Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

by John C. Wright

  Just as the villain does not need to be a villain, so too the girl does not need to be a girl, or even a human being, or even a physical thing, she only needs to be something, anything, precious to the hero that he seeks and follows and vows to win. She can also be at the end of a very long thread with many twists and turns, but the beginning of the thread has to be in chapter one.

  All the little questions follow smaller arcs within the chapters.

  Please note the difference between a science fiction reader and a normal reader or “muggle” at this point. A muggle has a very low tolerance to no tolerance for being lost at sea when it comes to matters of unearthly or extraterrestrial props, setting, events. If the scene is too strange to him, he will not make the imaginative leap to fill in the details, his mind will be blank of images, and the strangeness will repel rather than allure. He will say, “but that is not real!” and the hypnotic spell will break, and he will close the book.

  Science fiction readers are the opposite. They like the sensation of being lost at sea and not knowing what is going on, and will wait with the patience of Job to be allowed to figure out the unreal reality, provided, of course, that you play fair with them, and actually have a real unreal reality to figure out.

  Let me emphasize two points:

  Point one: first, this willingness to be lost tends not to work across genre boundaries. The reason why a collective groan of disbelief rose up to heaven from the massed fans of Star Wars was because of one line in one scene in The Phantom Menace, when the Jedi says Jedi powers are based, not on a mystical energy field binding the galaxy together, but due to microscopic bodies in the bloodstream. The groan was because the genre boundary had been crossed.

  A mystic energy field is something everyone sort of recognizes from New Age ideas, or Theosophy, or Oriental humbug. It is a simple and clear idea, and it is a mythic idea, from a fantasy story or a fairy tale, including fairy tales taking place “Once upon a time long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” The mystic energy field fits the mood and fits the tone because it fits the genre of the fairy tale.

  Microscopic psionic organisms are a “nuts-and-bolts SF” sort of idea, not from fairy tales but from “hard” SF, the sort of thing Larry Niven might invent to explain the esper powers of Gil Hammond or of the Thrint Slavers, but not the sort of thing found in the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis. It was tin-eared on the part of George Lucas, it broke the mood and thus broke the hypnotic spell of the story, and that is why every fan groaned. It violated the boundary between fairy tale conventions and Hard SF conventions.

  Imagine the difference if, in the first Star Wars movie, in the first scene where Luke meets Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan is called “a student of mind science” rather than “that crazy old wizard” and, instead of handing Luke a magic sword of his father, Obi-Wan pulled out a hypodermic needle and announced, “Your father was biologically programmed to be a Telek. You have the genetic ability too! I will inject you with psycho-mitochondria cells. These will enter your blood stream and allow your body to produce and generate the psychic energy forces that the Telek can produce. It will be painful, but your body can adapt. Are you willing?”—that would have been in the same mood and tone as the stupid scene in The Phantom Menace where a Jedi Knight does a blood test to discover whether a moppet is a Jedi, but it would have established a very different, and very unfairytale-like, story universe.

  The science fiction reader, unlike the muggle reader, will “grant” you at least one unreality on which the rest of your reality is based. The reader knows darn well that Time Machines do not exist, but if you want to tell the story of the Morlocks munching on Eloi of AD 802701, the reader will grant the Time Machine as a courtesy to you, the teller of the tale, to get your hapless hero to the time and place of your setting that you may tell your tale.

  Science fiction readers are more generous with their imagination than other readers, and science fiction writers should be grateful for the latitude they allow to us, or get the heck out of the business of science fiction writing; so say I.

  Science fiction readers do demand that we writers play fair. Once we make an implied promise, we must carry through on the promise, or else the readers feel not merely disappointed, but cheated, as if we lied to them. One implied promise made in the scene given above is that there is a realistic world behind all these dropped hints.

  If you write a paragraph where someone makes references to the Department in charge of manifestations from other universes and fairytale languages and so on, you are promising that you, the writer, have already thought through all the logical implications and the background of such a conceit, and that the details will be present in the story each in its proper place at the proper time, and that the ending of the tale will follow from the beginning in an unexpected but logical way, given the unreal conceit.

  The writer promises that he has thought through the implications of a version of World War Two where the Allies and Axis Powers have secretly made contact with creatures from nearby imaginary universes. Having Hitler become a Ringwraith when he brings through Sauron to Berlin in Chapter Six keeps the promise, since this is a logical outgrowth of the conceit. Even having MacNab discover that his own world is imaginary to yet a third world, where he with trembling fingers turns the pages of a book called Old Men Shall Dream Dreams by John C. Wright keeps the promise, because it is a logical outgrowth of the conceit. You, the author, have to make up whether the Inklings are inventing the universes they write about, or are merely sensing or discovering them. You have to know, before it happens, what would happen if Aslan the Lion, summoned by the Allies, joins a last ditch night mission over Berlin, accompanies the inventor Caractacus Potts in his flying car and the good witch Eglantine Price on her flying four-poster bed, to confront Sauron the Great in the nave of Saint Hedwig’s Cathedral at midnight while the city burns.

  This is true both for science fiction and for fantasy. You have to know how the system works, or the reader will sense that you are just guessing. As above, when Lucas had the Jedi power operate by microscopic blood cells, he betrayed that he did not know how his system worked.

  Mystery writers, by the bye, are under the same constraint. They make the implied promise to the reader that the murder in Chapter One will be solved before the end of the tale, and solved by some reasonable means, not by a miracle (miracles are not allowed, not even if the detective is Father Brown) and that the murderer will not be the person everyone first suspects. If that promise is not kept, the readers are not just bored, they are outraged, just as if they had been defrauded of their book-buying dollar and their book-reading time.

  Point Two: Second, and much more significant is the point that the writer never tells the reader anything unless there is absolutely no other choice.

  Instead the writer lets the reader figure out things from hints.

  If you can help it, you never say, “It was London during the Blitz.” You say, “Out the window a horse-drawn cart was hauling an anti-aircraft gun.” If you can help it, you never say, “He and I are old friends and don’t stand on ceremony.” You say, “He stole my drink and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.”

  You show the readers clues and trust them to figure out the details. This rule is so significant that it has its own name: “Show, don’t tell.”

  The next few paragraphs establish the plot. Plots are about conflict. Conflict means (1) someone we like wants something VERY BADLY and (2) someone or something else whom we like less is standing in the way and (3) someone we like is going to take a reasonable step to get the something he wants VERY BADLY and (4) the reasonable step will go badly wrong in an unexpected way, but in a way that in hindsight seems logical or reasonable.

  Then you repeat. The thing that goes badly wrong means that the someone we like has to take another step to get around the bad wrongness and back toward the something he wants VERY BADLY. He takes the next step, and everything goes even more badly wrong.

  Then he loses his map. The
n his flashlight falls into a storm drain and he has an asthma attack and his seeing eye dog dies. Then the cop who pulls him over for speeding while driving drunk in the nude turns out to be the short-tempered father of the bride he is marrying tomorrow.

  Then it goes more badly wrong for the someone we like, much more badly. Then the party is attacked and scattered by a band of goblins, and then the Gollum is on his trail, and the lure of the Ring is slowly destroying his mind. Then he finds the blasted corpses of his foster parents killed by Imperial Storm Troopers, and his house burnt to the ground. Then Lex Luthor chains a lump of Kryptonite around his neck and pushes him into a swimming pool and fires twin stealth atomic rockets at the San Andreas Fault in California and at Hackensack, New Jersey.

  And the spunky but beautiful girl reporter falls into a crack in the earth and dies. Then he is stung by Shelob and dies. Then he is maimed by Darth Vader and discovers his arch foe is his very own father, and he loses his grip and falls. Then he steps out unarmed to confront Lord Voldemort and dies. Then Judas Iscariot kisses him, Peter denounces him, he is humiliated, spat upon, whipped, betrayed by the crowd, tortured, sees his weeping mother, and dies a painful, horrible death and dies. Then he is thrown overboard and swallowed by a whale and dies.

  Then he gets help, gets better, arises from his swoon, is raised from the dead, the stone rolls back, the lucky shot hits the thermal exhaust port, and the Death Star blows up, the Dark Tower falls, the spunky but beautiful girl reporter is alive again due to a time paradox, and he is given all power under heaven and earth and either rides off into the sunset, or goes back to the bat-cave, or ascends into heaven, and we roll the credits.

  That is how a plot is done. The someone we like is the protagonist. We have to like him. He does not have to be pleasant, he can even be a repellent in many ways, but we nonetheless have to get caught up in his life and adventures.

  The something in his way is the antagonist, and it can be nature or a person. We do not have to hate the antagonist, and, indeed, some of the more memorable antagonists are men who might have been friends under other circumstances.

  The thing he wants VERY BADLY is the McGuffin, the whatsits that drives the plot.

  The reason why he wants it is his motivation, and you have to invent a deep and tear-jerking motivation, something that gets a hook in the reader, or otherwise the reader will put the book down and go watch a rerun of Gilligan’s Island on TV.

  The McGuffin is usually important in order to make it clear why the someone we like wants it so VERY BADLY. No one ever wrote a gripping story about an election to the local school board, unless (under the hands of a crafty writer) the someone we like has some reason why he absolutely, positively must win the election and get on the school board or else something he (and we) greatly fear will come upon us.

  The cleverest writers give the someone we like not one but two things he wants VERY BADLY, and then puts them at odds with each other.

  I love Romeo but hate his Montague family. I love the Shire but want to travel like Uncle Bilbo and see elves and dragons. I love Lois Lane but I have to act like a mild mannered dweeb to hide my powerful secret lest my effectiveness as a crimefighter be compromised, so the girl I have a crush on has a crush on my alter ego and won’t give me a date. I love Jerusalem and would gather her people to me like a hen gathering chicks beneath her wings, and yet her people kill the prophets sent to heal and save her. I love Oz but I want to go home. I think I will miss you most of all, Scarecrow.

  You see, none of these conflicts are about things people only sort of like. It is always about love. You may think me blasphemous to use the Passion of the Christ as an example of drama, but not so: this is the one true story, the greatest story ever told, the tale of tales even as Christ is the King of Kings, and all truly inspired fairy tales and fiction have to contain some echo or reflection of the One True Tale, or else it is no tale of any power at all, merely a pastime.

  The most powerful and potent tales, even when they are told awkwardly and without grace or poetry or craft, are stories of paradise lost and paradise regained; sacrifice, selfless love, forgiveness and salvation; stories of a man who learns better.

  This is why, even in the rather brainless fairy tale setting of Star Wars, Darth Vader has his soul saved when he sacrifices himself to slay the Emperor and save his son. I thought it was awkwardly handled, even stupidly, in that final scene (my gripe is that it was supposed to be a scene of powerful temptation, but the Emperor had nothing to tempt Luke with); but the power of selfless love, sacrifice, and redemption nonetheless brought a tear to my eye.

  This is why in the second Star Trek movie, The Wrath Of Khan, the powerful scene is the selfless sacrifice of Spock as he steps into a radiation-flooded engineering chamber to make a final and desperate repair, laying down his life for his friends. Greater love hath no Vulcan.

  This is why Superman, instead of putting on a crown and declaring himself World Ruler, has to live as a mild-mannered and painfully shy reporter who cannot get a date, and why he must fight crime in secret, with no one knowing about his double life: it is a sacrifice. He sacrifices the praise and love and companionship he craves in order to save mankind.

  This is why Frodo cannot retire to the Shire with a breastpocket full of medals and ribbons and awards and a pot belly, sitting at the local pub and regaling wide-eyed hobbit-lads with tales of his exploits in the Great War. He is sacrificed, and must depart across the sundering seas, having served without reward.

  That is conflict. That is motivation. Together they make plot.

  You read a book from front to back, but you write it from back to front, either knowing the ending (if you write by plot) or knowing the mature version of the hero (if you write by character arc) or know the mood you want to create (if you write by theme). Once you have the end result you want firmly in mind, you work backward step by step.

  Do you write by plot? To have your hero saved by the malice of Gollum, you must introduce Gollum in an earlier chapter.

  Do you write by character arc? You cannot have Mattie Ross be a loving and mature young woman at the end unless she is an unlovable and immature arrogant young pushy judgmental know-it-all at the beginning, and you cannot have Rooster Cogburn be a lovable crusty old one-eyed Marshall at the end, unless he is an unlovable arrogant crusty old one-eyed hard-drinking curmudgeon at the beginning.

  Do you write by theme? To establish a mood of radiant glory when Aslan rises from the dead, you must have the four children recoil with wonder at the mere mention of his name when Mr. Beaver speaks it, even though they do not know the name, because the mood of wonder leads to the mood of glory.

  The patented John C. Wright one-session lesson in how to write is not your last lesson. A good second lesson is to read a book you like and reverse engineer all of its tricks, figure out exactly how the writer does his sleight of hand, by what craft he crafts his spell, and put yourself mentally in the shoes of the stage magician, not the audience, and look at everything backward, from the reverse side.

  And that second lesson is not the last lesson. To be a writer, you have to teach and train yourself how to write until it becomes second nature. I mistrust all “how to” books and articles (including this one) and suggest instead the best method to learn is to try and fail and try and fail again.

  Now comes the hard part. To be a writer, you must write. To be a professional writer, you must sell what you write.

  Go to it.

  Swordplay in Space

  Why is the preferred weapon of the Galactic Empire the sword? It is to answer that question and perhaps one or two other questions of deeper import that this essay attempts.

  Science fiction is now old enough that a perspective of its changes over time is possible, to contrast the dreams of past futures with the present futures.

  A particularly telling survey should look at future war stories. Of all the institutions of man, war is the one that is the closest mortal men ever reach to hel
l. In war, good men do bad things, law and order breaks down, but also becomes tyrannical as military exigencies force civilian rights to one side, and continual fear, danger, desperation, and stench of death renders life brutal and miserable and hopeless. There is one small ray of heaven in this hell, tiny as a thread of sunlight that steals through the lock of a prison door, which is that the emergency can from time to time bring out acts of selfless and un-self-regarding fortitude, patriotism, honor, sacrifice, and heroism.

  War is fundamental. A man’s views on war tell you the basic axioms of his view on life. Because of this, a popular war story will tell you in an abbreviated form much about the storyteller’s most fundamental ideals and fears, and that of his audience.

  I have long maintained that science fiction is the mythology of the scientific age.

  A mythology is an exploration by means of concrete images of the abstractions and passions of the age; myth speaks in a vocabulary of anthropomorphized figures.

  The scientific age was one in which the empirical method explained the natural world to man with shocking clarity, gave him an unprecedented degree of dominion over it, made technological change a part of human experience, and, for better or worse, banished belief in magic, banished the world where woods were haunted by elves and villages by witches, to the remote fringes.

  Hence while science fiction is often defined as stories about future technology or future attitudes toward technology, I submit that a more useful definition would look at the themes, not at the props, of the stories. Science Fiction themes cluster around the factors crucial to the scientific revolution: the shock of clarity when the system of the world is revolutionized: the thrill or terror which accompanies dominion; the wonder or the horror of technological change and its social ramifications; the grim romance of naturalism, when man finds himself alone in a universe of astronomical grandeur and appalling, unending emptiness.