Sci Fi

I understand that to make a successful youtube channel you should have a tight topic focus and upload videos regularly. But I want this channel to be a reflection of my sensibilities in the aspirational sense of expanding the discussion of meaning and spirit and in the sense of being honest about my own interests. This video is meant to be the later, while science fiction novels are only some of many things I read they really have been a part of my life.

I quite like  pop culture, it seems to have a vitality and avoid the nihilism of much contemporary "serious" culture. I've loved George Lucas' Star Wars movies and I'm impressed with how engaged fans are about them, for me they embody a lot of the vitality of early science fiction novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and E E Doc Smith, obviously Lucas was inspired by the earlier Flash Gordon movie serials and he certainly has a ver 1950s sensibility which I love. It was a retro future that Lucas presented to us. I'd love for film makers to look to earlier science fiction novels for inspiration, I think there is plenty of untapped potential, it would mean they would be showing audiences what they want rather than doing market research to find out.

J G Ballard has said

For me, science fiction is above all a prospective form of narrative fiction; it is concerned with seeing the present in terms of the immediate future rather than the past. 

That's a funny thing of course because the future has not happened whereas the past is rich in detail, it has texture and is populated with a variety of creative people. But the direction of our sight as a culture seems to be orientated to the future, we're always looking for the next big thing, new technology, we want the new music or the new movie. I also wonder if a lot of Science Fiction is also the imagination trying to explore the fabulous while captivated by materialism or scientism.

CS Lewis writes of what he likes best in science fiction and this is also the heart of it for me:

I turn at last to that sub-species (of science fiction) in which alone I myself am greatly interested. It is best approached by reminding ourselves of a fact which every writer on the subject whom I have read completely ignores. Far the best of the American magazines bears the significant title Fantasy and Science Fiction. In it (as also in many other publications of the same type) you will find not only stories about spacetravel but stories about gods, ghosts, ghouls, demons, fairies, monsters, etc. This gives us our clue. The last subspecies of science fiction represents simply an imaginative impulse as old as the human race working under the special conditions of our own time. It is not difficult to see why those who wish to visit strange regions in search of such beauty, awe, or terror as the actual world does not supply have increasingly been driven to other planets or other stars. It is the result of increasing geographical knowledge. The less known the real world is, the more plausibly your marvels can be located near at hand. As the area of knowledge spreads, you need to go further afield: like a man moving his house further and further out into the country as the new building estates catch him up.

This to me is what George Lucas taps into, for instance in The Phantom Menace when Quigon Gin and Obi Wan meet Jar Jar Binks, Binks takes them to the hidden underwater city of the Gungans, he is exploring the same sense of wonder that he sets on earth with his Indiana Jones movies.

Brian Aldiss saw Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as the first Science Fiction novel, there are other early practioners like Jules Verne & HG Wells but for me it was the popular form of Science Fiction that emerged in the US and culminated in the 50s. This was a literary form that was anathema to intellectual tradition.

The idea of the future was vibrant in the 50s with the race to the moon, US cars were styled like space ships. We had sci fi movies The Day the Earth Stood Still, When Worlds Collide, This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet in the cinema sci fi didn't reach its culminating expression until Star Wars in 1977 but Lucas was steeped in the 50s. The 50s appear to me as being a decade of the future, an optimistic if naive future.

Science fiction has been a part of my reading over a long period of time. I'm in my late 50s now but I first read it in my teens. I recently thought about the books that mean sci fi to me, while academic or popular lists will include H G Wells the Time Machine, War of the Worlds, Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World. When i thought of my own canon 3 books not so well known came to mind. Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford D Simak, Slan by A E van Vogt, and Star Born by Andre Norton. I have just re read all 3 and this has been a satisfying personal experience. I think the act of rereading is  important.It not the making but the deepening of a relationship.

Because I am talking about reading science fiction, I'll start with a few quotes on the nature of reading and the novel, Rudolf Steiner has this to say:

 Anyone who reads a book is drawn out of the egoistic circle of his individual life, for it is not he alone who absorbs the author's thoughts; even when he is only half-way through a book he is already sharing these thoughts with a great company of other readers. And so, through this kinship of soul-experience, a certain human community is formed. This is an important characteristic of spiritual life: it has its springs in freedom, in the individual initiative of the single human being, and yet it draws men together, and forms communities out of what they have in common.

Rudolf Steiner - Inner Aspect of the Social Question https://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0193/19190211p01.html

Now something from Colin Wilson, who puts the beginning of the novel in the 18th Century, when Samuel Richardson wrote his wildly successful novel Pamela. Wilson speaks of the reader of that novel having this experience:

She has made the discovery that ‘living’ isn't necessarily a matter of physical experience, that the imagination is also capable of voyages. Today, this sounds utterly banal; in 1740, it was as startling as discovering you could fly by flapping your arms. Richardson had taught the European mind to daydream.  

Wilson further says"

 . . . In two hours, she lives through more experience than in two years of daily routine. 

Wilson goes on to talk about the kind of pessimistic cul de sac that the 20th Century novel had got itself into. He says this about Science Fiction:

Science fiction sprang from the progressive beliefs that are the essence of science. The spirit of science is a spirit of enterprise, it follows naturally that writers should ask themselves how far the human race can advance through enterprise.

...Nevertheless, at its best there is a great deal to be said for science fiction. It often shows a vitality and inventiveness that have been absent from literature since the nineteenth-century romantics. Its writers have, it might seem, become slightly delirious at being told that they needn't worry any more about Ulysses and the end of the modern novel, and have plunged into a debauch of pure fantasy. 

 The Strength to Dream

I noticed that the books I picked had certain things in common all had telepathy & a sense of evolution to the next stage of humanity. They were all critical of elements of the present & they all had a positive future possible in the foreseeable future.

Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford D Simak starts with a preamble about space flight, how mankind had tried going to the stars but had discovered that the human body and the technology just couldn't manage the feat, they tried and eventually realised it was impossible, and this failure created a collective depression. However eventually they realised there was another way, where they got people with paranormal abilities and used a machine to send their minds out to the various planets, this space endevour is presided over by a company called Fishhook who have a monopoly. The main character Sheppard Blaine is one of these paranormal astronauts and at the start of the novel we have this scene where he makes contact with an alien:

It was seldom that one contacted a telepathic creature. Other abilities and traits and idiosyncrasies that made telepathy seem a pallid thing were not at all uncommon, but only rarely did they prove as useful as the plain, old-fashioned telepathic art.
And the creature spoke.
' Hi, pal, it said. I trade with you my mind.
Blaine’s mind screamed soundlessly in outraged surprise that came very close to panic. For, suddenly, without warning, he was a double thing — himself and this other creature. For one chaotic instant he saw as the creature saw, felt as the creature felt, knew what the creature knew, and in the same instant he was likewise Shepherd Blaine, Fishhook explorer, a mind from out of Earth and very far from home.

Sheppard, his mind combined with an alien, goes on the run from Fishhook and the rest of the novel is his adventures, he draws from this alien knowledge from time to time to do some amazing feats. Later in the Novel he manages to return to visit that pink creature this time using just his mind with no technological help:

And he was really there. ’Without machine or body, without any outward trappings,
with nothing but his naked mind, Shepherd _Blaine had come back to the Pinkness.

Paranormals are hated by the mass of humanity and throughout the novel Sheppard is trying to escape from both Fishhook agents and the unruley mob, towards the end of the novel he raids his slimey alien knowledge to finds a way to move physical bodies between planets and he shares this knowledge with the paranormal community. He has found a paradisiacal planet  that they can go to leaving the petty mob of regular earthlings behind :

‘Last night,’ Blaine said, slowly, ‘Fishhook became obsolete.
We don’t need Fishhook any more. We can go anywhere we wish. We don’t need machines. We just need our minds. And that is the goal of all paranormal research. The machines were never more than just a crutch to help our limping mind. Now we can throw away that crutch. We have no need for it.’

He brought out the slimy alien knowledge and ‘held it for them to see until they became accustomed to it, then step by step he showed them the technique and the logic, although
there really was no need, for once one had seen the body of the knowledge, the technique and the logic became self-evident
Then he repeated it again so there’d be no misunderstanding.
The minds drew back from him, and he stood alone with Anita at his side.
He saw them staring at him as they drew away.
What’s the matter now? he asked Anita.
She shuddered. It was horrible. '
Naturally. But I've seen worse. ..They had never really touched an alien concept, and that was all this concept was. It was really as slimy as it seemed. It was only alien. There were a lot of alien things that’ could make one’s hair stand up on end while in their proper alien context they were fairly ordinary. 

The next novel A E von Vogt's Slan is the earliest of these three novels, it was Vogt's first novel, originally serialised in 1940 the story starts with the protagonist as a young boy named Jommy Cross, he's a mutant known as Slans, who are physically stronger, more intelligent and have tendrils in their hair that allows allows them to communicate telepathically and read minds,  his mother gets captured and killed but he manages to escape and in the pursuit he finds a hiding place under a set of stairs:

...he felt the thought of that other person out there, a sly, knowing thought, hopelessly mingled with the wild current of thoughts that beat on his brain. Not once did that somebody else stop thinking about this very hole. Jommy couldn’t tell whether it was a man or woman. But it was there, like an evil vibration from a warped brain. The thought was still there, dim and menacing...

I won't cover the story of the novel, but it has a constant pacing, his abilities are used for problem solving there is no strong connection to nature, no greater appreciation of art. This description of earth's ruler gives a good flavour of Vogt's approach:

The man who came in and -shut the door behind him was magnificently built, greyed at the temples now, lines of age showing. But there was no one in all the world who would not have recognized that lean face, those piercing eyes, the ruthlessness that was written indelibly in those thin nostrils and line of jaw. It was a face too hard, too determined to be pleasant. But withal it was a noble countenance. Here was a born leader of men. Cross felt himself dissected, his face explored by those keen eyes. Finally, the proud mouth twisted into the faintest sneer.
Kier Gray said, “So you got caught. That wasn’t very clever.” 

At the end of the novel we are given to understand that Slan are the next stage of human evolution and all will evolve into them. One of the interesting things about it is that the evolutionary transition is happening in very conscious, even self conscious times in fact where there is conscious resistance to it.

The third novel is Star Born by Andre Norton, my step brother leant me this novel in early teens to read on the train journey home from my Dad's place in Palmerston North back to my Mum's in Hamilton, I'm sorry Michael I never returned it to you, this novel has two main protagonist both humans one Dalgard has been on the alien planet where the novel is set for many generations they have lost a lot of their technology but have become friends with the native merman who have strong telepathic abilities that they use to communicate with one another but also to speak to the lower life forms, the humans also have developed telepathic abilities if to a lesser degree,  here in this early scene we have Dalgard the naturalised human communicating with a creature I guess much like a rabbit:

Dalgard made mind touch. The hoppers did not really think—at least not on the levels where communication was possible for the colonists—-but sensations of friendship and good will could be broadcast, primitive ideas exchanged...

There isn't a sense of the earth being conscious like we get in Powys Glastonbury Romance, but we get a very engaging narrative which revolves around non telepathic, intelligent and technologically advanced but heartless and evil aliens who are trying to pick themselves up after having almost destroyed themselves through a terrible war. Parts of the landscape had been marred by massive tracts of rock that had been boiled by their powerful weapons. The early chapters alternate between the story of Dalgard and the story of Raf a pilot from a  second group of human's from earth who meet up with the evil aliens and help them recover some of their wicked technology. We follow Raf's struggles of conscience and his distrust of the aliens.

Reflecting on the evolutionary divergence as Dalgard and Raf meet towards the end of the novel, I won't detail the plot further but it may be the strongest plot of the 3 but at the end when the two of them part we get this section:

“You see,” deliberately he used the mind touch as if to accent those differences the more, “once our roots were the same,_ but now from these roots different plants have grown. And we must be left to ourselves a space before we mingle once more. My father’s father’s father’s father was a Terran, but I am—what? We have something that you have not, just as you have developed during centuries of separation qualities of mind and body we do not know. You live with machines. And, since we could not keep machines in this world, having no power to repair or rebuild, we have been forced to turn in other directions. To go back to the old ways now would be throwing away clues to mysteries we have not yet fully explored, turning aside from discoveries ready to be made. To you I am a barbarian, hardly higher in the scale of civilization than the mermen—” Raf flushed, would have given a quick and polite denial, had he not known that his thoughts had been read. Dalgard laughed. His amusement was not directed against the pilot, rather it invited him to share the joke. And reluctantly, Raf’ s peeling lips relaxed in a smile. “But,” he offered one argument the other had not cited, -“what if you do go down this other path of yours so far that we no longer have any common meeting ground?” He had forgotten his own problem in the other’s. 

I'll leave it there, these novels were fun to reread, they're mostly under 200 pages which I find an excellent length. If you've read any of these novels please comment I'd like to know what you think of them and if not please say something about what science fiction means to you and what novels you have loved. For me the genre had a vitality, inventiveness and a love of narrative that was so sadly lacking in a lot of 20th century novels.