Ghosts of Yesterday

by Jack Cady

  At least one contemporary writer shows Brave New World as completely prophetic. In his critique of television culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman demonstrates that we need not fear the approach of Huxley’s hell because we’re already in it.

  When Huxley discarded the soapbox and ascended the pulpit he wrote After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. The book speaks of mortality, immortality, eternity; and praises death as solution to the problem of retrogression. In Huxley’s scheme we grow downward to the animal state as we age. Too much loss, too many steaks, and too many worn ideas chip at our humanity. Fear and respect for civilization vanish.

  The story begins in southern California with Huxley lighting satiric fireworks. An Englishman, Jeremy, of scholarly pretensions and no courage arrives to catalog the Hauberk Papers, purchased by the multimillionaire Jo Stoyte from the supposed estate of the raunchy Fifth Earl of Hauberk.

  Multimillionaire Stoyte has no fears, except a fear of death from which even his great wealth will not save him. He lives in a castle furnished with the finest religious art from Europe, a parody of William Randolph Hearst (but it could as easily be J. P. Morgan.) Stoyte’s household includes his fluffbrained concubine Virginia, Dr. Obispo, his goatish physician, and Pete, a young scientist so innocent he believes Stoyte and Virginia are only friends.

  Pete endures hopeless love for Virginia, and dies because of it. Meanwhile, Dr. Obispo is the one who makes out. At times when he is not seducing Virginia, the doctor works on problems of longevity. He studies the chemistry and life spans of fish. The scholar Jeremy will eventually discover that Obispo is on the right track. In the writings of the Fifth Earl, Jeremy finds that the key to immortality lies in eating carp guts. The story ends when the principal characters travel to England to see the Fifth Earl who is more than two hundred years old and still alive. It is a hideous ending.

  It makes a good tale, but is interrupted by a character who lives in the neighborhood. William Propter is a scholar of religion. When Pete becomes confused, or Jeremy becomes bored, the reader encounters a conversation with Mr. Propter:

  “And what is God? A being withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working. His vigilance gradually ceased to be an act of will, a deliberate thrusting back of irrelevant personal thoughts and wishes and feelings. For little by little these thoughts and wishes and feelings had settled like a muddy sediment in a jar of water, and as they settled, his vigilance was free to transform itself into a kind of effortless unattached awareness, at once intense and still, alert and passive….”

  Or

  (Love) “The word’s the same as the one we use when we talk about ‘being in love’ … Consequently we tend to think that the thing we’re talking about must be more or less the same. We imagine in a vague, reverential way, that God is composed of a kind of immensely magnified yearning… Creating God in our own image. It flatters our vanity.”

  Mr. Propter’s way is the way of the western mystic. Perhaps one-quarter of the story is given over to explanations and speculations. Such work does not serve the cause of literature, but it offers young readers some options. There truly exists a state of peace that passes all understanding. That may not be new news, but its actual existence is news for the young.

  From a high and thoughtful attempt I turn to a work of intellectual tutti-frutti, and do so with sorrow. Robert Heinlein was a hero of my youth, and when I read The Man Who Sold the Moon, I wished to be exactly like him. His Stranger in a Strange Land, however, is only interesting for its succession of cheap shots. Heinlein, at the time he wrote Stranger, had become a political and social conservative. Thus, his book is not only shabby, it’s an exercise in hypocrisy.

  A spaceship filled with husband and wife scientists goes to Mars. There is some hanky-panky. A bastard child is born. He is raised by Martians after all members of the expedition kill each other, or otherwise die. A second expedition returns the young man to earth. Using Martian philosophy he will become a new Messiah, preaching “Thou Art God.” The happy grasses are God, and presumably a cat is God. The kicker is that this is not animism, and is impossible to understand unless one can speak Martian. Unfortunately, the reader cannot speak Martian, nor could the author.

  The main shepherd who steers the young man is an aging hack writer who has read a thousand religious texts and realized none. He despises theologians, then espouses a theology devoid of all content except unlimited sex, unlimited power, and no responsibility for anything: including washing the dishes. It was a book deliberately tailored for the so-called ’60s Love Generation, and it purports to give sound religious reasons for bed hopping and destroying your enemies.

  Destruction, it turns out, is harmless and nothing but a joke. Guns, and people who carry guns, are simply turned sideways in time. That makes them disappear. When those people reappear they are found sitting among clouds and cracking one-liners while talking about “The Boss.” It is a showy, but not a satiric, performance by Heinlein whose ancient wise men consistently speak like teeny-boppers (see his nine-hundred year old man in Time Enough for Love.)

  In addition to breaking my heart, and felling one of my heroes, Stranger in a Strange Land gives easy answers and refuses to address questions. In a world where all men and women become “brothers,” and religiously bed each other, is there any possibility of privacy or contemplation? When power is absolute, does not power corrupt? Does mystery and reverence for a lover depart after one has had five hundred lovers?

  There are further offenses in the book, including eternal youth which no sensible person would want, but which was a big sales point in the 1960s. It only remains to note that Heinlein’s version of heaven was Huxley’s version of hell.

  It sometimes happens in science fiction that a good writer is compelled by a story that is too large for the genre. Past Master by R. A. Lafferty is a book to swear by and at. In this book the planet Astrobe has succeeded earth as first in the human pecking order. It enjoys a perfect society where everyone is rich, or will be rich by accepting the system. The planet is planned, programmed, mechanized, logical. Evil exists, however, as do things which are dreadful. Programmed killer beasts read thoughts and feelings. People who question paradise are rapidly removed from paradise. Rebellion spreads as people flee the system and establish the communities of Cathead and The Barrio. Conditions in these places approximate the bowels of England’s industrial revolution. No one is well, no one can be happy, and ugly death is certain. Still, people choose such horror rather than live in the golden state of Astrobe. A further horror lies in the feral strips surrounding the communities. These strips are filled with devouring beasts.

  The leaders of Astrobe seek a world president who can solve their problems. Their choice lies between a mechanical man (a programmed person) or searching through history and reviving a great leader of the people. They select Saint Thomas More, bringing him from the past just moments before he gets his head chopped off in 1535. More, the author of the satiric Utopia is called forth to lead Utopia.

  This is a wonderful premise, but the genre contains traps into which Past Master falls. Science Fiction may use soapbox or pulpit, but when ideas are not being argued there has to be action and event. Young readers — and some not so young — will buy random action ahead of character development and meaning. The trap came about because the author picked one of the most complex characters in English history, a character who lived in one of the most tumultuous times. In order to fully realize the presence of Thomas More, Past Master would require a ton of backgrounding, thus slowing the story. It’s a credit to Lafferty that the story almost comes off.

  Unfortunately, a good idea gets crippled. It is filled with all sorts of action and extraterrestrial critters. Some are symbolic, some are not, and the game of figuring everything out gets to be not worth the candle.

  The basic book, though, is worthy. It purports to be about the death of a world, the death of a man (human-kind) and the Godly and instant rebirth of both. This is va
luable intent, but real value comes from questions raised and brooded over.

  Given paradise, what are the human objections? What hungering after God, and after individuality, walks people toward hell; for, in Past Master, Thomas More’s religion and church survive in perverse and distorted forms among inhabitants of Cathead and Barrio. Thomas More does not much value church or religion, the leaders of Astrobe value them even less, yet the fundamental question of the book is: Are we better off to live in a heaven with no God, or have God although the divine plan may contain great measures of torment? I can’t help but wonder how the seed of the book would have sprouted if the past had not yielded Thomas More, but Jonathan Edwards.

  Some books further other books, and Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad knits skeins from Huxley and Heinlein. Once more the subjects are immortality and power: especially important here because the book (published in 1969) addresses the “1960s generation.” Youth then, as now, had a hard time grappling with the idea of death. Youth had not even begun its battles with ego, did not know such battles exist.

  The book is told in shucking 1960s Clockwork Orange legspread hunchbutt brainblast jive. Jack Barron, together with his black buddy Lukas Greene, and his bed buddy Sara Westerfield are “Baby Bolshevik Galahads” from the streets of Berkeley, and from demonstrations in Montgomery and Selma. As the book opens everyone has passed the dreaded age of thirty. Jack Barron hosts a network TV show (a hundred million viewers,) Lukas Greene is Governor of Mississippi, and Sara Westerfield has retreated into silence in Greenwich Village because she believes Jack has sold out. Three power groups are in conflict: Democrats own the government, Republicans own money but cannot elect a president, and the SJC (Social Justice Committee) owns the blues. The SJC represents the poor, the minorities, and political malcontents. It is headed by Lukas Greene.

  Jack Barron’s scam is a call-in show. People who have something bugging them call in and bug Jack Barron. Barron then vidphones senators or bureaucrats purporting to seek justice. “What bugs you bugs Jack Barron.”

  Focus for this stew of conflicting powers is the Foundation for Human Immortality, headed by Benedict Howards who is a demonic echo of Huxley’s Jo Stoyte. The foundation has fifty billion dollars in assets. For fifty thousand dollars it will freeze a citizen at the time of death, then maintain the frozen corpse until research discovers how to resurrect the dead and give them eternal youth. In the course of the book, scientists actually discover how to stop the aging process, thus granting immortality.

  By the end of the book Lukas Greene has settled for moral and political defeat, not yet knowing that he will be the nation’s next President. Sara is dead. Ghastly immortality has been achieved by Benedict Howards and Jack Barron; an ending even more hideous than the end of Huxley’s After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.

  Bug Jack Barron is about a world where politics and show biz replace God — at one point Barron thinks carefully of Christ, and how Christ would have sold out the same as everyone else. The book is filled with violent realizations.

  “There’s your definition of politics, grown men playing kid game, hate-games, to get some simple kicks I get off Bug Jack Barron, living-color, man-up-front, self-image is all. And that’s cool. But the real difference between show biz and politics is nothing but hate….”

  Or

  “They’re people, dig, people is all, but, baby, they’re junkies. All of ’em power-junkies. that’s what power does to you, a fucking monkey on your back — just like junk. First shot’s free, kiddies, but after that you’ve gotta go out and cop more and more and more to feed the monkey….”

  Bug Jack Barron is so filled with rage that even the jive becomes tolerable.

  Before turning to what may be science fiction’s greatest book, it is well to mention two others that do not actually belong in the science fiction/religion fold; but which come close. The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin is science fiction, but only abstractly connected to religion. The Goddess Letters by Carol Orlock is an exercise in the fantastical, but is not science fiction. It purports to be an exchange of letters between Persephone and Demeter. The religion involved is the Elusinian Mysteries.

  Faith guides A Canticle For Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. It is unlikely that any other science fiction novel has better served the cause of religion.

  Faith not only guides A Canticle For Liebowitz, it accompanies the reader through three ages of destruction, three dark ages, and three ages of renaissance.

  The world destroys itself with nuclear weapons in the 1960s. The book opens six hundred years later at the abbey of the beatus Leibowitz. The abbey stands in the Utah desert, surrounded by barbaric tribes and mutant people called “The Pope’s Children.”

  I.W. Leibowitz was a scientist working in “defense” when the world was destroyed. After the bombs fell a movement began. It was called The Simplification. All educated people, and all books, became the targets of the Simpleton mobs. The church offered sanctuary. Leibowitz fled to the Cistercians. After many years he became a priest. He received permission from New Rome to found a religious order named after Albertus Magnus. Its task was to preserve human history. Members of the order were “bookleggers” and “memorizers.” The bookleggers smuggled written records into the Utah desert where the records were buried in kegs. The memorizers committed texts to rote memory, as the dark ages spread across the world. Leibowitz was hanged and burned while following the faith.

  In 2560 a wanderer, a Jew, directs the novice Francis to an ancient bomb shelter which, among other things, contains a blueprint and some actual writing by Leibowitz: “Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels — bring home to Emma.” This, and other writing, is sufficient documentation for canonization. Leibowitz is canonized. The abbey stands through centurites on a plain of darkness as monks continue to hand-copy manuscripts from decaying originals.

  The second section of the book opens in 3174. There are rumors of war. Thon Taddeo is a scholar who must depend for his living on the barbarian ruler Hannegan. Taddeo comes to the abbey to review the records called The Memorabilia… “full of ancient words …. detached from minds that had died long ago. There was little of it that could be understood. Certain papers seemed as meaningless as a Breviary would seem to a shaman of the nomad tribes.”

  Taddeo’s presence signals the beginning of a renaissance. The abbot quarrels with Taddeo about the responsibility of a scientist. Taddeo makes the traditional plea that he is not responsible for the use of knowledge, only for its discovery. A new technology begins with his investigations, and barbarian war sweeps the plains.

  Meanwhile, the old wanderer, the Jew, has become a hermit in the hills beyond the abbey. After six hundred years he is still waiting. Outside the doorway of his hut he has a sign in Hebrew which he claims means “Tents Mended,” but which is really Deuteronomy 6:6, “And these words which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart.”

  The old Jew goes to see Thom Taddeo, then turns away in disappointment. “It’s still not Him.”

  The third section opens in 3781. Advanced technology produces a new civilization complete with nuclear weapons and starships. There are rumors of war.

  Through the centuries The Memorabilia has been kept intact. It is now on microfilm. In case of nuclear war the church has a plan Quo Peregrinature which will send The Memorabilia, along with a colony, to another star.

  Sufficient numbers of priests and bishops will go along to perpetuate the church. The third section of the book is a cry of faith, also a cry of anguish.

  “Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk. Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America — burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it wi
ll swing us clean to oblivion….”

  The old Jew has ceased to be a hermit and has once more become a wanderer. He names himself Lazarus — a man raised by Christ, but not a Christian.

  A mutant woman with two heads has only one head baptized. The other head does not seem alive. It is like a child in a coma. The woman has spent her lifetime trying to find a priest who will baptize this second head. She goes to the abbot. As the world dies, and as the abbot dies, from the woman comes a miracle of rebirth. As it happens the horizons light with explosions, and the starship departs.

  Science fiction is a game for the young, who, when reading tales told from the soapbox will likely respond to power. Yet, power is only part of the religious equation. For the young, and for those of us who are not so young, another dimension appears when literature enters the genre. In A Canticle For Liebowitz we step easily beside the eternal power of God, only to be struck dumb by realization of the Glory.

  HALLOWEEN 1942

  I was ten years old in ’42, and trapped in the German-Lutheran wilderness of small town Indiana. Halloween of that year still lives in memory because threats of Hell spouted from every pulpit, while true fires of Hell rose above coal and wood-burning chimneys; and a real ghost walked.

  In October of ’42 our town lay stunned as Hitler, having leveled Europe, marched on Russia. The Battle of Stalingrad thundered; blood-stained symbol of an adventure that would eventually cost a million, six hundred thousand lives. However, that many people, and more, were already dead before the Nazi thrust.

  In that Indiana town, where lived many third and fourth generation Germans, our people wisely concentrated their fears and hatreds on Japan. The Rape of Nanking had worked its way into local thought. Bataan had fallen, and government censorship could not conceal the Bataan Death March. Nor could censors hide the battle of the Java Sea. Government news hawks made much of the Battle of the Coral Sea, but its turn-around-significance would not be understood for years. Jimmy Doolittle led a raid on Tokyo, lost men (of whom some were captured and executed as war criminals.) Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians fell to Japan; and Japan took Correigidor.