either for apocalypse or for the protracted agonies of evolution. The long view of things is the very opposite of Rosny’s. Yet, just as Rosny’s readers must focus on Targ’s fate, Benford’s readers, still bound by the laws of narrative, must follow the individual destiny of Markham and his world. The infinity of possibilities remains a theoretical construct; as concrete reality, Markham’s world perishes as inexorably as the world of Targ. And in its demise, it snares the reader in Rosny’s ecological play of forces within which and only within which the transhuman possibility can occur.
Rosny’s story is poignant because it holds to a linearvision of time. Edens can be dreamt, but time, like Heraclitus’s river, is physically anchored in the vast flow of living things for which Targ’s humankind speaks. Benford’s physics localizes linear time to individual human units. In Rosny’s space-time, each individual action interconnects to, resonates with, the whole of evolutionary history. In Benford’s world, on the contrary, it appears that each action, even those that alter the past, concerns only its local time line and no other. We realize this when Gordon, in his present, meets the physicist Markham. The reader has already seen Markham die in a plane crash in 1999. But now we have a different “Markham” time line, with no plane crash in its future, and probably no tachyons either. Here we have two world lines, out of a vast possible number, bifurcating, each moving inexorably forward. Most likely it is the particles that move faster than the speed of light, shooting through our universe, invisible like Moedigen, that bring about such moments of double vision, improbably connecting two of an infinite number of possible time tracks.
As if in answer to Rosny’s monolithic evolutionary endgame, Benford’s tachyons seem to promise recapture of a human constant in a vast universe of otherwise indifferent and incomprehensible forces. For if each of us, theoretically, can at any instant generate another world, then causality fails. The river metaphor for time gives way to a Spinozan vision of space-time as a great tableau, where nature itself appears to be modeled on the paradigm of rational order: “Time and space were themselves players, vast lands engulfing the figures, a weave of future and past. There was no river-run of years. The abiding loops of causality ran both forward and back. The timescape rippled with waves, roiled and flexed, a great beast in the dark sea” (238).
Even so, Benford’s very description seems to tell us there is no escape from Rosny’s linear evolution. For even in the act of discarding individual human importance in the great canvas of time, his narrator seems to reassert the human element by using the all-too-human device of metaphor. Because this “timescape” remains the product of a “painter,” there abides, even in this neutral field of forces, the necessity of a human consciousness, a sentient entity capable of deciding to “collapse” wave functions, or not to collapse them. And so, despite the fearful symmetry of the mind-universe it posits, Benford’s text remains haunted by Rosny’s classic sense of time as a one-way stream of life and death. As its loops and waves morph into some great beast in the sea, Benford’s timescape resounds with echoes of Rosny’s paean to life in the cosmic sense. A plane crash in 1999 plunges Markham to his physical end. As the plane plunges, the hard fact of linear time, of his single time line, emerges within his interior monologue, to coincide with, then overwhelm, his unified theory to space, time, and the universe, a theory he will never utter: “They [the trees] rushed by faster and faster and Markham thought of a universe with one wave function, scattering into the new states of being as a paradox formed inside it like the kernel of an idea—If the wave function did not collapse. . . . Worlds lay ahead of him, and worlds behind. There was a sharp crack and he suddenly saw what should have been” (309).
Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind Page 10
