Lords of Imagination

 

 

I REMEMBERED HOW THE ALIEN WORLD HAD just hung there in the blackness of my fear-filled imagination, but also a reality thirty light years away, with beings who thought about humankind and the Earth, and no one knew what they were thinking. A whole alien culture, with its own history and view of the universe, a presence whose mere existence perturbed humankind’s view of itself into an appalling uncertainty greater than any ever faced by our kind. It had been a dreadful unease that suddenly revealed all of humanity’s past masks of identity. All the efforts of tribal songs, myths and religions, national, secular, and scientific narratives that had struggled to settle on a human identity might be redefined... by inhuman strangers who would certainly have an opinion. It was an outrage! Humanity’s Jonathan Swifts and various misanthropes had done the job for us, hadn’t they? And by comparison with genuine outsiders, it was feared, our own might turn out to have been... well, kindly. Here at my editorial desk, I still remembered the time—what, only two decades ago—when the universe had been silent, and all future possibilities of any great significance, alien contact being one of the majors, had been only science fiction stories. Books and magazines had been full of aliens, with or without plausible cultures behind them. Now the silence was in the science fiction, as the greatest possible horror had overtaken the writers. The alien civilization had unveiled itself slowly, as one might turn up the lights in a dark theater, revealing a large audience of strange faces, of onlookers rather than an appreciative gathering, powerful critics rather than fans.

It had been a slow contact, but suddenly there was the Galaxy, our milky way, marginalizing the Earth, as humankind had marginalized its own historical groups, in what was not, what now had to be, yes, pre-history...

Would it have been better for the intermediary to have just sat there for another century or more, getting us used to the idea? Would we have been waiting for a knock on the door, growing more frightened the longer it was delayed? Hadn’t we already had enough science fiction as preparation? Hadn’t we already inoculated ourselves against self-destruction with post apocalypse stories? Hadn’t we already had enough thunder and roses? Had we not survived? Had we not brought ourselves under control? Surely that still counted for something...

About a year after the aliens established their de facto protectorate of Earth (more the pressure of their presence than actual governance), one of their cultural attachés (what else could we call them?) came to my office and complained about the kind of backward science fiction we were still publishing at Earth SF. 

“You’re well aware,” he said good-naturedly as he fixed me with his two eyestalks, “that things are very different out in the Galaxy. It’s not a crowded place, but it’s not so empty that any new culture can come out and do as it pleases either. And it’s not a place of medieval adventuring in costumes among various sun-kingdoms.” The large eyes in his snaky stalks gazed at me earnestly, full of faith in my understanding.

“Well, I am aware of that,” I said, leaning back in my chair, “but our readers love nostalgia... uh, for the ways it wasn’t, especially.”

“But you do know that there are only four factions, and that they don’t talk to one another?”

She-it-whatever, waited in my silence.

“So?” I said. “How does that answer what I said?”

“Do understand that we do enjoy what you publish, some of us. We do not wish to censor. Nothing like that.”

“Well, then, what is that you want?” I asked after another autistic silence.

“We could well understand this kind of science fiction in the last century,” continued the attaché, “when your kind was limited to mere speculations about galactic life. But now there’s no need to invent when so many cultures are available for study via the tachynet.”

I cringed inwardly at the unfortunate conflation of tachyon, the term for faster-than-light particles, and net, and said, “Reality-based stuff is dull and takes too much effort to study,” I replied. “We like to invent, to be original.”

“But your invention is so much duller... so much less than can be found in the ocean of truth.”

“We don’t publish textbooks,” I said. “Our readers want entertainment, not dreary realistic dramas about an unchanging human nature, or documentary non-fiction. Factual information about the Galaxy has no place here.”

The four eyestalks came together graciously. “Yes, of course. After all, your science fiction, however much it is deformed by ignorance and purely fantastic impulses, has been the beginning of your planetary literature, and a sign of great hope for your species. And it is that hope that is of interest. Our betters have told us as much, and we do not doubt them.”

“Really?” I interrupted, wondering who his betters might be. “How?”

“An outcast form of writing in the past, science fiction sounded the first notes of an advanced idiom, one in which its creators accept all fields of knowledge as the basis of their fictional dramatic cauldrons.”

“I like that. Go on.”

“You were, of course, unable to produce most of the wonders described in the stories, but your minds saw what was possible, after a fashion, and that in itself was notable. Despite our hindsight, we found this encouraging. Science fiction became your folk literature, at a time just before your time of voyaging through biological possibilities, which is well underway now. Of course, as with all forms of storytelling, the attachment to your known bioform and its behavior persists, following the basic excitation-to-orgasm dramatic structure. But there has always been in your science fiction a clear quality of intellectual astringency and creative praxis.”

“Sure, sure,” I said, “we had to crawl before we could walk.” I wasn’t terribly impressed with this interstellar Boy Scout, or many of our own do-gooders who worked with the so-called protectorate. They had fixed our greenhouse and ozone atmospheric problems, had cured AIDS and a dozen other diseases—and had in fact prevented the feared dying off of much of humankind that had been expected at the start of the new century. And they kept us from nuking each other, which was a good thing, I guess, though our nukes had become much cleaner and less dangerous. Mostly, the aliens were happy just to observe us. Most of us hardly noticed them.

All our power seekers collaborated as much as they could, hoping to scavenge what power they could still use; but they got very little practice in that traditional kind of abuse. They asked and asked, themselves especially, what they were getting for all their cooperation, and got no answer at all, as if it wasn’t even a proper question, which demoralized them. Well and good.

“I’d like to remind you,” the attaché continued pleasantly, “that we are not a very creative species, as you understand the ability.”

“So I’ve heard, but I don’t buy it,” I said, sitting up in my chair. “You have starships, which manipulate forces equal to the gross economic products of a dozen Earths every second! That does it, to my way of thinking.” I was getting tired of my visitor’s show of modesty.

“Oh, that. Well, you see, our starships and attendant technologies were created for us by one exceptional individual born to our kind a long time ago. Another has not come since.”

For the first time I was amazed, astounded, startled by a fantastic vision of a civilization run by technical rituals set for it by a few masterly insights. My visitor belonged to a race of followers, if I could believe him-her-it.

“It occurs to me,” I said warily, “that I may be able to suggest a few things to help you.”

The eyestalks moved closer to me. “Please, do.”

“On the basis of your energy expenditures, it seems to me that you don’t have to find other solar systems. What is there to benefit you? You can make just about anything you want. So why are you here?” I was proud of the twists in my argument, but it seemed to pique his interest.

“But haven’t we been of some service to your kind, even if we aren’t quite clear about how our visitation would benefit us?”

“Well, yes, you have been of help.”

“I don’t imagine how we could ever enjoy domination, unless it chanced that our victim was a superior, in which case we would be defeated.” The eyestalks came to rest on my desk.

And I suddenly knew. “What you really want,” I said impulsively, “is information—ideas and visions! Maybe that’s why you came to me. That’s what you should want.” And I suddenly realized that I might be their new source. 

“Yes, of course,” the alien said. “We extract information from promising cultures and trade it elsewhere. Novel viewpoints and strange ideas which might be useless in one place might find a use elsewhere.”

“Sure!” I shouted as the eyestalks gazed around my office. “I’ll give you a disk of everything we’ve ever published. Lots of ideas we can’t or won’t ever make real. For example, this very discussion we’ve been having is an old story in science fiction.” And we were even right, some of us, about the likes of you, I wanted to add. Bug eyed monsters, but pretty wimpy as conquerors. They didn’t want much from us.

I gave him a disk and he tucked it away in a disgusting, furry fold of flesh, and I wondered if there was anything vital in this planetary lit of ours that might come back to bite us.

“Thank you so much,” whatever-it-was said, bringing all four eyestalks together again. “Your help may prove useful to others.” He tumbled off his chair and slithered out the door.

I sat there feeling glum, thinking that the old littérateurs like Alfred Kazin and Edmund Wilson had been right about the human story being changeless. All the old conflicts and failures only wore new clothes, while the central core of human character remained the same; and at the end of each story, film, or drama, it was understood that the same behavior might be repeated, that it would always remain possible. Only science fiction said otherwise, telling us that given what ounces of reason and nobility we had made it at least possible for us to change, that we in fact deserved to change, needed to change, to improve ourselves into something better— something that would never again slip back into the darkness, that could not ever again fall back into the pit, something that would one day not be able to understand Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Tarantino’s Double Bill. 

The great starships began to disappear from Earth’s skies, and I attributed it to the essential honesty of our alien visitors. They had helped us, had received something in return, and now the rest was up to us to use the gifts they had left us: a healthy planet, healthy populations, ever longer lives. We were expected to keep learning and to change. Somehow they had left this impression with us, without ever having to say much about it.

A day came when I looked up at the empty sky and felt troubled, knowing that all the restraints were gone. Nuclear war was once again possible, if only as a struggle for power rather than for resources and profits. We might have a holocaust at any time, as empty power niches were refilled. Conventional wars, of course, might come first. I thought of running nuclear war and post apocalypse stories—the more horrifying the better—in an effort to restrain my kind. And I wondered if my kind would care that they were probably being observed. I couldn’t help but suspect that watchers had been left behind, but eventually dismissed the idea; it would only fix the game to take away our responsibility to each other. Would we know enough to feel ashamed? Would we appreciate the possibility that the tropes of science fictional ideas might now be helping other species?

I realized that the stories I had given away were as violent as they were constructive, and shuddered at what I might have done to the Galaxy...

This was the end of science fiction, I realized. Anything we wanted to know about life outside our own sunspace was accessible to us through the tachynet, so new stories would be wrong, and we would have to look to the present and past of our world in which to set stories.

Or...

I realized that if we encouraged fantasy and horror, we could never be wrong!

We opened a new vein of horror fiction. The arrogant presumption of looking ahead in time and outward into the galaxies would be replaced with the infinite reality of our deepest desires and darkest impulses, too long repressed by our proud intellect. That was where our greatest creativity lay—in dangerous fantasies, not in our engineering feats. Time to forsake cortical dreams and return to the black forests of our true reality, I proclaimed in my first editorial, remembering the time when our efforts had been toward the light, when everything that had happened had been only an idea for a perverse kind of story...

If the aliens ever came back, that would only be material for news stories; and any fiction written about the Galaxy, if we ever learned enough to do so, would become what we had once called mainstream, mundane literature. As an editor, I lived with the death of science fiction, turning away those who grieved and felt the horror of this freedom. Our great ones adapted easily, realizing that science fiction, what we’d ever had of it, was for our intellects; fantasy was for our black, anarchic souls, for all that we had leashed, chained, and imprisoned within ourselves.