Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction, Page 2
R. A. Lafferty
Someday I will analyze the reason that the elusive essential flavor is to be found only in small amounts and in fractured and imperfect works.
June 6, 1979
Great Awkward Gold
Golden ages seem to appear full-formed and with no more roots than a hen has teeth. And the earliest works of an art often seem to be the best: the Homeric Epics, the earliest Cave Paintings, the Greek philosophies and lyric poems and mathematics and tragic dramas, the megaliths all over the world that are so large and incredible that their constructions have been ascribed to gods (not a bad guess, perhaps), the jungle-encrusted temple-towns of South-East Asia. Only in such comparatively recent Golden Ages as of Renaissance Florence and Elizabethan London can a few roots be discerned, pieces of exciting but awkward and badly-formed gold at the real beginning.
But the sun of each Golden Age dawns suddenly, and there will never be another morning like that first morning.
Would it be extravagant to speak of a Golden Age and of a quick-dawning Sun for Science Fiction? Certainly it would be. But if we do not speak extravagantly about Science Fiction we cannot speak of it at all.
The quick-appearing sun of Science Fiction was a binary or double sun. The first sun to appear was named Alpha Star Jules Verne, and the second slightly larger sun was named Beta Star H.G. Wells. Odd names for suns, are they not?
The Frenchman Jules Verne appeared with a blaze of novels that were all ‘voyages’ (but all Science Fiction stories are ‘voyages’ in a sense): Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863); A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864); From The Earth To The Moon (1865); Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea (1870); Around the World In Eighty Days (1874). Verne's ‘voyage’ novels were genial and pleasant and original. There was good comedy in them. As a comic writer, Verne was at least equal to Mark Twain. There is some good technology for the times, and even a touch of science. The ‘voyages’ were freighted with magic and gold; but it wasn't recognized immediately that Verne was an authentic sun.
The Englishman H.G. Wells appeared with the great Science Fiction novels, The Time Machine (1895); The Island of Doctor Moreau (1897); The Invisible Man (1897); The War of the Worlds (1898); The First Men In The Moon (1901); The Food of the Gods (1904). And at the same time his great Science Fiction short stories were appearing. Most of them are in his short story collections The Stolen Bacillus And Other Stories (1895); The Plattner Story (1897); Tales of Space and Time (1899). These Science Fiction short stories of Wells are more important than his Science Fiction novels. They are more important than anything else that has ever been written in Science Fiction. And all the great Science Fiction ideas are to be found in their original form in these stories.
Fundamentally these works of Verne and Wells are Science Fiction, the beginning and the end of it.
But when you have everything so complete and perfect from the first appearance, where further can you go? The perfection might be non-generating and self-limiting. And there are some things about copious perfection that begin to cloy, though only after they have been enjoyed a hundred times first.
Well really Verne was never so perfect as to be frustrating. But Wells, he barely stopped in time. If he had written one more perfect Science Fiction story, he should have been beheaded and drawn and quartered for it, and the quarters of his body nailed up in public places for a warning.
When one wants to go on a voyage, it is frustrating to be told “No, you may not go. You have already been everywhere.” There must be somewhere else beyond that everywhere.
And then there is a requirement so grotesque that one hardly knows how to phrase it. It is this: that a certain number of Science Fiction stories, in the name of exuberance and wide-spectrum variety, must be quite bad stories according to any rational standards. This requirement does not apply to the stories of any fiction except Science Fiction. These great awkward stories are fertile. They can have offspring, and the perfect stories can not.
Here is a very large book brim-full of them, Science Fiction By The Rivals of H.G. Wells, from Castle Books, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1979. It has thirty short stories and one complete novel. The ‘Rivals’ of H.G. Wells were W.L. Alden, Grant Allen, L.J. Beeston, Frank T. Bullen, Wardon Allan Curtis, Rudolph de Cordova, Ellsworth Douglas, George Griffith, Cutcliffe Hyne, Jack London, Owen Oliver, Edwin Pallander, E. Tickner-Edwards, George C. Wallis, A. Sarsfield Ward, Edward Olin Weeks, Fred M. White. All the stories were first published in England between 1895 and 1906 in the Strand Magazine (which was also publishing Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories at the same time), the Windsor Magazine, Pearson's Magazine, Cassell's Magazine, and the Harnsworth Magazine. Several of these writers, it is said, got higher rates for their stories than Wells was getting for his.
These ‘rivals’ of H.G. Wells were not imitators of Wells. In several cases where stories have ideas very close to the ‘original’ ideas of Wells' stories, these stories were published earlier than the corresponding Wells' masterworks. The best of these ‘rival’ writers are George Griffith, Cutcliffe Hyne, and Fred M. White. But the best-worst of the stories is The Monster of Lake LaMetrie by Wardon Allan Curtis.
The ‘monster’ seems to be a swimming dinosaur. Only recently had the ‘dragon’ been verified by finds of nearly complete skeletons; and ‘dinosaur’ is only another name for ‘dragon’. And the ‘monster’ also has a touch of the Loch Ness Monster.
Doctor McLennegan and his friend Framingham, collecting specimens, come to wild Lake LaMetrie. Framingham becomes very sick. McLennegan is attacked by the huge monster coming out of the lake, but by a lucky stroke of his short sword or bolo-knife he cuts the top off the monster's head. The monster is stunned but does not collapse, so McLennegan lifts the brain out of the monster's head and takes it back to camp to study it. The next day, McLennegan notices that the monster is still very much alive, though without a brain.
Framingham dies, and McLennegan puts Framingham's brain into the monster's head and connects it up. The combination lives, thrives, and quickly learns to talk. So McLennegan has his friend alive again, though in a rather ungainly body. What two companions they could be now! The man and the man-brained monster! A whole television series could be spun out of their situation.
But the man-brained monster becomes psychotic, and who could blame him! He becomes a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a good man and an evil monster in one brain-body. Then the man-monster dies, mostly of split personality. The material of this story is sheer gold; it is only the workmanship of this golden material that is wavering and impossible.
Many of these stories are of great disasters happening to the City of London: and London was the World to the writers for the Illustrated Magazines of the 1890's. London nearly perishes from epidemic disease, from fire, from vile oily fog, from icy cold.
There are submarine-boat stories, hollow-earth stories, other kinds of monsters in stories, space voyages. Dr. Ginochio Gyves would have been the first man on the moon except for a trifling error of navigation. He lands. He sees a wild landscape, small pseudo-horses, and little brown people. But they are little Mexican people and little Mexican donkeys or burros, and he is in Mexico rather than on the moon. I always get those two places confused myself.
But Rollo Lenox and his bride Lilla Zaide do voyage to the Moon, to Mars, to Venus, to Jupiter, to Saturn; and they have enormous and unparalleled adventures on every one of those globes. There is a great vigor in all this.
Even the story titles of this remarkable book are clumsy magic, The Purple Death, The Last of the Decapods, The Wheels of Dr. Ginochio Gyves, The Raid of Le Vengeur, The Lady Automaton, The Black Shadow, The Man Who Meddled With Eternity, The Last Days of Earth, The Green Spider, The Master of Octopus, The Invisible Force.
These were mega-tales, the awkward giants that were in the beginning before those smaller and more perfect stories appeared, the fertile giants whose progeny are still with us.
July 12, 1979
Something New Under The Black Suns
“But is there any way around this proverb?” I asked the urbane and sophisticated M9 Model Oracle. “May there not be some new ideas under the sun?”
“Not under an ordinary sun,” the Oracle answered. “Not a new Science Fiction idea anyhow. That's what you're talking about, isn't it? H.G. Wells and Zena of Elea have already discovered all Science Fiction ideas that are possible under ordinary suns.
“Not under an ordinary sun. But under a black sun there just may be a few new Science Fiction ideas. They'd be grotesque though, and you wouldn't like them.”
“Yes I would,” I said. “How can I investigate this further?”
The Oracle handed me a book bearing the name: Black Holes, Edited by Jerry Pournelle, co-Author of Lucifer's Hammer. Well, does this book have some claim to new ideas?
A black sun or black-hole is a collapsing star whose matter becomes very dense, whose gravity becomes correspondently strong, and whose escape velocity finally exceeds the speed of light. Therefore light does not escape from it. Therefore it becomes invisible. And the laws of mathematics and science cease to operate in the case of the black sun. The irrationality is called the ‘singularity’. The impossibility of communicating with the black sun is called the ‘event horizon’, and one cannot go beyond the horizon.
Editor Pournelle gives such things as these:
“The theory says that if enough matter is piled together, even neutronium will collapse. The neutrons are forced together, squeezed, they continue to collapse until… There is no ‘until’. The collapse is infinite… The object gets smaller until its radius is — zero. Now that is patently absurd. How can there be an object in this universe that has real mass, but no radius at all? There can't be; which is why we say that a black hole is not really in this universe at all… This is not a trick with numbers; by zero we mean zero.
“Schwarzschild called the zero point, the dimensionless mass down at the bottom of the hole, a ‘singularity’. In Einsteinian terms space has become so curved that it closes in on itself — and once again the object is not, in a certain sense anyhow, in our universe at all.”
In a latter piece in the book, Editor Pournelle goes to hear Professor Stephen Hawking (“since Hawking is considered by important physicists to possibly rank alongside Newton and Einstein”) and is apparently overly impressed. “Ah, but inside each black hole there lurks a ‘singularity’. Up close to them time reversals can happen… Because now comes the punch line. The singularities emit matter and energy. And they emit all possible configurations with equal probability… The hole can emit anything. Anything at all.”
It sounds as though somebody has been into the morning wine. And then it becomes a little bit droll.
“Matter and information can fall into these holes—or can come out,” Professor Hawking says. “And what comes out is completely random and uncorrelated… Of course we might have to wait quite a while for it to emit one of the people here this afternoon, or myself, but eventually it must.”
This is a little bit extreme. There is about as much chance of the singularity at the bottom of a black hole emitting one of the readers of this as there is of that goldfish bowl emitting him. One thing that the black holes do seem to emit is the ‘New Pomposity’.
But we do have a new country here in which to set our speculations. Mathematical formulae are said to be among the things that collapse when a star collapses. The old rules go blind, and there is the possibility of almost anything.
There are quite a few fiction pieces, all on the theme of the black suns or the black holes, in this book. These stories aren't very good, and this is surprising for two reasons: the writers (Pournelle himself, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, Mildred Broxon, and others) often write good stories; and the new area here opened to fiction would seem to command good stories. The stories aren't very good because they aren't very original. They are much less original than the general average of Science Fiction stories. Instead of the freshness of the new, there is an incomparable staleness.
Real originality grows. It takes several cycles of reworking before an idea shakes off its unoriginal elements and stands forth as truly original. And until the new ideas are refined they lack elegance as well as originality.
Well, so much for that new book! Interesting in spots, but not completed in any part of it. Then I received a message from the mechanical Oracle: “Come at once. A slight error has been made.” So I went to the Oracle immediately. “I gave you the wrong book,” the Oracle confessed. “The titles are similar.”
I returned to the Oracle the book Black Holes, Edited by Jerry Pournelle, co-Author of Lucifer's Hammer, and the Oracle handed me the book Black-Holes, John G. Taylor, ‘A Remarkable Book,’ The Washington Post. This latter book was solid science and speculation, and it contained no fiction identified as such. But the stuff in it was pretty much like the stuff in the Pournelle book:
“But as the rotating star collapses it becomes frozen as seen by an outside observer before it reaches the ‘event horizon’. The region on which the star's surface appears to hover forever has been called the ergosphere. It is the surface on which time stands still and immortality is created.” And—
“For in it time and space would have been interchanged… This is exactly reversed inside the event horizon. There we would have no control over our voyage through space, even though we could go backwards in time, or simply move around in it to our heart's desire.” And—
“We would appear to have stumbled on a paradox, since time travel would seem to imply that we can go faster than light. At least the converse of that idea is true: a faster-than-light traveler can return to his or her place of departure at an earlier time than he left.” And—
“The usual ideas of before and after, of what happens ‘next’, have to be abandoned; even time itself loses any sense, and we must be prepared for the instantaneous jump from one point of space to another if we can once understand how to penetrate and escape from superspace.” And—
“But if a naked singularity could ever be created the whole of science would have to be abandoned… We would be able to travel in time to our heart's desire, to return and meet ourselves.”
But why does contemplating a black sun turn the brains to putty?
For a long time there has been argument about the shape of the universe. But if the concept of the black hole is admitted, then the shape of the universe is the cornucopia or the horn of plenty, for it will have everything for everybody.
There can be closed universes everywhere. There can be a closed universe, containing everything that a total universe can contain, between me and that wall there. There might be numberless closed and completely total universes, each one containing all the space and time and matter there is. But it would not, of course, be the same space and time and matter, nor would it be the same ‘all’. And yet the existence of even one such total black universe guarantees that there is nothing anywhere outside of it. These are sundering absolutes.
One person even says that there may be innumerable one-and-only Gods in being in the one-and-only universes.
But there is nothing in any of this to shake a one-and-only Faith. That will survive all the discussions and viewpoints. Because they (we) are not really saying all this jumble of stuff. But it seems that we are saying it, till it shall finally be decoded. If present mathematics does not fit black holes, then present mathematics must be extended a trifle. That's better than smashing and exploding all the worlds.
The fictions based on all this are unoriginal, yes. And the science that stutters around it is likewise unoriginal. No more than the fictions are the new ideas and paradoxes original, yet. They lack originality, and also elegance. And is elegance a test of mathematical truth? Yes it is, absolutely. We observe all the stuff being generated by the black holes and we ask “How do we know that any of this is so?”
One does not ask such things of really elegant
ideas.
August 10, 1979
More Worlds Than One?
May there be more inhabited worlds than one?
Whet not your knives at me, people! You thought that the question was answered forever in the affirmative, did you? And if one does not give the required affirmative answer to the Establishment, that is the end of him? We will see.
But first, to leave no unexplored possibilities behind us, let us ask: may there be more Universes than one? Our own Universe, with its many galaxies and clusters of galaxies, seems pretty universal. It has a consistency throughout its texture. It has a pattern or characteristic or god that seems to enforce an over-all regularity. Hydrogen is approximately the same hydrogen throughout it all, and so are the other elements. The same mathematics prevails through it all, though there are still quibbles about small areas of consideration. The same categories appear to infuse our universe throughout its extent: space, time, motion, gravity, temperature, light, magnetism, momentum, matter and mass, action and reaction, cause and effect, change or aging. But might there be other universes that have none of these categories, that have other sets of categories instead of them, or have something entirely different from categories?
Where would the other universes be, especially if our own universe is open and goes on forever? They might not be in any place at all, if space and place are not among their categories. Who of our universe would know it if there were other universes of utterly different sorts? No atom would know it, no sun or planet would know it, no man or god would know it.
