Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023)

Cormac McCarthy has died. He was eighty-nine years old. It would not be exactly true to call him a mainstream novelist, but he was more nearly mainstream than an author of genre fiction or of one of the pulp genres. However, like Walker Percy (1916-1990), he wrote a post-apocalyptic novel, his called The Road, from 2006.

Like Percy and so many well-known and well-admired American authors of the twentieth century, the late Mr. McCarthy was a Southerner. However, he was not so by birth, for Cormac McCarthy, whose real name was the same as a ventriloquist's dummy, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933. Imagine: for a time, he shared a city with H.P. Lovecraft.

Like Lovecraft, Cormac McCarthy, as a writer, lived in poverty. He did not come from poverty, though. His father was a successful and well-off attorney. Named Charles Joseph McCarthy (1907-1995), he was born in Providence, too. In 1934, the elder McCarthy began work for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The McCarthy family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937. I imagine they lived somewhere else in the South before that. If so, maybe Cormac McCarthy was a Yankee only for a year.

In 1962, when the childhood home of Knoxville author James Agee (1909-1955) was being demolished, Cormac McCarthy salvaged some of the bricks to build fireplaces in his writer's shack. Like Mr. McCarthy, James Agee was not an especially prolific author. Unlike him, Agee died young. Agee is known for his work from the Great Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a collaboration with another Walker, Walker Evans.* Agee also wrote the screenplay for The Night of the Hunter (1955), an unforgettable film directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. Agee's screenplay was based on the novel of the same name by West Virginia author Davis Grubb (1919-1980). Writing as Dave Grubb, he had one story in Weird Tales, "One Foot in the Grave," from May 1948. His story "The Horsehair Trunk" (Collier's, May 25, 1946) was adapted to an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery in 1971.

I said that Cormac McCarthy was not exactly a mainstream author. That's probably not exactly true, either, for he wrote about violence, death, menace, and terror. He also wrote mostly of men. And if there is a setting for the American novel, it might be the road. Cormac McCarthy wrote, of course, the aforementioned novel, The Road. I think that he and his works would have fit easily into Leslie Fiedler's thesis concerning American literature, which Dr. Fiedler explicated in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960, 1966). Not love and hate, as printed on Robert Mitchum's knuckles, but love and death.**

Cormac McCarthy did a lot of wandering in his life. He lived in a lot of places and must surely have spent a lot of time on the road. The wonder is that he lived so long, was married three times, and had two children, one of whom, a then-young son, is one of the subjects of The Road. Mr. McCarthy came from an Irish-Catholic family. We have our ways. I see echoes in my own family of him and his.

He was interested in science and hung out with physicists, biologists, and other scientists. One of these was whale biologist Roger Payne (1935-2023), who died three days before Cormac McCarthy, on June 10, 2023. Dr. Payne's recordings of whale-song are on their way to the stars aboard the Voyager spacecraft. They are also in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), one of the better entries, I think, in that series. We begin our voyages by setting off on the road.

Another way in which Cormac McCarthy is in the mainstream of American literature is that he is essentially an enigma and a kind of solitary voice emanating from his place on the fringes, in the wilderness, from foreign shores, from beyond frontiers. In that way, he is like Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, his fellow Southerners William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor, and countless others.*** I wish we had more of him. But at least we have what we have. At least we shared with him this life and this earth, at least for a while.

-----

*Like The Road, The Walking Dead is post-apocalyptic. In the former, the cannibals are living. In the latter, they are the walking dead, and they are called walkers.

**Cormac McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965, probably too late for consideration in Leslie Fiedler's book. I once had a copy of The Orchid Keeper. I regret having given it up. I started it but never finished it. Like trying to read Loren Eiseley's book The Invisible Pyramid while I was still a high-schooler, I knew that this was something important and a book that would hold something for me, but I knew also that it was something above me at the time. Instead, since then, I have read Mr. McCarthy's Border Trilogy and The Road, plus No Country for Old Men (2005). I have Suttree and Blood Meridian on my bookshelf. Maybe it's time to read those, too. And, yes, I did go back and read The Invisible Pyramid. Loren Eiseley, a friend of Ray Bradbury, is one of my favorite authors.

***Another on that list might be Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810). Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr., known as Cormac McCarthy, and Charles Brockden Brown shared a first name. Unfortunately, Mr. McCarthy also shared his first and last names with a ventriloquist's dummy, thus the powerful and evocative assumed name, Cormac. Brown's last novel is entitled Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1803-1805). A biloquist is a ventriloquist.

Finally, Cormac MacCarthy and Cormac Mac Art were both men in Irish history. Robert E. Howard wrote stories about Cormac Mac Art. Finally, finally, my friend Sarah had a short-tailed cat that she called Cormy, short for Cormac McCarthy. Hello to Sarah wherever you are on this great road and I miss you.

Copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Summer Reading List No. 2-Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

I wrote recently of Kate Wilhelm (1928-2018). I had never read anything by her, but in reading about her, I became intrigued. So I looked on my shelf and found Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Timescape-Pocket Books, 1977). I read it this summer.

First I should say what a good writer Kate Wilhelm was. Her prose runs clear and smooth, like a river. There is feeling in this novel and an awareness of the importance of human relationships. There is also color. These things are too often lacking in science fiction.

I work as a forester and I'm always glad to see and read stories that take place in the woods and that involve trees. In her statement in The Faces of Science Fiction, Kate wrote about gardening. She knew her plants and she knew her trees. The title may mention birds, but she named more trees than birds here: pine, spruce, and fir; sassafras, silver maple, and bitternut hickory. What other writer in all of literature knows or has named bitternut hickory in her work? But the title is apt, for it is a kind of lament, an allusion to things that have been lost.

If you're trying to categorize Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, you could call it a post-apocalypse. You might also call it an example of the cosy catastrophe. But in its depiction of a collectivist society guided by science and the needs of science and run by almost soulless (and eventually stupid) clones, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is also a Dystopia. And it's clear where the author's sympathies lie, for they are with individual human beings and against collectivist unity. Some illustrative quotes:

     Barry was shaking his head. "Psychology is a dead end for us," he said. "It revives the cult of the individual. When the unit is functioning, the members are self-curing. [. . .] We all know and agree it is our duty to safeguard the well-being of the unit, not the individuals within it. If there is a conflict between those two choices, we must abandon the individual." (p. 100)

* * * 

[Ben speaks:] "Always before us, in infancy there was a period when ego development naturally occurred, and if all went well during that period, the individual was formed, separate from his parents. With us such a development is not necessary, or even possible, because our brothers and sisters [i.e., other members of the unit] obviate the need for separate existence, and instead a unit consciousness is formed." (p. 106)

* * *

[Carl speaks:] "If the human baby [i.e., naturally conceived and carried to term by the mother] has a birth defect, caused by a birth trauma, he can be aborted, and still the cloned babies will be all right."

     "That's hardly in the nature of a drawback," Barry said, smiling. There was an answering ripple of amusement throughout the class.

     He waited a moment, then said, "The genetic pool is unpredictable, its past is unknown, its constituents so varied that when the process is not regulated and controlled, there is always the danger of producing unwanted characteristics. And the even more dangerous threat of losing talents that are important to our community." He allowed time for this to be grasped, then continued. "The only way to ensure our future, to ensure continuity, is through perfecting the process of cloning [. . . .]"

     "Our goal is to remove the need for sexual reproduction. Then we will be able to plan our future. [. . .] For the first time since mankind walked the face of the earth," he said, "there will be no misfits."

     [Conceived through natural sexual reproduction and born from and reared by his mother, Mark, a misfit, retorts:] "And no geniuses." [Emphasis added.] (pp. 132-133)

* * *

There is euthanasia also in this perfect and planned society. Certain women, called breeders, bear children naturally but have them taken away to be reared and educated (or indoctrinated) by the State in the form of the community. These women are kept in a drugged state in an attempt to control or at least dampen their depression and despair.

* * *

So in Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, we see all of the elements of Utopia/Dystopia: unity, conformity, collectivism, planning, regulation, control, extreme risk-aversion by the Community/State, abortion, euthanasia, attempts to do away with sex (love, too, of course), attempts to eradicate the individual, the view that children are the property of the Community/State, intolerance and punishment of nonconformity and dissent, fear and hatred of and alienation from nature, etc. You might recognize these elements in the real world of today. Yes, they're here. An example from just this week:

"Designer Baby Revolution: Can We Outlaw Sexual Reproduction?" by Cameron English, on the website of the American Council of Science and Health, August 30, 2021.

 * * *

As with so many science fiction writers, Kate Wilhelm was prescient, but then anyone with an awareness and understanding of human nature can probably foresee these things. Maybe the purpose of science fiction is to expand the reach and appeal of philosophy, ethics, theology, psychology, politics, economics, etc., into the popular realm by turning these things into readable, enjoyable, satisfying fiction. Anyway, in its closing, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang sums up the reason for the satisfaction, happiness, and end of loneliness now felt by Mark, the former misfit: "Because all the children were different."

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm, winner of the Locus and Hugo Awards for best novel in 1977 and nominated for the Nebula Award in the same category that same year. The cover art is by Edward J. "Ed" Soyka (b. 1947).

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Comet Madness!

I wasn't going to interrupt my series on Earl Peirce, Jr. I was going to keep writing it straight through to the end, which is still a couple of weeks off at the current rate. But then I saw something yesterday that put me over the edge.

I saw a man driving a Jeep.

Alone.

With the top down.

And the doors off.

With the wind whipping all around him and through his vehicle.

And he was wearing a mask.

It's not just a Jeep Thing. Every day, I see people driving, with their windows up or down, or bicycling, or walking, in the breeze, in the fresh air, in the bright, hot, ultraviolet-y sunshine--and they wear masks. They're alone, and they wear masks. They're with their husbands or wives, with whom they presumably live, sleep, eat, and make love, and they wear masks. They could be astronauts in quarantine after a moon-landing--they could be the scientists in The Andromeda Strain, scrubbed and sterilized to the marrow--they could be the Bubble Boy inside his impervious plastic membrane--and they would still wear masks.

The operative part of coronavirus is virus, a thing--living, non-living, or somewhere in between--that is both discoverable and describable by science. Our superstitious acts--knocking on wood or throwing a pinch of salt over our shoulders--are of no use. They do nothing. To use a science-y kind of word, they are inefficacious. Likewise, the coronavirus does not exist or act in accordance with superstition. It does not go around in clouds, vapors, gases, or waves, like the poisonous tail of a world-ending comet, or a fog of mustard gas creeping over a Belgian battlefield, or a strange mist that engulfs you like the one in The Incredible Shrinking Man, leaving you coated all over the way a kindergartner is after crafting with sparkles and glue. It is a virus, and it is subject to the laws of nature, not the vagaries of superstition. We live in a world full of people who claim an absolute belief in science and an equally absolute disdain for superstition. In actuality, most people feed at a buffet in which both are offered and they take their pick. A little of this, a little of that . . .

A comet is crossing our skies this week. Called NEOWISE, it was discovered on March 27, 2020, the week before coronavirus deaths in the United States jumped from the hundreds into the thousands. Coincidence? I don't think so. Not when you realize that comets have been bringers of doom and disaster for as long as there have been people. It happened in 1832 with Biela's Comet. If you don't know that the world ended then, it's only because all records were wiped out in the disaster. The same comet came back in 1872 and the world ended again. In 1910, the French astronomer and science fiction author Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) predicted that if the Earth should pass through the tail of Halley's Comet, cyanogen gas could impregnate our atmosphere, thereby snuffing out all life here. I don't know which hat Flammarion was wearing when he made that prediction, whether it was his stargazer hat or his fantasist hat. Maybe he made this one himself from tinfoil. In any case, I don't remember that the world came to end in 1910, but then that was way before my time.

By the way, that's the second time Flammarion's name has come up in this blog in the last month. That's pretty good for a guy who has been dead for nearly a century and whom nobody remembers much anymore.

I'm not sure how Flammarion survived all of the cyanogen gas that swept the planet. Maybe he hid in a cave like we're all doing right now and like a "strange sect" in Georgia did on the night of May 18-19, 1910, as the comet made its deadly pass. (1) Those people were pikers, though. They may have had to deal with great clouds of cyanogen gas, but that's nothing compared to coronavirus. I heard that coronavirus can actually dissolve rubber. It happened to a fighter pilot over New Mexico when he flew through a cloud of it. His mask dissolved and he ended up crashing his airplane and dying. That's what I heard.

We don't know how many fatalities there were from Halley's Comet in 1910. We didn't keep good numbers back then. Not like today. Not like in Florida, where a man who was killed in a motorcycle crash the other day is rightly counted as a coronavirus victim because he had the coronavirus when he crashed. That's what Dr. Florida Man told us. I quote: "But you could actually argue that it could have been the COVID-19 that caused him to crash." Too bad Dr. Florida Man wasn't around in 1910 to count the victims. Then we would know. Instead all we have is the case of forty-eight-year-old Jacob Haberlach of Evansville, Indiana, who keeled over from a heart attack while trying to get a look at the comet. (2) The score so far: Coronavirus 10 billion, Halley's Comet 1.

If this is science, I guess we will go on having clouds and mists, vapors and waves, fogs and gasses, cloaking the planet in a deadly miasma but rendered completely harmless by pieces of cloth worn over our faces. Or really just parts of our faces because who ever breathes through their nose? You don't need a mask there.

I don't know how we're ever going to get through all of this.

Notes

(1) "Georgia Sect in Cave Awaiting End of World," York Daily (York, Pennsylvania), May 19, 1910, p. 1.

(2) "Comet Causes Heart Disease," York Daily (York, Pennsylvania), May 19, 1910, p. 1. Yes, they're from the same source.

Comet Madness!

"But wonders and wild fancies had been, of late days, strangely rife among mankind [. . . ]."

--Edgar Allan Poe

In its issue of December 1839, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine printed Edgar Allan Poe's tale "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion." The tale is brief. It takes the form of a dramatic dialogue between the two title characters, one newly arrived in the afterlife, the other a veteran. The newcomer Eiros explains how he got to this place: Earth came in contact with a comet that--tenuous as it was known to be--nonetheless took away all of our planet's nitrogen, leaving everything to "burst at once into a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in the high Heaven of pure knowledge have no name. Thus ended all." Was this the first comet story in fantasy and science fiction? I don't know. Was it the first tale of comet madness? I don't know that either. Let's just call it an introduction and draw from it the epigraph above, which is as true now--or truer--as it was in Poe's day. The illustration by the way is by the Italian artist Alberto Martini (1876-1954).

Clouds, gases, and waves, engulfing us, sweeping over us, carrying us away--these have been the promises, predictions, prognostications, and panics that have come again and again throughout history, especially since science and mass culture were invented in the modern period. "One of the Terrors of Halley's Comet Which Is Not at All Likely to Be Realized," reads the caption of this illustration from the New York Tribune, May 8, 1910. Thanks for letting us know that this probably maybe won't really happen. The copywriter left off a subtitle: "But We're Going to Show It to You Anyway, Just to Put a Scare into You!" We have the same thing now with predictions of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dead from the coronavirus. Anyway, this picture has it all: the comet and its tail in the background, an ominous black cloud in the middle ground, and a huge, devastating wave washing over the village in the foreground. We don't have any comet panic this week that I know of, but there has been talk of waves and second waves for months now in regards to the coronavirus. Don't Get Caught In the Wave! Wear Your Mask!

If you thought that passing through a tail of cyanogenic gas was bad, just think of what would happen if the comet were actually to crash into Earth! It would look like a cordial cherry when you squeeze it too hard, as in this illustration from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 15, 1910. There are clouds again and jets of gas, too.

This one's even better. There is actual pain, suffering, and destruction going on, though most of the people don't appear to be too worked up over things. One woman is even holding onto her hat as if to lose it would be the greatest of disasters. Taken from the Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1903, this illustration has a now-classic composition with people running around in the foreground while all kinds of terrible things are going on in the background. ("It's a cookbook! It's cookbook!") Basil Wolverton drew a picture almost exactly like it for a story called--appropriately enough--"The End of the World." To see it and others like it, click here.

So Halley's Comet passed and nobody died except Jacob Haberlach. Nelson Harding (1879-1942) of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle observed that happy event--the passing of the comet, not the passing of Haberlach--with this cartoon captioned "That Was Easy," dated May 19, 1910. Easy? Maybe. Old Planet Earth still has a little bit of sweat on his brow, though. But look how brave he is: no mask.

In World War I, on the battlefields of Europe, deadly clouds of gas became real, and men wore masks to protect themselves from it. "Learn to Adjust Your Respirator Correct and Quick" enjoined the caption on this poster by Lieut. W.G. Thayer (William Gordon Thayer, 1893-1921) of the U.S. Army. In 1918, when this picture was made, wearing a mask might mean the difference between a little more life and a horrifying death. Again, the threat was real and the need for the mask was real. Those two things don't always go together.

These are British soldiers "Fighting Foul Fumes and Fiends." They're wearing masks like the ones we're wearing now. The difference is that they faced horrors, many of them almost certain death. What do we face exactly?

The date--May 15, 1915--is significant: less than a month before, on April 22, 1915, the Germans used poison gas for the first time as they launched what became known as the Second Battle of Ypres. Note the blurb above the main title, "The Allies' Wonderful Advance on Turkey." It refers, I assume, to the landing at Gallipoli, April 25, 1915. That "advance" turned out to be not so wonderful after all.

By the way, American soldiers were gassed during the war, too, among them Robert Jere Black, Jr. (1892-1953), a teller of weird tales.

There were other veterans of the Great War who contributed to Weird Tales, most notably the editor, Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940), and the co-founder Jacob Clark Henneberger (1890-1969). The war was a seminal event in the creation of the magazine. It's hard to imagine that Weird Tales would otherwise have come about or that it would have had the subject matter from which to draw so many of its stories. There was (and is) a general atmosphere of doom or fate in weird fiction (that's actually close to the meaning of the word weird), also a feeling that we are helpless--or nearly so--in our encounters with the indifferent or even malevolent forces afoot in the universe. In the depths of mass warfare, men might only feel the same things.

In December 1939, just three months after World War II began, Weird Tales had its first war cover. The artist was a young Hannes Bok (1914-1964). The cover story is "Lords of the Ice" by David H. Keller (1880-1966). The plot is fanciful (it concerns a nameless dictator's plot to seize the natural resources of Antarctica), but the imagery would have been firm in the memory of its viewers: the man in the doorway could easily have stepped out of a trench in Flanders or France, circa 1915. He's even wearing a mask.

(We can safely add Keller's story to the Polar Fiction Database. We might also speculate that the idea of the secret Nazi base in Antarctica was in weird fiction and science fiction before it became a conspiracy theory in what some people think is the real world. But then that's usually the case, not just with conspiracy theories but with all kinds of wacky ideas.)

The 1930s were a time of anxiety as people sensed that real disaster was once again stalking Europe. On November 19, 1932, the Illustrated London News printed this shocking and sensationalistic image on its cover. The artist's signature is partially cropped out, as is any caption or subtitle. (I didn't do the cropping but I'll apologize for it anyway.) It doesn't take the reading of a caption to understand the subject matter: it can only be a gas attack, perhaps on London, certainly on a city of Western Europe. The timing would not appear random, for in November 1932, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party were wrangling for power in the German government. Two months later, he and they would have it.

And when it came time to stand up to the Nazis, the world didn't flinch. People didn't put on masks and hide in a corner of their houses. They showed courage, and they fought.

As I have already said and as everybody should already know, the coronavirus does not travel around the world in a cloud. You will not encounter it in any such way. Not on foot. Not in your car. Not on your bicycle. And especially not on a boat on the lake. (Unless you're in Michigan. But then only on a motorboat. Being in a canoe protects you from clouds of coronavirus.) What we're living through is not the coming of a comet or a World War I gas attack, and it's certainly not like this scene from The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957).*

This is actually the first image that came to me as I began seeing people driving around in their cars while wearing masks. This is what I picture must be going on in their imaginations: the approaching cloud of coronavirus . . .

The Incredible Shrinking Man was written by Richard Matheson (1926-2013), who also wrote for Weird Tales. His second and last story, entitled "Slaughter House," appeared in the magazine sixty-seven years ago this month, July 1953. Matheson went on to write I Am Legend (1954), the story of a terrible disease that ravages the world and probably the same story that started us off on the road to zombie hordes roaming over the Earth.

*Which was released, it so happens, in the month that the Asian Flu pandemic began, February 1957.

Original text and captions copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

A Return to Cozy Dystopia

I'm back again after a month, but this probably won't last very long. There's always so much to do until there isn't anymore. I last wrote about the concept of the cozy dystopia in art. This is in contrast to the more common dark dystopia, exemplified, I think, in Blade Runner (1982), Brazil (1985), and the less well known Batman: Digital Justice (1990). The cozy dystopia is one in which things are clean, bright, and shiny, yet society and people's lives within it, all creations and outward manifestations of the State, are perfectly awful. In Cozy Dystopia, everyone has what he needs except a chance at happiness.

In my conception of it, the cozy dystopia runs parallel to Brian Aldiss' cosy catastrophe. Examples of the cosy catastrophe are pretty easy to come by. Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank (1959) is one. In thinking about it over the past few weeks, I have come up with a possible cozy dystopia, too. It is described in Player Piano by a fellow Hoosier, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Originally published in 1952, Player Piano has been reprinted many times, in English, Italian, German, French, and even Croatian. I had read a few years back about this book and eagerly sought it out. When I finally found a copy, I dove in and there began a long, long slog through one of the most boring and event-free books I have ever known. I suppose the eventlessness in Player Piano is in keeping with the idea of the dystopian society, which is, after all, one of complete stasis. Or, as D-503, the protagonist in We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, explains to the rebel and his soon-to-be lover, I-330:

"It is inconceivable! It is absurd! Is it not clear to you that what you are planning is a revolution? Absurd because a revolution is impossible! Because our--I speak for myself and for you--our revolution was the last one. No other revolutions may occur. Everybody knows that."

In other words, there can be no revolution after the one that introduces a completely stable and eventless dystopia into the world. 

* * *

By the way, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) and Logan's Run (1976) might also be called cozy dystopias. In Logan's Run, as in our world of today, there is even a Tinder-like machine called "the circuit" for choosing sexual partners: in the dystopian future as in the world of today, the individual human being is both objectified and commodified. Reduced in the mind of the user to mere material, the object of his desire is literally materialized within and by "the circuit."

* * *

I wrote before about the bread-and-circuses component of the cozy dystopia. In thinking about these things since then, I remember that the place of origin of the bread (i.e., food) and circuses (i.e., entertainment) that currently arrive in such vast supply on our doorsteps is called a "fulfillment center." Yes, you will be fulfilled by buying more stuff, so keep at it, America. Keep climbing that asymptotic slope towards the mountaintop of your happiness.

* * *

So, I wrote last about dystopia. In the interim we have had instead in the real world a taste of apocalypse. The mob has emerged from all of its dark, fetid places and has fallen upon us like a horde of zombies, bent on our destruction. Dystopia and apocalypse are interrelated--there can be no doubt of that. In much of our popular culture, the latter precedes the former. Anthem by Ayn Rand (1938) is a good example of this. Sometimes dystopia grows out of apocalyptic conditions: the aspiring dystopian ruler simply takes advantage of disaster and disorder to construct his perfectly awful society upon the ruins of the previous, far less awful one. Other times, the tyrant and his minions actually bring about the destruction of the preceding society so as to build their new, dystopian version in its place, complete with a calendar reset to Year Zero. That seems to be the aim of our current breed of aspiring tyrants. Apocalypse first, then Dystopia. We have seen people like them before. We will again. We can gain some comfort in knowing that they have always been and always will be defeated. Nevertheless, we should know this: although reality may be arrayed against them, we can't really count on it to defeat them by itself, not, that is, without the customary heaps of rotting bodies, deep, vast, mass graves, and chains of miserable gulags stretching from sea to shining sea. We have to take an active part in their defeat if we are to head these things off.

* * *

You're not supposed to give advice to your enemies, but the zombie hordes running through our streets, universities, and television studios should know two things. One is a lesson from history, and it is this: although you as a revolutionary may be the one pulling the trigger today, tomorrow you will be the one facing the firing squad. That's not just a figure of speech: it will really happen, as it has happened before. (Why do progressives always think they're doing something new?) Just ask the ghosts of Trotsky and Robespierre. In the worlds of art and entertainment, Jimmy Kimmel and J.K Rowling have had the mob turn upon them. Margaret Atwood, too, I think. Yesterday these people were progressives. Today they are dangerous reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries. The mob is unlikely to rest until they are destroyed, or at least rendered non-persons, or persons of little or no consequence. Just past his allotted threescore-and-ten, Stephen King has been cowed and now speaks nonsense so as to conform to the mob's orthodoxy. In the process he has made himself inconsequential as an artist and thinker. He probably imagines that he has saved himself. He should know, though, that his time before the firing squad will come, too. It's just that instead of tomorrow, it will happen the day after tomorrow. In any event, we might feel sorry for Mr. Kimmel, Ms. Rowling, and others like them who have been hoisted with their own petards. Then again, we might not.

The other thing that the zombie hordes and their tyrant-leaders might want to know is that there is a poison pill in each of us, poison, that is, to those who aspire to control us. However hard they might try to impose dystopia upon us, they must always fail because we each have within us the means of their destruction: each one of us alone has greater power than the entire State. Imagine that. Here is the explanation: because the State is made by man, it is trapped within time and cannot endure. The spirit and nature of the individual, on the other hand, made as they are by something greater than man, exist outside of time and are thus eternal and imperishable. The Progressive believes otherwise of course, that the Perfect State is the end point of History and will thus last forever in its unchanging condition, also that the individual human being is negligible and eradicable, his spirit extinguishable.* The poison pill is of course our freedom, that unalienable, inseparable, and irrepressible condition of our very existence. The tyrant may have his run and murder millions, but in the end human freedom always wins and he is undone.

* * *

Sex, too, is a poison pill, a passion so great that it always undermines the efforts of the State. That's why the State always seeks to control it. See Orwell's 1984 or Anthony Burgess' 1985 for explications of the State's antipathy to sex. One of the problems with sex--from the point of view of the State, I mean--is that it is so completely powerful. It is meant to be that way, I would wager, by the One who planted the seed of sex within us. Another is that sex is inextricably bound to love, marriage, and the formation of families. The State cannot tolerate any of these institutions because they necessarily stand between it and the individual. In other words, if the individual loves and is devoted to another person or persons, then he cannot fully love or devote himself to the State--and he must so love and devote himself. He must prostrate himself before the State. Nothing must intervene between it and him, and there can be no other object for him. That explains the statist/socialist/progressive desire to undermine and ultimately destroy marriage and family. We have had that in rounds of recent supreme court decisions, deposited upon us and our Constitution like stinking piles of manure. Look elsewhere on the Internet for this quote: "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement . . . ." From there it drones on and on as boring and tiresome socialists inevitably do. As Jahn in the Star Trek episode "Miri" might say, Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, too bad for all of them. The poison pill has been expertly placed and cannot be removed. You, the statist/socialist/progressive, can only choke on it. Excuse me if I don't offer you a glass of water or a pump for your stomach.

* * *

*A pertinent quote from George Orwell's 1984, pertinent not just here but to our current situation:

He [the protagonist Winston Smith] tried to make her [his lover Julia] understand. "This was an exceptional case. It wasn't just a question of somebody being killed. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. [Emphasis added.]

Update (June 30, 2020): Here is another quote, from a digital flyer announcing a protest at the home of the multi-bezillionaire who sends us all the stuff we so crave: "Abolish the present. Reconstruct our future." Emphasis added again. Note the recurring use of the word abolish. At the protest itself, modern-day Jacobins set up a guillotine as a not-very veiled threat against him. My comment is this: You can't make this stuff up. My thought: I wonder if the protesters ordered their sign-making materials from the multi-bezillionaire himself and had it delivered to their doorsteps. My disclaimer: I did not pay anyone to do these things just so I might look oh-so-smart and my essay oh-so-prescient. Actually, you don't have to be very smart to see through these people and to understand that when it comes to humanity and its endeavors, there is nothing new under the sun.

Utopia 14 (1954), the Bantam Books edition of Player Piano (1952) by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The cover art is by Charles Binger (1907-1974), who also, as it turns out, did the cover art for the Bantam edition of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1953).

Revised during the day and into the evening, June 30, 2020.
Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

This Boring Apocalypse

I have been away for five weeks and now back again, I write.

The apocalypse has come and it's nothing like we thought it would be. There are no zombies clawing at the door, no gun-toting commies or Nazis in the street, no aliens in the skies above us, no radioactive particles in the air around us. There is no challenge, no struggle, no need to focus, no desperate decision-making, no discarding of unneeded things along the side of the road, no rushing or fleeing into storm and night. This is in fact the first apocalypse in which the only thing we have to do to survive is nothing at all. Setting aside all of the death and suffering in the world, the whole situation seems a little comic or ironic. If we all just watch TV for the next few weeks--which is what we have all wanted to do anyway--we'll be okay. Then it's back to the really unenjoyable part: again daily life.

There is actually a term for this in genre literature. It's called the "cosy catastrophe," and a science fiction author, Brian Aldiss (1925-2017), was the one who thought it up. Aldiss was referring to the works of fellow British author John Wyndham (1903-1969) when he wrote, but there are others who have penned cosy catastrophes. The best example I have, I think, is Alas Babylon by Pat Frank, from 1959. Another is Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy, from 1971.

You will see some hazy definitions and descriptions of the cosy catastrophe wherever you happen to look. Imprecision in thought and language seems to be a hallmark of our age--but then that started long before the current apocalypse and can't be attributed to it. Anyway, I'll let you go. You have a television show to watch.

Copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Max World

More on Utopia/Dystopia and Apocalypse:

What we think of as apocalyptic literature is probably not apocalyptic in that it isn't Christian or biblical. In fact, it's usually entirely secular and may actually be nihilistic. That's why I have used the term Anti-Apocalypse to describe the non-Christian or non-biblical story of the end of the world, to differentiate stories of this type from their Christian or biblical counterparts, and as an analog to the term Anti-Utopia, aka Dystopia. Again, I don't think we need a different term--i.e., Anti-Apocalypse--describing a separate genre, as that would just be a needless complication, but I wanted to make a distinction anyway.

As for Utopia and Dystopia: in literature, they are different genres, or two sides of the same genre. In the real world, though, Utopia is Dystopia, for this reason: a perfect society must be made up of perfect human beings; human beings are imperfect and imperfectible; the utopian visionary will never rest in his quest for a perfect society; as a result of all that, human beings--the citizens of Utopia--must be driven ceaselessly and mercilessly even to their deaths for the sake of creating the perfect society. That's where the Dystopia within every Utopia comes from. For anyone who believes that a perfect or utopian society is possible without a perfect humanity, I pose this question: how do you propose to make something perfect out of imperfect parts? The answer of the utopian is likely to be: by perfecting society, we will make people perfect. They of course have things backward, and more than two hundred years of ruin have shown as much.

So here's my next distinction, probably more needful than the first: isn't an apocalyptic story one about the end of the world (or the world we know), while post-apocalyptic describes a different kind of story? I'm thinking here of apocalyptic movies like Melancholia, 2012, When Worlds Collide, and War of the Worlds versus movies in which the disaster has already happened and now people are trying to pick up the pieces: The Omega Man, The Road, the Terminator movies, etc. In other words, what we too often call an apocalyptic story is actually a post-apocalyptic story. I think people have had an easier time with this distinction than they have with the distinction between Dystopia and Apocalypse.

Anyway, I watched Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) the other night. It's a post-apocalyptic story, just like the other Mad Max movies. Like them, it's packed with furious action, only more so. In fact, Mad Max: Fury Road is so over the top in places that it's more like a brilliant physical comedy (and a satire) than a serious action picture. (It could easily be retitled It's a Mad, Mad, Mad Max World.) Here's something I noticed, though: Mad Max: Fury Road is a Mad Max movie, but Max has been demoted. He is now, at most, a co-protagonist. He may actually be simply a supporting character. The lead character, or Max's co-protagonist, is now a woman, Imperator Furiosa. Further, that woman is more or less a female Mad Max. The moviemakers can't really throw Max out the window and call their picture Furiosa or Mad Maxine without putting their franchise at risk, but the effect is the same. Max is no longer the lead, and it's no longer his story.

The drift of all of this seems obvious to me: what were once stories about men are becoming stories about women, and not only about women but about women who are in charge. Men have been reduced to secondary status. I'll put up for exhibit the two most recent Star Wars movies: both have strong, courageous, and determined female protagonists. (Both are also essentially iterations of the Luke Skywalker character.) The men are simply helpmates and satisfied to be led around by the women. In comic books, Iron Man and Thor have become women. (There are probably other sex changes that I don't know about, as I don't follow comic books very well.) It may just be a matter of time before there is a female Tarzan, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes (Watson is already a woman), and so on. And I don't mean just a female version of these characters: James Bond will be a woman.

So where will the men be in all of this? I am reminded of a dystopian novel, The Republic of the Future by Anna Bowman Dodd (1887). The story is told in the words of a man writing to his friend about the United States under socialism in the year 2050:

The few men . . . whom I saw seemed to me to be allowed to exist as specimen examples of a fallen race. Of course, this view is more or less an exaggeration. But the women here do appear to possess by far the most energy, vigor, vitality and ambition. (p. 38)

and:

The longer I stay here the more I am impressed with the profound melancholy which appears to have taken possession of this people. The men, particularly, seem sunk in a torpor of dejection and settled apathy. (p. 58)

I'm not sure we'll have to wait until 2050 to see that kind of world.

Update (July 26, 2017): Since I wrote this all those many days ago, I have read that the character of the Doctor in the television show Doctor Who will next be played by a woman. Now I find out that there is talk of making James Bond a woman. You can read more about the idea in "Why James Bond Should Never Be A Woman" by D.C. McCallister, dated July 24, 2017, here. One of the actresses whose name has been thrown out to play the role is none other than Charlize Theron. (D.C. McCallister is a woman by the way.)

Second Update (Oct. 31, 2017): A few weeks ago, I saw a commercial for Red Baron Pizza in which the Red Baron has been pushed aside and replaced by the Baroness. Even in commercials, male characters are being converted into female.

Third Update (January 30, 2018): More evidence: Colonel Sanders is now a woman, played by Reba McEntire. And it's weird and disturbing.

Copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Anti-Apocalypse

As I write and think about the alternative futures of Dystopia and Apocalypse, it occurs to me that the picture isn't complete. It occurs to me also that I may have misinterpreted the meaning of Apocalypse. I'll go at this by first writing about Utopia and Dystopia.

Utopia came first, before Dystopia. The first Utopia to bear that name was in Sir Thomas More's work of 1516. Stories of Utopia have been a mainstay of literature since then. It was only in the nineteenth century--a century of utopian theorizing and attempts at utopian living--that Utopia met its opposite, the anti-utopia or Dystopia, which describes a perfectly awful society. In the twentieth century, stories of Dystopia overshadowed those of Utopia. That is to be expected, as people who had encountered utopian/totalitarian regimes woke up to the reality that Utopia is an impossibility and that every attempt at establishing Utopia on Earth ends in disaster.

So the dream is of Utopia and the reality is of Dystopia. Again, I don't think that any serious writer of the last fifty to one hundred years is or was foolish or naïve enough to have attempted a utopian story. (Stories of Lost Worlds may be the closest thing to it, but they are within the less serious pulp genres of science fiction, fantasy, etc.) Many, though, have written dystopian stories. Those stories have often succeeded as utopian stories once did, that is, as satires. Others have come as critiques, warnings, descriptions, or predictions. The point is that, given the fallen nature of humanity, Dystopia is a possibility, while Utopia will forever remain a pipe dream.

I wrote recently that Utopia and Apocalypse may well be impossible without the Christian notion of progress. Apocalypse, after all, is a book of the Bible and a synonym for revelation. We think of Apocalypse as a negative--a world-ending disaster. But that's our convention. In its original meaning, Apocalypse is positive, a revelation about the end of our current world and the ushering in of something better. In that sense, the word and idea of Apocalypse is more nearly analogous to Utopia than it is to Dystopia. What's missing is the Anti-Apocalypse, a thing for which there isn't any word as far as I know. Put another way, Utopia and Apocalypse are positive fantasies, while Dystopia and Anti-Apocalypse (i.e., a world-ending disaster) are closer to what could really happen on Earth, should events go a certain way. But to switch the meaning of the word apocalypse to its opposite would be confusing to say the least, and probably needless, too.

So should we then make a distinction between Apocalypse of the Christian variety, or at least as a positive story of end times (in which good finally triumphs over evil), and Anti-Apocalypse, which is what we now call Apocalypse? And if so, should we have a word for it? One of the reasons I ask is that we could make of all this a nice symmetry: Utopia and Apocalypse as positive, progressive genres (progressive in the sense that earthly progress is a possibility, at least in literature), and Dystopia and Anti-Apocalypse as negative, more nearly conservative genres (conservative in that they recognize man's fallen nature). In the positive genres, what is good in humanity would be put on display. In the negative genres, the opposite would be the case. One point to consider here is that the positive Apocalypse would be an explicitly Christian genre; the other three genres would not necessarily be so. (The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is an example--actually a critique--of a Christian Dystopia. It suffers from the same problem utopian/dystopian literature does in general, i.e., a lack of plausibility.) Another question: Has there been any positive apocalyptic literature? I guess the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins might qualify, but I have never read any of these books. From what I know, a lot of really terrible things happen in them, but all in fulfillment of the prophecy of end times.

Anyway, I'll say it again, to make a distinction between the positive (Christian) Apocalypse and the negative (more nearly secular) Anti-Apocalypse is probably unnecessary. It would only confuse things. We're already having enough trouble trying to differentiate between Apocalypse (a world of extreme chaos) and Dystopia (a world of extreme order). I'm not sure why the distinction is so hard to understand, but people keep making the mistake. Let's keep reminding them of the difference.

Copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Beyond the Finland Station

I finished reading To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson last night. I'm glad to be out from under the shadow of this book, not only because of its excessive length--484 pages in the Doubleday Anchor edition of 1953--and not only for the author's less than engaging prose style. More than anything, I'm glad to have the book behind me because of its subject matter and for Wilson's apparent admiration for the ideas and historical figures--Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and so on--described therein. Socialism is, as we now know, the ideology of mass murder. It's sickening to read a chronicle of its development, moreover, to follow an otherwise intelligent man in his appreciation of it. Maybe I'm being too sensitive. Maybe Edmund Wilson was not as appreciative as I imagine. But I'm glad to have it behind me. Still, the centennial year of the Russian Revolution of 1917 continues. Still, an awareness of what that has meant is with us: 100 years and as many as 100 million dead at the hands of socialists the world over.

I wrote in yesterday's entry about the Listeners, the men and women who have dedicated themselves to the search for intelligent life in the universe. They listen and listen, certain that we will, at any moment, finally hear from our space brethren. That certainty is, it seems to me, religious in origin and intensity. It carries through many fields of endeavor, though. Even squatchers believe that we are on the verge of discovering definitive proof of the existence of Bigfoot, if not finding the hairy beast himself. As Robert Crumb might say, Keep on Squatchin'.

Anyway, following is a quote to that point from To the Finland Station. The speaker is Lenin himself. The occasion is the beginning of the first Russian Revolution, from the spring of 1917:

Not today, but tomorrow, any day, may see the general collapse of European capitalism. The Russian revolution you have accomplished has dealt it the first blow and has opened a new epoch. . . . (p. 469)

Note the similarity in expression between the breathless Marxist revolutionary and any number of fervent believers of the last century and more as they await the coming of their most hoped-for event.

A century of political murder and mass starvation, imprisonment, and torture has intervened since Lenin spoke those words. Thank God--our God, not his--that "new epoch" is reaching its end, although leftists in the West have invented and put into practice new and far more subtle and insidious permutations in the form of political correctness, critical theory, cultural Marxism, etc. A second point, though: when and if we hear messages from outer space, they are not likely to be anything we hope for, expect, or predict. Imagine, for example, this bur under the blanket of the atheistic Listener: What if the people from the stars tell us that they believe in God? Better yet, what if they tell us they believe God sent to their planet a representative of himself who died for their sins? Imagine a real-life Mr. Spock who wants us to know that everything he does is washed in the green blood of the Vulcan Jesus. The Listeners in that case are likely to become Non-Listeners and to begin asking themselves, Where can we find a cotton ball big enough to plug the Arecibo telescope?

We should know by now that predictions based on a priori reasoning and abstruse theorizing about history and human nature are practically useless. The best predictions continue to be those made by conservatives who have some understanding of these things. To that point, another quote from To the Finland Station:

Victor Adler [an Austrian socialist, though apparently more moderate than his Russian counterpart] had once shocked Trotsky by declaring that, as for him, he preferred political predictions based on the Apocalypse to those based on Dialectical Materialism. (p. 429)

Dialectical Materialism, at least in later interpretations, can be taken as an a priori system and is seemingly used by some science fiction writers either as a backdrop for their work or as a means of making predictions in their work. Contrast that with the idea of the Apocalypse, especially as applied in genre fiction. The idea of a leftist or Marxist Apocalypse would seem an affront, a self-contradiction, an impossibility. Although Utopia is his prediction, Dystopia is the Leftist's preferred future. Apocalypse, it seems to me, is more nearly a conservative idea. But, as Robert Frost wrote:

Some say the world will end in fire, 
Some say in ice. 
From what I’ve tasted of desire 
I hold with those who favor fire. 
But if it had to perish twice, 
I think I know enough of hate 
To say that for destruction ice 
Is also great 
And would suffice.

Yes, ice--a freezing of history in the form of Dystopia--would suffice.

Alien Crucifixion (one version) by Frank Frazetta.

Original text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Skilled Destroyers

It becomes more and more plain to me that genre fiction in America is descended mostly from conservative writers--not conservative in the contemporary political sense, but in an older, non-political or even anti-political sense. One exception among the various genres might be science fiction, which tends to be, in its purest or original forms, progressive, forward-looking, and optimistic. But then you could make a case that Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was a founder of science fiction in America (maybe the founder), and Poe was no liberal or progressive.

In reading Poe and reading about Poe recently, I came across the following quote again, from Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill by Peter Viereck (D. Van Nostrand Company, 1956, pp. 102-103):

Cultural Conservatives: Melville, Hawthorne. But, although a narrowly political conservatism in America may today require such a business élite [discussed in the previous section], conservatism need not be political at all. Instead, its characteristic American form may be a lonely soul-searching by American artists to transcend what Melville called "the impieties of progress." (1) Many of America's greatest literary figures have been cultural conservatives in their anti-optimism, their qualms about external reforms--for example, James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Herman Melville (1819-1891), Henry James (1843-1916), [and] William Faulkner (1897-    ). Hyatt Waggoner's Hawthorne, 1955, represents the latest research of those scholars who see the real American cultural tradition as a conservative "tragic sense," affirming Original Sin and rejecting liberal illusions about progress and human nature. These liberal illusions, concludes Waggoner, "were useless for any artist who would not wilfully [sic] blind himself to the existence of tragedy. . . . The 'evolutionary optimism' of . . . nineteenth-century liberalism was affronted by anyone who concerned himself with the 'deeper psychology.'" [. . . .] The ideal inspiring America's cultural conservatives has been best expressed by a little-known quatrain of Melville:

.                    "Not magnitude, not lavishness,

                     But Form--the site;

                     Not innovating wilfulness, 

                     But reverence for the Archetype." (2)

My own notes:

(1) The quote is from Melville's epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), from Canto 21, "Ungar and Rolfe." In its original, the phrase is:

The impieties of "Progress" . . .

(2) This quatrain is the poem "Greek Architecture" in its entirety.

If you read a little more of "Ungar and Rolfe," you will find the following lines of dialogue. Ungar, a Catholic and a believer, speaks first. He is questioned by the more skeptical Rolfe, who is Protestant:

"True heart do ye bear
In this discussion? or but trim
To draw my monomania out,
For monomania, past doubt,
Some of ye deem it. Yet I'll on.
Yours seems a reasonable tone;
But in the New World things make haste:
Not only men, the state lives fast--
Fast breeds the pregnant eggs and shells,
The slumberous combustibles
Sure to explode. 'Twill come, 'twill come!
One demagogue can trouble much:
How of a hundred thousand such?
And universal suffrage lent
To back them with brute element
Overwhelming? What shall bind these seas
Of rival sharp communities
Unchristianized? Yea, but 'twill come!"
"What come? "
"Your Thirty Years (of) War."
"Should fortune's favorable star
Avert it?"
"Fortune? nay, 'tis doom."
"Then what comes after? spasms but tend
Ever, at last, to quiet."
"Know,
Whatever happen in the end,
Be sure 'twill yield to one and all
New confirmation of the fall
Of Adam. Sequel may ensue,
Indeed, whose germs one now may view:
Myriads playing pygmy parts--
Debased into equality:
In glut of all material arts
A civic barbarism may be:
Man disennobled--brutalized
By popular science--Atheized
Into a smatterer--"
"Oh, oh!"
"Yet knowing all self need to know
In self's base little fallacy;
Dead level of rank commonplace:
An Anglo-Saxon China, see,
May on your vast plains shame the race
In the Dark Ages of Democracy."
America!

I have written before--or maybe I have just passed on the observation--that conservatives, though their eyes be directed on the past, are far better at predictions and prognostications than are liberals with their "illusions about progress and human nature." (See what happens when you read classic literature? You start using the subjunctive mood.) Look what Melville foresaw and look what we have now as night falls on the Dark Ages of Democracy: A fast-breeding state . . . a hundred thousand demagogues leading rival sharp communities . . . a civic barbarism of men, myriads of them playing their pygmy parts, all existing at a dead level of rank commonplace . . . unchristianized, disennobled, brutalized by popular science, atheized, debased into equality, yet each knowing all the self need know in self's base little fallacy. And though we don't yet have war, there are at least rumors of war among us. And all of it new confirmation of the fall of Adam, as if we needed any further evidence that we are indeed fallen.

In reading further in Viereck's book, I came on a section on George Santayana (1863-1952) and liberalism:

In Dominations and Powers, 1951, Santayana pointed out the paradoxical consequences of idealistic nineteenth-century liberalism: it either ended in twentieth-century anarchy or, to avoid anarchy, imposed its will on an unliberal world. But by imposing its will, it ceased to be liberal, became despotic. Because of these equally deadly alternatives, Santayana pronounced the history of liberalism "virtually closed." (p. 105)

I have written before, too, about these two alternatives, anarchy (or chaos, or, alternatively, apocalypse) and despotism (or tyranny, or, alternatively, dystopia). In drawing further distinctions, I think you could say that anarchy and despotism are real-world conditions, while apocalypse and dystopia are more nearly fantasies. And because they are fantasies of the future, apocalypse and dystopia can be considered science fiction, and it is within that genre that stories of this kind ordinarily reside.

It occurs to me now that both apocalypse and dystopia are outgrowths of a Christian worldview. Apocalypse is of course another name for the biblical Book of Revelation, which describes, by some interpretations, Christian end times. That's easy enough. Dystopia is a little tougher, but once you realize that Utopia is Dystopia, and that Utopia is simply either a Heaven or a Garden of Eden on Earth (both are called Paradise), then you can see that Dystopia is just another variation on what seems to me a Christian notion that time is an arrow rather than a circle and that it is flying fast and straight, inexorably towards the Millennium. In other words, history is a chronicle of progress, with the benighted pre-Christian era in the past and a glorious Millennial future awaiting us. Science fiction may be an outgrowth of a secular age of reason, but would it have been possible without the Christian concept of progress and of a looking forward to a glorious (and earthly) future?

* * *

I know I have written a lot here, but I can't pass up the opportunity to quote George Santayana at length. Again, from Conservatism, pp. 183-184, originally in Dominations and Powers (1951):

The hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. The traditional order, which was pregnant with all sorts of wars, civil, foreign, religious, and domestic, was to be relaxed precisely for the sake of peace. . . . When we have conceded everything that anybody clamors for, everyone will be satisfied. . . . Swimming in the holiday pond of a universal tolerance, we may confidently call our souls our own. . . . So, all grievances being righted and everyone quite free, we hoped in the nineteenth century to remain for ever in unchallengeable enjoyment of our private property, our private religions, and our private morals.

But there was a canker in this rose. The dearest friend and ally of the liberal was the reformer; perhaps even in his own inmost self was a prepotent Will, not by any means content with being let alone, but aspiring to dominate everything. Why were all those traditional constraints so irksome? Why were all those old ideas so ridiculous? Because I had a Will of my own to satisfy and an opinion of my own to proclaim. Relaxing the order of society, so as to allow me to live, is by no means enough, if the old absurdities and the old institutions continue to flourish. . . . No pond is large enough for this celestial swan . . . no scurry into backwaters will save the ducks and geese from annihilation. How should I live safe or happy in the midst of such creatures? . . . [Hence] the price of peace, as men are actually constituted, is the suppression of almost all liberties. The history of liberalism, now virtually closed, illustrates this paradox.

Again, a conservative writer and thinker foresaw the future, the future in which we now live, and one in which the liberal reformer, possessed of a "prepotent will," seeks not only to live free from traditional constraints but also to destroy traditional order and traditional institutions because he finds their continued existence so intolerable. There is peace in Dystopia and no freedom.

If Santayana was wrong about anything in the quote above, it may be that the history of liberalism is not yet closed. We see that every day, every time one among Melville's myriads playing his pygmy part throws a rock through the window of a person whose rights or property he covets . . . shoots pepper spray into the eyes of the woman who opposes his ideas . . . sets fire to a car or building at a protest against violence and hatred . . . silences by force the speaker with whom he disagrees . . . requires someone to labor for him under threat of legal penalty . . . revolts at any perceived contraction of the power of the State . . . and on and on. I suspect that the history of liberalism may never be closed, as liberalism as a state of mind is just one more bit of confirmation of the fall of Adam. If we exist in a fallen state, then we will continue to aspire to godhood and to order the universe in accordance with our own dark whims and desires. There will always be within each of us a skilled destroyer and a ruthless tyrant.

So that brings me back to Poe as a founder of genres of fiction. (I just finished reading The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which is, in its final sequences, first, a story of Lost Worlds, then, a strange and mysterious dream-vision or apocalyptic fantasy.) If conservatism is in some apprehension of the truth about human nature, then the genres of fiction that tend towards a conservative worldview--weird fiction, supernatural fiction, horror, fantasy, historical fiction, romance--will go on easily enough. And if conservatism is right about the liberalism which rages against it, then the more liberal or progressive genres--namely, science fiction--will continue to struggle. You might consider the success or un-success of various genres to be a test of this hypothesis.

One alternative to a struggling science fiction is for there to be conservative version of the genre, a seeming contradiction, but not out of the question. There has been conservative science fiction before, and I imagine there is still some now, as well. Two examples from past and present are the very sub-genres about which I have written here, that is, apocalypse (or post-apocalypse) and dystopia. Both seem to be doing fine, and because the contemporary liberal or progressive in America has broken the mirror in which he might view himself, the latter--stories of dystopia--seem to be flourishing. Never mind that they tend to be descriptions of liberal rather than conservative excess, just as George Santayana implicitly predicted. The liberal or progressive reader likes them just the same and seems blissful to read them in his ignorance.

A picture illustrating the very last strange and mysterious words in the main action of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838). Illustration by the British artist Arthur David McCormick (1860-1943).

Revised on February 28, 2021.

Original text and caption copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley