From StarDreaming: Letters from a Mystic to a Science Fiction Author
Myths of Inner and Outer Space: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence
by Maureen B. Roberts BSc, PhD
Presented at the 11th International Conference of the Mythopoeic Literature Society of Australia [July 1994]
To quote from J. G. Ballard: ’By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified forests, and jewelled alligators glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline rivers. By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown.’ It sounds like the stuff of myth and fantasy, yet this is a work of science fiction by an author who with a Conrad-like, almost suffocating density of image and symbolic meaning evokes in his novel The Crystal World the metaphysical landscapes of soul, through a Daliesque dwarfing of the individual by the immense energies of the unconscious as they are echoed in Nature. Set in a West African jungle, an apocalyptic crystallisation of the universe into living gems unfolds, when through a time contraction all is ‘transfigured and illuminated, joined together in the last marriage of time and space.’ Matter and antimatter, time and anti-time are mutually annihilated into timelessness.
If Ballard’s vision is the ironic nemesis of Nature too long abused through the hubris of technocracy, it nonetheless anticipates the transcendence of dualism in all its guises. However bizarre the apotheosis, it involves the surrender of a lone self limited by physical and temporal identity to an existence unbound by such restrictions, a self whose fate mirrors the fate of the universe to which he is inextricably tied. Since the 60’s, much of science fiction as prophetic mythology has anticipated key changes that are emerging into our collective awareness. As a reflection of radical shifts in the meanings of ‘science’ and ‘God’, our age is witnessing a dramatic upheaval of consciousness, through a humanisation of the universe and a corresponding deification of humanity. This trend reflects our quest for selfhood as completeness—as a relatedness that seeks to unite the many polarities of life—dark and light, male and female, inner and outer, Nature and technology, human and divine, science and mythology.
In science fiction, along with the stock motifs of parallel universes and time travel, we find metaphysics, utopianism, shape-shifting, gender-swapping, cybernetics, psionics, God; anything is fair game in this genre’s role as mediator between science and imagination in our quest to transcend the limitations of mundane existence. But this escapism is neither (to paraphrase Tolkien) the flight of the deserter nor the legitimate escape of the prisoner. It is, rather, the search for a new paradigm of reality which reflects our collective evolution of consciousness.
Myth is both a response to the emerging needs of a culture and an impetus for its change. As a dramatisation of archetypal patterns and themes, myth is a mirror held up to the collective soul. Myth-makers are prophetic voices who transpose the universal themes of myth into a contemporary setting, in order to deal with questions triggered by the deplorable state of the world and the sense of meaninglessness in a materialistic society. Science fiction both questions and sanctions the directions society takes, because its response to scientific progress is ambivalent.
Science fiction can warn us of the dangers of inflation, arrogance, hubris and nemesis. The 50’s, for instance, got stuck in a conflict between science and Nature through a deification of deterministic science and the backlash of a mass neurosis over Nature. Humans armed with technology triggered Nature’s revenge, as the dragons and monsters of traditional mythology became a giantism of natural imagery: a fly, rabbits, ants, walking plants, dinosaurs, The Giant Claw, The Spider, The Blob, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, all angry symbols of the rejected instinctive realm. This was a time when mechanistic science, idealistically fuelled with high-powered futurism and the illusion of omnipotence, saved the day.
Since then the inflated notion of science as conquest has been superseded by the theme of a humble a search for harmony with Nature and alien cultures, a quest championed by authors such as Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Larry Niven, C. J. Cherryh, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Walter Miller, and others. Can myth and technological progress coexist? Indeed it can. Science fiction transposes technology into the context of contemporary myth, a challenge from which fantasy, in spite of it being usually healthy escapism, makes a sometimes cowardly retreat. If fantasy’s defect is its exclusiveness, that is, its omission of technology, science fiction’s merit is its inclusive ability to absorb every facet of modern culture into a mythic vision.
At the heart of myth is the archetypal essence of human nature, the transcendental centre and circumferential whole of the Jungian ‘self’, which is coextensive with the cosmos and experientially indistinguishable from God. If myth is inclusive by virtue of its holism, so then is its unifying core self, which transcends the polarities of matter and psyche, inner and outer, Nature and technology. Hence in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, the mythologizing of computer networking unfolds on a cosmic scale through a heroic struggle against a technopsychic ‘Perversion’, which is threatening to destabilise the galactic ‘Known Net’ and its Zone borders. In Vinge’s scheme, different planetary races explore paths to a ‘Transcendence’ whose supremacy is hazily defined in terms of technological superiority. Vinge’s division of the mandala-like galaxy into ‘Zones of Thought’ mirrors the hierarchical structure of the psyche, moving outward from the ‘The Unthinking Depths’ of the unconscious Core, through the Great Slowness, to the Beyond, and finally to the outermost ‘Transcend’ where godlike ‘Powers’ dwell.
There is perhaps a similar mythic intent in Damien Broderick’s The Dreaming Dragons, which portrays a symbolic reality in which a ‘transcendent computer’ induces a godlike consciousness through which machines, a centaur, angelic archetypes and the aboriginal Serpent Dreaming coexist in a ‘universe of discourse’ where inner and outer reality merge into one consciousness, one technomythic existence. At the culmination of the novel, earthly wisdom is revealed as culminating in ‘spirit and matter brought together in life knowing itself’, when the questing protagonists move inward through ten spheres of progressive enlightenment toward the central singularity of ultimate truth. In The Dreaming Dragons Broderick presents an intriguing rationale for the Platonic idea of the World Soul, or the collective unconscious, which originates as a constructed ‘Soul Core’, a spherical locus of wisdom located in a Central Australian ‘Vault’ made by ancestral prehuman saurians.
In these novels we witness the trend to literalise the symbolic, to merge gods and humans through the erosion of a clear distinction between fact and myth. Such visions perhaps foresee that technology and consciousness may eventually fuse into an alchemical synthesis transcending both material and immaterial existence. Through an evolutionary imperative, humanity gropes from one paradigm of reality to another; by exploring existential questions of identity and apocalyptic visions of transformation, science fiction dramatises the fragmentedness, complexity and mystery of who we are. To quote the motto of Star Trek’s ‘Deep Space Nine’ series: ‘It is the unknown that defines our existence.’ The relativity of mass, space and time echoes the kaleidoscopic shuffling and reformation of our identity. But paradoxically a kaleidoscope image is ordered, for in the self, as in the cosmos, harmony and dissolution into chaos coexist in creative tension.
As Kim Stanley Robinson suggests, successive scientific eras zig-zag between alternating paradigms of reality, from the illusory stability of determinism to the fluid boundaries of relativity. The oscillation between integration and disintegration mirrors the cyclic dance of the psyche. In science fiction the search for identity involves fundamental questions about knowledge, and the nature and scope of the psyche, as we midwife a new consciousness in which there are as many universes as there are souls to experience them. In this regard the quasi-mystical view of science has fostered the burgeoning of science fiction’s metaphysical dimension.
In the new, holistic paradigm of science the theoretical emphasis is no longer on detached analysis, but rather on interaction, complementarity, synchronicity, and relatedness, reflecting the supposition that energy, matter and consciousness share an unknown common ground. In describing the universe as a great idea, though, we are not implying the existence of an overarching deity but are rather suggesting that psyche per se pervades the universe. Philip K. Dick embraces the pre-Socratic view that the 'kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly what the human being is at his [or her] deepest level—call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material…. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts.'
In microphysics an observer is postulated in objective reality. In our age of relativity, uncertainty as the prime ingredient of quantum theory leads us to conclude that the reality which the observation sharpens into focus cannot be separated from the observer. Reality, then, is not empirical; the universe achieves a knowable existence only as a result of our perception of it. It is in some sense created by its own inhabitants. The allied theory of parallel universes might well give rise to cosmic schizophrenia, for if the unity of psyche and cosmos postulated by Jung and theoretical physicists implies on one level the coincidence of subjectivity and universal truth, the other side of the coin is that it gives rise to a personal crisis of knowledge, perception and existence. In this regard, Dick, perhaps better than any other science fiction writer, manages to integrate both sides of the challenge and dilemma.
As metafictions of the spirit-matter dualism of Gnosticism, many of Dick’s metaphors of individual alienation can also be read as allegories of the ignorance which binds us to a fake reality, and blinds us to the ‘gnosis’, or heart-centred certainty of our true, eternal identity. Hence although Dick’s spirit-matter dualism is at odds with the emerging holism of our age, VALIS, his cosmic ‘Vast Active Living Information System’, is envisioned in Radio Free Albemuth as a ‘great universe of transmitting and receiving stations’, like brain synapses.
If the universe is more like a great idea than a great machine, for those who value intimacy there’s comfort to be gained from this more personal paradigm. The shift of perspective undermines the ‘Logos’ of verbal discrimination by ‘Eros’, the feminine principle of empathy and relatedness that understands through acquaintance and participation, such that detachment is no longer even a respectable theoretical option. In Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion amidst high-tech gateways and networks, AI’s threaten to build a ‘God of Machines’, a technology void of relatedness. Understandably, it is the unborn female child of emerging human consciousness who is to counteract—through becoming ‘the One Who Teaches’—the knowledge needed for the ‘junction of human spirit and AI logic’.