Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

by John C. Wright

  Is there a rational basis for this discontent with Arthur C. Clarke’s worlds? It is a judgment call, and reasonable men can differ on matters of judgment, on the weight given one thing or the other, but it is not an arbitrary judgment. Let me list the particulars in order:

  First, the idea of benevolent nursemaids descending from heaven to pry the atom bomb and the spaceship from our chubby little fists is obnoxious on several levels. It is condescending, it is puerile, it is cowardly, and it is typically European. Our ancestors came to the New World to get away from slavish little men who delight in the desire for rule by the benevolent elite. The TV show “V” was more realistic. The benevolence of the elitist aliens turned out to be a trick. They came to eat us.

  The Overlords in this book are never shown suffering any temptation or weakness. There are no factions among them, no argument between tradition and innovation, or between formality and expediency. The Overlords are as bland and unrealistic as any Communist’s daydream of a world government that fades out of existence voluntarily at the end of its term.

  Second, the idea that men would submit without fighting to the last man, without any show of brutality on the part of the aliens, is unrealistic. As I recall, all armed resistance, open of covert, to the Overlords evaporates after one stern warning. While there are plenty of men, maybe most, willing to be slaves, one need only look toward the Middle East or the Midwest to find men, who, for good causes or bad ones, are willing to fight against impossible odds, even with zero chance of success.

  Third, the idea that natives just die off in the presence of superior cultures, while it has happened in history, is an exception rather than a rule: there are many cultures which kept slaves, and many slaves that flourished. (Indeed, the Janissaries ended up ruling in Egypt.) Here, the race of man is not being kept as slaves, not being sent to labor, they are merely being prevented from harming each other. Why would, for example, the Indians of South America, already conquered and crushed by the Spanish, feel any more overwhelmed and inferior now that some outerspacemen have halted the Russians and Americans from global war?

  Fourth, the scene where bullfighting is outlawed by the aliens, who stick everyone in the Spanish arena in the buttocks with illusionary pain when the bull is gored, is one of those pet peeves of an author or a pet cause which strains the suspension of disbelief.

  Consider: Creatures entirely alien in biology and psychology and outlook who have less in common with us than we have with digger wasps or starfish, spent the unthinkable energies needed to cross the fifty light years from the constellation Argo Navis for the purpose of stopping war and crime and—wait for it!—to impose vegetarianism on us.

  Hmm. If in one of my stories, I ever have a ship land from Argo Navis, and the vast vessel is shaped like a giant crucifix adorned with stained glass windows, and out marches the Archbishop of Alpha Carinae with a miter on his insectoid head, to announce that contraception is against the order of nature and must be outlawed, do you think there is even one reader, even one, who is so unwary as to not realize that the writer is Catholic, and that I am using my story time as an excuse to preach some particular pet peeve of mine? So, here, when the benevolent space-dictator outlaws cruelty to animals, a hot- button topic of particular interest to the English intellectual class of the 1930s to 1950s, there is that creaking strain at the traces of suspension of disbelief.

  Instead of imposing the dogma of SPCA or PETA on us, the story could have said that the Octopus Beings of Spica would demand that we arrange for all our mothers to die in childbirth as theirs do, or the Spider Beings of Arcturus insist that we eat our mates during copulation. Whether this is more realistic or less I leave for xenobiologists to debate, but in terms of what a reader can swallow in a story, the conceit that advanced beings care about fuzzy animals rings hollow.

  It rings doubly hollow, especially since these same advanced beings later in the book allow all Earthly life to be destroyed at the hands of beings more advanced yet. All the bulls saved from the Spaniards are obliterated when the core of the planet blows.

  Fifth, the idea that religion would simply fade away and disappear is stupid. If anything, the stress and pressure of being confronted by alien overlords would encourage religion. Someone would start worshipping them, if nothing else.

  The book handles this by saying a time-viewing television is set up in the basement of an Oxford building, and scientists are allowed to look at some historical events and not others. There is only one religion which rests for its validity on a specific historical event—the book coyly does not name that religion by name. The book assumes that once the spacemen show a picture allegedly from the past that no one died at Calvary and rose again, gee willikers, all the Zen Buddhists would turn in their saffron robes.

  I myself know plenty of Jews who don’t believe Moses ever parted the Red Sea, and plenty of Witches who don’t either. I don’t see how a photo produced by an alien monster that no burning bush ever blazed on Oreb without being consumed would convince, or even interest them.

  The fact that the pictures come from the horned and winged gargoyles of Christian religious art, of course, would increase their credibility, at least with me. And we all know Christianity is a biological theory about the origin of species AND NOTHING ELSE, so that when the central premise was shown to be historically inaccurate, the pseudo-science known as faith would simply fade away. Just the same way Mormonism vanished overnight once genetic science proved the American Indians were not the lost ten tribes of Israel.

  Parenthood apparently disappears as rapidly, since there is no scene where the humans fight the aliens who come to take away their children who have psionic powers, or even voice vehement objections. Professor X, call your office.

  Sixth, the whole idea of psionic evolution into a spiritual form of being as the next step of evolution is a lazy cheat. Bob Heinlein’s idea of the next form of man, (as portrayed in his short story “Gulf”), as a being of greater intellect, or A.E. van Vogt’s conception of a Slan as a hominid of a finer-grained and more densely packed and powerful nervous system, not to mention Way Cool Mind Powers, are both more solid and real. These ideas are not just a vague pink cloud labeled “The Superman” with nothing in it.

  I say it is lazy because it is like the supremacy of the Overmind: just something that is established by auctorial fiat, not given any sense of proportion or solidity. It does not even have the solidity of showing what it looks like when someone opposes it.

  In other words, a lazy conceit is one that cannot be imagined when set against a background not prepared carefully by the author to receive it. If the Overlords of Carina, for example, were shown conquering the Middle East, and prevented the Islamic Fascists from nuking the Jews, how would they prevent them from butchering the Jews with machetes? Inflict illusion-pain? Pain does not stop suicide bombers. Stun them all? For how long; and what if the mad bombers continue their evil once the stun wears off? What then? Crucify them by the thousands like the remorseless Romans did?

  For that matter, landing during the Cold War, how did the Overlords prevent Stalin from starving the Ukrainians, without any act of brutality against Stalin?

  I am not saying there are not answers which could be deduced from the book to these questions. I am saying that, as an artist, there is something oddly flat and artificial about a benevolent invasion by powerful aliens who, because the author has prepared the ground and weeded away any remotely human seeming or realistic characters, neither the power is shown nor the benevolence put to a test.

  The lack of any such scene makes the Overlords seem benevolent even though they are conquerors, and this illusion is preserved only by the lazy sleight of hand of not having any resistance to conquest on stage, or any brutality.

  In the novel Methuselah’s Children and again in Time Enough For Love, Lazarus Long, the curmudgeon who was Heinlein’s ‘peak’ character, that is, his most Heinlein-like character, confronts aliens of supreme and godlike power. His
reaction is to get a handweapon and go kill them.

  Whether this is good or bad or simply gobstoppingly stupid I leave for the reader to decide, but the point is that there is no character like Lazarus Long seen anywhere on Earth at the time of the Overlords, and when someone smuggles himself aboard one of their vessels, it is not Long carrying a suitcase nuke.

  The author did not bother to imagine what the Overlords would actually act like in a situation involving some stress or moral pressure. Would the beings so advanced that they stop bullfights put Lazarus Long on trial, or would they just kill him like a bug? It would have given the aliens a specific personality, which the author here was careful to avoid.

  This lack of detail is deliberate. The only way to portray something as incomprehensible is to leave it blank. If the next step of human evolution which the children of man embrace had been something other than psionic and disembodied, it would have failed to awe.

  Gazing upon the fate of man in this yarn is like gazing upon a vast arctic sea frozen mile after endless mile to the far horizon beneath the eerie light of the aurora borealis. It is awe-inspiring but infinitely cold. The stars are not meant for man, and the future is inhospitable and deadly.

  This leads to the final point. What was Arthur C. Clarke trying to accomplish in this book? I suggest that he was trying to tell a myth rather than a story, and that he succeeded brilliantly.

  A myth is a tale of a certain narrative shape which rests for its beauty on the proportion of ideas. A myth is the most abstract, most universal and most easily told and retold of human literary inventions. Here the story is about what it says it is about: the end of the childhood of man and his evolution into unimaginable maturity, the posthuman beings of pure spirit, them to whom the stars truly belong. The universe is too vast and cool and deadly for beings of mere flesh and blood like us.

  The myth is as simple and sad and dramatic as the death of the octopus to give birth to her young, or the sacrifice of the spider to her own hatched eggs: simple, horrible, awesome, and with a promise of the great mystery of the universe acting to crack the Earth like such an egg, a cast off shell the higher beings we shall birth, but never understand, shall crack.

  Let me end with an idea at once shocking and obvious. Myths are about religious notions. The notion here was that science, or the purely materialistic and naturalistic worldview, the cold and dull and empty world without God, could somehow find in its remorseless grind of blind evolution something as interesting and dramatic as damnation and salvation.

  The whole book is an ersatz sort of religious myth, as cold and pitiless as the Ragnarok of the Norseman, and as inescapable. There is perhaps some strange hope in the disembodied ghosts who are the heirs of mankind, but they mean nothing to their parents, and have no human properties, no, not even names. They are a type of Tarzan who never thanks the apes who raised them, a Romulus and Remus who put up no statues to the wolf that nursed them.

  Which leads to a final question of why? Why does the Overmind use the Overlords of Carina, but cannot discover a way to evolve them up to his level? They are the Moses of this book, who can lead others to a promised land but not enter themselves. As in myth, this is given by auctorial fiat, without explanation. The younger brother, Man, is preferred over the Elder, the Overlords, like Jacob over Esau, or, more likely, like the ratlike mammals who conquered the world after the downfall of the dinosaurs. Again, as in a myth, this is just given by auctorial fiat.

  Only upon reflection, long after the book is put down, does one realize what shabby gods these godlike beings are.

  The children of men are allegedly very advanced, but why have they forgotten how to speak to their parents. Even if such speech would be baby-talk to them, the cooing and simple words of a mother to her child, it would have shown love.

  And likewise, the Overmind cannot uplift its own servants, even though its resources and wisdom are transcendental. The problem is just insoluble? Or is it that the Overmind simply does not love its serfs?

  You see the problem of seeking for ersatz religious sentiment among the arctic splendor and inhumanity of the blind cruelty of a universe without God. You might find some very awesome and even godlike beings, such as the Arisians of the Lensmen, or the Martians of H.G. Wells, or the Martians of Robert Heinlein, beings with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, creatures as impressive as some mighty Prince of Hell with a legion of devils clad in adamantium at his command.

  But a child’s idea of a superior being is the same as Nietzsche’s: A creature beyond good and evil. That means, in other words, a creature greater in power, but indifferent, callous, reticent, remote. The idea of love will not even be brought up, not even to be dismissed, even though this is the first idea a mature man contemplates when he thinks of superior beings who are truly superior.

  The book succeeds and succeeds brilliantly on every level but this one. The core idea of seeking for religious transcendence in the dead cosmos of materialism is an incoherent idea, a self-refuting idea. The mythical image produced is one of beings of immense power and retarded capacity for love, like some super-villain caricature of an evil scientist, or the hollow grandeur of the Satan of Milton.

  As far as philosophical depth is concerned, the book might as well have been called Childhood’s Idea Of Superiority.

  Childhood’s End and Gnosticism

  Let me follow up my previous essay by arguing that Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke has a Gnostic attitude toward God, and I mean one God in particular. Gnostics are not heretics of Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, Shinto or Hinduism, after all, but of Christianity.

  That the good guys in Childhood’s End look like cartoon devils has already been mentioned in the previous essay. Gnostics love the idea that good guys are bad guys, and bad are good: one Gnostic sect, for example, are Cainites, who think Cain was right to kill Abel. That the good devils lead mankind out of their false world into the Pleroma, where we are all gods, has already been mentioned, albeit in Clarke’s book, the godhead is called “The Galactic Overmind”— as if that change in terminology would fool anyone. The earth is not remade into a new world, as St. John of Patmos holds, but is destroyed by hidden fire, the arson of an abandoned prison, as Valentinus holds.

  Gnostics take as their prime dogma the idea that the world as we know it is a deception, and that God is the Deceiver, that matter is evil, the human body a trap. In a science fiction setting, God cannot come onstage as a supernatural being and be shown to be a liar, since science fiction properly so called stays within the bounds of the natural setting. (Any supernatural events, telepathy or reincarnation, are explained away as being psionic or superhightech in an SF background, phenomena as subject to natural laws as biology or ballistics, not noumenal reality.) In a supernatural setting you can kill God, and throw Him into Tartarus. In a natural setting you can destroy His lies, but there is no Him.

  Hence, in a natural setting the religion of the Magisterium can be shown to be false, and their evil attempts to destroy our daemons of free will by incision can be condemned. If an alethiometer is not ready to hand, maybe an alien gizmo provided by space devils will do instead.

  Here is the crucial passage:

  The instrument he handed over on permanent loan to the World History Foundation was nothing more than a television receiver… linked somehow to a far more complex machine, operating on principles no one could imagine, aboard the Karellen’s ship. One had merely to adjust the controls, and a window into the past was opened up. Almost the whole of human history for the past five thousand years became accessible in an instant. Earlier than that, the machine would not go, and there were some baffling blanks all down the ages. They might have had some natural cause, or they might be due to deliberate censorship by the Overlords.

  Though it had always been obvious to any rational mind that all the world’s religious writings could not be true, the shock was nevertheless profound. Here was a revelation that no one could doubt or deny: here, se
en by some unknown magic of Overlord science, were the true beginnings of all the world’s great faiths. Most of them were noble and inspiring—but that was not enough. Within a few days, all mankind’s multitudinous messiahs had lost their divinity. Beneath the fierce and passionless light of truth, faiths that had sustained millions for twice a thousand years vanished like the morning dew. All the good and all the evil they had wrought were swept suddenly into the past, and could touch the minds of men no more.

  Humanity had lost its ancient gods: now it was old enough to have no need for new ones.

  The smugness and dishonesty of the passage is breathtaking, not to mention the naive optimism, (if you are an atheist), or blockheaded arrogance, (if you are a theist).

  Let us pause for a moment to admire four of the more amusing shortfalls, shall we?

  First, there is only one religion under attack here, and it is misleading to pretend any religion but one is in the crosshairs. Like far too many an atheist’s writings, this passage is not atheist, merely anti-Christian. There is only one religion that has a messiah who claims divinity. It is twice a thousand years old, which just so happens to be the age mentioned in the passage.

  Note that it is the religious writings of “the world” that “any rational mind” can see cannot all simultaneously be true. Obviously the author means the sacred ideas and dogmas, and is using the word “writings” as a synecdoche. Why the emphasis on writings, that is to say, on Bible(s)? There is only one God whose word has been written into officially recognized sacred books: and that is the God of Abraham. The Buddhists have no central authority, no Magisterium, to decide which books are in and out of an official canon. I am not saying pagans do not have holy books: I am saying it is a metaphor particular to the religions of Abraham to refer to holy doctrines by referring to holy books, because we emphasize our books as testament. Clarke is not referring to the Kojiki nor to the Shahnameh nor to the Mahabharata.