“Any sufficiently advanced technology,” wrote Arthur C. Clarke, decades ago, “is indistinguishable from magic.” Thus was born the First Great Commandment of science fiction, a dictate so all-pervasive in the annals of SF that Clarke actually quotes himself in his latest novel, 3001: The Final Odyssey.
3001–the final installment in the series that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey–opens with the rescue of astronaut Frank Poole, last seen being shoved into space by the out-of-control computer Hal. Poole wakes up from a thousand-year sleep brought on by the coldness of space and discovers himself in the year 3001. The fourth millennium is, indeed, a world of wonders. Poole muses, eying the Braincap that all humans now wear: “Someone once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Will I meet magic in this new world–and be able to handle it?”
Poole’s Braincap does look like magic–it fits onto his skull and downloads the history and customs of humanity into his brain–but Clarke explains that the Braincap is actually “the end product of more than a thousand years of electro-optical technology.”
The Braincap rescues Poole from years of catch-up study, but it has a more important payoff: It has eliminated religion. When children are fitted for the Braincap, they are mentally “calibrated”–a process that serves as an early-warning system for psychosis. Any mental deviancies are treated immediately. As a result, no one in the fourth millennium starts wars, eats meat, or believes in God. (Marriages have also taken the eminently reasonable form of 15-year renewable contracts, but that’s another issue.) Anyone with strong religious beliefs is classed as either certifiably insane or mentally impaired due to childhood conditioning. As a matter of fact, the name of God is the only obscenity left in the 3001 vocabulary.
All this is a setup for Clarke’s explanation of the greatest magic of all: the development of intelligence from Earth’s primordial ooze. 3001 is less a novel than a wandering wrap-up of all the loose threads from the previous books in the series (2001, 2010, and 2061). And the wrap-up finally reveals the truth about humanity: We’re a crop sown by aliens.
Clarke is, apparently, serious. The genesis of human life may seem miraculous, but creation was actually a matter of extraterrestrial technology far, far beyond our ken. The Firstborn–alien intelligences that have long since conquered the limitations of flesh and blood, transferring their minds into the “structure of space itself” and becoming pure energy–wander through the universe, planting monoliths that accelerate and guide the process of evolution.
3001’s plot (such as it is) revolves around Poole’s attempts to save humanity from extinction. It seems that mankind has not quite measured up to the Firstborn’s standards. The aliens have slated the entire race for destruction, as a failed experiment, and have moved on to more fertile fields.
Eventually, Frank Poole saves humanity by launching a computer virus at the attacking Firstborn weapon, successfully disabling it. If this sounds familiar, you’re quite right; 3001 and Independence Day have the same ending. To forestall criticism, Clarke explains in his afterword that he thought of the virus before Independence Day was even released.
It doesn’t really matter; the rescue of Earth is completely incidental to 3001, which is primarily about the idiocy of faith. Every mystery is herein explained in technological terms. The intangible essence of man? No such thing; human personality is merely a matter of intelligence plus collected memories, a “straightforward job of nanoassembly.” Religious faith? Simply a “reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe.” Sin? Mental maladjustment, practically unknown by the year 3001. The reason for humanity’s existence? The Firstborn were lonely; they became creators because they sought “fellowship among the stars.” Mystery solved.
Well, not quite. Clarke doesn’t explain the Firstborn, and probably never will; he is 80 years old, living in Sri Lanka, and in poor health. But undoubtedly the Firstborn themselves arose from an odd wrinkle of the expanding universe and will disappear back into that wrinkle as the universe contracts. In the meantime, Clarke–the great-grandfather of science fiction–has no use for faith. He ends his afterword with barbed condescension:
Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy.
Faced with a mystery, the sane and happy man digs for the technology behind it. In Clarke’s fairy tales, the quest is always successful. And his sane and happy heroes don’t keep asking silly questions, like: What’s the point?
Not all science fiction is so overtly hostile to faith. The Rise of Endymion, the latest chapter in the Hyperion saga by sf veteran Dan Simmons, is positively enthralled by it. In the future as imagined by Simmons, faith is a genuine phenomenon, the portal to a whole new world, a realm that lies beyond the “scientific,” beyond what we can see and touch. Faith is necessary for survival. Indeed, by the end of the novel, everyone has faith.
But Simmons is still a science-fiction writer, and The Rise of Endymion illustrates sf’s Second Great Commandment, like unto the first: The supernatural is simply a manifestation of natural laws that are not yet understood.
The Rise of Endymion, like 3001, is a bad novel. Simmons is a better plotter than Clarke, but his characters deliver speeches in 15-page chunks, his exposition is incredibly clunky (“My friends, as good born-again Christians you undoubtedly know the procedure for the election of our next Pope. But let me refresh your memory”), and his sentences can be exquisitely awful (“During all the centuries of the Hegemony’s WorldWeb, the Three Sectors of Consciousness of the Core had not found a way to use the Void portal–that instantaneous interface that humans had known as farcasters–without leaving a record of modulated neutrinos in the fold matrix”).
But for all that, Simmons weaves a world that is fascinating in its very perversity. In The Rise of Endymion, the known universe is ruled by a corrupt Catholic church, which has purchased the technology of resurrection from a mysterious, technologically advanced entity known as the Core. The church rewards all its followers–“born-again Christians”–with a parasitic implant shaped like a cross, which records both personality and genetic makeup and allows physical resurrection in case of accident or disease.
Simmons’s hero, Raul Endymion, quite rightly rejects this resurrection; Christianity, he decides, is not supposed to be about life forever in the here-and-now. True Christianity holds the answers to those questions that standard science dismisses. True Christianity explains the intangibles: love, self-sacrifice, personality, the meaning of life. True Christianity, it turns out, has more to do with quantum physics than with the supernatural, and it happens to look a lot like Zen.
The Rise of Endymion chronicles Raul’s growing understanding of something called the Void Which Binds, a realm stitched of quantum stuff, woven with Planck space, Planck time, lying under and around space/time. . . . Neither mystical nor metaphysical, it flows from and responds to the physical laws of the universe. . . . The Void is structured from thought and feeling. It is an artifact of the universe’s consciousness of itself. . . . Its actual but inaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite-satisfying bullshit.
This is more than just another eye-popping Simmons-style paragraph; it is a credo, an avowal of faith in a realm that lies beyond the scope of traditional science. To access the Void, humanity must reject the cruciform and the church’s offer of physical resurrection and accept mortality. But that’s all right, because death isn’t really the end. If mortals can learn to enter the Void, they will live on as part of the universe, their emotions, experiences, and intelligences returning to the universe as water flows back into water.
This may sound supernatural, but don’t be fooled: It is still science. The Void is bound by physical laws, even if those laws are odd. The Void can be reached through Zen disciplines, but also through dna modification. As a matter of fact, Jesus discovered the Void Which Binds; he was able to move back and forth through Planck space, appearing to his disciples in the future as he still hung on the cross. And he tried to help them enter the Void as well, by putting blood in wine and skin scrapings in bread. He knew that anyone who drank his blood would “share his dna, and be able to perceive the power of the Void Which Binds the universe.”
But the disciples didn’t understand the Void. They “turned to dogma, reducing the inexpressible into rough words and turgid sermons, tight rules and fiery rhetoric. And the vision paled, then failed. The portal closed.”
The Rise of Endymion is about the reopening of that portal, the coming of a new messiah who opens the Void Which Binds to all humanity. She shares her blood with her followers and begins a revolution against the corrupt church. Her disciples move in together, share their belongings, devote themselves to the breaking of bread and the teachings of the enlightened.
It’s a much warmer universe than the fourth millennium of Arthur C. Clarke. Simmons–30 years younger than Clarke–has benefited from the popularization of the strange and wonderful world of quantum physics. Unlike Clarke, he can be a materialist without admitting that life ends at the grave. He can allow for strange, spiritual-seeming phenomena. He can wax ecstatic about the power of love and still call himself a writer of science fiction. He can even give Christianity and Buddhism passing nods of approval.
This isn’t progress; it is simply a rearranging of the boundaries of science so that the “spiritual” falls within them. But the urge to do away with the inexplicable–common to science-fiction writers since the days of Jules Verne–remains.
Both Clarke and Simmons are looking for a Grand Unifying Theory, an explanation that brings together the material and immaterial into a coherent whole. Clarke pitches the immaterial out; Simmons redraws the lines. Both remain hostile to Christ. And this hostility is ironic, since it is precisely in Christ–the one who sustains all things, both visible and invisible–that the laws of physics and the intangible yearnings of humanity come together “before the foundation of the world.”
Susan Wise Bauer writes for Charles Colson’s radio commentary, BreakPoint, and teaches literature at the College of William and Mary.
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.
Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 34
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