Dichotomies

I have been caught up in my regular work and have fallen behind in my writing. There are always family things, too, and the tragicomedy of life to deal with. Anyway, I was reading this morning and came upon a striking thing. If you keep your eyes and ears open, you will see and hear this kind of thing all the time now--now that we live in a science-fiction world. From an interview by Sean Illing of author Martin Gurri:

Sean Illing: Have elites--politicians, corporate actors, media and cultural elites--lost control of the world?

Martin Gurri: Yes and no. It's a wishy-washy answer, but it's a reality. They would have completely lost control of the world if the public in revolt had a clear program or an organization or leadership. If they were more like the Bolsheviks and less like QAnon, they'd take over the Capitol building. They'd start passing laws. They would topple the regime. But what we have is this collision between a public that is in repudiation mode and these elites who have lost control to the degree that they can't hoist these utopian promises upon us anymore because no one believes it, but they're still acting like zombie elites in zombie institutions. They still have power. They can still take us to war. They can still throw the police out there, and the police could shoot us, but they have no authority or legitimacy. They're stumbling around like zombies.

(From: "The Elites Have Failed" on the website Vox, March 27, 2021, accessible by clicking here.)

So here in a discussion between a university professor and a former CIA analyst comes imagery of science fiction and fantasy, of utopianism and stumbling zombies. And it's not just some imagery. It may in fact be the essential imagery of science fiction, the central question or dilemma of the genre: the dichotomy of Utopian/Dystopian order and ultimate dissolution versus apocalyptic chaos and destruction. Is there any other choice? Can we steer ourselves between this Scylla and that Charybdis? Maybe that's the question good science fiction seeks to answer.

I'm reading The Humanoids by Jack Williamson right now. Here's how he phrased this dichotomy, in the words of one of his characters:

". . . the same crisis that every culture meets, at a certain point in its technological evolution. The common solutions are death and slavery--violent ruin or slow decay." (Lancer, 1963, p. 39)

Death and violent ruin: the zombie apocalypse. Slavery and slow decay: Utopia/Dystopia.

Again, the striking thing is that people working at high levels of the academic/governmental-industrial complex resort to science fiction and fantasy for their imagery. That probably could not have happened in the pre-war world (pre-World War II, that is), as science fiction and fantasy were beneath consideration for men born in the nineteenth century. Now, eighty years later, or even just thirty or forty years later, we turn to these visionary and predictive genres for inspiration, maybe because only in them is there imagery adequate to describe or to which we can make adequate allusions regarding our current situation. As in politics, traditional, elitist ways fail, and the elites are forced to fall back on the modes of the popular for their expression.

Above: Zombies in black and white.

Another dichotomy, too, from folklore and literature: the dark versus the fair. And a non-dichotomy, or an analog vs. a digital or binary choice: "not alive . . . nor dead . . ."

By the way, I Walked with a Zombie was produced by a teller of weird tales, Val Lewton (1904-1951).

Original text copyright 2021 Terence E. Hanley