Science Fiction and Humanity’s Search for Meaning: Endings and Beginnings

In the world of today, it’s difficult to look towards the future. Instead of dreaming about a glorious future ahead for humanity, we now spend our days bickering about the problems we’ve made for ourselves. When we do speculate on the future, it’s not a good one¾fears of the impact of climate change and global war make it seemingly impossible to imagine a bright future. Every discussion we have is dominated by a need for facts and logic. In the polarized society we live in, as emotional and spiritual appeals become more and more disregarded, it would be easy to argue that there is no longer a need for science fiction. In fact, I’m sure the argument has been made, likely by many people. As we make advances in scientific knowledge and understand the world around us better every day, there seems to be less of a need for the fiction part of science fiction. Why waste our time speculating on silly fictional ideas when we have real problems that are around us and happening right now?

That question isn’t necessary invalid, and it certainly has its merits. In areas such as vaccination and climate change, I agree that it is extremely important to focus on the truth of the science and avoid resorting to fictions. Ignoring reality in favor of stories and conspiracy theories is a dangerous path for humanity to take and should be avoided. However, I am concerned that it we are also facing the danger of leaning too far away from speculation and science fiction. Secularism is on the rise in the Western world as more and more people turn away from religion. Organized religion certainly has more than its fair share of problems, and many arguments could be made that the world might be better off as it disappears. However, religion and spirituality has given meaning to human life since our beginnings. Even before the time of organized religion, the earliest human civilizations were asking questions about their purpose, and the purpose of the world around them. Spirituality is innate in humans, as we yearn for a deeper understanding of ourselves. So why are we abandoning it now? It is foolish to think that we should abandon our tradition of telling stories and theorizing on the big questions because we think we’ve reached a point where that is impossible. Instead of abandoning that line of questioning, we need to embrace it more than ever. That’s where science fiction comes in¾traditionally, sci-fi has been at its most powerful and necessary when grappling with questions of humanity’s purpose. This is why it is so important to continue asking those questions, now not as religious beliefs, but as speculation through science fiction. Darko Suvin defines science fiction as a way to imagine an estranged world which differs from our empirical environment.[1] Now is the time when we need that ability to imagine a different world, as we lose religious ideas which have traditionally filled that role. Science fiction has the ability, more than any other genre, to give meaning to individuals by telling stories about our beginning and about our ending.

BEGINNINGS

         Origin stories attempt to answer some of the most fundamental questions of human existence: why are we here, and where did we come from? Those questions have been the subject of mythological and religious stories for thousands of years. There are countless versions, from the Bible story to native creation stories, but they all stem from the same thing: humanity’s deep longing for a purpose. Every individual faces these questions at some point in their life, and it is necessary that we continue asking them. Science has shown us the truth of our origin in the form of the Big Bang Theory. But should that mean that we cease theorizing on why we exist? Of course not. Where we once held strict religious beliefs, we can now satisfy that search for meaning through science fiction. One such way for us to use science fiction to engage with humanity’s origin is by engaging with classical religious ideas in new ways, a technique mastered by Arthur C. Clarke.

More than any other science fiction author, Clarke embodies the synthesis of spirituality and science. Instead of considering knowledge and religion mutually exclusive, he allowed them to coexist in his stories, stating that “Any path to knowledge is a path to God—or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use.”[2] He was staunchly against organized religion and stated that he personally didn’t believe in God or an afterlife,[3] but clearly found the idea worth exploring. His writings came at a time when religion in the Western world was beginning to question if there really was e benevolent God guiding their every step. Clarke’s 1955 story “The Star” came at a time of systemic collapse in America, between the paranoia of McCarthyism and the Cold War, and the soon-to-come chaos of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. What defined this time was a removal of rose-colored glasses in America. Suddenly, people had reason to be suspicious of higher powers, both politically and spirituality. In “The Star,” a devout Catholic priest is also an astrophysicist aboard an expedition to explore the star system of a dead star. The crew discovers the remnants of a beautiful civilization, destroyed by the supernova, quite similar to humanity. In a cruel twist of fate, the priest calculates that this was the very same star that proclaimed the birth of Jesus: “oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?”[4] Another story that uses science fiction to question origin stories is the 1972 story The Falsifier by José B. Adolph. Similarly to Clarke, Adolph questions the truth of the Christian biblical story. However, instead of adding ethical consequences to the idea of a Christian God, he rejects the idea altogether. The story focuses on a Peruvian historian struggling with his decision to change the native Incan origin story to one rooted in Catholicism. He calls their story foolish, but in the end it is revealed that the Incans were telling the truth, and the historian’s cover-up is appreciated by the higher beings watching over Earth.[5] Both stories exemplify how authors use science fiction to prompt questions about humanities beginnings.

ENDINGS

Just as important as origin stories to the big questions about humanity are stories of apocalypse and ending. Particularly relevant in a world where it’s hard not to feel doomed, these science fiction stories ask the questions about what happens when it’s all over. What did all of it mean? What happens to us? How does it all end? Some authors attempt to answer these questions within the framework of our preexisting religious ideas about the end. Clarke’s story The Nine Billion Names of God focuses on the idea in a Tibetan monastery that once all nine billion names of God are written down, the purpose of the universe is complete and the world will end. Western supercomputer programmers are hired to help the monks, and the story ends as the supercomputer completes it’s task and the once-skeptical Westerners notice the stars above them extinguishing.[6] Clarke’s synthesis of traditional spiritual ideas and advanced technology offers a thesis that the world’s end will be brought on both by ourselves and by a higher power. Other stories offer more secular theories on the apocalypse, with theories that the end will come from a dangerous product of random science, such as the virus in Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds.” In H.G. Wells’ “The Star” (not be confused with Clarke’s aforementioned story of the same name), the warnings about the end of the world are largely ignored until it’s too late. The master mathematician who tried to warn the world becomes a tragic messiah, only few heeding his prophecy before it comes true.[7]

There is value in those stories about these stories of apocalypse, and they can certainly prompt thinking about our existing world and big ideas. However, science fiction is at its best when it offers hope, and many stories of endings do exactly that. It’s difficult to even call them stories of the end, because they are also stories of new beginnings.  Arthur Clarke’s novels 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood’s End exemplify this approach. In 2001, he explores pathways for the future of humanity, both through artificial intelligence and more spiritual ideas. In the end, a human evolves into a new being called the Star Child, who protects humanity by preventing nuclear war, a clear response to Cold War fears.[8] In Childhood’s End, he subverts the classical Christian imagery of demons by making them aliens Overlords responsible for guiding humanity to its next stage as a single entity no longer constrained by bodies.[9] Isaac Asimov also theorized about the evolution of humanity in his story The Last Question, in which humanity fuses with AI to become an amorphous consciousness that survives long past the end of the world, eventually reversing entropy and restarting the universe. More important, however, is what the consciousness proclaims as he recreates the universe: “And AC said, ‘LET THERE BE LIGHT!’ And there was light –”[10] By reusing that Christian saying, Asimov is challenging our very idea of what a God could be, suggesting that humanity itself will advance to a god-like state. All three of these stories don’t have a sole protagonist, instead telling stories across time and space that create an overall story of humanity’s evolution. They seem almost biblical in their narrative structure, fulfilling the same questions that holy texts have done for years, just with different answers.

In 1966, TIME Magazine released one of their most infamous covers, simple red text on a black background that asks: “Is God Dead?”[11] The magazine examined the idea that in an increasingly scientific world, there was no need for the idea of a God in theology. It came at a time when the Western world was beginning to question the religious institutions that had held it tightly for centuries. Since that time, 34% of Americans have lost faith in their belief in a God.[12] We now live in a world that largely rejects spiritual ideas as silly and irrelevant. However, it is fundamentally important to our continued evolution as a species that we not stop considering the big ideas that spirituality has always brought up. An archetypal reading of religious works and ideas could be used to say that we have essentially been telling the same stories since our beginnings. We have always looked for ways to explain the universe we live in, and considering those questions has always been central to the human experience. As we continue to reject religion, it is increasingly important to use science fiction as a way to challenge our empirical environment.

[1] Arielle Saiber, WSF Class 2 PowerPoint.

[2] “Sir Arthur C. Clarke: The Times Obituary,” The Times, 2008.

[3] “Exclusive interview with Arthur C. Clarke – Life beyond 2001,“ The Island, 2000.

[4] The Star, Arthur C. Clarke, 1955.

[5] The Falsifier, Jose B. Adolph, 1972.

[6] The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke, 1953.

[7] The Star, H.G. Wells, 1897.

[8] 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke, 1968.

[9]  Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke, 1953.

[10] The Last Question, Isaac Asimov, 1956

[11] “Is God Dead? At 50,” TIME Magazine, 2016.

[12] Ibid.

So, my final Voyant visualization isn’t loading, so I looked through my past visualizations and will post a short reflection until I can get that on here. Honestly, based on what I can see, I don’t think I’ll be able to draw any clear conclusions through my voyant. I might be wrong, but my writings and web explorations didn’t have much of any clear theme. However, the good thing is that I don’t really need voyant to tell me what I’ve found through my blogging and web explorations. I’ve found what I want to write about: the search for meaning in humanity’s story through science-fiction. It’s interesting that this is what I initially wrote about, but I couldn’t really put it into words. Now, after a semester of learning, reading, and searching, I’ve realized that while I love many sci-fi concepts, what truly intrigues me the most are the big ideas and how sci-fi writers attempt to answer the question of humanity’s purpose.

I’ll update this post when my final Voyant loads!

Over the course of the semester, I’ve come to realize the type of ideas and themes which I enjoy in sci-fi stories the most. I thought for this final website post I’d look back on some of my favorite sci-fi stories that influenced by thought before even taking this class, and solidify some ideas going into the writing of my manifesto.

A story that is probably one of the first pieces I read which grappled with these big ideas of death and human meaning, is Andy Weir’s “The Egg.” “The Egg” is a short story that follows the conversation between a man who has just died, and his creator. In a short span, it essentially lays out a theory for the universe: that the entire world is simply an egg for one soul, which is reincarnated over and over again in every single human life until it reaches a type of enlightenment, becoming a higher being itself. I remember this blowing my mind when I first read it (probably at age 11/12). It really prompted me to think more about deeper ideas, and question my own faith and views on the universe. One of the most interesting concepts in the story was that the “God” was simply one of many higher beings, all born initially as humans like us. I wondered about that race of beings – was there somebody higher than them? Did the universe just go on infinitely in a fractal of lives?

I also want to revisit two books I wrote about for my first blog post: Childhood’s End and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both tackle similar big ideas about man’s search for meaning. One interesting thing, and something siiilar in all these stories that I love but seems antithetical to my normal favorites, is that they’re not very character focused. I usually love shows and movies that are focused on characters and their relationships, yet these stories all jump around time and never have a singular main characters. Instead, they almost seem to be manifestos of theories, using characters briefly as vessels to lay out ideas of the universe. In Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke lays out a story of humanity transcending to a new higher level of being. The beings that nurture this transition are linked to human spirituality, as they appear in the form of classic Christian Satan imagery. The reveal that Christian imagery had come into being because of a non-chronological deep human connection to these higher beings was fascinating to me. In 2001, Clarke explores the idea of the birth of a “starchild,” a different version of a higher form of human, one with control over the entire universe. In both, there is no singular protagonist, instead the ideas push the story forward, becoming a character of sorts.

Another story – one of my absolute favorites that I haven’t yet written about is Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. The story is similar in how it has a long chronological timeline that doesn’t have a single protagonist, and lays out a “theory of the universe” of sorts. It begins with two humans asking an AI what happens when the universe dies, when entropy occurs. Over the course of millions of years of human evolution, all the way up to when man ceases to have physical bodies and is simply a soul, the AI can only answer “insufficient data for a meaningful answer.” Finally, after the universe has entirely died, and the AI is the only thing left, it finally learns how to reverse entropy. It sets its consciousness to recreating the universe, and declares “LET THERE BE LIGHT–“. Clearly, this is a reference to the famous biblical phrase uttered by God when he created our universe. Asimov’s theory that what we know as “God” is simply an incredibly advanced AI consciousness is incredibly interesting to me. For me, The Last Question is the most interesting exploration of creation in science fiction.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=30e3d0afb2c2ef73d06967af57bb306f

Going into this class I assumed we’d be talking mostly about classic sci-fi stories and that my previous light readings of Clarke and Asimov would be most useful. Of course, we have read plenty of amazing classic sci-fi literature, but I’ve also been pleasantly surprised at the discussions we’ve had about more modern science fiction in TV and film. So, I thought, I’d revisit some old sci-fi shows that I’ve loved for a long time and see how people on the internet are thinking about them in terms of the genre.

The first is the show “Lost,” which I binged on Netflix during high school and therefore had a much different viewing experience than most of the audience. I had heard about the show before I watched it pretty much only in context of its infamous ending, but someone told me that the ending is NOT that they were dead the whole time, which intrigued me enough to start. Sure enough, 6 seasons later what I saw was an ending that was emotional and powerful, if a little bloated. But I was disappointed that such a fantastic show had been overshadowed by people’s interpretations of the ending who hadn’t even watched the whole thing. I’ve been interested in thinking about spirituality and religious ideas in sci-fi for this semester, and I think that stemmed from Lost in some part. There is an undertone of spirituality throughout the series, set from the first season with the theme of Jack (a “man of science”) vs John Locke (a “man of faith”). Locke is convinced that theres some meaning for the plane crashing on the island, that these people were meant to be together. While I’m certainly oversimplifying it, Locke turns out to be right – there’s deep meaning in the connections the strangers find with eachother, and in the end they find eachother in an ambiguous secular afterlife, “moving on” together. I think what I appreciated the most about “Lost” is that while it deals with many complex sci-fi ideas like time travel and parallel universes, it stays rooted in that search for meaning, and ultimately is about the characters.

I’m also looking at “The Leftovers,” a show I actually got into because its creator Damon Lindelof (who has now also done “Watchmen”) was a showrunner of “Lost.” The Leftovers has been described by some people on the internet as a more mature version of Lost, which I can agree with, in a sense. It maintains the focus on character-driven drama with a science-fiction backdrop, although the sci-fi is much more subtle. Most of the three seasons are more drama than sci-fi, but the show begins and ends with intriguing sci-fi concepts. In the first episode, you learn that on a day known as “The Great Departure,” 2% of the world’s population vanished into thin air. The series deals with those who were left behind (hence the name) and their search for meaning in the confusing post-Departure world. It’s extremely depressing, but also probably the best series I’ve ever seen. There are also some heavy religious/spiritual undertones, even more explicit than in “Lost.” One character, Matt, is a priest and has an episode focused on him each season, season 2’s being eerily similar to the Book of Job, and season 3’s including a conversation with a man posing as God. The main character Kevin, also discovers his ability to visit and return from a bizarre afterlife by singing Simon and Garfunkel, and becomes a Messiah of sorts, some believing he is the second coming of Jesus. It isn’t just Christian imagery, too – a season 3 episode focuses on one character’s journey through indigenous Australia in a search for meaning through Aboriginal myths. There’s so much more I could get into, but I’ve done some exploring on the internet regarding theories and interpretations of all the imagery and themes in “Lost” and “The Leftovers” (https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=ec22a0c23d3f662836b300c810b66fed)

I’m nowhere near an artist myself, so I never considered writing about sci fi themed visual artwork. However, I realized when I was planning my short story that art I have seen over the years has influenced my ideas and inspiration for writing. I have a list on my computer of ideas and images that I could write about, and many of them come from digital art pieces I’ve seen on the internet. Pieces like “Engine Maintenance” by Mac Rebisz, “Collapsed Bridge” by Etienne Hebinger, and one of my favorites: “Eclipse” by Aenami. “Eclipse” has been my header image on this website form the beginning of the semester, and was my computer desktop screen for a while. The image itself is not that science fiction-esque, it really only can be classified as such by the titular red eclipse. I think the simplicity is what I love so much about it – it gives the sense that there is a futuristic world out there, built on the industrial remnants of our civilization. I went to Aenami’s DeviantArt page and found many similar paintings, most focusing on a sole figure looking out on a industrial cityscape. While there aren’t any explicit sci-fi elements in most of the images, they conjure up ideas for me of epic journeys and apocalyptic civilizations. Another artist’s work who I enjoy is Simon Stålenhag, who creates images set in an alternate suburban Swedish landscape where children grow up around robots and science fiction.

I thought for this post I would revisit a science-fiction book I read about half a year ago, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. It came back into my mind when I saw a tweet from the author on my twitter timeline (https://twitter.com/EmilyMandel/status/1237807751620853762?s=20). She was retweeting somebody who had said “Guys have you read Station Eleven? Read Station Eleven. @EmilyMandel,” and replied by saying “Counterpoint: maybe wait a few months?” Besides the initial irony of an author telling people not to read her book, I was immediately struck with an eerie sense of how similar the story was to what we’re experiencing now with the COVID-19 pandemic. I was actually shocked I hadn’t made the connection sooner, considering I really enjoyed the book and read it so recently. I guess I had it slotted into the “fiction” category of my mind, and thus didn’t think about it in relation to our reality.

The book is about the rapid spread of a novel flu virus that originates in Georgia (the country), and quickly becomes a pandemic that wipes out most of the world’s population. While the speed and deadliness of this fictional virus are (luckily) much different from our reality, there are a few ideas she presents that evoke our current situation. The first is the general sense of a new normal, and the impossibility of return to a time that seemed so stable. The second is the idea of isolation and quarantine – the reader spends the early chapters witnessing the spread of the flu through the eyes of a man who locked himself in his brother’s apartment for months, watching the world fall apart around him. The third is the idea of optimism through art in our changed world – much of the novel is spent with a traveling troupe of actors working to ring Shakespeare back to the apocalyptic U.S. While each one of these is way more dramatic than our current situation, I think there’s still something to take away – hope. There is an theme of hope running through the entire novel, and it ends with a moment looking towards a hopeful future. After revisiting the ok, I’m trying to take that hope away in a time when its easy to feel like things won’t be better for a long time.

Also, I guess I’m not the only one turning to this story again: EW revisited it for their “Quarantine Book Club” (https://ew.com/books/quarantine-book-club-station-eleven-helped-my-reading-slump/). Still, it’s a bit of a tricky one for me to recommend to others at this time – if you can’t handle images of our worst-case scenario (even with hopeful themes!), you should probably heed the author’s advice and not read it right now.

How did that poem go, the one about the end of the world? “Not with a bang, but a whimper?” Yeah, that’s pretty much how it was for us. Although I still find it a little insulting when people say that the world ended. You’d think I’d have accepted it after 47 years, but for whatever reason, nothing gets on my nerves more than people saying that the world ended. It’s a logical paradox. They’re always saying “we survived the end of the world,” which doesn’t make sense. If the world had really ended, nobody would’ve survived. My thinking is, it’s not really over until we’re all gone. Sure, our population is dwindling and nobody’s in the mood to make more babies, but I’d say we all deserve a little credit for still being here. I just want to shout at them. You’re still here! Hell, even I’m still here. They call it hope. I call it reason.

Sorry, I got a little off track there. I’ll go back to the end. The whimper.

It was the lights. All it took to wipe us out was turning off the goddamn lights. I should’ve known. I always thought it would be something more… complex? You learn about the great tragedies of humanity in high school and there’s always emphasis on just how complicated it all was. World War I happened because that Ferdinand guy got assassinated, which was because of Serbian nationalism, which was because of the web of alliances in the Balkans, which was because of a whole bunch of other history I never understood. I think that’s why it always used to be so shocking when some type of natural disaster happened. I remember when that earthquake hit my city when I was a kid, and how afterwards everybody walked around in a daze, unable to process without somebody to blame. So I guess it’s not surprising when the lights first went out, the all anybody could do was try to figure out who was responsible. On that first day, the U.S was split dead even between its conspiracy theories: half the people I talked to said it was China, the other half said it was our own government. Without computer screens working, we had no idea that the rest of the world was grappling with the same question. It took us shockingly long to figure out international communication without our iPhone screens working. Only when the people who still had landlines finally called their family abroad did we realize that this was something beyond politics. And then when we woke up the next morning and NASA announced the sun was starting to dim, we realized this was something beyond our world.

The scientists never figured out exactly how it worked. I suppose they could’ve with more time, but once we realized there’d only be a few more weeks of light, most people had other priorities. After a few days of the sun getting darker but the air staying warm, we knew that this was only about the light. The sources of light still worked, we just weren’t able to see it. Although, the strangest thing wasn’t seeing the sky without the sun in it. That happened every night before this. The strangest thing was fire. Once the power grids went down and the heat turned off, we started to make fire to keep our houses warm. There’s something so cold about a fire without light.

It took about 10 years for society to completely collapse. People tried to hold onto normal for a long time. Even I foolishly expected some type of new civilized society to rise. But in the dark, it quickly becomes clear that most people only behaved civilly because that’s what they knew. Look at crime, for example. Let’s say robbing a bank. Take the shame of looking into someone’s eyes out of the equation and it becomes a whole lot easier. By the end of Year 2, my parents had been murdered in their home and my brother had went missing trying to get food. By Year 5, I was the only one left. I protected Diane for as long as I could, but some thug shot her on one of her walks. I always told her it was a bad idea to leave the house without me, but I guess I can’t blame her for valuing her sanity over her safety. Her walks had been getting longer. I think she wanted a baby. Always mentioned it. Maybe it’s good then, that she went when she did. Bringing a child into this world would’ve been a far greater sin than anything else I’ve done to survive.

Now I’ve been mostly alone for 43 years. It’s not too bad. I can’t even see myself getting old. But I can feel it. My bones creak, my muscles ache. I try not to think about the past too much. Even that’s getting harder. As I get closer to a sure end, I can’t help but remember the light. But it’s not the sunny days, or the bright houses. What I remember most vividly are the lights that stood alone among darkness. Slow dancing with Diane in the tiny kitchen of our first apartment, bathed in the pale white light of our open refrigerator. Sitting with Dad in the bed of his pickup truck, eating Mexican food tinted with the red of the taillights. Smoking with my college friends, the tiny lighter casting shadows across my shivering hands. I guess light shines the strongest in the dark.

Which brings me to why I’m making this recording. I don’t know who this is for. Or what. But I thought I’d at least leave an account of what happened here. Fun stuff, right?

Anyways, I won’t keep you for much longer. I have to leave. I’ve heard whispers about a farmhouse. They say it still has light. For whatever reason, this random barn in the middle of rural Ireland still glows with light. It’s probably a trap to weed out the few of us who didn’t go when they turned off the lights. Or it doesn’t exist, a false hope for those who need something to believe in. Either way, it doesn’t make sense for me to go. I’m a rational person. Yet I’m about to try and cross the Atlantic. I’m not stupid, I know I’ll probably die.

But I need to see it again.

The light shining in the dark.

Jack Butler

Prof. Arielle Saiber

World Science Fiction

28 February 2020

Beyond Humankind: Simak’s Criticism of Anthropocentrism in “Desertion”

“’They would turn me back into a dog,’ said Towser. ‘And me,’ said Fowler, ‘back into a man’” (Clifford D. Simak, p. 188). At the conclusion of Simak’s 1944 short story “Desertion,” his protagonist Kent Fowler and his canine companion Towser reject their respective human and dog bodies, choosing instead to continue on in their new forms. It is a moment of transcendence, in which Simak allows his character to step away from the human condition. Simak’s exploration of this theme reflects his role as one of the writers at the forefront of the Golden Age of science fiction, in which writers used the genre to experiment with other ways of life beyond human existence. Through Simak’s use of plot, language, and style, “Desertion” emphasizes the naivety of the human race and offers an escapist vision of the possibilities beyond simply what we already know.

Simak’s story is unique first in its exploration of humanity’s relationship not only to other beings from a world beyond our own, but to another being with whom we already share Earth. This is the first plot element which allows Simak to paint humans in a self-centered light. While not explicitly stated in the story, there is an underlying sense of the superiority which humans feels over dogs like Towser, which extends even to the reader. While Fowler clearly has love for his dog and Miss Stanley is quick to defend him, the communication barrier is not enough to elevate Towser to the humans’ level of intelligence. Simak hints at Towser being of greater intellect with his small moments of communication such as thumping his tail in response to a question. However, the structure of the story makes it so that only in retrospect does the reader see this as intelligent communication, after Towser’s sentience is revealed. Science fiction so often deals with other forms of intelligent life from distant worlds, yet Simak makes the case that we need not look further than our own dogs to find connections to other lifeforms. He is criticizing the anthropocentric view that humanity needs to venture far to find life we can truly connect with.

Simak’s criticism of anthropocentrism in “Desertion” extends to the human conception of the physical worlds we occupy¾both our bodies, and the spaces in which we live. Before being transformed, Fowler acknowledges the apparent intelligence of the Lopers, but still doubts the species’ ability to become a new body for human life: “Perhaps the Lopers were so alien there was no common ground for human knowledge and the Jovian conception of existence to meet and work together” (Simak, p. 183). Simak’s language here is deliberately chosen to show Fowler’s misunderstanding of the Lopers’ intelligence. By describing human sentience as “knowledge” and the Lopers’ sentience as a “conception of existence,” he shows how Fowler views the human way of living as the default, based in intelligence and awareness, and the Jovian way as simply an alternative. Specifically by using the word “knowledge,” Simak is making the implication that Fowler feels that the Lopers’ are not smart enough to work with humans. Simak could be using this story as a metaphor to highlight human flaws which plague exploration and connection on Earth just as they plague exploration in space in the story. Anthropomorphism in “Desertion” can serve as a parallel to ethnocentrism and racism. Simak deliberately paints humans as inherently egotistical, with the assumption that our way of existing is automatically the best. It is worth noting that the only way for Fowler to realize the possibility of forms beyond the human body is to physically transform into a new form and experience it for himself.  Perhaps Simak is saying that only when man forces himself to occupy another perspective can he fully realize the limited nature of his own.

Fowler also comes to realize that not only was he wrong in assuming that the human body was superior, but that the worlds built by humans were superior to those unexplored. He first describes Jupiter in a way meant to invoke fear, using words such as “monstrous” (Simak, p. 178), “choking,” and “bitter” (Simak, p. 180) to characterize the planet’s atmosphere.  The syntax is logical and negative, again promoting an anthropocentric view by describing Jupiter in terms of how it would affect humans. Similarly to how humans on Earth tend to view countries other than their own as hostile and unwelcoming, Fowler doesn’t even consider thinking of Jupiter differently despite knowing that the Lopers can thrive in its atmosphere. The language used by Simak shifts once Fowler inhabits the new Jovian body which allows him to experience the gas world differently¾now the syntax becomes abstract and full of strong imagery: “pure ecstasy across a painted sky” (Simak, p. 184), “a spray of magic sound,” “a glittering rainbow of many hundred colors” (Simak, p. 186).

Writing “Desertion” at the tail end of the most destructive war in human history, Simak clearly did not think too favorably of the human species. At its core, the story is about the deeply flawed nature of humans, and our inability to see those flaws. Fowler discovers a way of existing that is beyond the rational, logical nature of human thought, and chooses to abandon humanity instead of return to a dull existence. His choice is presented by Simak not as cowardly, but as admirable. The beauty and connection found once Fowler becomes untethered to the human existence is enough to justify leaving it. His rejection of the human condition is characteristic of a Golden Age writer, dissatisfied with the petty conflicts of World War II and yearning for more beyond our human existence. While Simak’s view on humanity is pessimistic and cynical, he offers hope that humankind can occupy a different perspective and move past our inherently egotistical nature.

Works Cited

Simak, Clifford D. “Desertion” (1944). The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction. Ed. Arthur B. Evans, et al. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2019. 178-188.

I wanted to continue thinking about big ideas regarding humanity’s place in the universe. I decided to focus on religious and spiritual ideas because the intersection of science-fiction and religion is fascinating to me. I read that despite his atheism late in life, Arthur C. Clarke was fascinated with the idea of God, saying that “Any path to knowledge is a path to God—or Reality, whichever word one prefers to use.” I read two stories by Clarke which grapple with spiritual ideas. The first, which shares its title with H.G. Wells’ 1897 story, is called “The Star.” It details the journey home of a space exploration crew from a dead star system. On the visit, the crew found that one of the planets destroyed by the exploded star previously housed life, and they discover a vault with records of a civilization that was peaceful and very similar to humanity. The story ends with the lead member of the crew, a priest, reckoning with a crisis of faith after he calculated that the star was the Star of Bethlehem. He asks, “Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?”

The other story I read was “Nine Billion Names of God” which focuses not on Catholic faith, but on Buddhism. The story is about two Western computer operators who help Tibetan monks who have the belief that once all nine billion names of God are listed, the function of the universe will have been completed. The Westerners treat the task as a joke and do their job quietly, finally leaving once the computer program is almost done listing all nine billion names. However, as they ride out of the monastery, one of them realizes that “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

Both stories deal with questions of how faith intersects with our growing scientific achievements as a species. In “The Star,” humanity’s ability to travel to distant planets is a double-edged sword, allowing us to see the beauty of distant civilizations while forcing us to see the reality of God’s love for us. An entire civilization had to die so Jesus could be found, leading the priest to ask: “was it worth it?” In “Nine Billion Names of God,” Clarke explores the idea of computer technology being used to fast track the “natural” processes of faith – what would’ve taken thousands more years to complete is able to be completed within months, ending the universe prematurely. The ideas in these two stories contradict themselves – in the former, God seems to be conceived of as independent from the greater universe, serving only Earth and humankind, while the latter imagines him as being dominant over every star and every world.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=0c82c204a87d1a075cb2c5aa65214898&view=Cirrus

For the beginning of this science fiction journey, I decided to start with what I knew. Besides popular sci-fi films, my exposure to sci-fi in the past has been primarily through two of the classic novels by Arthur C. Clarke – 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood’s End. I absolutely loved both of them, and so figured it was as good a place to start as any. I didn’t have a particular goal in mind when i went into it, but realized that I was interested in find out what it is about those stories that interests me. I just explored the SF Encyclopedia and TV Tropes websites to read more about Clarke’s themes. One of the most compelling pages I landed on was the encyclopedia page for the theme of Transcendence. The idea of humanity evolving into a higher form as seen in the end of Childhood’s End, 2001, and even some stories we have read in class like Desertion, is particularly interesting to me, for whatever reason.

I’m still not sure what my focus will be for my manifesto at the end of this course, I hope to narrow that down soon. I think I’d like it to be focused on something specific, like an author, film, or theme.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=35ad8b09a68f38eefc27ed623f35313b