Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (422 page)

Well, that is the tale, really. She said to me “Be content” and so I am; they call me Radulf the Happy now. I have had my share of trouble and sickness but always somewhere in me there is a little spot of warmth and joy to make it all easier, like a traveler’s fire burning out in the wilderness on a cold night. When I am in real sorrow or distress I remember her fingers touching my hair and that takes part of the pain away, somehow. So perhaps I got the best gift, after all. And she said also, “Remember me,” and thus I have, every little thing, although it all happened when I was the age my own grandson is now, and that is how I can tell you this tale today.

And the rest? Three days after the Norsemen left, Sibihd got back her wits and no one knew how, though I think I do! And as for Thorvald Einarsson, I have heard that after his wife died in Norway he went to England and ended his days there as a monk, but whether this story be true or not I do not know.

I know this: they may call me Happy Radulf all they like, but there is much that troubles me. Was the Abbess Radegunde a demon, as the new priest says? I cannot believe this, although he called half her sayings nonsense and the other half blasphemy when I asked him. Father Cairbre, before the Norse killed him, told us stories about the Sidhe, that is the Irish fairy people, who leave changelings in human cradles, and for a while it seemed to me that Radegunde must be a woman of the Sidhe when I remembered that she could read Latin at the age of two and was such a marvel of learning when so young, for the changelings the fairies leave are not their own children, you understand, but one of the fairy-folk themselves, who are hundreds upon hundreds of years old, and the other fairy-folk always come back for their own in the end. And yet this could not have been, for Father Cairbre said also that the Sidhe are wanton and cruel and without souls, and neither the Abbess Radegunde nor the people who came for her were one blessed bit like that, although she did break Thorfinn’s neck—but then it may be that Thorfinn broke his own neck by chance, just as we all thought at the time, and she told this to Thorvald afterwards, as if she had done it herself, only to frighten him. She had more of a soul with a soul’s griefs and joys than most of us, no matter what the new priest says. He never saw her or felt her sorrow and lonesomeness, or heard her talk of the blazing light all around us—and what can that be but God Himself? Even though she did call the crucifix a deaf thing and vain, she must have meant not Christ, you see, but only the piece of wood itself, for she was always telling the Sisters that Christ was in Heaven and not on the wall. And if she said the light was not good or evil, well, there is a traveling Irish scholar who told me of a holy Christian monk named Augustinus who tells us that all which is, is good, and evil is only a lack of the good, like an empty place not filled up. And if the Abbess truly said there was no God, I say it was the sin of despair, and even saints may sin, if only they repent, which I believe she did at the end.

So I tell myself and yet I know the Abbess Radegunde was no saint, for are the saints few and weak, as she said? Surely not! And then there is a thing I held back in my telling, a small thing and it will make you laugh and perhaps means nothing one way or the other but it is this:

Are the saints bald?

These folk in white had young faces but they were like eggs; there was not a stitch of hair on their domes! Well, God may shave his saints if He pleases, I suppose.

But I know she was no saint. And then I believe that she did kill Thorfinn and the light was not God and she not even a Christian or maybe even human and I remember how Radegunde was to her only a gown to step out of at will, and how she truly hated and scorned Thorvald until she was happy and safe with her own people. Or perhaps it was like her talk about living in a house with the rooms shut up; when she stopped being Radegunde first one part of her came back and then the other—the joyful part that could not lie or plan and then the angry part—and then they were all together when she was back among her own folk. And then I give up trying to weigh this matter and go back to warm my soul at the little fire she lit in me, that one warm, bright place in the wide and windy dark.

But something troubles me even there, and will not be put to rest by the memory of the Abbess’s touch on my hair. As I grow older it troubles me more and more. It was the very last thing she said to me, which I have not told you but will now. When she had given me the gift of contentment, I became so happy that I said, “Abbess, you said you would be revenged on Thorvald, but all you did was change him into a good man. That is no revenge!”

What this saying did to her astonished me, for all the color went out of her face and left it gray. She looked suddenly old, like a death’s head, even standing there among her own true folk with love and joy coming from them so strongly that
I
myself might feel it. She said, “I did not change him. I lent him my eyes; that is all.” Then she looked beyond me, as if at our village, at the Norsemen loading their boats with weeping slaves, at all the villages of Germany and England and France where the poor folk sweat from dawn to dark so that the great lords may do battle with one another, at castles under siege with the starving folk within eating mice and rats and sometimes each other, at the women carried off or raped or beaten, at the mothers wailing for their little ones, and beyond this at the great wide world itself with all its battles which I had used to think so grand, and the misery and greediness and fear and jealousy and hatred of folk one for the other, save—perhaps—for a few small bands of savages, but they were so far from us that one could scarcely see them. She said:
No
revenge? Thinkest thou so, boy?
And then she said as one who believes absolutely, as one who has seen all the folk at their living and dying, not for one year but for many, not in one place but in all places, as one who knows it all over the whole wide earth:

Think again.…

* * * *

Copyright © 1982 by Mercury Press, Inc.

In 1896, H.G. Wells published
The Island of Dr. Moreau
. In contrast to the warm reception of his earlier novel,
The Time Machine
,
Moreau
was critically savaged by reviewers who found it sensationalist and blasphemous. His protagonist Prendick’s description of Dr. Moreau’s inter-species vivisection, which rendered its subjects “so cut and mutilated as I pray I may never see living flesh again,” graphically highlighted the bloody nature of vivisection as a scientific technique (73). Even more shocking, however, was his description of the hybrid beast-men that technique created and their pseudo-religious rituals attributing divine powers to Moreau. Many reviewers saw the beast-men’s unthinking worship of Moreau as an undisguised critique of Western religion. As Mark Hillegas notes, the reading of the novel as an attack on a Christian God is “consistent, too, with the interpretation, frequent since the earliest reviews, of Dr. Moreau as a caricature, most often a ‘blasphemous’ caricature of God” (37). Although the main scientific technique that the novel dealt with, vivisection, was widely considered unethical within the scientific community of his day, Wells’ extrapolation of its dangers and ethical problems seemed to many to enter forbidden territory, both theological and scientific. Touching on contemporary fears of human degeneration and anxieties about the newly propounded theory of evolution, Wells’ novel was criticized as broaching taboo subjects and ideas.

Modern science fiction has, from its earliest origins, led authors to question the limits of human potential. And in exploring these limits, some authors have, like Wells, ventured into taboo or dangerous territory. These forays into taboo subjects, however, were rare until the late 1960s, as a generic tendency to take social structures as innate and a lack of markets for edgy material maintained a more conservative tenor to the field. Science fiction novels and stories could question the humanity of machines (
The Caves of Steel
) or explore the dangerous ethical choices created by the harsh environment of space (“The Cold Equations”), but gender roles and sexual identities were largely depicted as unchanging. Stories that suggested that robots might be able to attain humanity nevertheless depicted women as secondary love interests or housewives, and it seemed (as in Asimov’s “Robbie”) that a robot might more easily display a complex understanding of the human condition than a woman who had been born into it. Similarly, depictions of religion remained predominantly Christian and stories maintained, by and large, an understanding of human supremacy in the broader universe. The bulk of science fiction from the first half of the twentieth century celebrated human (particularly white male) potential and the inevitable victory of human (generally Western) culture. Stories that questioned social or religious structures or that anticipated an irredeemably dystopian future were few and far between and often controversial.

However, as the example of Wells suggests, there were authors who did touch on these dangerous territories. Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
excited widespread criticism at its publication in 1931. While inherently conservative in its outlook, its depiction of a totalitarian society characterized by joyless casual sex, rampant drug-addiction, and artificial reproduction was met with almost universal criticism at the time of publication. The “savage” protagonist of the book has been raised on a reservation where babies are still conceived and born naturally and marriage still exists. His horrified reaction to the society in which he finds himself after being removed from the reservation culminates in his eventual suicide as he refuses to live in this more “civilized” world. Huxley’s story has since received critical acclaim, but its engagement with socially sensitive subjects created significant controversy at the time of its publication. Subsequent cultural shifts have rendered much of this sensitive matter considerably less scandalous.

In contrast to the reception of
Brave New World
, Robert Heinlein’s 1961
Stranger in a Strange Land
(a book that deals at length with similar taboo subjects) was both popular and critically well received (winning the 1962 Hugo award and appearing on the
New York Times
best-seller list). The novel describes the return to Earth of a human orphan raised by Martians, his initial government confinement, and his dissemination of Martian religion and philosophy to humans. Valentine Michael Smith, the protagonist of the novel, promotes a religion in which a central tenet is an absolute understanding of others (to “grok” another is to have a full knowledge of him or her). This kind of absolute knowledge of other living things is the route to divinity in Martian belief, in which the idea of God translates as “one who groks.” The book deals, in a much more positive way than Brave New World, with topics like sexual license that had made Huxley’s text so negatively received. In addition, Heinlein’s book discusses issues of religion and its influence on society, including the concept of ritual cannibalism, described in the text in Eucharistic terms. In fact, while the book’s contents made and continue to make it controversial, over one quarter of the original manuscript was cut, in part to trim more objectionable material. The full manuscript was not published until 1991. However, despite coverage of taboo or sensitive subjects, books like Brave New World and Stranger in a Strange Land nevertheless largely retained traditional gender roles and stereotypes.

This changed, however, with the publication of
Dangerous Visions
in 1967, an anthology edited by New Wave author Harlan Ellison that addressed a number of taboo subjects in ways that fundamentally expanded the scope of science fiction (or Ellison’s preferred term, speculative fiction) as a genre. Notably, it was a collection of all original stories, the largest all-original anthology published in a field where anthologies had predominantly collected already extant works in a second wave of publication. Stories in reprint anthologies had thus already had to find a print market in the SF magazines of the era, a requirement that largely prevented short stories from addressing the kinds of taboo subjects that longer novels had sometimes been able to broach. Dangerous Visions, Ellison notes in its introduction, was “intended to shake things up.” He collected stories that authors had either not been able to sell or had not written due to the stories’ controversial nature with the intent to create a collection that would push the boundaries of existing speculative fiction and provide “new horizons and styles and forms and challenges” to revitalize the genre (xix). Although the text was thus actively intended to represent a break with existing forms, it nevertheless included works from established authors. Its foreword, written by Isaac Asimov, characterizes the collection as marking a “second revolution” in science fiction that echoes an earlier paradigm shift in the 1940s as the field evolved, a movement that included some earlier authors but consisted largely of a new wave of authors with entirely different ideas and expectations; Dangerous Visions, he notes contains the field “at its most daring and experimental” (xi).

The anthology includes stories that deal radically with a range of sensitive or controversial subjects. Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye and Gomorrah,” the final story in the anthology, describes the inherently unfulfillable desire between human astronauts, “Spacers,” who have been surgically rendered genderless and asexual at puberty, and the fetishist subculture that sexually desires them, “Frelks.” While the spacers profess disdain for the frelks, they nevertheless prostitute themselves to frelks in order to both obtain extra finances and, more fundamentally, attempt to assuage their own inarticulate and unconsummatable desire. Read by many critics as a commentary on homosexual male experience in the 1960s, the story is described instead by Delany in his afterword as “basically a horror story” in its depiction of desire that cannot be satisfied. Delany highlights the potential science fiction has for exploring this kind of concept, claiming that “s-f” is the best medium “in which to integrate clearly the disparate and technical with the desperate and human” (520). Philip K. Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers” depicts a future ruled by a communist totalitarian government that maintains its control over the population through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. The protagonist of Dick’s story, Tung Chien, takes an illegal anti-hallucinogenic drug while viewing a television appearance of the party leader, the “absolute benefactor,” and has a vision of the leader’s horrific non-human nature. Prompted by a group of other people who have experienced similar visions, Chien discovers that the absolute benefactor is not human but an all-destroying, all-devouring God. Dick’s story engages with theology, government control, and illegal drug use (particularly central to the story in light of both Ellison and Dick’s comments on Dick’s experience with LSD as a part of the creative process) (174, 205).

Some stories in the collection promote their primary goal as intentionally inspiring controversy, such as Theodore Sturgeon’s “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” The story dramatizes the encounter between an man from Earth who visits a paradisical planet, Vexvelt, shunned by other human colonies, to investigate the possibilities of trade. He at first is horrified to discover that the Vexveltian culture encourages incest, only to discover that the promotion of incest is the root of its utopian society. Returning to his own world, he encounters irrational prejudices in those he reports to who reject as unthinkable the adoption of “ecological sexuality” despite its proven ability to prevent war, disease, and other social ills. Sturgeon intentionally selects an “unsettling” topic in order to stimulate his reader to question the bases of social “truths.” He notes in his afterword that he has waited twenty years to write the story, which he intends to “star[t] some fruitful argument” (370).

In accordance with Ellison’s hopes, the collection did prove to be a major intervention in the field, both demonstrating the market for and possibilities of some of these controversial topics. Both the anthology itself and a number of individual stories received critical acclaim and awards, and Ellison followed up the success of the anthology with a larger sequel,
Again Dangerous Visions,
in 1972. Again, Ellison invited authors to contribute stories on edgy or “unpublishable” subjects.

Authors responded with material that continued to push the boundaries of cultural taboos. Joanna Russ’ “When it Changed” explores the reestablishing of contact between Earth and “Whileaway,” a colony where a gender-specific plague has killed off all men several generations before. The remaining female settlers use artificial technology to create female children from fused ova, raised by female married couples. The astronauts anticipate an enthusiastic response from the inhabitants to resuming “normal” lives with the addition of men from Earth. However, the colonists, who have done away with established gender roles, resist the transformation of their culture, threatening the men with firearms. Russ’ story questions cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality, asserting the validity of an all-female culture and the limitations of gendered roles and expectations. Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Word For World in Forest” critiques imperialist practices and attitudes. The story follows the exploitation by Earthlings of the smaller peaceful natives of the planet Athshe, who the Earthlings enslave and brutalize. After a number of atrocities, including the brutal rape of one native woman who later dies of her wounds, the Athsheans develop the idea of armed resistance and retaliate against the Terrans, culminating in their final slaughter of many of the human colonists, especially human women whom they see as particularly threatening to their long term society in their ability to produce new human colonists. The story criticizes military occupation and control as well as wartime atrocities, hotly debated topics in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the height of the Vietnam War.

In addition to stories that examine aspects of society that prove harmful or constraining for humans, the anthology contains a polemic endorsement of animal rights, Piers Anthony’s “In the Barn.” Anthony’s story advocates for animal rights by dramatizing the cultivation of human beings as domestic animals. In the story, Hitch, an investigator from Earth Prime travels to a newly discovered parallel Earth (#722) that seems to contain no animals, but a large number of barns. Working as a farmhand, Hitch discovers that on this Earth, a slave class of humans are reduced to near-animal intelligence through a program of sensory deprivation in infancy along with the removal of their thumbs and tongues. Females are raised primarily as milk animals, maintained in conditions similar to large commercial dairy farms, while males are culled as useless except for a small number kept for breeding purposes. Hitch is horrified and disgusted, returning to Earth only to be confronted with the parallel conditions in which animals are kept on Earth Prime. The story has been described by Anthony as “a message story intended to be an animal-rights shocker.”

Again Dangerous Visions
also received critical acclaim within the Science Fiction community and Ellison announced plans for a third collection,
The Last Dangerous Visions
. This final collection has never seen print, although Ellison continues to retain copyright on the stories collected for the anthology. The influence of the first two collections, however, strongly influenced the shape of the field, expanding markets for edgy science fiction stories and encouraging continued experimentation with socially taboo subjects. These explorations are more frequent and more readily published.