Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

by Wright, John C.

  Heinlein’s sexual neuroses, thankfully absent from his juveniles and Future History stories might seem to be at odds with this sense of honor, but the libertarian conceit in his philosophy pretended that such vices could be indulged without harm if done by sufficiently mature and virtuous men. Given this false-to-facts conceit, it becomes at least self-consistent for a man to preach that personal independence both required patriotic defense of self and home and laws and race, and permitted any vice or self-indulgence as the self-sovereign individual or self-apotheosized god might please himself to do.

  A.E. van Vogt, the least well remembered of the three, rejected, and rightly so, the shallow philosophical concepts of the European intellectuals as to what would constitute the superman, the next evolutionary step beyond man. The Europeans assumed the next stage of morality was to shed all moral scruples, and to become as cold and hard as a machine.

  Do not be deceived, O reader, by such external and extraneous frippery as the mind reading tendrils of Jommy Cross, or the teleportation of Gilbert Gosseyn, or the immortality of Walter S. DeLany, founder of the Weapon Shops. These supermen were superior, precisely because the moral conscience and altruism of the supermen was superior. The superpowered Coeurl and the Rull and other monsters from his early stories were inferior because of their inflexibility, their moral retardation. For Van Vogt, the larger brain of the Martians of H.G. Wells, or the cold remorselessness of the superman imagined by Nietzsche were of no account if not also wedded to a greater moral sense.

  The philosophy of all three, and indeed of Campbell himself, as we can see in the types of stories he wrote and bought, agreed on its prime axiom: Man is the measure of all things, and if he measures himself against the infinite hostility of the infinite cosmos, he must grow in his soul and reason, and be large enough to encompass that cosmos.

  This was not Arthur C. Clarke’s view. His was more similar to H.G. Wells’s view, namely, that man would eventually evolve into something glorious in its own way but ultimately inhuman. His was certainly not Ray Bradbury’s view, which was not so impressed with vast vistas and boastful futures, and more interested in the joys of home and hearth and the mysteries of the woods beyond the backyard, and the deeper mysteries of the human heart.

  In the Hard SF view Campbell spread, we men are Homo Instrumenta, the Tool-Using Man, the Problem-Solving Man. Behind us is the ape-man and before us is the interstellar man, the cosmic man.

  This is perhaps the inevitable outgrowth of the Enlightenment philosophy which informs the American character. These are typical or even archetypical American stories, as much as anything by Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce.

  The cynicism met in the stories is similar to the unromantic view of man, ambitious, easily tempted man, which underpins so much of the American character. It is why we mistrust Big Business and Big Government and credentialed yammerheads without a lick of common sense.

  But the optimism, the belief that a clever man with a clever system can solve things, fix things, correct things, also underpins so much of the American character. That is why we trust the brain trusts and experts from City Hall and concerned activists from the college campuses to organize and solve public matters, and why we trust free enterprise.

  If any man can explain why Americans mistrust Big Business and trust Free Enterprise, trust academicians and mistrust yammerheads, trust City Hall and mistrust Big Government, that man can explain the American character.

  And that man, furthermore, will understand that Hard SF is not just any story that puts technology at its heart. The heart of Hard SF is this cynical optimism, the paradox of men whose feet are firmly planted on the ground, and yet whose hands reach for the stars.

  The Fourth of the Big Three

  During the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the Big Three Names were the three authors with the greatest prestige in the John W. Campbell, Jr. stable of authors: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and one now is unfairly unrecognized, A.E. van Vogt. His obscurity may be due in part to a malign attempt by Damon Knight to undermine his career.

  These days, the term “The Big Three” is still sometimes used, but the third name is given as Ray Bradbury or Arthur C. Clarke. Why this should be is also unclear, since no one linked the names at the time, but, again, it may be due to Damon Knight, who for all I know is also responsible for the hole in the ozone layer.

  Arthur C. Clarke is a fairly convincing stand-in for a Campbell-style writer, and indeed he sold his first story to Campbell, (“Loophole”, which appeareed in Astounding in 1946), so this may be why he is often photo-shopped into the position A.E. van Vogt was airbrushed out of. But I would argue that there was a theme, or even a philosophy, to Campbellian fiction, and that Clarke represents an older, and perhaps more literate, style of science fiction harkening back to H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon.

  I submit to your candid judgment that Arthur C. Clarke has a particular sense of a broader vision, and yet it is a darker vision, of man and his ultimate fate in the universe which is in keeping with H.G. Wells and alien to Campbell.

  Asimov, Heinlein, Van Vogt and other regular contributors to Astounding betrayed a heady optimism typical of America at that period. The tales regularly involved heroes who solved their problems by reason, by the power of science, and they were, in effect, something like the hero in detective stories who always gets his man before the end.

  Even stories that seem quite grim about their view of the littleness of man in the universe—Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” springs to mind as an example—are based on an optimistic idea. “Nightfall” assumes that men of a world where the sunset came only once every thousand years would go mad at the sight of stars. This at first seems a pessimistic view of man, that we are like the ninnies in Lovecraft stories, who go insane upon learning the truths of the universe, rather than being fascinated. But in fact the idea is a typically modern one, full of the optimism and hence the folly of modernity. The idea here is that men are plastic and pliant in our souls, and that evolution can adapt us eventually to any environment, or propel us eventually to superhuman heights.

  Science Fiction differs from all other genres. Membership in another genre is based on elements that appear in all stories. To be a detective story means to have the mystery plot. To be a pirate story means to have a pirate character. To be a Western means to have a frontier setting. To be a horror story or a romance means to have a theme or mood of fear or love. All stories, (except modern mainstream ones), have plot, character, setting, theme, mood. But Science Fiction has one thing more. It has world building. To be Science Fiction the natural laws of the story-world, which include the science and technology, must differ from the laws of the real world we know, and the expectations of the reader must be flexible enough to adapt to the new rules.

  This flexibility is why imagination is paramount in the Science Fiction field, and, for hard or realistic Science Fiction, it is a disciplined imagination.

  Readers are simply cheated if the story-world has laws and technologies and therefore expectations of what is possible or not altar and warp and change according to the storyteller’s convenience. Readers are simply cheated if the story does not explore any logical yet unexpected side-effect of the hypothetical situation.

  (If the supernatural laws differ, and include witches and magicians, dragons and elves, or anything redolent of the period before modernity, this is Fantasy, which is a sister empire to science fiction, overlapping in some places, and which these days bids fair to replace her, but the two are nonetheless distinct.)

  I would go so far as to say that Science Fiction is the essential and archetypal literature of the modern age, because it is the only literature which confronts and incorporates the central idea that separates modernity from all past philosophies and worldviews: namely, change and evolution. Science Fiction is more popular during eras when technological change is faster or more profound.

  To be sure, men of the Enlightenment, and Renaissance, and Middle Ages, and
the Ancient world were aware of technological changes in history: But these occurred at a slow enough rate and small enough scale that it was not the central pillar of their worldview. The essential note of their worldview was one of stability and centrality. Even after the Roman Empire was long fallen, the European mind continued to use the Empire as the basis of reference and comparison and as the source of legal legitimacy—up through the Napoleonic Era, which was the era of revolutions, and arguably the beginning of the modern world.

  So I submit that Science Fiction, no matter what it seems to be about, is always about progress, and even when it is a cautionary tale, is a caution about progress gone wrong.

  I would also suggest—for the point is too broad to be argued here—that Jules Verne wrote the type of fiction that Campbell would later expand upon, the hard and technophilic SF set either in a today or a nearby tomorrow of a world not much changed. Asimov, Van Vogt and Heinlein tended to set their stories no farther in the future than the launch of the Wright Brothers was in the past, or the American Revolution. When tales were set in the farther future, as Slan or Foundation, the cultures were immediately recognizable: Slan is set in a totalitarian fascist-state, complete with secret police, and Foundation is set in a Roman Empire, complete with Emperor and Senate.

  In each case, the fundamental benevolence of the fate in store for man is on display in the imaginings of these and other Golden Age authors. Before the Gold Age, the pulp field was famous for stories of apocalypse and scientific Götterdämmerung. One can grow weary counting the planets destroyed by Edmond "World-Wrecker" Hamilton or E.E. “Doc” Smith. But the Age of Campbell was different.

  The Future History of Heinlein ended in an era called the Maturity of Man, when, thanks to advances in General Semantics and psychology, insanity and therefore war and therefore the need for government is left behind on Earth and the stars are ours; the Foundation stories of Asimov promised a Second Empire ruled by a benevolent technological elite, mind-reading psycho-historians who had mathematical control over the future, and could obviate wars before they began; the Slans of Van Vogt, and the Null-A men likewise were creatures more wise, more sane, more benevolent than man, and were secretly or openly ruling them for the good of mankind and their own.

  Please note the recurring theme. Politically speaking, no matter where a Campbell author falls on the spectrum, he regards the human condition, the political nature of man, the questions of war and government, as a problem that can be solved.

  There is no Greek Tragedy for the Big Three, no Twilight of the Gods which Odin foretells and cannot forestall. But then again, the Campbell authors rarely fixed their eyes on the farther horizons, or told us what would happen after the golden age of nudist telepaths on new world the near future promised.

  On the other hand, Arthur C. Clarke and H.G. Wells are haunted by a sense of the true magnitude of time, and while some of their stories, (A Fall Of Moondust or The Isle Of Dr. Moreau), are near-future tales, these authors are most famous for those which go to the end of mankind and beyond.

  H.G. Wells, when he has his Martians invade Horsell Common, is putting on display not a truly alien creature of truly alien psychology, such as Tweel from “A Martian Odyssey” by Standley W Weinbaum. Wells is instead showing the dark Darwinian future of man, a creature as feeble compared to modern man as modern man was to, (at least Wells’ Victorian conception of), a Cave Man or Noble Savage, but as developed in those organs of his superiority, his brain and his hands. The Martian is the Wellsian conception of the Man of the Remote Future as sculpted, not by some fatherly supernatural Creator but by the remorseless and bloody chisel-blade of blind Mother Nature.

  Likewise, in The Time Machine, we see the effects of the passage of deep time on the evolution of man, because eight hundred millennia of civilized life has bred out of the possessing classes intelligence, self-preservation, and overt masculinity, and reduced them to Eloi, mere livestock for the cannibal troglodyte Morlocks, whose breeding was the opposite.

  Three novels of Arthur C. Clarke show his vision of the remote or ultimate destiny of man, and they are just as cold and eerie as the vision of H.G. Wells.

  In Against The Fall Of Night we see the city of billion-year-old Diaspar, inhabited by immortals, alone on an otherwise barren Earth, a veritable city of despair, when one lone lad, Alvin, chafes against the sterile perfection of the deathless utopia, and seeks the hidden past where once man roamed the stars. All that is left of those days is a legend of a vast and alien power that refused the other worlds to man, and drove man out of heaven and back to a barren Earth. The tale ends on a note of hope, when the siege of eternity is broken, and man once more turns his eyes outward.

  In 2001: A Space Odyssey, we see man evolved by the direct intervention of transcendentally superhuman beings from space, who wait for him to achieve spaceflight, and select one astronaut for evolution into something as far above us as we are above our ape-man ancestors. The man dies and the Star-Child, incomprehensible to us, is born.

  But the clearest expression of this theme of deep time is Childhood’s End. This tale is unique among invasion stories, because the aliens are benevolent. On the very brink of the launch of the first spacegoing ships by the Russians and the Americans, the aliens conquer mankind out of a condescending need to impose order on us, to preserve us from atomic self-destruction, and to deny us the stars.

  In one of the most striking images of all Science Fiction, one copied more than once, vast disk-shaped ships hang weightlessly over the cities of man, announcing the end of human dominion over the Earth. War and crime, hunger, and even cruelty to animals are instantly done away with. There is no war, no resistance, because the Overlords are superior in technology in a fashion that is simply irresistible.

  Two centuries pass, and mankind, no longer their own masters, withers under the benevolent peace, losing religion, losing will to live, turning its eyes inward away from the stars forever beyond reach, puttering away the years before the extinction of man.

  For the children of men are being born with psychic powers, and an evolutionary change as dramatic as the end of the Neanderthals is coming to pass: and this is the true reason for the visit of the Overlords. With something of an apology, the Overlords kidnap all the psionic children, and explain that the invasion was meant not just to stop mankind from destroying itself by scientific investigation of the power of the atom, but to stop mankind from destroying much more by scientific investigation of the paranormal.

  A man stows away on one of the alien vessels, and is the only human to visit the homeworld of the Overlords, NGS 549672 in the Constellation Carina. Here he finds the Overlords—who turn out to be the horned and winged demons from Christian mythology—are no more than the thralls of a being immensely superior to themselves, an Overmind which exists as a purely psychic entity or collection of entities. Returning home after eighty years, it is discovered that the children of the human race are no longer human, but are dull-eyed members of a vast telepathic group-mind, that they are no longer men but Man, Man-as-One, or, rather Superman-as-One.

  Freed of its need for planetary, or even physical existence, and equally beyond the comprehension of human or Overlord, the mass-mind destroys the Earth and joins in an inexpressible cosmic union with the Overmind.

  The last star vessel departs the now-empty solar system, and the alien Overlords regret that, for reasons unknown and inexplicable to them, while they can help nursemaid other races into transcendence, they will never join it themselves.

  On this note of sorrow, the book, and mankind, ends.

  Now, I suppose an utterly bloodless intellectual with no great love for mankind or any of the things that make us human might regard the theme of transcending into posthuman inhumanity as a noble or hopeful one, but that is not the message of the book. The alien-influenced children of men turn into something described as being repellent in their nonhumanity: the posthumans have no more expression on their faces than idiots, and the
romp through the wilderness, naked as prelapsarian man, in some dance-pattern covering the continent, and too complex even for the aliens to comprehend. This is The Midwich Cuckoos where the cuckoos are triumphant.

  The book is meant to depict a disquieting sensation, similar to looking at the ruins of Nineveh and Tyre, and seeing the current glory of London, or looking at the bones of dinosaurs, and seeing the men and horses on the modern street: this too shall pass.

  The glory of man is to pass away, and the superhuman children of man are superior without being benevolent, or companionable, or friendly. They are not even godlike: no Zeus of the new race visits any Semele, even in disguise. There is no more amity or concern between the species than between man and ape.

  I suggest that this is a thoroughly H.G. Wellsian view of man and his place in the universe. To fly off as disembodied minds in the train of a cosmic Overmind is a fate as disquieting as that of the Eloi or Morlocks, but if these creatures were at the same time as superior as the vast, cool, unsympathetic intellects of Mars.

  I note also that the writing style has the same lyrical stiffness and history-book quality as H.G. Wells. While I can recall characters from Heinlein and A.E van Vogt, Lazarus Long or Gilbert Gosseyn, whose adventures were written in either a florid pulp style or a slangy journalistic style, rapid of pace, Childhood’s End is written more like The War Of The Worlds. None of the main characters make any impression on the imagination, the prose is dignified and austere, more like Edward Gibbon than like World-Wrecker Hamilton; and the plot is that of a great historical event unfolding, not like that of a murder mystery in space or an interplanetary adventure or even a puzzle-solving story about a malfunctioning robot.

  Partly by upbringing and partly by inclination, I tend to appreciate and savor the Big Three authors a bit more than this Fourth of the Big Three. I do not think he fits in their ranks. The American optimism, the belief in progress, the sheer orneriness of the Campbellian hero has a greater appeal to me than the Wellsian man, overwhelmed by events, evolved into Star-Child or absorbed into Overminds as a passive observer of vast unstoppable cosmic events.