Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth Read online

  I dimly recall that there were some scenes of short people swinging on long lines, unless I am confusing this with a similar scene where Frankenstein’s monster with a glowing skull window, while trying to escape from Dracula, was spider-manning across a deep chasm in the movie Van Helsing. Or maybe that was Spider-Man trying to escape from Doctor Octopus atop a speeding train. Or maybe it was the last board in the famous video game Dragon’s Lair made by that guy who animated Rats Of Nimh. I dunno. It is all a popcorn-oil-flavored blur now.

  With the infinite weariness of one who wishes only to die and be reborn due to bad karma as a stinging centipede, I pried open one gummy, tear-crusted eye and focused it dimly at the great shining screen of neverending movie dumbness.

  I saw a giant statue of a dwarf king made of molten gold fall over on the dragon. It hit the dragon and he shook it off, sending expensive droplets, worth a thousand dollars an ounce, off in every direction. He was not hurt in any way.

  That was the plan.

  It was a two step plan: Step (1) dance on the dragon’s nose and then Step (2) construct or find a conveniently placed Lady Liberty-sized master mold of a cast statue of Durin the Great or someone, fill it with the molten gold conveniently stacked and prepared in the furnaces, which conveniently all heat up to the proper temperature and need no crew to work any of their moving parts, and wait until the flying version of Godzilla, the guy who EATS WHOLE FUNDIN ARMIES is hovering on his vast batlike wings right in the exact right spot, and drop the entire molten statue on his head, because he will be too surprised and stupefied to use his vast batlike wings to move eight meters to the left or two meters up and ergo avoid the falling Lady Liberty-sized but still hissingly molten statue of Durin the Great or someone.

  Ah, but not to worry, because the third part of the plan, right after the dragon shakes off the molten gold because it cannot hurt him in any way, is better than the first two parts! In the third part of the plan, the dragon shakes off the molten gold and opens his mouth and breathes out fire which kills every living thing in the chamber where he is and all the corridors and chambers to each side of him, as he destroys everything in his vast, inhuman, unstoppable rage.

  The dragon then uses his nose like a bloodhound, and scents his foes, if any survived, and follows them one by screaming one, slithering his snaky body into narrow spaces if need be, or if the prey attempts to hide in holes too small for him, he vomits fire on them, burns up all the oxygen in the room, and laughs while they die.

  Failing that, he topples titanic pillars and statues to block any escape exits he discovers, and then goes to the main gate and takes up a position and waits for them to starve to death, all the while shouting out mocking riddles to them, or perhaps catching the king’s deer and, with puffs of his fiery breath, cooking the venison so they can smell the savory fumes.

  Whoops, I am sorry, that is not the third part of the plan. The third part of the plan is that the dragon loves the idea of people breaking into his lair and taking his stuff, and he does not really want to disturb them, and so he flies away to go attack Laketown, perhaps because he is miffed at the customs agents who are stopping the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh and mad about the treatment of French aristocrats.

  The end. To be continued in our next episode. Perhaps there will be even less of Bilbo in Part Three.

  Let us be clear on that last, dumb, super dumb, stupidly dumb scene of dumbfounding dumbness. Let us review, one more time, the steps of this awesome, awesome plan:

  1. Send down Bilbo.

  2. Have him take off his magic ring while standing directly in front of the dragon’s nose.

  3. Listen for the sound of the dragon inexplicably not killing the hobbit in one-eighth of one second.

  4. Rush into the dragon’s lair.

  5. Hope he misses you while trying to swat you.

  6. Dance on nose.

  7. Swing on things, run in circles.

  8. Hit him with a zillion cubic feet of molten metal. Watch to make sure he is not wounded or inconvenienced in any way as he shakes it off.

  9. Watch as he flies off for no reason whatsoever, during the one moment when nothing in Middle Earth or Upper Heaven or Lower Hell could possibly have forced him to depart, namely, the very moment when someone is trespassing on his horde.

  Since that was the plan anyway, I wonder why the plan was not to forget about the stupid map and key and Durin’s Day and all that rigmarole, march into the front gate, hope the dragon misses, et cetera, and watch him fly off to go burn Laketown, and then gather up as much loot as your donkeys can carry. Repeat every week for 151 weeks or until you have all the hoard.

  The paramedics had to haul my broken and bleeding body and wet, soggy brain out from the theater after the riot police, mistaking my hysterical leaping and gargling caused by post-traumatic movie disorder for a threatening gesture, had been forced to club me down, and as I was dragged away, leaving a long slimy snail trail of popcorn butter-flavored oil behind, my last words could be heard, as weak as twitching ants blinded by exposure to fumigation fumes who crawl out into the sunlight to die:

  “Shoot… him. with… an… elf… arrow….”

  Whistle While You Work

  If, like me, you have too much free time on your hands, you have probably wondered why Snow White, at least as Walt Disney portrays her tale, has small woodland animals to help her with her household chores, with bunnies and chipmunks scrubbing dishes, songbirds helping to sew, and fawns dusting the furniture with their white tails.

  If, like me, you have too much education on your hands, you have probably used Aristotelian categories to analyze the question.

  If, as a child, you ever asked the question, “But WHY must I go to bed?—I am not sleepy!”, and heard the answer, “Because Daddy says so!”, and you found the answer unsatisfying, you experienced the frustration of hearing the wrong kind of answer to the right kind of question.

  The sleepy child is asking for a justification, asking what fair purpose lights out for unsleepy children serves, and the impatient parent is explaining a formality, that a command from a lawful authority must be obeyed independent of its fairness. It answers a different “why” than the “why” that was asked.

  Aristotle answers that there are four kinds of answers to the question “why”.

  1. Final cause is motive, or, in other words, it is the answer in terms of that for the sake of which the thing is done to explain the thing.

  2. Formal cause is structure, or, in other words, it is the answer in terms of how the thing is put together, the relation of parts one to another.

  3. Material cause is substance, or, in other words, it is the answer in terms of the content, what stuff the thing is.

  4. Efficient cause is the past, or in other words, it is the answer in terms of the history of cause and effect leading up to the event being described.

  In this case, we can discard the answer that, “Snow White has maidservant bunnies because Uncle Walt put them in the story”—this tells us the efficient cause, and we don’t care about that.

  Likewise, we can dismiss the answer that, “Snow White has maidservant bunnies because it is a fairy tale and therefore made of make-believe: in real life, when I tried to get my bunny to clean the rug, he left poop pellets over everything, and ate the leather slip covers on my couch”—this tells us that you never want to ask me for advice on housekeeping or animal-training.

  Likewise again, to answer that, “Snow White has maidservant bunnies because they are a convenient, labor-saving pets for her,” gives the story-world final cause, that is, it tells us Snow White’s motive inside the story, but it does not tell us the real-world final cause, that is, it does not tell us Walt Disney’s motive outside the story.

  Presumably the motive of Uncle Walt is to tell a good and memorable and charming story to entertain both young and young-at-heart. That we can presume, but it does not answer the question asked. In this case, the answer we are asking is one of formal caus
e, that is, what makes this particular conceit entertaining, that is, charming and memorable and good?

  We want to know what about having shy and wild deer befriend and love a virginal maiden appeals to any audience whose hearts are fit for fairy tales. We want to know what about furry animals doing human chores appeals to those young children and any graybeard philosophers innocent or wise enough to delight in fairy stories.

  The alert reader will note that I introduce a thought into this question slyly, but, if I may be allowed, crucially. I propose that we cannot answer what makes a story element fit for being told in a fairy story without answering what makes a heart fit for hearing a fairy story.

  Let us answer the smaller half of the question first, as it is easier. I assume nearly everyone who likes fairy stories, and who likes seeing wild animals befriend the virgin princess in the story, sees immediately what the appeal is. Any reader who cannot see it is asked merely to imagine the same conceit in other types of tales, so as to see how wrong or comical it would be there.

  Imagine the detective story where the hard-boiled gumshoe, having just survived a beating from Lash Canino, the thug of Eddie Mars the gambler, and only now realizing that his old pal, Sean Reagan, whom everyone thinks ran off with Eddie’s wife to Mexico, is actually dead, stumbles into his ratty apartment lit only by slanting strips of light from the Venetian blinds. A cigarette is dangling from his bleeding lip, and hatred glinting from his swollen black eyes. He stumbles over to his gun cabinet, and his pet groundhog, Mr. Flunbuffly, hands him a tumbler of scotch. Dwinky the Fawn reloads his shooting iron for him.

  Such a scene could be done for comical effect, or absurd, or as a wild hallucination after a svelte dame slips someone a Mickey, but it is foreign to the mood of Film Noir whodunits and utterly outside the conceptual frame of what a detective story universe allows.

  To use a less absurd example, imagine a similar scene either in a Sword-and-Sorcery story, or a myth, or a work of science fiction or High Fantasy.

  Conan the Barbarian we can imagine strangling a vulture with his teeth while being crucified, because he is the baddest of badasses ever to tread the bloodstained pages of pulp magazines. We cannot imagine Blinknose the Beaver sharpening the sword of his fathers before sending him with a few words of sage advice to face the snake-god of Stygia in the windowless and primordial temple from which the smokes of incense and the screams of victims on moonlit midnights arise.

  If the veil between man and nature is ever parted for Conan, and this applies to all the Sword-and-Sorcery I have read, what comes through the parted veil is a monster, an abomination stirred up by the aforementioned sorcery, something to be slain with the aforementioned sword. Conan dwells in a Lovecraftian universe, where the things beyond mortal ken are hostile, unearthly, indifferent, and they do not want to talk to you.

  Cthulhu does not want to be your friend.

  The Great Old Ones in this respect are more horrible than the Mephistopheles of Faust. They do not want to tempt you, and will make no bargain, signed in blood or no, for your soul.

  Now, I am not saying all Sword-and-Sorcery is Lovecraftian, but I am saying the sorcery is more often Eldritch than it is Disney. I don’t think I ever read a single tale of this kind where Elric of Melnibone or Solomon Kane had his fairy godmother turn a comedy relief mouse into a steed for him to ride to war. It is not the kind of thing Arioch, Lord of Chaos, does for you.

  But note that Siegfried from the Wagner opera seems to have as many animal friends as Snow White. He plays with a bear that terrifies his foster father, Mim the Dwarf, and he understands the speech of the songbird that warns him Mim means to murder him. A myth has some element that Sword-and-Sorcery is lacking. The common thread here is that Siegfried is like Tarzan or like Romulus and Remus, a man both closer to nature than any civilized man, but also possessed of a glamor or a power due to this innocence.

  But note that the opposite of Snow White is seen in these Noble Savages: Siegfried is stronger than the bear, and can play with him as if with a puppy, in rough friendship, but in no way does he domesticate the bear, or set him to cooking or cleaning or sweeping, or even helping him to forge a sword.

  Science fiction differs from fantasy and fairy tales in one special conceit: the magic and the wonder in science fiction is confined to those which can be fit into a naturalistic universe, one where only those mysteries of the universe that can be discovered by science are real.

  Now, this might not seem like a deep difference. After all, we might ask, what is the difference between a dragon from planet Pern or Velantia and a dragon from the Lonely Mountain or from Neidhöle? What is the difference between a Slan or Lensman or Vulcan who reads minds and an Elf-Queen who reads hearts? What is the difference between the Time Traveler, who visits the Morlocks of AD 807901, and Ebenezer Scrooge, who visits the graveyard in a Christmas of some future year closer at hand?

  To travel in time or read minds or deal with dragons are alike in that they are wonders and mysteries, things we cannot do in real life. But the difference is clear and deep: the flying lizard creatures of Pern are extraterrestrials. Fafnir of Neidhöle is supernatural. What Slans or Lensmen or Vulcans do, according to the rules of their own make-believe universe, is a natural effect, either a skill that can be learned, or a native talent no more supernatural than an electric eel’s ability to discharge a shock. The Time Traveler built a time traveling machine, which any competent workman with the Time Traveler’s blueprints and materials could duplicate. The conceit of the story is that Time Machine is just as impossible as a radio would have been in the Bronze Age: something that does not exist but could. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a ghost, a spirit, something science cannot explain nor science worshipers admit possible.

  If the Gray Lensman came back to his barracks from a hard campaign of blasting Boskonian space-pirates out of the ether, he could not find a fuzzy animal mopping the floor or polishing his raygun. He could find an underperson or uplifted animal, of course, something from the island of Dr. Moreau changed by science to be intelligent; or he could find any number of fuzzy extraterrestrials. Indeed, a suspiciously large number of extraterrestrials are our all-too-terrestrial fellow earthcritters merely propped up on their hind legs. Kzinti are cats, for example, and Selenites are termites.

  Green Martians are Red Indians, and Green Osnomians are Red Martians (who are nudists), and Romulans are Romans, and Klingons are Russians (unless, later, they are Samurai), and Vulcans are Houyhnhnms (who are horses).

  But in each case, if the story is science fiction and not fantasy, the reason why the talking animal talks is that some undiscovered but quite natural property of natural science allows for it, such as the natural evolutionary development of intelligence on extraterrestrial worlds.

  A second difference is one of familiarity. A talking fox or a talking tree we can easily imagine to be like the trickster from Pinocchio or Treebeard from Tolkien. But a Martian is either a monster, something strange and dangerous, or an alien, someone strange whether dangerous or not. Possibly the Martian is a space princess named Dejah Thoris, who happily is both gorgeous and naked, but even she must be alien in the sense of exotic and alluring, if she is to be a convincing Martian.

  There is a veil between the human world and the Otherworld in fairy tales which the tale penetrates, and we imagine what life is on the other side. In science fiction the veil is between the human world and other places in time and space and other dimensions, between the natural world we know and unknown worlds equally as natural as our own. They can be extraterrestrial and even extra-dimensional, but they cannot be literally uncanny, nor, in sense that Elfland or the Inferno is, can they be unearthly.

  But now we are far afield, so let us quickly return to the point of the appeal of seeing a maiden befriending animals to do human tasks. I hope we are all agreed from the examples above, and many others we can imagine, that the appeal is a longing to be at peace with nature, to cross the gap which even tho
se men who do not believe in the literal Garden of Eden will admit exists. There is something in the human soul that longs for Arcadia, for the Golden Age of Saturn, for the time which modern science says never existed, but all myths report once did exist, when man and nature were one, and beasts were our brothers.

  To be sure, there is many a modern myth, spun by Rousseau or Marx and seen in stories like Dances With Wolves, about the Edenic times when we were all noble savages. Some of these myths pretend to be scientific, but real science, studying the skull wounds of Neolithic corpses, can tell the murder rate back in the Stone Age was higher than anywhere in the modern world, and that includes inner cities during riots and provinces at war. It should rightly be called not the 'Stone Age' but the 'Homicide by Stone Axe Age'.

  Whatever science or pseudoscience says, anyone whose heart is fit to hear fairy tales knows a sense of loneliness and loss which is soothed, but only in part, by the sublime beauties of nature. There is something out there we all want to embrace, and to have it talk to us.

  That, by the way, is the point of the appeal of having the fuzzy woodland friends do chores. If Snow White were seen keeping house for the dwarves, but what she did was get a cat to keep the rats out of the grain store, go duck hunting with her faithful hound Greatheart, and hitch up a horse or ox to plough the field, or keep bees for their honey or chickens for their eggs or keep lambs for their veal, then the gap between man and nature is still in place, and the virgin has not lured the wild things over the gap to our side.

  No doubt by now some readers are puzzled at my repeated use of the words virgin and maiden, and, if those readers went to public school instead of getting an education, they are not only puzzled but offended. This brings up a second and larger point about woodland creatures working at human tasks, which is, namely, what power does the fairy tale virgin possess which enables her to overcome or ignore the gap between man and nature which afflicts the rest of the Sons of Adam?