Free Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright Page B
Authors: John C. Wright
the imaginative kind discussed here. Psalms and hymns, to be sure, or epics of praise for glorious deeds, or love songs, or all the other kinds of tales the other muses inspire, all might be present in the unfallen world.
But stories of fairytale and fantasy and science fiction I speculate may indeed be absent in those happier and higher realms. The saints in heaven will have realized the immense longing we here in exile on Earth cannot fulfill on Earth. They will do as their Father does and sing the songs of creation.
Imagine instead of imagining the talking cats of Kzin or dragons of Pern, using the gift of speech as we all secretly know it is meant to be used, and speaking the worlds and stars into being.
Why should they daydream, and not do? No youth sighs over his beloved’s picture when she is in the bridal bower and demurely shedding her veil.
Science Fiction: What is it good for?
One thing no science fiction writer inventing any future predicted was the future where science fiction replaced the mainstream literature.
It was foreseeable—mainstream fiction, after all, was never mainstream. So-called mainstream literature is a modern and recent invention, and was meant to appeal only to a limited audience of limited taste, an audience with an artificially cramped and narrow view of reality. In the same way time casts down tall towers and crumbles empires to dust, so too it throws down artifices.
One of the artificial things that happened was that the literary mainstream decreed, as a matter of dogma, that matters fantastic and wonderful, the doings of saints and demigods and their wars with demons and dragons, and anything that smelled like Elfland, or even like adventureland, would be banished.
There would be no more flights to the moon on hippogriff-back, nor faces that launched a thousand ships, nor witches who turn sailors to swine, nor voyages to the land of the dead, nor wrestling matches with man-eating Grendel, nor swords upheld from the bosom of the lake by arms clad in shimmering samite, nor three weird sisters prophesying the doom of kings.
And the matter of science fiction, Martian invasions and time machines and invisible men, was exiled from highbrow literature. It is telling to note that this degree of exile fell during the years when the most daring prophecies of Jules Verne and his fantastic machines that swam beneath the sea or thundered through the air were just beginning to come true.
Human nature, for better or worse, always eventually comes to the fore again. And human nature likes and needs stories that are stories.
The artifice of exiling the fantastic in literature cuts against the nature both of story-teller and story-lover, since stories by their nature are nursery tales, concerned with simple moral truths and talking animals. Only as they develop do tales take on other tasks, such as to glorify heroes, and keep alive the memories of our forefathers and their deeds, and to celebrate the blessings bestowed on one’s people, tribe, and nation, and express wonder and gratitude for the gift of living in this gorgeous and dangerous world.
Does it strike you as odd, perhaps even insane, to hear the duty of a teller of tales described in this fashion? When is the last time you heard a story that told a simple moral truth, or even that took place in a universe where moral truths were true? When is the last time you heard a fiction that glorified Washington, or Jefferson, or Adams, rather than deconstructed them? When is the last time the wonder of the universe was the subject of a passage in a story or poem you read?
It is almost as if the tellers of tales think their duty is not to these things, but to undermine, question, satirize, mock and subvert these things. It is as if the tellers of modern tales think their duty is to unnerve the audience, unsettle tradition, and overthrow the American way of life, Christian faith, and Western love of reason.
I will not dwell on this
But stories of fairytale and fantasy and science fiction I speculate may indeed be absent in those happier and higher realms. The saints in heaven will have realized the immense longing we here in exile on Earth cannot fulfill on Earth. They will do as their Father does and sing the songs of creation.
Imagine instead of imagining the talking cats of Kzin or dragons of Pern, using the gift of speech as we all secretly know it is meant to be used, and speaking the worlds and stars into being.
Why should they daydream, and not do? No youth sighs over his beloved’s picture when she is in the bridal bower and demurely shedding her veil.
Science Fiction: What is it good for?
One thing no science fiction writer inventing any future predicted was the future where science fiction replaced the mainstream literature.
It was foreseeable—mainstream fiction, after all, was never mainstream. So-called mainstream literature is a modern and recent invention, and was meant to appeal only to a limited audience of limited taste, an audience with an artificially cramped and narrow view of reality. In the same way time casts down tall towers and crumbles empires to dust, so too it throws down artifices.
One of the artificial things that happened was that the literary mainstream decreed, as a matter of dogma, that matters fantastic and wonderful, the doings of saints and demigods and their wars with demons and dragons, and anything that smelled like Elfland, or even like adventureland, would be banished.
There would be no more flights to the moon on hippogriff-back, nor faces that launched a thousand ships, nor witches who turn sailors to swine, nor voyages to the land of the dead, nor wrestling matches with man-eating Grendel, nor swords upheld from the bosom of the lake by arms clad in shimmering samite, nor three weird sisters prophesying the doom of kings.
And the matter of science fiction, Martian invasions and time machines and invisible men, was exiled from highbrow literature. It is telling to note that this degree of exile fell during the years when the most daring prophecies of Jules Verne and his fantastic machines that swam beneath the sea or thundered through the air were just beginning to come true.
Human nature, for better or worse, always eventually comes to the fore again. And human nature likes and needs stories that are stories.
The artifice of exiling the fantastic in literature cuts against the nature both of story-teller and story-lover, since stories by their nature are nursery tales, concerned with simple moral truths and talking animals. Only as they develop do tales take on other tasks, such as to glorify heroes, and keep alive the memories of our forefathers and their deeds, and to celebrate the blessings bestowed on one’s people, tribe, and nation, and express wonder and gratitude for the gift of living in this gorgeous and dangerous world.
Does it strike you as odd, perhaps even insane, to hear the duty of a teller of tales described in this fashion? When is the last time you heard a story that told a simple moral truth, or even that took place in a universe where moral truths were true? When is the last time you heard a fiction that glorified Washington, or Jefferson, or Adams, rather than deconstructed them? When is the last time the wonder of the universe was the subject of a passage in a story or poem you read?
It is almost as if the tellers of tales think their duty is not to these things, but to undermine, question, satirize, mock and subvert these things. It is as if the tellers of modern tales think their duty is to unnerve the audience, unsettle tradition, and overthrow the American way of life, Christian faith, and Western love of reason.
I will not dwell on this
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