Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

by John C. Wright

  Does it strike you as odd, perhaps even insane, to hear the duty of a teller of tales described in this fashion? When is the last time you heard a story that told a simple moral truth, or even that took place in a universe where moral truths were true? When is the last time you heard a fiction that glorified Washington, or Jefferson, or Adams, rather than deconstructed them? When is the last time the wonder of the universe was the subject of a passage in a story or poem you read?

  It is almost as if the tellers of tales think their duty is not to these things, but to undermine, question, satirize, mock and subvert these things. It is as if the tellers of modern tales think their duty is to unnerve the audience, unsettle tradition, and overthrow the American way of life, Christian faith, and Western love of reason.

  I will not dwell on this particular point further; you have perhaps yourself heard tellers of tales expressly say that their purpose is subversion. They cast themselves in the role of playing the Socratic gadfly, to sting the complaisant into questioning their values. But Socrates questioned things to learn the truth of things, that he might live the examined life, that he might know himself. And men who hold all truth to be relative, or to be a fable meant to uphold an unjust social order, have no purpose to their questions, except to erode the world.

  Let us turn to the question of when and why this wrong turn happened. Others have written on this topic more fully than can I. I will mention only in brief that it became the fashion—and it was only the fashion of a season, not an irrevocable evolution as claimed—to write and read stories about quotidian things, about drunks and adulterers and ordinary people suffering ordinary problems.

  From the pages of glossy magazines were banished all pirate gold and secret passageways and secret societies run by masterminds called the Napoleon of Crime. The evil instead was quotidian, the treachery of philandering husbands or crooked businessmen, not the plundering of drug-maddened Voodoo cultists or berserk Vikings or the hordes of Tamerlane. The good was quotidian as well, the bravery of farmers or housewives or clerks facing poverty or social injustice, and not the bold and chivalrous acts of a Paladin of Charlemagne or a lone Texas Ranger facing paynims or outlaws or painted savages.

  Unromance was the order of the day: ordinary events happening to ordinary people, usually without much plot. You need drama to have plot, and drama requires the bold clash of starkest black and brightest white, heroes and villains both larger than life. When the emphasis is on realism, or what is called realism, the three-act structure of a plot, the setup and climax and resolution, begins to seem artificial. And in a world where there is no good and evil, and nothing worth fighting for, there is insufficient tension to have a satisfactory plot.

  With no other occupation for their genius, the teller of the storyless story then concentrates merely on technique, on wit, on the telling of ordinary events, the tedium and small betrayals of ordinary life, with as much verbal pyrotechnics as possible, layers of allusion, riddles of words and unexpected contrasts of metaphor, or experimental techniques, such as writing without punctuation marks. And so, step by step, we descend into the plotless purgatory of works like Ulysses by James Joyce.

  Obviously no one of sound taste enjoys reading such a book. Its appeal is to those rare and sick minds that vomit up wholesome fare, who hate fairy tales and police dramas and romances and Westerns and historical pageants. The sickness is a rejection, through ennui, of all that is romantic and splendid and heavenly and hellish and dramatic and grandiose and sublime both in this world and the next.

  The mind that says the quotidian is all that there is or all that is worthwhile shies back from greater worlds. He is not seeking grandeur in everyday things, (for that grandeur indeed is there, if you know how to seek it). He is seeking a darkness to destroy the grandeur. He seeks to strangle laughter with a sneer. Can anyone recall a single joke, simple and good-natured, not an irony and not a witticism, appearing in Ulysses?

  Such was the mainstream. But notice, please, the earliest limit on what is rightly called mainstream. Das Rheingold by Wagner, if written these days, with its fables of pagan gods and giants, abominable gnomes and mercurial mermaids, would be accepted only by the science fiction and fantasy publishers, not by the prestigious mainstream printing houses.

  The romances of Jane Austen and Margaret Mitchell may perhaps, if we stretch a point, be considered mainstream, but by their emphasis on the follies of love or the manners of the rich, or the tumult of war and its aftermath, the mood and tone is certainly antithetical to the realism beloved of this narrow school of writing I decry as mainstream. Romances belong in the popular mainstream, which is a different (albeit connected) stream from the literary mainstream.

  I propose that the earliest writer properly called mainstream in both the popular and literary sense was Charles Dickens: and yet his earliest book, and the best remembered title, is his A Christmas Carol, which is a ghost story as much as is Hamlet, and a time travel story as much as anything by H.G. Wells. So even at this late date in history, the realistic and the fantastic were still Siamese Twins, two parts of the same body.

  Notice that everything before that time, the work of Shakespeare and Dante and Milton and Aristophanes and Euripides and Homer and everything in between was not mainstream, or, rather, there was nothing outside the mainstream. Shakespeare would write about magicians like Prospero as easily as about kings like Richard or braggarts like Toby Belch. Aeschylus could write about Prometheus the titan as easily as about Cassandra the slave-girl. There simply was no division or demarcation between so called realistic and fantastic stories. All stories were realistic; all stories were fantastic.

  What, then, was it that formed what we now call the mainstream? I say it was the Great War. The First World War crippled something in the consciousness of Europe, and in the intellect of the European Intellectuals, and our envious intellectuals in America, seeking for some reason approval from the genius of Europe which we fled here to avoid, followed along like dogs chasing a parade wagon.

  I suggest that the mainstream was not a philosophy, but a feeling or a fashion, that is, an emotional stance that was never put into words. It was a deliberate rejection at first of only the openly fantastic things, dragons and invaders from Mars; then next it was a rejection of the things that are fantastic but which some people take as real, such as ghosts or the sunken continent of Atlantis; and finally a rejection of those things which are fantastic and wonderful in real life, the heroism of ordinary men, the saintliness of ordinary women, not one of whom is truly ordinary.

  Not just men died in the Great War, but an entire social and political system, and, more importantly, a spirit of the nations, a vision and view of life which was their animating principle. Before the Great War, they believed in ideals like nobility and tradition, in the private ownership of property and the duty to serve the public weal. They believed in virgin maidens and faithful wives. They believed in private modesty as well as public pomp, kings and queens arrayed in gold and purple. They believed in the captains of industry and the captains of war, the silk hats and the tin hats.

  Now, if you are a child of the modern age, you are already hearing a voice in your ear, whispering: that the Victorians did not actually believe in chastity, since they had more whores per square mile of London than any era before or since. That nobility is merely the rich grinding the faces of the poor. That pomp is vanity. That industry is plutocracy. That war is hell, and Colonels are devils in hell. And on and on.

  Did you hear it? I would be surprised if you did not. It is in the air we breathe, it is part of our unspoken cultural assumptions. It is the effluvium that rises like a mist from the words and ideas of the mainstream literature, movies and songs and media in which we are immersed and drenched. It is the voice of accusation. It is the voice of division. It is the sneer of scorn.

  The fundamental idea that died in the Great War was the idea of Christianity. That was when God actually died in the soul of European history. By
the end of the Second World War, which was actually the second round of the same war, God and His law no longer had the majority influence in shaping the laws and institutions of the Europeans. They thought about other considerations first.

  Let me be clear: these ideas were decades older than the Great War. That war was only the final point of no return, the point at which the ever steeper drop of the slope into darkness became a brink.

  The attacks against the concept of the divine were as old as Lucretius, as old as Eden. But in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century these crackpot notions gained respectability, slowly won over the intellectuals, who lured the rest of society toward their simplistically elegant and simply wrong notions.

  So, the artistic world is nothing but the concrete images that make real and solid the emotional and spiritual atmosphere of the age. The artistic world lost faith in romance and grandeur and adventure during and after the Great War because it lost faith in God.

  The barren and roaring chaos of the universe presented to the imagination of him who regards God as myth is void and sad, filled with mindless violence and meaningless pain, and the Great War was as sad and meaningless, as truly horrible as any event in history.

  This world view is not even tragic. Tragedy is cathartic. The empty events, the impact of dinosaur-killing asteroids, the broken legs of monuments of Ozymandias found in antique lands, the sheer emptiness of the blind star-gulfs overhead where our ancestors thought the angels danced—all life in such a world is merely meaningless, a grain of dust lost in a desiccated desert.

  So a movement started to expunge the gold and purple, the glory and the nobility, the gaiety and wonder, and most of all the miracles from art and literature.

  No more paintings of the Creation on the Sistine Chapel; instead we have paintings of cans, of Campbell’s soup cans. No more dragons nor knights, no more Pre-Raphaelites. Instead, we have Picasso, and scrawls a baboon could make by ingesting paint, and splashing out colors by flinging his poop.

  Ghosts and supernatural evils were, naturally, harder to expunge, since they are more in line with the emotional makeup of the empty and godless universe. Supernatural horrors are in keeping with the horrors of discovering life to be meaningless and love to be a sour joke: writers like Edgar Allan Poe, despite his connection to popular genres of detective and horror tales, retained his respectable place among in the eyes of the self-appointed guardians of literature.

  The mainstream maintained itself artificially. Whenever a book that started as a mainstream novel, such as, let us say, Gone With The Wind or Casino Royale, which had the fire of romance or intrigue, adventures in times long gone or in exotic locales across the sea, if its more fantastic and romantic elements caught the public imagination and other writers began writing in the same background, the novels were thereafter considered “genre” novels, love-stories or spy thrillers, and no longer of interest to the literati.

  Science fiction preserved the exiled creatures of the fantastic through these dry years. Science fiction rather cleverly exploits a loophole in the whole worldview that rejects the supernatural. The loophole is that wonder still persists in the unknown, which includes other planets and future advancements. And where there is wonder, and where there is the unknown, the gods and giants and abominable dwarves can make their appearance again, disguised perhaps as Morlocks or Martians or Monolith-builders, higher powers and lower monsters. And even, thanks to Anne McCaffrey and E.E. Doc Smith, dragons can return once more, disguised as extraterrestrials from Pern or from the haunted planet Velantia.

  Fantasy made a slower comeback, and at first even science fiction readers were wary of it. There were a number of fantasy worlds with all the tropes and props of medievalism and the supernatural, but set in space with the magic called psionics to give it the glamor of scientific respectability.

  After Tolkien, fantasy slowly but steadily re-conquered the territory that the mainstream had usurped. Look at the top ten best-selling movies of recent years, and odds are that eight or nine of them out of ten will be movies with some fantastic or supernatural element, from The Wizard Of Oz to It’s A Wonderful Life to Star Wars to Superman to Avatar.

  When persons known for their allegiance to the self-anointed elite, pundits and pedants and the President of the United States, can make casual references to Jedi mind-powers or the One Ring from Mordor, then space opera and fantasy epic have sunk into the marrow bones of the popular imagination. When books that, in my day, a schoolboy would be chastised for bringing to class are now required textbook reading, and when South American writers can write science fiction and fantasy and have it be smuggled into the literary establishment by being called ‘magical realism’—well, at that point, it is not premature to read the eulogy of the narrow literate fashion of the mainstream.

  The term of exile is over.

  Mainstream writers can write once again about fantastic things: love affairs with vampires, let us say, or science fiction dystopias who slay the children of the rural underclass in annual gladiatorial games.

  Star Wars, more than any one single cause, brought science fiction out of its ghetto and into the public eye. Now note this irony: since before the days of Michael Moorcock’s ‘New Wave’ of science fiction, writers of sciffy yearned for the aura of respectability surrounding the European literati and their New York epigones, the subversive and experimental writers who concentrated on style and ignored storytelling.

  In order to play their guitars of seduction before the moonlit windows of the proud fair maidens of the elite, the envious science fictioneers attempted to play the songs that found favor in their ears. The attempt was doomed from the start, because the thing the elite disliked in the science fiction field was the field itself, that is, the sense of wonder, the belief in the future, the love of the fantastic, the glory of utopia and the horror of dystopia.

  We did not win the favor of the mainstream by adopting the tropes and formulae of high literary style into our humble craft of telling stories about space princesses being rescued by loveable space rogues and poor but honest space farmboys who grow into space knights with way cool mind-powers. It was a film, deliberately made to echo and glorify the most lowbrow and popular elements of that least literate branch of sci-fi, namely, the Buck Rogers style space opera, which enamored the public. It was a simple tale about a space princess being rescued by a loveable space rogue and a poor but honest space farmboy who grows into a space knight with way cool mind-powers. The mountain, so to speak, came to us.

  There were other factors, to be sure. With the flop of the Soviet Union, the elite’s dream about heaven on earth lost most of its magnetic and mesmeric force. There was also an inherent logical contradiction built into the nasty and narrow fashion of unfantastic fiction, because the same worldview which subverted all authority from God in Heaven to the cop on the street corner, subverted the cause of virtue by enabling and magnifying the Cult of Youth. Impulsive action, provided it was “authentic” or heartfelt, was glorified above self-discipline, and the energy of youth was glorified above the justice and prudence and courage and temperance of age. Unfortunately for the cause of the unfantastic in fiction, youth is as naturally allured to the fantastic as they are to the idealistic.

  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 knig
hts 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).