Read Online Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright - Free Book Online
Authors: John C. Wright
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undiscovered but quite natural property of natural science allows for it, such as the natural evolutionary development of intelligence on extraterrestrial worlds.
A second difference is one of familiarity. A talking fox or a talking tree we can easily imagine to be like the trickster from
Pinocchio
or Treebeard from Tolkien. But a Martian is either a monster, something strange and dangerous, or an alien, someone strange whether dangerous or not. Possibly the Martian is a space princess named Dejah Thoris, who happily is both gorgeous and naked, but even she must be alien in the sense of exotic and alluring, if she is to be a convincing Martian.
There is a veil between the human world and the Otherworld in fairy tales which the tale penetrates, and we imagine what life is on the other side. In science fiction the veil is between the human world and other places in time and space and other dimensions, between the natural world we know and unknown worlds equally as natural as our own. They can be extraterrestrial and even extra-dimensional, but they cannot be literally uncanny, nor, in sense that Elfland or the Inferno is, can they be unearthly.
But now we are far afield, so let us quickly return to the point of the appeal of seeing a maiden befriending animals to do human tasks. I hope we are all agreed from the examples above, and many others we can imagine, that the appeal is a longing to be at peace with nature, to cross the gap which even those men who do not believe in the literal Garden of Eden will admit exists. There is something in the human soul that longs for Arcadia, for the Golden Age of Saturn, for the time which modern science says never existed, but all myths report once did exist, when man and nature were one, and beasts were our brothers.
To be sure, there is many a modern myth, spun by Rousseau or Marx and seen in stories like
Dances With Wolves
, about the Edenic times when we were all noble savages. Some of these myths pretend to be scientific, but real science, studying the skull wounds of Neolithic corpses, can tell the murder rate back in the Stone Age was higher than anywhere in the modern world, and that includes inner cities during riots and provinces at war. It should rightly be called not the 'Stone Age' but the 'Homicide by Stone Axe Age'.
Whatever science or pseudoscience says, anyone whose heart is fit to hear fairy tales knows a sense of loneliness and loss which is soothed, but only in part, by the sublime beauties of nature. There is something out there we all want to embrace, and to have it talk to us.
That, by the way, is the point of the appeal of having the fuzzy woodland friends do chores. If Snow White were seen keeping house for the dwarves, but what she did was get a cat to keep the rats out of the grain store, go duck hunting with her faithful hound Greatheart, and hitch up a horse or ox to plough the field, or keep bees for their honey or chickens for their eggs or keep lambs for their veal, then the gap between man and nature is still in place, and the virgin has not lured the wild things over the gap to our side.
No doubt by now some readers are puzzled at my repeated use of the words virgin and maiden, and, if those readers went to public school instead of getting an education, they are not only puzzled but offended. This brings up a second and larger point about woodland creatures working at human tasks, which is, namely, what power does the fairy tale virgin possess which enables her to overcome or ignore the gap between man and nature which afflicts the rest of the Sons of Adam?
It is, of course, her innocence. Much as it appalls the brain-dead zombies indoctrinated by public schools, innocence is better than the cynicism or shared guilt or victimology taught by modern thought, and, if we place faith in the account Moses told the Children of Israel about Eden, it was lack of innocence that drove the parents of mankind out of paradise.
Even more appalling to the zombies,
A second difference is one of familiarity. A talking fox or a talking tree we can easily imagine to be like the trickster from
Pinocchio
or Treebeard from Tolkien. But a Martian is either a monster, something strange and dangerous, or an alien, someone strange whether dangerous or not. Possibly the Martian is a space princess named Dejah Thoris, who happily is both gorgeous and naked, but even she must be alien in the sense of exotic and alluring, if she is to be a convincing Martian.
There is a veil between the human world and the Otherworld in fairy tales which the tale penetrates, and we imagine what life is on the other side. In science fiction the veil is between the human world and other places in time and space and other dimensions, between the natural world we know and unknown worlds equally as natural as our own. They can be extraterrestrial and even extra-dimensional, but they cannot be literally uncanny, nor, in sense that Elfland or the Inferno is, can they be unearthly.
But now we are far afield, so let us quickly return to the point of the appeal of seeing a maiden befriending animals to do human tasks. I hope we are all agreed from the examples above, and many others we can imagine, that the appeal is a longing to be at peace with nature, to cross the gap which even those men who do not believe in the literal Garden of Eden will admit exists. There is something in the human soul that longs for Arcadia, for the Golden Age of Saturn, for the time which modern science says never existed, but all myths report once did exist, when man and nature were one, and beasts were our brothers.
To be sure, there is many a modern myth, spun by Rousseau or Marx and seen in stories like
Dances With Wolves
, about the Edenic times when we were all noble savages. Some of these myths pretend to be scientific, but real science, studying the skull wounds of Neolithic corpses, can tell the murder rate back in the Stone Age was higher than anywhere in the modern world, and that includes inner cities during riots and provinces at war. It should rightly be called not the 'Stone Age' but the 'Homicide by Stone Axe Age'.
Whatever science or pseudoscience says, anyone whose heart is fit to hear fairy tales knows a sense of loneliness and loss which is soothed, but only in part, by the sublime beauties of nature. There is something out there we all want to embrace, and to have it talk to us.
That, by the way, is the point of the appeal of having the fuzzy woodland friends do chores. If Snow White were seen keeping house for the dwarves, but what she did was get a cat to keep the rats out of the grain store, go duck hunting with her faithful hound Greatheart, and hitch up a horse or ox to plough the field, or keep bees for their honey or chickens for their eggs or keep lambs for their veal, then the gap between man and nature is still in place, and the virgin has not lured the wild things over the gap to our side.
No doubt by now some readers are puzzled at my repeated use of the words virgin and maiden, and, if those readers went to public school instead of getting an education, they are not only puzzled but offended. This brings up a second and larger point about woodland creatures working at human tasks, which is, namely, what power does the fairy tale virgin possess which enables her to overcome or ignore the gap between man and nature which afflicts the rest of the Sons of Adam?
It is, of course, her innocence. Much as it appalls the brain-dead zombies indoctrinated by public schools, innocence is better than the cynicism or shared guilt or victimology taught by modern thought, and, if we place faith in the account Moses told the Children of Israel about Eden, it was lack of innocence that drove the parents of mankind out of paradise.
Even more appalling to the zombies,
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