The Monsters of Progress

In science fiction and some sub-genres of fantasy, monsters are external and their invasions come from without. Invasions can be of the old-fashioned type: monsters arrive at our doors or upon our shores like Mongol hordes or ravaging Vikings. Aliens from other planets, other lands, crossing vast oceans of space, arrive in their ships upon the shores of Earth. They mean to take over and subdue us, or to take everything we have, including our lives.

A more effective invasion, though, is an invasion from within. The alien Cthulhu invades the psyche of the sensitive artist Henry Anthony Wilcox of Providence, Rhode Island. For the duration of the Cthulhu crisis, Wilcox is taken over. He is no longer himself. Likewise, the alien ovipositor in Alien (1979), acting as an organism separate from the egg-laying alien queen, invades the very body of a crewman from Earth. He, then, is also taken over, but the invasion of his body is a physical one and not at all psychic. He is like a caterpillar to a parasitic wasp. As with the patient in Frederick Exley's fictional memoir, A Fan's Notes (1968), both men, Wilcox and the luckless crewman, have fallen victim to a "debbil" inside them. Worse still are the alien invaders that do not merely possess the human body or psyche but that actually supplant the human person within his own body or identity. He is wiped away while they advance. Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Invasions from without are science-fictional. Science fiction is in one sense the fiction of science, science being a development of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Science doesn't account for the supernatural, of course, and not much, if at all, for anything non-material. If it can't be measured, quantified, tested, or observed, science is not interested and might even say it doesn't exist. If there are any debbils inside of us, they must come from the outside, or else something inside of us--our tissues or cells, more likely our chemicals and molecules--has gone terribly wrong. Those things can be fixed by scientific means. If you're off, it's only because the chemical soup inside you has too much of one ingredient or too little of another. If we put your chemicals back into balance, you will be yourself again. You will be perfect and happy, which is really what you are in your essential being and self. In short, all problems have material or physical solutions. That was of course the promise of science. Science would make for a better and more perfect world. In other words, through applications of science, technology, medicine, and so on, there would be progress.

In weird fiction and some other sub-genres of fantasy, the past is still alive and intrudes upon the present. Although there are sometimes external monsters in these sub-genres, science is often of little use, for it doesn't admit to the possibility of the non-material or supernatural. It cannot address the problem, let alone solve it. Progress is an illusion in weird fiction and related sub-genres. Very often, the monsters of traditional fiction (if we can call it that in opposition to science fiction) live within. They may come from without, but in moving in and taking over the human body and soul, they enter into a ready-made habitat. In our fall from grace and our cultivation of sin, corruption, depravity, and impurity, we carve out places in our hearts for the arrival of the debbil. We build it and he comes.

In preparing to write this, I have read a little about the idea of progress. One article I read traces the modern concept of progress to Francis Bacon (1561-1626). (Bacon is Progress.) I'm not a philosopher and know nothing about Bacon. My thoughts were going in another direction, namely, towards Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and the idea that human beings are good and pure but that we are corrupted by an imperfect society. If Rousseau was the originator of that idea, then he would seem to have been saying that our debbils are not internal but are in fact external. Monsters are placed inside of us by the motile ovipositor of the society in which we live. If we can perfect society, then the debbil can be exorcised and man can be made perfectly happy again. That's what progress is all about: a return to a perfect state.

So my hypostulatin' in all of this is towards the idea that the monsters of progress are external and that they came from the outside for as long as science and science-mindedness were viewed as the wave of the future. In other words, for as long as science fiction was strong and pervasive, the threat of the monster emanated from somewhere outside of our pure selves. (Remember that the stereotypical--and flat--science fiction hero is perfect and without flaw.) Before there was science and science fiction, though, the monster threatened from within, from the weak and corrupted human heart. Call it a heart of darkness. And now that science and science fiction are not pervasive and seem to have weakened greatly, the monster--that black mental patient's debbil--emanates from within. "The horror, the horror" is not out there but in here. But then that's where tradition has always placed it, I think. And poor Ichabod Crane may have been simply the victim of an elaborate prank.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley