In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [26]
In this respect they may use SF conventions as a semi-disguise or decorative front whereby they may criticize the present-day governments and institutions of the writer’s own society when overt criticism might prove dangerous or fatal. Yevgeny Zamyatin, an early Bolshevik who saw Big Brother coming, used SF for this purpose in We, and Judith Merril and her generation of writer friends took to SF during the McCarthy era in the United States because they felt that bald statements of dissent would invite retribution.
Finally, SF stories can explore the outer reaches of the imagination by taking us boldly where no man has gone before, or indeed ever. Thus the spaceship, thus the inner realms of Fantastic Voyage, thus the cyberspace trips of William Gibson, and thus the trips between two realities in the film The Matrix—this last, by the way, an adventure romance with strong overtones of Christian allegory, and thus more closely related to The Pilgrim’s Progress than to Pride and Prejudice.
In the process of such explorations, SF may create patterns that purport to depict the relationship of man to the universe, a depiction that takes us in the direction of religion and ultimately into the preoccupations of metaphysics and mythologies—the dispositions of gods, spirits, and demons, the origins of the universe and of the people or entities that comprise its societies, the longed-for or feared spiritual landscapes or territories, and the nature of psychic enemies. Again, this is something that can happen within the conventions of fictional realism only through conversations, reveries, stories told within stories, hallucinations, or dreams.
I’m far from the first commentator to note that science fiction is where theologically linked phenomena and reasonable facsimiles of them went after Paradise Lost. The form has often been used as a way of acting out a theological doctrine, as—for instance—Dante’s Divine Comedy was once used. I’m thinking especially of C. S. Lewis’s “space trilogy,” Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, which rings the changes on the Fall of Man, Original Sin, and the possibilities of redemption, but there are by now many other examples. The religious resonances in such films as Star Wars are more than obvious.
Why this migration of the West’s more recent founding mythologies—our once-essential core stories of the Judeo-Christian era—from Earth to Planet X? Possibly because—as a society—we no longer believe in the old religious furniture, or not enough to make it part of our waking “realistic” life. If you have a conversation with the Devil and admit to it, you’re liable to end up in a psychiatric ward, not sizzling at the stake. Supernatural creatures with wings and burning bushes that speak are unlikely to be encountered in a novel about stockbrokers unless the stockbrokers have been taking mind-altering substances. But such creatures are thoroughly at home on Planet X.
So that’s why Heaven and Hell—or at least some of the shapes their inhabitants have traditionally taken—have gone to Planet X. A lot of the other gods and heroes have gone there as well. They’ve moved shop because they’re acceptable to us there, whereas they wouldn’t be here. On Planet X they can take part in a plausible story—plausible, that is, within its own otherworldly parameters. And many of us are more than willing to engage with them there because—say some theorists—our own deep inner selves still contain the archetypal patterns that produced them.
NOTES
1. Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, originally published in Cracow, 1971; Avon translation by Michael Kandel and Christine Rose. Quotation, page 10.
2. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, (Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 49.
3. M. R. James: see, for instance, Tales of an Antiquary.
4. Donovan’s Brain is by Curt Siodmak. The Kraken Wakes is by John Wyndham.
5. Jane Austen: Thus the frisson produced by such titles as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
6. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and