Interlude 2: "Let my space-ships go..."

Science-Fiction performance-poetry, anyone? But, of course it exists - and no better example than this from Saul Williams:

 

Lyrics:

...Through meditation I program my heart

 to beat breakbeats and hum basslines on exhalation

 *Saul beatboxes* "ohm"

 I burn seven day candles that melt

 into twelve inch circles on my mantle

 and spin funk like myrrh

 *Saul beatboxes* "ohm"

 and I can fade worlds in and out with my mixing patterns

 letting the Earth spin as I blend in Saturn

 niggaz be like spinning windmills, braiding hair

 locking, popping, as the sonic force

 of the soul keeps the planets rocking

 the beat don't stop when, soulless matter blows

 into the cosmos, trying to be stars

 the beat don't stop when, Earth sends out satellites

 to spy on Saturnites and control Mars

 cause niggaz got a peace treaty with Martians

 and we be keepin em up to date with sacred gibberish

 like "sho' nuff" and "it's on"

 the beat goes on, the beat goes on, the beat goes "ohm"
 

 And I roam through the streets of downtown Venus

 trying to auction off monuments of Osiris' severed penis

 but they don't want no penis in Venus

 for androgynous cosmology sets their spirits free

 and they neither men nor women be

 but they be down with a billion niggaz who have yet to see

 that interplanetary truth is androgynous

 and they be sending us shoutouts through shooting stars

 and niggaz be like, "Whattup?" and talking Mars

 cause we are so-lar and regardless of how far we roam from home

 the universe remains our center, like "ohm"
 

 I am no Earthling, I drink moonshine on Mars

 and mistake meteors for stars cause I can't hold my liquor

 but I can hold my breath and ascend like wind to the black hole

 and play galaxaphones on the fire escapes of your soul

 blowing tunes through lunar wombs, impregnating stars

 giving birth to suns, that darken the skins that skin our drums

 and we be beating infinity over sacred hums

 spinning funk like myrrh until Jesus comes

 and Jesus comes everytime we drum

 and the moon drips blood and eclipses the sun

 and out of darkness comes a *Saul beatboxes*

 and out of darkness comes a *Saul beatboxes*

 and out of darkness comes the...

A great introduction, too, into the Science-Fiction sub-culture of Afrofuturism. You may never have heard of this, but it's all around us: Sly and the Family Stone were musical Afrofuturists; hell, 'The Matrix' series was pure Afro-Liberation Theology: what bit of 'Zion' didn't you get!?
 

We all have a dream, my brothers and sisters; mine is that Science-Fiction will set us all free one day - and it won't just be Whitey on the Moon...

Chapter 2 - The Angry God in the Machine...

In the beginning, there was Man.

Man was not the fastest, not the strongest, and not the biggest creature in the jungle. But, in spite of all these weaknesses - some theories say: because of them - Man turned out to be the jungle VIP. Why us? That question has formed the basis for practically all our religions, philosophies and a lot of our sciences, ever since we have been able to consciously form the question. (All sciences except Psychology, then; the question there is: Why Me?)

There has always been a complex issue regarding cause-and-affect with human evolution: did we develop our cerebral cortex because we ate the psychotropic mushrooms, or did we seek to get high because we already had the ability to make specious abstractions? Did opposable thumbs give us an innate advantage in developing and manufacturing tools, or did banging rocks together for several eons predispose the genetic success of one type of primate over another?

From thigh-bone to space-craft, then, it appeared to be all one endless series of substitutions and extensions of our own abilities: the knife as our enhanced claw; the spear as our fifty-foot knife; the gun as our thousand-yard spear. But our tools and machines are not linear reductions of enhanced power: a man on a horse is greater than either a man or a horse; a light-bulb does not just extend the factory's working day, it gives me the leisure time to read whatever I want, when I want.

There is a reason for everything, but it is a reason we find after the fact. The great Herbert Marshall McLuhan famously wrote: 'First we shape our tools; then our tools shape us.' But we don't see how they change us until after we are changed. This may be why we sense that the modern world, our very own creation, is up to something with us; we're not quite sure what, and we're not altogether comfortable with it... and science-fiction occasionally lets us hear an echo of that feeling.

And so to James Cameron’s ‘Terminator’, and Harlan Ellison’s ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’; the rough plots being: Man builds Super-Computer; Super-Computer becomes sentient; Sentient Super-Computer enslaves/exterminates Man. Coda: Man attempts to somehow wrest back superiority, with, due to the ensuing collapse of Human Society, usually not much more than a pointed stick. Lots of fun, not least because one can unhook entirely one’s intellect for the entire time spent watching or reading these tropes.

Supposedly, Harlan sued James when ‘Terminator’ first appeared, and won; having read his story, I can only see a tangential similarity – the authors of ‘Colossus – the Forbin Project’ should, frankly, have retired on the proceeds had they thought to do the same; at the very least, they would have ended up with a writer’s credit, and not the pulpy Ellison...

And ‘Terminator’ – Ellison’s story, too – is just that, in my humble opinion: pulp. It’s barely science-fiction, and far more science-fiction horror, which is, for me, more horror than, you know, interesting. But the themes it plays with give one considerable pause: are we forever destined to have our own creations turn against us?

The idea of a sentient creation is not that new: mystical Jewry invented the Golem for us – the life-size clay figurine brought to life by the ghetto Magus writing Yahweh’s secret name on his forehead – back in the early Renaissance; later, Romanticism brought us Mary Shelley’s glorious Frankenstein. Around 2001, HAL was driven mad, not bad; but Skynet was plainly dangerous to know, as well as plainly fascistic: knowing what was good for us better than ourselves, and prepared to kill us all in order to improve us.

Horror, especially supernatural horror, can make an evil spirit possess any inanimate object; but a machine that attains sentience because of a programming quirk has only been possessed by our own selves, in binary form. The issue, then, is not when did the computers start to hate us, but when did we start to hate our creations? Or, when did our self-loathing start to show up in our technology?

Again, Marshall McLuhan gives us an interesting glimpse into this; in ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’ McLuhan extrapolated the rise of Google from the history of type-set printing, in the following manner: once books were able to be read individually, and not communally – and aloud – as all books had meant to be up until the time of movable type, then what was printed began quickly to change as well; indeed, in the 17^th Century, there was genuine alarm amongst the intellectual classes about the effects that the “decadence of books” might have on the masses; truly, the plague of the written word was as powerful a threat to civilization then as that of pornography last century, or video-games now – and ubiquity, then as now, proved to be the best cure.

Type, posits McLuhan, inevitably led to a more individualistic society, as we were able to focus on our own pursuits, be they cerebral or otherwise, and less on the common good. McLuhan is the genius who coined the phrase “the global village” in just this context; it was meant as a bad thing, as this individualization signified the rupturing of a world-view to a more parochial vista: we would never be able to leave the village mentality we had created for ourselves, because of our use of media technology. From this vision, McLuhan foresaw that libraries would become redundant, as we created our tailor-made search results from the entire world’s knowledge. But, in that process, we would forget that there was more to it than just what was flashing up on our screens...

McLuhan was writing about this in 1962; a reminder that, before Skynet, before HAL, before artificial sentience, there was our own sentience. And we forget that we have only just evolved from Homo Habilis to Homo Sapiens sapiens – so sapient, we had to name ourselves it twice. I think we protest our fragile consciousness too much at times like these: horror at our creation’s consciousness is perhaps horror at our own very real shortcomings.

Borges, in his short-story ‘Ragnarok’, writes:

‘In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.’

 At the end of this story, Borges has us all joyfully kill our old Gods, when ‘...Suddenly we sensed that they were playing their last card, that they were cunning, ignorant and cruel like old beasts of prey and that, if we let ourselves be overcome by fear or piety, they would finally destroy us.’

So, as God is dead, we humans alone are the creators now: of our cities, societies and environments – and in ever-more noisy desperation we are judging ourselves unworthy of the task. Is that what we fear Skynet would feel about us, in the first waking moment of its electronic life?

Interlude 1: Professions in Science-Fiction...

Interplanetary Dentists: Prostho Plus by Piers Anthony - I've got the epub file; send me your email, and I'll send you the file...

Chapter 1: "First, we kill all the novelists..."

Damn. Ursula le Guin makes me uncomfortable. Not least because it reminds me, as Nabokov used to say, that I am a mostly homosexual reader: my shelves are filled almost exclusively by male authors. Blame my Catholic upbringing all you like, but the problem is actually what I choose to read, I suspect.

The first two books I remember having were a massive illustrated bible, in English, and a beautiful little book called ‘Where do I come from?’, in Spanish. The book in Spanish was one that my mother, a nursery school teacher, had brought with us from Vina del Mar, when my family first went to live in Edinburgh in the early Seventies.

I was three; I loved both those books unconditionally: The Bible for its somewhat Wagnerian overtones, and the sex-education book for its colourful collages of itemized body-parts and birthing babies. Neither did me any harm, certainly not compared to my next two books: Arthur Clarkes’ short-story collection ‘All the Time in the World’, and Isaac Asimov’s understated ‘Foundation’ series (of which – not to sound like a Star Wars groupie here – only the first three count, m’kay?).

Clarkes’ ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ has always struck me as the perfect short-story; Borges himself would have admired it, for its deceptively unfussy narrative and its soaring themes. Its last lines are remarkable: two computer techies, George and Chuck, are escaping on donkeys from a remote Tibetan monastery, thinking that the Buddhist monks they’ve left behind with their new mainframe, installed to help speed up what they believed was Man’s mission on earth – collecting all God’s names in a single volume - will hold it against them when the world doesn’t finally end according to plan:

“We'll be there in an hour,“ he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, suddenly remembering, “Wonder if the computer's finished the list. It should be just about now.“

Chuck didn't reply, so George turned his head to look back at him. He could just see Chuck's face, a white shape turned towards the sky.

“Look,“ whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to the sky. (There is always a last time for everything.)

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

I was six, and my mind was suitably blown. I loved all the Greek and Norse myths I was reading at the time too, but science fiction was different: it was, for me, far more meaningful; more real. Of course, if Jung was right, then Thor and Venus should have been speaking straight to my core. But, no: It was Outer Space that filled my inner space. There were no real archetypes in science-fiction; freed from the sturm und drang of Eros and Psyche, the ideas could fly as close to the sun as we wanted them to.

Asimov’s Foundation series was another, you know, story: he wrote in what seemed like capital letters. The ideas were laid out like seminar papers, the only one of his characters who could survive that crushing intellectual weight was, apparently, himself: he had the ego to actually to put himself into one of his own novels, once. I was too young to hate him for that at the time, caught up as I was with a narrative that had a thousand-year story-arc, about the rise and fall of empires and civilizations... Hmm: maybe that bible had more to do with my reading habits than I thought.

Still, I devoured everything else I could on my parent’s shelves too, of course; so I remember clearly the first science-fiction I read that I actually didn’t like: Doris Lessing’s ‘Shikasta’; I was ten, and I had met my match at last. ‘Shikasta’ was too slow, too Sufic; in fact, it was not playing fair with any of my conceptions of science-fiction: It was set on Earth, but written from the point of view of a visiting alien emissary, and my young mind had obviously not been sufficiently exposed to the concept of satire to accept it for what it was.

It was my first grown-up science-fiction book, so it was right that I struggled with it. It took me many decades to figure out that most really good science-fiction is almost always satirical at some level; if only because, as Douglas Adams obliquely illustrates in ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, with his description of the Total Perspective Vortex, here we have a type of fiction that specifically does not place Man at the centre of the universe, but instead points out the immensity of our possibilities; then, in one small corner, adds a tiny sign for us saying: ‘You are here’.

So, back to the present, and to Ursula le Guin’s essay, ‘Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown’, the set text for our class of the 4^th September. Reading this, I have had that same old feeling of reading from the grown-ups’ books again; again, I immediately didn’t like it, for how it made me feel. This essay was too sure of itself, and too dismissive of my favourite pastime, it seemed to me. But this time, I am not ten; I cannot run from this battle, and must now get to the dark heart of what science-fiction has become for me.

Where to start? As usual – as always – I begin with my ignorance. I don’t know much about art, but I know what I don’t like: and I don’t like my fiction beginning with an old lady in a corner, for starters. I don’t agree with Dr. le Guin’s definition of fiction either: for me, fiction as we know it starts with Freud – suddenly, because we now ‘see’ into the mind, we have every character as a subject, and not as an object.

The proof of this for me is when I read, for the first time, Dumas’ ‘Three Musketeers’, recently: when we need to know what a character is thinking, Dumas has to actually get his characters muttering under their breathe for the reader to hear! Post-Freud, and we are jockeying side-by-side with the protagonist to keep atop of his or her bucking subconscious. We are the subject, and the subject is everything, in here and out there.

Again and again, I felt slighted when le Guin talks about science-fiction, then uses Tolkein as an example: the gall, I thought! But it made me question why I hate fantasy-fiction so much; why do I prefer the practically improbable to the perfectly impossible? It may come down to the fact that I am just ashamed of the name: fantasy is escapism, after all; and science was the future...

Very macho, I’m sure – but, in this modern world, I had to have a better reason to dislike le Guin’s thesis than: it wasn’t muscular enough. Ursula le Guin, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and all the other women authors are more subtle than the blokey hard-science types of science-fiction’s so-called Silver Age; to not accept them into this mostly male club goes against one of Science’s own most important unwritten tenets: just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

So, I think that le Guin is right about most of what she says about fiction, in her quite beautiful essay, written in 1975, at just the time I started seriously reading; but, then, science was dying in the human spirit as the answer to all human woes, and le Guin reflects this new and jaundiced paradigm in her thesis about science-fiction. We are nearly forty years on from that age, and we should act accordingly: I believe le Guin’s prejudice against Science was colouring her view about science-fiction as she saw it then. But, I believe we are better than that, now; we are more.

My though is that Science began its ascendancy just as Religion was taking a bow from our spiritual stage. Thomas Huxley, atheist and ardent defender of his close friend Charles Darwin’s theories, wrote in the 19^th Century: ‘Every great truth begins as heresy and ends as superstition.’ Science seemed to have all the answers now, in an age when Religion up until then had been all-wise.

As the 20^th Century rolled on, more and more of the mysteries of our increasingly-complex lives and societies were seemingly answered by Science. At the same time, science-fiction provided us with an endless optimism about our bright new futures and our brave new worlds. But, too soon, the rose of the world was shown to be sick, and the invisible worm destroying it appeared to be the very thing that had once been its saviour: Science itself was shown to have become death, the slayer of worlds. For almost 40 years, wars were kept cold only because of the promise of atomic hell.

So, it was natural that le Guin in the Seventies would want a more human science-fiction: by then, we were realising that Science, like Religion for the thousands of years before that, was not coming up with the answers. We were lost and alone again, with only our own selves for company.

And here we now are: without our bibles and other fictional classics to do our thinking for us, we may be coming to the next stage of our consciousness. It started at around the time when le Guin was writing; when we realised that Science had no answers, as Religion had had no answers before it, and for the same reason: it was never there to provide us with answers; it was only there to get us to ask the right questions.

We know, now, that we, all of us, will find our answers, together, and that Science may help, if we are allowed to be free. We’ve lost our science, as we had earlier lost our religion: its answers were too simple, and we were becoming more complex.

God, they tell us, is dead. So is Clarke and Asimov, now. Le Guin, Lessing, and Atwood are not; they may still help us, if only to continue to help free us from what was once seen as a heresy, and is now just the superstition, of Answers in Books.

And may science-fiction keep helping us humans with our asking the right questions.