by James Gunn
Part of the lesson Gilgamesh learned was given him during his journey by a divine barmaid: “Enjoy your life and make the best of it.” There is no immortality; you must make do with what you have.
The epic even contains a bit of technology, not only the weapons with which Gilgamesh and Enkidu do battle but the bricks with which the wall of Uruk is built. When Gilgamesh and Urshanabi (Utnapishtim’s boatman) return to Uruk, Gilgamesh says:
Urshanabi, climb upon the wall of Uruk and walk about;
Inspect the foundation terrace and examine the brickwork,
If its brickwork be not of burnt bricks,
And if the seven wise men did not lay its foundation!
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Technology plays a more significant part in the Greek myth of Daedalus, a craftsman said to have been taught his art by Athene herself. He took as apprentice his nephew Talos and then killed the boy out of jealousy when he invented the saw, the potter’s wheel, and the compass. Daedalus had to flee from Athens and went eventually to Crete.
King Minos welcomed him to Knossos. There Daedalus fathered Icarus, built the maze called the labyrinth for the bullheaded man called the Minotaur (the result of the unnatural coupling of Pasiphaë and Zeus’s white bull), and perhaps constructed the bull-headed bronze servant (the first robot?), also named Talos who ran three times a day around the island of Crete, threw rocks at any foreign ships, and destroyed an army of invading Sardinians by turning himself red-hot in a fire and destroying them with his embrace. Other versions say that Talos was a survivor of the bronze race of men who sprang from the ash trees, or that he was forged by Hephaestus in Sardinia and given to Minos by Zeus.
Minos finally learned that his wife’s coupling with the white bull had been made possible by Daedalus, who constructed for Pasiphaë a hollow wooden cow in which she placed herself. Minos locked Daedalus and Icarus in the labyrinth; Pasiphaë freed them, and Daedalus fashioned wings out of feathers and wax. The escape, however, ended with Icarus ignoring his father’s warning, flying too near the sun, and plunging into the sea (later named the Icaran sea in his honor) when his wings melted.
In some versions Daedalus also is said to have invented sails, built temples, fashioned a lifelike statue of Heracles, and constructed beautiful toys, including jointed dolls. The basic story, however, contains many of the elements of later science fiction: the inventor imprisoned in his own invention, escaping through his ingenuity, and losing someone close to him because of the incautious use of the new technology.
Greek mythology is a rich source of imagery for science fiction, as for literature as a whole. For science fiction, however, it provides a useful tension between great ambitions and their consequences: the heroism of Perseus and his uses of Medusa’s head; the capture of the winged horse Pegasus by Bellerophon and his conquest of the Chimera; the adventures of the Argonauts; the misfortune of Midas. But the most science fictional of Greek myths is The Odyssey.
Today we make sharp distinctions between the real and the unreal (though such distinctions have come under attack from mystics, absurdists, and fabulists). Science and technology have empowered us to make such distinctions. Their measuring instruments and laboratory techniques, microscopes and telescopes, test tubes and particle accelerators, computers and counters—all the theories and paraphernalia of science encourage us in the illusion that we know what is real and what is not.
Naturalism and realism in fiction have led us to believe, similarly, that we can detect an author’s intention to deal with things as they are, to speculate about what might be, or to describe worlds that could not be—to write mundane works (to use the fan term for everything that isn’t science fiction or fantasy), science fiction, or fantasy. It seems to many critics (though not to all) that our reaction to a story is significantly affected by the distinction between a fictional world presented to us as an extension of the world we live in and a fictional world that we are told could not exist, though we may be confused when these two worlds are mixed or the distinctions are blurred.
The Babylonians and the Greeks did not have that problem. The real and the unreal flowed together imperceptibly. When one believes that the stars or the gods control human affairs, that storm and drought and good weather are brought by spirits or deities who can be placated by ceremony or sacrifice, that living things can rise spontaneously out of inanimate matter, that even real things are merely poor imitations of some ideal objects existing elsewhere, then the difference between the real and the unreal may be, in every sense of the word, immaterial.
When Odysseus, destined as he knows not to return to Ithaca and his wife, Penelope, for ten long years, makes his epic journey around the Mediterranean, what we take as a strange mixture of superstition, myth, geographic exploration, and natural (and unnatural) history must have seemed all of a piece to Homer’s audience, and as real as the battles of The Iliad.
Apollodorus speculated that the Odyssey was an account of a voyage around Sicily, and Robert Graves, following Samuel Butler, that it was written by a woman; but it may as easily be read as a fictional exploration of the known universe, with speculations about the nature of the unknown that lurks where no man has gone.
The Odyssey offers a story about destiny, death, sea-raiding, theft, adventure, and the miraculous; far-traveling, witchcraft, and superstition; and accounts of the strange people who live in the distant places of the world and the strange customs they practice. The fantastic episodes begin with the brief sojourn of Odysseus’ ships in the land of the lotus eaters, where his two picked men
never cared to report, nor to return:
they longed to stay forever, browsing on
that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland.
Later Odysseus encountered the Cyclops Polyphemus, was trapped by his curiosity, and escaped by his ingenuity, including the blinding of the Cyclops and giving his name as “Nobody”; received a bag of winds from Aeolus, Warden of the Winds, and had the unfavorable winds released by his men; stayed with the witch Circe after she turned his men back into human form from the pigs they had become; summoned the seer Teiresias from the dead to prophesy for him and conversed with other ghosts; evaded the lure of the Sirens, who promised him foreknowledge of all future happenings; and eluded the monsters Scylla and Charybdis.
Place such a voyage among the stars, and it would evoke what Sam Moskowitz called the sense of wonder. Many a science-fiction writer (and Gene Roddenberry) has done just that.
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The works of Plato have a different kind of interest—not of form or even of theme but of content. In two of the dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, he records the earliest account of the lost continent of Atlantis. There are Egyptian parallels. The legend may have a factual background in the destruction of a Minoan civilization by earthquake or volcanic explosion, or both. Or it may be only the kind of myth about a once-flourishing, higher civilization that was destroyed, or disappeared—the sort of thing that still sells books for Erich von Daniken and his imitators.
Plato’s story of Atlantis, as told by Critias, describes how the Greek gods portioned out the earth and how Poseidon took the island of Atlantis and settled there his children by a mortal woman. His eldest son, Atlas (who was to bear the heavens on his shoulders as punishment for joining the Titans in their unsuccessful war against the Olympian gods), was king.
As befitted a land established by Poseidon, it was blessed by the sea. The island, larger than Africa and Asia together, lay beyond the Pillars of Heracles; beyond Atlantis, joined by a chain of fruit-bearing islands, was another continent. This was the inspiration for later stories about Atlantis as a once-great civilization located between Europe and the Americas. Mu was the name of a similar island civilization located in the Pacific in more contemporary speculations.
The citizens of Atlantis, according to Critias, cultivated a great central plain and surrounded it with rings of land and sea. They built palaces, baths, racetracks, harbors, and temples, and they made
war as far as the western continent and as far east as Egypt and Italy. But greed and cruelty finally overcame them, and the Athenians defeated them single-handedly. At the same time the gods sent a deluge that, in one day and one night, overwhelmed all of Atlantis, burying the harbor and temples under tons of mud and making the sea unnavigable.
The concept that life once was better, or men were wiser or richer or more powerful, or nature was kinder, has exhibited itself in a variety of forms. The Judeo-Christian story of the Garden of Eden followed by man’s fall from grace and the Greek myth of the Golden Age are the two best-known versions. Thomas Bulfinch described the Golden Age in his book Mythology (1855):
The world being thus furnished with inhabitants, the first age was an age of innocence and happiness, called the Golden Age. Truth and right prevailed, though not enforced by law, nor was there any magistrate to threaten or punish. The forest had not yet been robbed of its trees to furnish timbers for vessels, nor had men built fortifications round their towns. There were no such things as swords, spears, or helmets. The earth brought forth all things necessary for man, without his labor in ploughing or sowing. Perpetual spring reigned, flowers sprang up without seed, the rivers flowed with milk and wine, and yellow honey distilled from the oaks.
Then succeeded the Silver Age, inferior to the golden, but better than that of brass. Jupiter shortened the spring, and divided the year into seasons. Then, first, men had to endure the extremes of heat and cold, and houses became necessary. Caves were the first dwellings, and leafy coverts of the woods, and huts woven of twigs. Crops would no longer grow without planting. The farmer was obliged to sow the seed, and the toiling ox to draw the plough.
Next came the Brazen Age, more savage of temper and readier to the strife of arms, yet not altogether wicked. The hardest and worst was the Iron Age. Crime burst in like a flood; modesty, truth, and honor fled. In their places came fraud and cunning, violence, and the wicked love of gain. The seamen spread sails to the wind, and the trees were torn from the mountains to serve for keels to ships, and vex the face of ocean. The earth, which till now had been cultivated in common, began to be divided off into possessions. Men were not satisfied with what the surface produced, but must dig into its bowels, and draw forth from thence the ores of metals. Mischievous iron, and more mischievous gold, were produced. War sprang up, using both as weapons; the guest was not safe in his friend’s house; and sons-in-law and fathers-in-law, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, could not trust one another. Sons wished their fathers dead, that they might come to the inheritance; family love lay prostrate. The earth was wet with slaughter, and the gods abandoned it, one by one, till Astraea alone was left, and finally she also took her departure.
The concept of fallen man or the Golden Age is the opposite of the concept of progress, the concept that man’s condition is improvable and is, in fact, steadily improving through his own efforts. The possibility of progress was suggested in the utopian vision that first found expression in Plato’s Republic. In this dialogue Plato constructs a model state planned not for the benefit of any one citizen but for the good of all.
“Our aim in founding the State,” says Socrates, Plato’s spokesman, “was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the greatest happiness of the whole.”
Plato’s Republic was not distinguished by its happiness. In order to make it work, each individual had to be relatively miserable and completely content with his condition and his situation; otherwise the state would be disorderly, and when the state is disorderly, all citizens suffer.
All the citizens of Plato’s Republic had to belong to one of three social classes: worker, soldier, or guardian. Each citizen had to know his place, perform his job, and be content. No one could possess gold or silver, and thus grow rich. The state raised the children, assigned their roles, and regulated all economic and social activities. Because the state would be firm and strong, the citizens of the state would be happy.
Later writers would imagine other utopias—the word was invented by Sir Thomas More in 1516, by combining two Greek words to mean “no place”—where man at last would find perfect happiness.
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Satire always has been a different matter.
Satire offers criticisms of society, using humor and wit, so that humanity or human institutions may be improved. It depends on the reader’s recognition of the difference between reality and fantasy. Satire presents real people or real institutions in a fantasy setting or fantastically exaggerated; the reader or audience must transfer the qualities from the fantastic to the real, and in that transference his appreciation resides.
Thus the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were considered to deal dramatically with reality, with real historical personages; certain dramatic license was permitted for emphasis or reinterpretation. The civic religious nature of the drama allowed little room for fantasy.
The comedies of Aristophanes, however, clearly could be fantastic, and their departure from reality had to be recognized by the audience if they were to succeed. In The Clouds, for instance, Aristophanes satirized the sophistic system of education that was leading Athenians to argue for victory, not truth; to make a bad cause triumph over the right. To personify these traits, Aristophanes put Socrates in a basket hanging between heaven and earth.
In The Birds, Aristophanes caricatured the schemes and ambitions of the Athenian expedition against Sicily by describing how two elderly Athenians went to live with the birds, persuaded the birds to build an enormous wall in the Mid-Air between men and gods so that no sacrifices could reach the gods, and starved the gods into submission. In The Frogs, Dionysus, patron of the drama, visited Hades to obtain the release of Euripides in order to reinvigorate Greek tragedy, but in a literary contest Aeschylus won over Euripides and was released by Pluto to return with Dionysus.
Let me be clear: I am not claiming that any of these examples is science fiction. No true science fiction was written prior to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818, and perhaps not until Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864. Nor do I claim that they exist in any special paternal relationship to science fiction; in a sense they are the parents of all Western literature. What I do claim for them is some of the same kind of qualities that later science fiction would possess, and one must trace a kind of literary ancestry or claim that science fiction was created, implausibly, without parents or precedents.
These examples have science-fictional interest as treatment of ideas that might have developed as science fiction under different conditions; they represent a continuing line of literary interest that eventually, when the conditions were right, became science fiction; and the intellectual concerns they reflect were influential on later science fiction.
The First Voyage to the Moon
The first extended narrative that has enough of the qualities of science fiction to be included in this anthology is “A True Story” by Lucian of Samosata.
The days of the battling Greek states had been ended by the successes of Rome. Rome had conquered the world and brought peace, plenty, efficiency, engineering, a concern for material values, and time for contemplation.
Edward Gibbon began his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with the statement:
In the second century of the Christian Aera, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guaranteed by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle, but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. . . .
Under Roman rule men had opportunity to make money, to get ahead, to see their children get ahead, and to enjoy the longest period of peace in Western history. Every major city had a university; many citizens listened to lectures or to soap-box orators.
In this period Lucian was born in Samosata, a remo
te town of the empire, on the Euphrates in Syria. He was a poor boy. He was apprenticed as a stonemason but took off for Ionia, learned Greek, steeped himself in Greek literature, mastered public speaking, became a lawyer but soon became a traveling lecturer in Greece, Italy, and Gaul, held a government professorship in Gaul, settled in Athens, became a satirical writer, returned to lecturing, and as an old man accepted an appointment from the Emperor Commodus to a well-paying government job in Egypt.
Lucian wrote two satirical stories about a trip to the moon. In the first, “Icaromennipus,” a philosopher bent on proving that the earth is round flies to the moon with one wing from a vulture and one from an eagle. Lucian’s more ambitious work is “A True Story.” It was written between A.D. 165 and 175, in Lucian’s most creative period. It belongs to that kind of narrative that would later be called a tall tale. It satirizes, and in places parodies, Homer (going Odysseus one better by sailing not just around the Mediterranean but to the moon), Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, and other authors whose works have been lost, such as Iambulus.
Lucian’s sailing ship is no spaceship. His adventurers have no intention of going to the moon, and Lucian’s purpose is not to make such a journey credible or to speculate about what we might find if we could really make the journey. He was writing satire. But a sailing ship is not that much different from Poe’s balloon or Verne’s cannon shell, and the story probably was read (or listened to) largely for its adventure and its inventiveness.
“A True Story” inspired a long chain of literary descendants, including Kepler, Godwin, Cyrano de Bergerac, Swift, Voltaire, and Poe.