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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Sci-fi Anthropology11/08/2006 00:38:33Trying to hold myself back from the election returns, I've been continuing my "science fiction classics" project by reading C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet. I'm not done yet, and I still don't understand why the aliens in it call Earth "silent," but I will comment anyway. People never finish anything really, but that doesn't stop us from pontificating about it. One interesting thing about the book is that it was written during World War II, before spaceflight really began, when science fiction still had to imagine space completely. He doesn't even call it science fiction, but a "space-and-time story," in the dedication. At one point the main character Ransom is looking through an alien telescope at a planet and isn't sure whether it is Earth or Mars. Inundated as we are with images of our planet, a writer twenty years later probably would not have suggested that sort of confusion. There are ways in which this book also reflects the Christianity of Lewis's cosmology, as in the Narnia books. It is certainly instructive to see the kind of ideal society he imagines - one of pretty total chastity, innocent virtue, and unquestioned benevolent semi-divine leadership - particularly compared with, say, what Robert Heinlein offers us. There is a great deal also in the reflections of Ransom about the Fall in human nature. Lewis's uses, which are still only developing where I am in the book, demonstrate the effectiveness of science fiction as a medium of theology. He also reveals so plainly its power of expression for anthropology. By inventing alien races, arranging for interactions with them, and exploring the realms of possibility for the sentient being, science fiction is able to make visionary statements about what we can be or try to be. I sure felt this as a kid when I absorbed the Star Trek eschatology: the encounter with alien races forces human beings outside the old scale of their existence, in which all the old conflicts were founded, becoming immediately peaceful and exploration-oriented. Lewis points this out in the novel through the words of an alien talking to Ransom, the human. On the alien's world, there are several sentient species that all get along pretty well and live under the same Christlike authority. "Your thought must be at the mercy of your blood," said the old sorn. "For you cannot compare it with thought that floats on a different blood." Which is to say, only as long as we are bound to the limits of our own worlds (which we are only now discovering not to be the only world), we cannot truly think. We merely grunt and act at a kind of thinking that is really only the expression of instinct and fallenness. Only when people can see ourselves next to the wholly other can we begin to explore the vaster possibilities of imagination. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
re:CS Lewis - 11/08/2006 02:44:46
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re:English Scifi - 11/09/2006 15:40:49
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re:Sci-fi Anthropology - 11/13/2006 15:44:27
What we need for the moment is not so much a body of belief as a body of people familiarized with certain ideas. If we could even effect in one per cent of our readers a change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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