The Anti-Christ
At the New Year’s Eve ball in Australia where Gully debuts as Geoffrey Fourmyle of Ceres, he tells Robin that he has three leads to the man responsible for leaving him to die on Nomad. One is Vorga crewman Ben Forrest. He and Robin track him down. They find him among a congregation of Cellar Christians, a cult that must worship in underground speakeasies, not to avoid persecution, but prosecution. “The twenty-fifth century had not yet abolished God, but it had abolished religion” (Bester, Stars 145). It’s okay to believe in God—and, for that matter, to become God—in this future. Organized religion, however, is illegal and must be conducted in secret.
This is one of many critical gestures toward religion in Stars. In Palumbo’s view, Cellar Christians signify a “spiritual impoverishment” that Gully aspires to repair by “assum[ing] the two-fold role of making this benighted world spiritually significant and humankind comprehensible to itself” (338, 339). And yet the world of Stars is already spiritually significant, enabled rather than disabled by the loss of organized religion. Gully doesn’t want to make humankind comprehensible to itself by reminding everybody what has been lost. Religion should stay lost. On the road to the superhuman, Gully implores everybody to follow him, to transcend the indoctrination of Christian ideology in particular and subpoena Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ, a Zarathustrian tiger whose “teaching comes out of one’s own burning” (Nietzsche 184).
The mysterious Burning Man that recurs throughout the novel turns out to be Gully haphazardly leaping back and forth in space and time after Old St. Pat’s Cathedral collapses on him and he catches fire in the wreckage. The extreme fear and anxiety he experiences mirrors that of Charles Fort Jaunte when he caught fire and jaunted for the first time. Gully is the next step in the evolutionary process. Jaunte teleported across a room. Gully teleports across spacetime. There is a “scientific” reason and explanation for his burning. At the same time, it symbolizes his spiritual awakening as well as the emotional volatility of his character and the trials he must endure (i.e., “one’s own burning”) before he comes out on the other side as a bona fide teacher, like Nietzsche the philosopher and Zarathustra the free-spirited “madman.” In this anti-Christian allegory, Gully simultaneously plays and unpacks the role of Jesus. He won’t die for human beings. But he will dream for them.
The theme of religion emerges in multiple ways, ranging from Cellar Christians and Gully’s transformation into a deterritorialized Anti-Christ to the “blind faith” required to jaunt, the mysticism of the Scientific People, and the sensory deprived Skoptsys who live like zombified monks in the caves of Mars. Subtly or indiscreetly, Bester has something to say about religion in every chapter. I am especially interested in how the gutter tongue “speaks” to this theme in the novel and in the broader context of Bester’s SF authorship. Above all, gutterspeak marks Gully as a lower-class prole, but it also operates like religion, an insignia of his “sinful” social status that consistently dictates the flows of his emotions and actions. We are what we speak as much as what we eat, and Gully’s slow molting of the gutter tongue parallels his molting of all of the social and cultural constructs that made him into a Common Man. Furthermore, Bester’s playful conception of the gutter tongue (among other narrative experiments) reifies the stylistic complexity and diversity of Stars, “sermonizing” the way for the SF avant-garde that would follow him. Gully becomes a prophet. So did Stars become prophetic.
“Gonna Sermonize, Me”
To convert from ordinary prole to ultraviolent tiger to transcendent übermensch, Gully walks the plank of Christian “salvation”: he must confess his sins, relinquish his guilt, and reduce himself into a glutton for punishment.
In the final chapter, Gully makes a choice between himself and society. “Am I to turn PyrE over to the world and let it destroy itself? Am I to teach the world how to space-jaunte and let us spread our freak show from galaxy to galaxy through all the universe?” (Bester, Stars 250). He implicates Presteign, Dagenham, and Y’ang-Yeovil with himself. “The common man’s been whipped and led long enough by driven men like us … Compulsive men … Tiger men who can’t help lashing the world before them. We’re all tigers, the three of us, but who the hell are we to make decisions for the world just because we’re compulsive? […] Are we to be scapegoats for the world forever?” (254). Presteign wants PyrE so he can blow up the Outer Planets and rule the roost. This sort of egocentric power-ploy is exactly what Gully comes to despise in himself; all of his actions up to this point have been driven by self-interest. As desiring-machines, these two tigers mirror one another and represent the instinctual aggressive compulsion of all human beings. Freud discusses this compulsion in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), arguing that the “human love of aggression” is a definitive characteristic that goes back to primitive times where it “reigned almost without limit” (71). An eternal recurrence of that reign afflicts the wartime culture of Stars, and Gully gets caught in the middle of it. His super(anti)heroic ascension is an accident.
Earlier, I suggested that Gully is a slavemaster to Robin. He also enslaves himself. Now he wants his freedom—freedom from desire, freedom from psyche, freedom from the burden of conscience. “I want to pay for what I’ve done and settle the account,” he concedes. “I want to get rid of this damnable cross I’m carrying … this ache that’s cracking my spine. I want to go back to Gouffre Martel. I want a lobo, if I deserve it … and I know I do” (249). Presteign, Dagenham, and Y’ang-Yeovil won’t have it; they assure him that there’s no escape, not from himself, not from them. Robin disagrees—“There must always be sin and forgiveness,” she declares (249)—and Jiz thinks he shouldn’t accept Presteign’s offer for power, honor, and wealth if he hands over PyrE: “Don’t accept. If you want to be a savior, destroy the secret. Don’t give PyrE to anyone” (248). Gully doesn’t know what to do. Appropriately, it is not a human but Presteign’s robotic bartender that gives him the final push he needs to do the right thing. Eavesdropping on their conversion, the robot says: “A man is a member of society first, and an individual second. You must go along with society, whether it chooses destruction or not” (250).
Gully jaunts back to Old St. Pat’s Cathedral and discovers an altar. “Two centuries before, when organized religion had been abolished and orthodox worshippers of all faiths had been driven underground, some devout souls had constructed this secret niche in Old St. Pat’s and turned it into an altar. The gold of the crucifix still shone with the brilliance of eternal faith. At the foot of the cross rested a small black box of Inert Lead Isotope” (252). The box contains PyrE, and Gully thinks it’s an omen. At last, he resolves to play Christ and undo his burden.
Jaunting from one world stage to the next with his “devil face glow[ing] blood red,” Gully disseminates PyrE (i.e., power) to the people, delivering bits of wisdom in the gutter tongue so that the masses will understand him (253). He decides to give people knowledge, to “[s]top treating them like children. Explain the loaded gun to them. Bring it all out into the open. […] No more secrets from now on. No more telling children what’s best for them to know … Let ‘em all grow up” (254). What people do with PyrE is up to them, but at least now they have the choice. Power-hungry slavemasters like Presteign will no longer determine their fate.
Listen a me, all you! Listen, man! Gonna sermonize, me. Dig this, you! […] You pigs, you. You rut like pigs, is all. You got the most in you, and you use the least. You hear me, you? Got a million in you and spend pennies. Got a genius in you and think crazies. Got a heart in you and feel empties. All a you. Every you […] Take a war to make you spend. Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great. Rest of the time you sit around lazy, you. Pigs, you! All right, God damn you! I challenge you, me. Die or live and be great. Blow yourselves to Christ gone or come and find me, Gully Foyle, and I make you men. I make you great. I give you the stars. (255)
This is the longest unbroken usage of the gutter tongue in the novel. Prior to this moment, we don’t see much of the vernacular: it’s talked about more than it’s actually talked. The raw, simplistic, punchy, fragmented syntax reflects the social, emotional, and intellectual status of the so-called Common Man, whose ability to express himself is limited by a lack of education and the forces of culture, which are built by the social elite to keep him down and out.
Tim Blackmore praises Bester for his expertise in wordplay. For instance, “[u]sing his limited keyboard, Bester created &kins (‘Atkins’), Duffy Wyg&, Jo 1/4maine, Powell’s three satellite esters Wyken, Blyken, and Nod, while all the Scientific People in Destination have their gender built into their names. […] This is more than slick writing; it is the author pressing new visions on his readers” (113, 103). Bester’s wordplay looks like child’s play today, and compared to the linguistic boldness of SF novels like Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker (1980), and Iain M. Banks’s Feersum Endjinn (1994), Stars is a conservative, accessible, reader-friendly work. It’s certainly nothing like Joyce’s Ulysses or Finnegans Wake—the two most ambitious SF novels ever written, in my opinion—but then again, Bester didn’t aspire to usurp or complicate story with style. His experiments are small-scale supplements to narrative. In the absence of the Scientific People’s gender symbols and the fifteenth chapter’s typography and imagery, almost nothing is lost, and the book still would have been just as successful. Similarly, Bester’s execution of the gutter tongue could be enhanced, but he didn’t have a lot of leeway.
If Stars had been written a decade or two later, gutterspeak might look quite different. Composed in the twenty-first century, I’d expect it to be riddled with expletives, and if Bester were aspiring for absolute realism, expletives would likely dwarf all other verbiage, exemplifying gutterspeak’s inherent anger, animosity, illiteracy, violence, and pathology. But the limitations of the Common Man extend to his author, who couldn’t fully express himself without censorship (and possibly prosecution) for obscenity. Bester still pushed the bill. Five years before the publication of Stars, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) came out. The novel was widely banned for language and sexuality despite an absence of explicit sex (by today’s standards, anyway) and “extremist” taboo terms like shit and fuck. Goddamn was the catalyst, and Bester uses it aplenty, but he got away with it, partly because Holden Caulfield is a kid and Gully is a man, partly because Catcher is set in a realistic, relatable present whereas Stars unfolds in a surreal, estranging future. God-fearing readers could forgive Bester, but not Salinger, whose style and storyline hit too close to home.
The gutter tongue’s diminutive lexicon emboldens the undereducated identity of its speaker. Bester strips language to the bone and formulates a dialogue of clipped utterances and verbal stabs. In lieu of expletives, he condenses and sometimes inverts syntax, rendering an assertion like “All a you fuckin’ shitheads’re motherfuckin’ pigs” as “You pigs, you.” As in this instance, he frequently ends sentences with a reiteration of an object pronoun (i.e., “me” or “you”). This is similar to the way in which people use “dude,” “like,” or “nah mean” today (e.g., “Dude, I’m, like, angry I’m a prole, nah mean?). It’s an incessant crutch-word, a rhetorical anchor used by people who have not developed the skills or vocabulary to articulate themselves, and it can turn into a habit. For Gully, “Gonna sermonize, me” (i.e., “I am going to deliver a sermon to you”) epitomizes how the gutter tongue compresses and rearranges dialogue, objectifying the subject pronoun (“I”) at the end of the utterance. The construction of this particular utterance also incriminates the speaker. Gully isn’t just delivering a sermon to the masses. He’s punctuating the fact that he (“me”) is the voice of the sermon. An important part of his demolition/reconstruction is the manifestation of an authentic, genuine voice that belongs to him. The gutter tongue was imprinted upon him by the culture machine. Now he’s making it his own. Now he’s Making It New.
As much as Gully wants to help people help themselves, he wants them to see him for who he really is. The subtext of his me-sermon is the very subtext that flares up on his face when his emotions escape him—I am a tiger: hear me roar—only now he knows how to control and channel it. He has learned to be his own circus tamer. He wants humanity to recognize his accomplishment, and he wants everybody to do likewise (i.e., to become what he has become) in the interest of creating a better, gentler world. There is a self-referentiality to gutterspeak that marks Gully like stigmata. His climactic world tour of sermons is a self-induced exorcism as well as a fusillade of enlightenment.
The gutter tongue operates something like Pentecostal tongues. Pentecostalism is a subdivision of Christianity that centers on the Holy Spirit and the idea that God exists in the body of the believer. In Christianity, the Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost) belongs to a trinity of coeternal, consubstantial figures, the other two being “the Father” (God) and “the Son” (Jesus). All three figures are versions of God who play different roles. The Holy Spirit serves as a mediator between the Father and the Son, the latter of whom is a stand-in for humanity. In the New Testament’s Book of Acts, the day of the Pentecost occurs when the Holy Spirit descends on the apostles of Jesus and floods their sensoria. As a result, they explode with uncontrollable xenoglossy: “And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 245). This charism empowers speakers as supernatural “children” of God; with the spiritual gift of glossolalia, they are enabled to execute the mission of the church, the home of God’s Word on earth.
In and of itself, the gutter tongue isn’t spiritual, but like the Pentecost’s “cloven tongues of fire” (perfect for Gully), it’s a nonsense language through which the god of culture “speaks” its speaker. God isn’t dead in Stars, but he’s moribund, and Gully sets himself up for becoming a new god, one who is not Christian (or affiliated with any organized religion) but who remains invested in the greater good.
“I believe,” he thought. “I have faith.”
“Faith in what?” he asked himself, adrift in limbo.
“Faith in faith,” he answered himself. “It isn’t necessary to have something to believe in. It’s only necessary to believe that somewhere there’s something worthy of belief.” (256)
Gully’s rise to godliness annuls God; all that matters is ideology itself, or rather, an ideology of the self, the belief in the vast potential of the individual freed from the hammer of social and cultural construction. Together such individuals could make a great society. Gully articulates this epiphany shortly before returning to Nomad’s womb-locker to be reborn. In Piccadilly Circus, his last usage of the gutter tongue, a language of ignorance, paradoxically disseminates knowledge. This paradox is exacerbated by the contrast between his text and his image. Like Jesus, he teaches people how to be good shepherds—but with his mask ablaze, he looks like the Devil. In Gully, Christ and Anti-Christ bleed together, and by deconstructing himself, he deconstructs the residua of this binary Christian power structure. By the time he enunciates his final words, he has moved beyond the gutter tongue, a “damnable cross” shrugged off of his shoulders once and for all.
Skoptsys and Cellar Christians
In the interval between his last words and return to Nomad, Gully jaunts across the universe, pausing on five occasions at different stars: Rigel, Vega, Canopus, Aldebaran, and Antares—all the brightest stars in the constellations of, respectively, Orion, Lyra, Carina, Taurus, and Scorpius. This narrative constellation of flash-scenes makes the novel’s title a reality as Gully bears witness to the spacetime continuum in all of its glory.
Near Rigel, “Foyle hung, freezing and suffocating in space, face to face with the incredible destiny in which he believed, but which was still inconceivable. He hung in space for a blinding moment, as helpless, as amazed, and yet as inevitable as the first gilled creature to come out of the sea and hang gulping on a primeval beach in the dawn-history of life on earth” (256). Near Canopus, he becomes that gilled creature, “gulping on the beach of the universe, nearer death than life, nearer the future than the past” (257). Everything implodes into Gully, who is everything that ever was, is, and will be—the biblical Alpha and Omega. Gully’s id has been suppressed, and his ego has merged with the cosmos. His solar identity illuminates mankind’s connection to the universe, and vice versa, from the smallest molecules to the largest supernovas. Stars concludes on this pantheistic note. Belief is important, says the novel. God, however, is only as important as our ability to find a higher power within ourselves and recognize that we are all part of spatial and temporal eternity. As such, we are responsible for taking care of ourselves, not killing ourselves.
Bester paves the road to this thesis with the asphalt of Gully’s experience and evolution. He introduces the idea of blind faith in the prologue when he recounts the history of the Jaunte Age. In order to jaunte, one must believe in one’s ability to do it. “The slightest doubt would block the mind-thrust necessary for teleportation,” just as doubt in the idea that Jesus is a messiah who died for humanity’s sins might “block” one’s admittance into Heaven (11). And an excess of doubt might land a disbeliever in Hell, which is where Gully finds himself in the rubble of Old St. Pat’s, burning and bereft, before rising from the flames, shooting to the stars, and becoming a shooting star himself. Ideology and the notion of faith is thus knitted into the fabric of everyday life. Without it, life won’t work anymore. Jaunting has revolutionized civilization and brought about a communal dependency on its constant enaction.
After two centuries of colonization, the air struggle on Mars was still so critical that the V-L Law, the Vegetative-Lynch Law, was still in effect. It was a killing offense to endanger or destroy any plant vital to the transformation of Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere into an oxygen atmosphere. Even blades of grass were sacred. There was no need to erect KEEP OFF THE GRASS neons. The man who wandered off a path onto a lawn would be instantly shot. The woman who picked a flower would be killed without mercy. Two centuries of sudden death had inspired a reverence for green growing things that almost amounted to a religion. (198)
“Did you ever stop to think what swearing is?” Robin asked quietly.
“You say ‘Jesus’ and ‘Jesus Christ.’ Do you know what that is?”
“Just swearing, that’s all. Like ‘ouch’ or ‘damn.’”
“No, it’s religion. You don’t know it, but there are two thousand years of meaning behind words like that.”
“This is not time for dirty talk,” Foyle said impatiently. (145)
Robin isn’t critiquing Gully for using God’s name in vain. That would be silly: as Gully indicates, religion itself (and everything it entails) amounts to “dirty talk.” Instead, she tries to explain how the ghost of religion still haunts twenty-fifth-century discourse.
Most noticeably, Bester depicts the ghost of religion via two groups of deviants: Skoptsys and Cellar Christians. In both cases, he associates their deviance with sexuality.
Gully’s quest to find out who gave the order for Vorga to bypass Nomad takes a long time as he steps on and over numerous leads to the truth. He’s our lens: we know what he knows, and as he gathers clues and puts the pieces of the puzzle together, so do readers. Eventually, he discovers that Vorga had been smuggling war refugees away from Callisto and the Outer Planets. Rather than bring the refugees to safety, the captain of the ship, Lindsey Joyce, confiscated their belongings, then dumped them into space, like Nazis plundering Jews and sending them to the gas chamber. Not until later does Gully realize that Olivia orchestrated the subterfuge (and his collateral abandonment) as part of her battle against humanity. At first, though, he thinks the blame lies with Joyce.
Guilt-ridden from her crimes, Joyce becomes a Skoptsy and retreats to a colony on Mars. Bester extrapolates Skoptsys from a sect of Russian Orthodox Christians that formed in the eighteenth century. Gully calls these monastic zombies “the living dead” (200). Not only do they practice abstinence, they literally cut ties with all of their senses: “The ancient Skoptsy sect of White Russia, believing that sex was the root of all evil, practiced an atrocious self-castration to extirpate the root. The modern Skoptsys, believing that sensation was the root of all evil, practiced an even more barbaric custom. Having entered the Skoptsy Colony and paid a fortune for the privilege, the initiates submitted joyously to an operation that severed the sensory nervous system, and lived out their days without sight, sound, speech, smell, taste, or touch” (ibid.). They exist in the darkness of underground catacombs, without social interaction, and with just enough sustenance and exercise to stay alive. The main purpose of such an existence is to purify the mind and body of original sin, which lives in the senses. For Joyce, it’s penance for mass murder.
Gully doesn’t just show up on Mars and find Joyce. As always, he must find somebody else to lead the way to his next lead. Here it’s the only fully operational Martian telepath, Sigurd Magsman, “an ancient, ancient child” who possesses as much wisdom as he does immaturity (199). In fact, he’s a spoiled brat, kowtowed by everybody on the planet. Gully kidnaps him, forces him to do his bidding. At the Skoptsy monastery, they discover Joyce among her flock, all of them “white as slugs, mute as corpses, motionless as Buddhas” (201). Gully didn’t know Joyce is a woman; because of purdah, she had to masquerade as a man in order to climb the officer ranks. He’s doubly taken aback when the Burning Man shows up and reveals that Olivia, not Joyce, was the one who gave the bypass order. All along, he thought that men had been in charge of his demolition, but it was two women, one of which he loves dearly.
There is a Buddhist component to Bester’s Skoptsys, who acknowledge suffering and practice a kind of mindfulness, yet as Sigurd tells Gully, “[t]hey’re sick … all sick … like worms in their heads” (201). Nirvana doesn’t await them; they each live in their own personal, pathological Hell. For the most part, their ideological roots are in Christianity, the dominant ex-religion in Stars. Bester almost exclusively projects Western civilization and culture into the future. Anything non-occidental is incidental.
The term skoptsky derives from the antiquated Russian oskopit, which means “to castrate.” Oleg Skripnik explains that “[r]itual self-castration was observed among ardent Christians long before the appearance of the sect [in the eighteenth century]. The most important tenet of the Skoptic faith, which inspired ancient Christian theologian and ascetic Origen to castrate himself, came from a passage in the Gospel according to Matthew: ‘There are castrates who were castrated by others and there are castrates who castrated themselves for the Kingdom of God.’” Over time, sectarians began to interpret parts of the Bible to suit their beliefs (e.g., the idea that Jesus castrated his disciples after washing their feet).
In Stars, the very existence of Skoptsys threatens the phallus that Gully so vehemently embodies as an aggressive alpha male. Coupled with the discovery that Joyce is a woman and Olivia forsakened him, Gully experiences emasculation and symbolic castration on multiple levels. His fear is palpable, and it’s telling that Bester poses him like Christ on the cross when he attempts to escape Mars. He’s on the lam—and on the lamb (of God)—for snatching Sigurd. As commandos close in on the monastery and he hastens to the nearest jaunte stage, the Outer Satellites bomb the planet. He scurries to his ship and takes off, but he’s in acceleration mode, and the gravitational force throws him onto the back wall of the cockpit: “The wall appeared, to his accelerated senses, to approach him. He thrust out both arms, palms flat against the wall to brace himself. The sluggish power thrusting him back split his arms apart and forced him against the wall, gently at first, then harder and harder until face, jaw, chest, and body were crushed against the metal” (Bester, Stars 206). It’s as if Gully has been nailed there. Once again, Bester christens him as Christ. He has risen from the catacombs of “the living dead” and blasted off of Mars. Soon he will rise from the symbolic death of his tiger-self and blast off to the stars.
In addition to foreshadowing Gully’s rebirth, Skoptskys foreshadow his movement beyond the gutter tongue and language in general. They do not appear to have a voice, or at least one that we can hear, telepathically or actually. To extract intel from Joyce, Gully uses Sigurd, who doesn’t want to look inside her head. He’s afraid—it’s too painful and chaotic in there, and he can’t understand her. At no point does Joyce speak or give up any information. Gully gives himself the information about Olivia in the form of the Burning Man. Joyce’s voicelessness is part of her punishment, one of many stigmata removed from her being. Gully’s voicelessness connotes a removal of stigmata as well, but unlike Joyce’s, it’s only temporary. As J♂seph tells M♀ira in the last scene, he will unlock a new voice from the womb-locker in which he sleeps and dreams: “Presently he will awaken and read to us, his people, his thoughts” (258).
Cellar Christians are a counterpoint to Skoptsys. Their closet gatherings are more like orgies than funeraries, and Bester links them to pornography and drugs.
On several occasions, characters mention Cellar Christians, never in a positive light. For example, when the specters of guilt and conscience first begin to distress Gully, he worries that he might be “turning into a white-livered Cellar Christian turning the other cheek and whining forgiveness” (195); and when Y’ang-Yeovil (disguised as Angelo Poggi) tries to bag and tag Gully on the Spanish Stairs, he pretends to be a black-market panhandler: “Filthy pictures, signore? Cellar Christians, kneeling, praying, singing psalms, kissing cross? Very naughty. Very smutty, signore. Entertain your friends … Excite the ladies” (158). Christianity, a forbidden fruit, has usurped sexuality as the dominant mode of porn, although sexuality remains part of the scopophilic thrill. There’s still a desire for Christianity, but not like there used to be.
Gully and Robin encounter a congregation of Cellar Christians on their hunt for Ben Forrest, whose house turns out to be a conventicle. Among the congregation, Gully sees “a priest and a rabbi,” insinuating that Judaism has been lumped together with this underground cult. He and Robin don’t find Forrest in the basement. He’s upstairs, in the attic, doing drugs. Forrest is a “twitch” who takes Analogue, a hallucinogenic that reverts him to a primal state wherein he identifies with a specific animal. Not coincidentally, “Forrest was queer for snakes,” the animal most disparaged and feared in Christian lore, especially in the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis, where Satan tempts Adam and Eve in the form of a serpent, robbing mankind of the bliss of ignorance (147).
There is no evidence that worshipping Cellar Christians have taken Analogue, too, but the juxtaposition of “[r]eligion in the cellar and dope upstairs” is enough (144). By associating Cellar Christians with porn and drugs, Bester accentuates the illicit status of religion in Stars. What used to be widely valued by the masses is now a source of contempt, weakness, and absurdity. But why? We are never told outright. Historically, nothing conceived of by the human mind is responsible for more anxiety, enmity, bloodshed, pain, and suffering than religion, but getting rid of religion didn’t get rid of war and meaningless death in this imagined future. We must look to Gully for the reason. His transformation into an übermensch explains what happened to religion and why the journey away from it has been so rocky: the slow replacement of myth with mankind. Post-Stars, Bester implies, Gully will teach people to believe in themselves and the universe rather than harmful superstitions.
Whatever one believes, the prospect of death and nothingness is sufficiently frightening to induce the mass pathology of religion and the belief in an afterlife, a skygod, an oven in the dirt, messiahs, cosmic energy, regeneration, thetans, flying spaghetti monsters, and so on, but if the waning of religious fervor in the twentieth century is any indicator, by the twenty-fifth century, religion will be seriously marginalized. Cellar Christians could be Bester’s most realistic extrapolation in Stars.
Last Rites
In The Gospel According to Science Fiction (2007), Gabriel Mckee makes a case for the religious tenor of SF, refuting the idea that the genre downplays religion and is atheistic, if only by prioritizing science and technology over spirituality. The book was printed by Presbyterian publisher Westminister John Knox Press, and McKee’s unease and insecurity about the genre (or anything) not being religious comes across in spades. The same can be said for his blog, SF Gospel, and the entry he writes on Stars, “‘Cellar Christians’: What It Really Means When an SF Author Says Religion Doesn’t Exist in the Future.” Responding to other bloggers who assume that SF and religion don’t mix, he uses Stars to show that even SF texts in which religion has been outlawed are religious at their core. “In The Stars My Destination,” he writes, “religion has been suppressed, but it cannot be destroyed. Indeed, by presenting religion with the terminology of pornography, Bester places the spiritual drive on a primal level equal to that of the sexual drive. By the time he introduces the Skoptsys […], it’s far more reasonable to conclude that Bester thinks human beings must be religious, even if his protagonist is not.”
McKee is right about Bester presenting religion in terms of porn and sexuality rather than spiritual drives, but he’s dead wrong about Bester’s attitude toward religion as represented in the novel. What McKee fears is the absence of religion, namely Christianity—in this text or any text—and as with most devout Christians, what he wants is an endorsement of his beliefs; like the classic Skoptsy, he feels compelled to interpret Stars so that it suits his own needs and desires. In fact, the novel does not say that humans must be religious. It says we must have faith in our ability to become the best we can be without God, the idea of which has produced illimitable death and destruction throughout history. If anything, belief in science is what the novel wants, because advances in technology will allow human beings to increasingly unlock their full potential. Science, not God, is the gateway to the “new frontiers” that the Romantics cry for in the prologue. Both rely on the power of the imagination, but Stars thinks human beings must not be religious.
Langford and Stableford say that most SF definitions tend to dissociate religion from the genre, but “many of the roots of proto-SF are embedded in traditions of speculative fiction closely associated with the religious imagination, and contemporary SF recovered a strong interest in certain mystical and transcendental themes and images when it moved beyond the taboos imposed by the pulp magazines.” Bester breaks these taboos not only by thematizing religion, but by making it taboo.
Gernsback broke in a half dozen writers who were maladroits as fiction writers but mature experts in one aspect of popular science or another. […] Within five years science fiction exhausted the reprint field and the prefabricated concepts, and, alas, fell into the hands of the pulp writers. It was then that the great decline set in because science fiction began to reflect the inwardness of the hack writer, and the essence of the hack writer is that he has no inwardness. He has no contact with reality, no sense of dramatic proportion, no principles of human behavior, no eye for truth … and a wooden ear for dialogue. He is all compromise and clever-shabby tricks … [S]cience fiction wallowed in this pigsty. (410, 413)
Bester and Gully are both exorcists, then, frustrated by the demons of history, fighting to elevate their respective worlds of wonder.