The Uses of Science Fiction

I could take time and set down some ways people regard science fiction writing, but I won't. I am not writing for the audience of the year 2235, where no one any longer knows what Sci-Fi is; I am writing for the same people in the country wherein I was born and live: we share our intimate prejudices and tastes from birth, we drank them in our mothers' milk, we breathe them in the air from our first breath. Suffice it to say that in some quarters, fiction is frowned on, and science fiction is the frowniest. ( or frowniest upon...I shall have to check my Fowler's.)

Olaf Stadpledon's Last and First Men changed my life. I read it early on, when I was about twelve, I should think. I remember the Library Thought-Police sort of taking a gander at the binding and snuffing, "Isn't this a bit advanced for you...?"

When they said "you", they turned their searing gaze from the book binding to my ephebic form, trying to make me wilt. I just went back to the shelves, grabbed more books, and brought them back to the counter, saying, "Please, Miss: more?!"

Of course, they gave in. There were no really "bad" books there. Nothing that was on the "Index", say, nor anything too much in praise of Aphrodite or Eros. The books I wanted merely had explosive ideas that masqueraded as "sci fi", and were thus below the radar of officialdom. As far as they were concerned a Dewey classification under "fiction, science" was a dunce cap, meaning "japes, twists, guffaws, antics" , but quite immune from "Ideas, Greate & Serious & Wyse"

Well, Last and First Men showed me the length of days and the presence of the Holy in ways I had never dreamed of before. It caused me unquiet, and it set me to wrestle like Jacob with the angels of understanding.

I finally bought my own copy in Montreal. I still have it, a Penguin edition, the frontispiece with a silhouette of one of the winged Second Men.

The SciFi channel, now yclept ScyFy ( I use "yclept" since it is Anglo-Saxon, and "ScyFy" makes no sense to me, so I assume it means something like "The science fiction channel watched by Beowulf and Grendel...when they weren't carrying on".  Actually, the ScyFy - sort of a demon rather than an FCC regulated channel - seems to have developed a taste for slasher movies, which is either a last gasp of something, or a bad omen of something else...ta-da! )...

Anyway, the ScyFy has a mini-series called Riverworld on. I decided to watch it, since it, too, had a rather pronounced effect on me that went far beyond the typewriter-left-right movement of the eyeballs actively engaged in reading.

Written by Philip Jose Farmer, the novel which is To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first of the trilogy,  was published in 1971, and I came upon a bit more than 10 years later never having heard of it; I came across it cold, unaware of the Thing from beyond imagination! it contained.

Along the littoral of a river more than a million million miles long, all of mankind is reborn into the prime of life! Is it heaven, or hell? And those reborn, if dying yet again, will be reborn along the river, though possibly far from where they had lived their previous rebirth.

I had not thought much about rebirth, or the resurrection. There were not enough answers up front. I found it very unsettling to have such an ingrained particle of faith wrenched out of my psyche and forced to go onstage to fill in for one of the main actors. I mean, God's will, God's love, Creation - all those things are common fodder for the Sunday sermon, but...rebirth!? Finality! This is bloody it! Karma and Shawarma!!

I was knocked off kilter. I frantically perused ahead to find some crumbs of explanation strewn about by Farmer so I could once again emerge from the forest...no crumbs!

I got drunk and mused upon the mystery in that state. Not much help, although it did serve to ring down the curtain on the play of sound and fury upon the stage of my imagination.

All in all, one heck of a book. It is a trilogy and, as trilogies go, the second and third were pale and wan compared to the first.

But the TV series is not to be believed. The main character in the book was Sir Richard Burton, Burton of the Nile - not Burton of Night of the Iguana, and the main supporting role was Alice Liddel Pleasance, better known as the Alice of Lewis Carrol's acquaintance. ( Her father,  Liddel, was - of course - the Liddel of Liddel & Scott's Greek Lexicon. ) Richard Burton was a fascinating human being. I am reading his 1,000 Nights and a Night translation on-line now, complete and unbowdlerized by his loving wife. Somehow on ScyFy he is no longer the main focus, but has been re-incarnated as someone determined to prove a villain. Or whatever.

The main character on TV is a guy named Sam or Jack, a sandwich character who is a slab of Brad Pitt cast upon a bedding of secret-agent-McWaterboard or a Marine-tough-guy- &- handle-with-care. The "squeeze" ( and "squeeze" appears to be the only possible word one can use in talking about this. ) is someone named Jessica, last name not Rabbit.

Thus: the sublime to the ridiculous. Not just in SciFi, but in all Art:

Art transcends the human passion wherein it was created.

Schlock is a parasite within that needs the hormones and secretions of the body to increase.

Now, to the Uses of Science Fiction.

I quote from The New Time Travelers

David Toomey, 2007, W.W.Norton & Co,  ISBN 978-0-393-06013-3 (hardcover)

page 309

...Although many of the people described in this book read science fiction in their youth, they had a thirst for deeper knowledge. At some point there was...a kind of intellectual maturation...Listen to any of them speaking, and you will realize they are not so excited by imagined universes as they are by real universes - by what is.

First, the point about imagined versus real universes is not well thought out. All of the scientists mentioned in the book madly procreate hypothetical universes. They wish to prove them real, of course, but does this imply that the readers of science fiction somehow find inspiration yet lack any desire to fill out their understanding of the real world with the new inspiration found in their reading? Hardly.

Second, Mr. Toomey obviously believes that there is a hard "fact" which is superior to "story, narrative...theory, hypothesis". I do not. In a universe of vast information, all is information, and the ancient split between material and spirit has vanished. Ditto the Grand Canyon between "fact" and "fiction".

Third, the inspiration given by reading leads to deeper knowledge. To arbitrarily grasp "deeper knowledge" as the sole belonging of Science is to commit the same error that Creationists do by claiming Biological efficacy for the Bible.

Live long, and prosper!