Summa Risus: Collected Non-Fiction, Page 3

  “Yes, I would know it,” God says. But we could not know it.

  “You'd better keep that guy out of this,” say the knife-whetting Establishment Types very pointedly.

  So we must leave this very large and undecided point behind us, and it casts an uncertainty over all that follows. It cannot be helped.

  In our own universe then, is the ‘life affair’ on our own Earth unique? Has it happened in more than one variety and in more than one place? Does our Earth offer unique conditions for the carbon-cycle life that we know? Is the life-possibility on our own world a juggler's act of many local conditions balancing upon each other to the extent that it is impossible of duplication?

  To give an example of the limitations of life, the temperatures in our own universe run from zero to a hundred million degrees. In the bottom hundred degrees (the bottom one-millionth of the scale) there could be no carbon-cycle life: it would be too cold. In part of the next two-millionths of the scale from the bottom there could be life, if a hundred conditions other than temperature were fulfilled. And in the 999,997-millionths of the scale above that there could be no carbon-based life: it would be too hot.

  A demiurge from another universe, running a life possibility survey of our system, might take a quarter of a million evenly-spaced probes up and down our temperature scale (“Temperature, hum? What odd categories they do have in this universe! Well, two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand tests are enough to run on so small a detail as that. No life is possible here,” the demiurge might say), and he would have missed the ‘life affair’.

  Life would be possible only on a planet. On nothing else could so fine a focus be got on the temperature. And it would take a very, very, very special planet to attain so fine a focus. Our Earth is a very, very, very special planet.

  The problem of having a life-possible temperature over a fair part of area for a fair part of the time has been solved by Earth by a deep inclination (25° 27' to the perpendicular of the plane of orbit) to give the seasons, by a rapid rotation to give reasonable days and nights, and by an orbit that is only slightly eccentric to act as governor. This latter is very tricky: ask any demiurge who is in the business of making and positioning planets. The Earth is the right distance from the sun and has the right atmosphere to allow for the reception of the correct amount of life-supporting heat from the sun. And the sun has the correct output.

  The five other motions of the Earth are as essential to the process, as is the influence of the moon. The other planets (despite the beliefs of the astrologers) could not have any significant influence. The masses of the Sun and the Earth and the Moon, the distances between them, the periods of circuit of the Earth around the Sun and the Moon around the Earth are all finely interlocked.

  There are all sorts of cycles and corrections, from sun-spots to ice-ages, and they all seem to be essential. Temperature kept in that low narrow range is not enough. The planet must select its own atmosphere for the support of life. It selects this by being of the right size and mass and so having the right gravity to allow the escape of certain gasses and not of others. A one percent variation either way in gravity would have given a different atmosphere, and it would not have been a life-supporting atmosphere. And our Earth has the rarest of planetary features and the most essential for life—oceans. And it has a history of crustal development aimed directly at life.

  There are several hundred other requirements for the possibility of carbon-cycle life, the only life we know. Temperature may not be the most important of them; it is only the one that is easiest to understand. The possibility equation for ‘life’ contains from two hundred to seven hundred different interlocking integers, each of them a function of all the others. The calculus-of-seven-hundred-variables is a difficult branch of mathematics.

  It all fits the Earth as though the Earth was made specifically for carbon-cycle life, or carbon-cycle life was made specifically for Earth. But the unique carbon-cycle life seems to be predicated on the unique chemical make-up of our entire universe.

  The conditions fit the Earth. But in a billion billion billion planets will the conditions fit another planet? The miracle of life has happened on Earth. But the kindling of life, even when the conditions are favorable, is not inevitable. It is a mathematical requirement that somebody must breathe life into the conditions.

  Make a pile of chemicals roughly equivalent to the chemical elements and compounds of a human body. Let the pile set overnight. And I bet you all the money I have that it won't have turned into a living human being by morning. Persons such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan say that tens of thousands (maybe tens of millions) of planets will fulfill the conditions for the support of life. And then they take the rather deceptive step from the ‘possibility of life’ to the ‘inevitability of life’ by such connivance as would shame a crooked gambler. They posit towering numbers of ‘civilizations’ on those ‘possibility-of-life planets’, at least half of them to be more advanced than the Civilization of Earth and Humankind.

  But there is a strong element of Advocacy Science in this. There is a great and powerful lobby advocating the existence of great numbers of superior civilizations. One reason for this is that the secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic faction of scientists cannot allow the uniqueness of anything, not of Earth, not of Life, certainly not of Human Life, most certainly not of existing Human Civilization. To allow the uniqueness of any of these things, they would have to cease to be secular-liberal-agnostic-relativistic persons. And the shock of changing their style would kill all of them.

  Science Fiction also has a vested interest in there being a multiplicity of inhabited worlds and civilizations. That is one of the small number of things that Science Fiction is about. But Science Fiction is, after all, only a fiction.

  It is, isn't it? And persons will not defend the tenets of a fiction as stubbornly as they will defend the beliefs of their core institutions. They won't, will they?

  Then why are all those people picking up jagged rocks when I give my belief that our Earth is very likely unique, that our carbon-based life is almost certainly unique in our universe and is the only life there is, and that our human species is absolutely unique and its equal is not to be found in all of material creation no matter how many billions of billions of planets are examined?

  Why are you people cutting my ham-string muscles and breaking my thigh-bones? Oh, to immobilize me and make it easier to stone me to death, your aim not being very good. And why are you putting out my eyes with those whetted knives? Why no, I haven't priced blindfolds lately. Pretty costly, are they?

  Have I any last request? you ask me.

  Yes, throw soft rocks only. Those hard rocks hurt.

  October 18, 1979

  For A Little Bit Of Gold

  Some of the best fiction written by Science Fiction and Fantasy writers is in their own biographical notes in which they give such glamorous accounts of the occupations and employments of their past lives. The accounts are entrancing, intriguing, adventurous, romantic, and largely fictional. I have been tempted to join them and write that I have been a “Gold Prospector and Miner in the Mountain Wildness of New Guinea”. It is technically true, in a very small way, and for a short time.

  When I first went overseas with the U.S. Army in World War II, my battalion was stationed for several months on the north peninsula of Milne Bay in New Guinea, and there had indeed been gold discoveries made by Australian prospectors in that place fifty years before. The Australians had taken what was worth taking, but surely they had overlooked some of the gold.

  In our off-duty hours we would climb the mountains (which had a very new look to them as if they had been made only yesterday) and try to placer-mine gold out of the pools and basins below the water-falls of those little mountain torrents. Some of the soldiers got several ounces of gold for their labor of about three months. A rough calculation was that the dust and grains that would fill one of those little tin aspirin boxes was about an ounce. Others, like myself,
got only small flecks of gold. And besides our almost microscopic amounts of gold, we found a lot of ‘almost gold’, iron pyrites, copper pyrites, mica, ‘fools-gold’, various metallic gleams and glitters. But out of those magnificent and shining-new mountains we took only very small bits of gold.

  It is the same with the reading of Science Fiction. The percentage of real gold to be found in it is quite small. And yet Science Fiction is always tall and spacious and fresh and new-appearing, and it does show many gleams of ‘almost gold’, sounding brass, various tinny alloys, babbitt metal which is so smooth and efficient; and sometimes even a few grains of gold dust or even actual nuggets of gold.

  I have just been reading seven books of the general Science Fiction sort and finishing them at about the same time. And now I will examine just how many grains or flakes or nuggets of pure gold are to be found in them.

  1. The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke is almost always good for discernible amounts of real gold, in novels like Childhood's End and Rendezvous With Rama, and in short stories such as those in Tales From The White Hart. But in the present work the gold almost fails. This is the old notion about the Sky Hook or Jacob's Ladder going up to Heaven. In this case it is an orbital astrolite set to remain over one spot on Earth, and a tower-ladder-elevator going up to it from Earth. There is the impression of great amounts of technology implied but not revealed. There is the mad rushing from one insolvable crisis to another, with each of them being childishly simple of solution (“Why didn't I think of that!”) after a certain amount of verbiage. Arthur Clarke has written so many good books that he is entitled to a few bad ones. This is a bad one; but I had counted on finding a little bit of gold here, and there wasn't any.

  2. Stardance, by Spider and Jeanne Robinson. The first third of this book, the novella that gives the name Stardance to all of it, won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, so I began to read it out of curiosity. The case here is the opposite of that of Clarke. Spider Robinson has written so many really bad stories that it seemed that cosmic justice could only be served by him writing a good one. But I didn't understand how this could come about. The book is about dancing and about a woman dancer who is a failure at Dance on Earth, because she is too big-bodied, but she is a success at the dancing in null-gravity space. Her no-gravity dances are caught in pictures and sound, and of course they are sensations on Earth.

  Alien invaders are nearing Earth. They come in the form of sparkles or fire-flies, and yet it is known that their intention is murderous and that they threaten to destroy Earth. The dancer dances out to them and explains the whole affair to them by her dancing. The sparkling aliens withdraw. And, of course, the dancer dies from the effort. It isn't a very good storyline.

  And yet there are sparkles and dazzles of pure gold all through it. There is some sort of overlapping of the arts here. There is a startling and strong feeling for the power of the dance, and it is communicated in what is not at all remarkable as prose. Something unexpected has happened here, very odd, very good. Very good, as dance, not as story. Jeanne Robinson, the choreographer of the couple, is certainly responsible for some or most of this oddly superior performance.

  The other two related novellas that make up the book, the Stardancers and Starseed, aren't very good, but it doesn't matter. Unexpected gold has been garnered.

  3. The Very Slow Time Machine by Ian Watson. There isn't any gold in this, but there is quite a bit of British Sterling Silver. The British have been good at minor and comic silver-smithing (almost as good as the Mexicans) during several grotesque and obscure periods which I (but nobody else) call the Queen Anne Period and the Prince Albert Period. For grotesque verbal silver-smithing, Ian Watson has set up his own Ian Watson period. At least four of the thirteen short stories in this book are very good, and few collections average that high.

  4. Cautionary Tales, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. There isn't any gold in this book either. The metal here is brass, bright-polished brass sometimes, loud-sounding brass sometimes. Chelsea herself however had turned from a brass-haired to a red-haired lady when last I saw her, and she lost by it. There are three good stories out of the thirteen in this book (again a very high average). But no gold.

  5. Galactic Empires, Vol. One, Edited by Brian Aldiss.

  6. The Hugo Winners, Vol. 3, Book 2. Edited by Isaac Asimov.

  7. The Road to Science Fiction #3, From Heinlein to Here, Edited by James Gunn.

  We can't miss a vast treasure of gold in these three. These new publications of old stories going from 1943 to 1976 are all certified to be solid gold, the Best of the Best Stories of the Modern Age of Science Fiction, taken from slightly different viewpoints for the three books. Moreover, each of these overflowing books contains one of my own excellent stories. What could go wrong? How could there not be gold here?

  Yes, there is gold here, but it is curiously dimmed. Part of it is like the golden hoards of fairy tales that often were found turned into cinders and ashes when dug up again. Remembered gold is one thing. Revisited gold hasn't quite the same sparkle. Yes, much of this old gold has become a little bit dull. Even my own stories (this hurts) aren't as shining as I remembered them.

  Oh, there is still the spaciousness and the novelty (even novelty-grown-old has its charm), and the wonder. Even on a diminished scale the spaciousness is pleasant. But the brighter sort of gold must be in the future and not in the past. Tomorrow, or yet tonight, we may come onto new gold, real gold. And what we do find of it we will find in these newest and brightest mountains in the world with their sharp colors that have just been invented, the Science Fiction Mountains that raise themselves up pungent and waiting, the pleasant and ever-cheating mountains.

  But some weeks' readings just haven't as much gold in them as other weeks'.

  February 12, 1980

  Riddle-Writers Of The Isthmus

  The title comes from a verse work, An Essay on Man, by Alexander Pope:

  “Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

  A being darkly wise and rudely great…

  Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:

  The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.”

  We aren't really the ‘Sole judge of truth’. And we are hurled in ‘temporary’ and not in ‘endless’ error. But most of the rest of it applies to us humans accurately. We are beings darkly wise and rudely great. And even if our glory is pretty spotted, we are indeed the jest and riddle of the world. And one of the tall labors assigned to us is reading the riddle of the world and of ourselves.

  One side of this riddle-solving is named ‘science’, and another side is named ‘intuition’. But it has several other sides, both brighter and darker. The riddle itself is a many-sided thing. We lack even a clear statement of the riddle, or of the story of it. There is dispute about its shape and appearance. But various obscure mirrors held up by riddle-writers do give a mottled view of this authentic history of the world. The riddle-writers are in every field, and they are busy in several of the areas of Science Fiction. The works of all the riddle-writers are really garbled ‘Remembrances of Great Things Past’.

  All of them write scraps of the History of the World in riddle form. All of them spin theories of what mankind really is, what the true appearance of mankind may be, what its purpose and plight add up to, who its nearest kindred are. And all of the riddle-writers essentially agree on at least the first of the several parts of The Only True History of the World and of the Lords of the World. All of them agree (though some of them try to deny it in their less intelligent moments) that there was a Fall from a higher and more pleasant place to a lower and less pleasant.

  The ‘After the Catastrophe’ stories of which there are so many in modern Science Fiction are really ‘After the Fall’ stories or ‘Love in the Ruins’ stories. Many of the riddle-writers place the Fall correctly near the beginning of the human affair. Others place it in the near present or in the near or far future.

  Most agree that there is an amne
sia about the Fall, that it has been forced out of our conventional memory and thus has become the most enigmatic part of the life riddle. Most hint that the Fall has a certain dark grandeur and renown about it.

  Some people swear that the Fall is nowhere in history, nor in clear memory, nor in vestige, and nowhere in common sense. But it is in psychology, and in clouded memory, and in inherited folk impressions.

  Any competent practitioner of History will know that ‘The Fall of Man’ is there and that perhaps it is the event that divides history from pre-history. Any competent practitioner of anthropology will know that man cannot be described without stating that he is ‘The Fallen Creature’.

  “Hold! Go no further!” upset people cry out. “You are coming too near to the subject named ‘religion’!”

  Yes, ‘Religion’ is one of the taboo words that modern science fictioneers may not think nor say, unless they use it to mean something else. The selective speculation which they are allowed will not stretch far enough to allow religion itself, not far enough to see that we have passed the Isthmus and have only to take off our handcuffs and blindfolds to be free. In this, the narrowness, Science Fiction stands where much science stood a hundred years ago and where almost all pseudo-science still stands today.

  But the theme of the Fall in the deep past is implicit in most of the central works of science fiction and in virtually all of the fringe works. It is the breath of life of High Fantasy. It is the ‘memory of Magic’ behind all sword-and-sorcery. The idea of a humanity both taller and deeper and more inclusive than now, of the time when animals were somehow contained in mankind, is echoed in the Tarzan stories, in the Planet-of-the-Apes pieces, in the Island-of-Doctor-Moreau pastiches. The idea of humanity still containing a spirit world, a supernatural world as well as a preternatural world, a ghostly as well as a poltergeistly world, is the theme of all the Tales-of-the-Uncanny-and-Supernatural, or all Tales-of-the-Mysterious-and-Macabre, of all Great-Tales-of-Terror-and-the-Unearthly, of all Weird Tales, of all Great-Ghost-Stories-of-the-Gas-Light-Era.