Myths of the Future

This article is not about our myths that concern the future—the Third World War, the Singularity, Ragnarök etc. It is about the myths of the future, when our present days will be remote as the Trojan war, or Gilgamesh or the Yellow Emperor are from us.

Will there be myths at all? I do not think this question can be readily answered. Stone survives a long time, parchment much shorter, paper shorter still, and the lifespan of a DVD is sometimes so short it makes you shake your head over the state of technology. So it is thinkable that the tale of our civilizations will be blurred and muddied some day and turn into myth.

On the other hand, if we manage to evade the whole world falling in an age of barbary ever again, and if the world wide web of information stays alive with all information being copied and recopied scores of times, where will be the myths, unless you count the “urban legends” of the “poodle in the microwave” variant? Maybe even forum posts discussing the best way to display a bar diagram in Microsoft Excel will make it into futurity …

In short, I cannot answer that question. But join me in assuming for the time being that there will be a time when myths will be the only things of our days that arise out of the mist of time! What would they look like?

The future is the realm of science fiction, of course, and many authors have depicted future civilizations on earth and elsewhere, where only pale myths remain of the present. I will discuss two of them, of which I consider one brilliant and one bad.

The bad example, I am afraid, is by Isaac Asimov. That man is viewed as one of the cornerstones of science fiction literature, and rightly so. His works remain brilliant and seminal, even if there is much cause for criticism in them. And there is. In fact I find it incredible that I am able to find that much fault with an author and still respect him that immensely. It is a deeply paradoxical situation.

Today I have an axe to grind with Asimov’s myths of the future.

Strictly speaking they are not myths about the present day. They are myths about things that happened in some of Asimov’s books a couple of thousand years in the future, but they are told as myths is other books that take place more than 20,000 years in the future (Asimov wrote a lot of books).

I will not go into the details of these mythical stories which appear in the book Prelude to Foundation. They concern earth, which was lost, colonies and settlers, robots and renegades, and mythical heroes.

The thing that bothers me about them is that they are all true. The worst that has happened over millennia of supposedly oral tradition is that the names are changed a bit, for example one Elijah Baley is remembered as “Ba-lee”. Aside from that, as in a witness’ testimony in an Agatha Christie novel, every little detail turns out to be the truth and nothing but the truth. There is no simplification, euhemerism, no mixing-up or combination of several events anywhere.

As satisfying as this method is from the point of view of a detective novel (and most Asimov novels have that whodunnit element in them, even if there is no crime), as unsatisfactory it is when read as a history of the future.

Now for the positive example! It is by one of my favorite authors, Gene Wolfe, from his most famous work, the Book of the New Sun. I recommend that work to you most warmly! Consisting of four books it tells of the path of life of Severian, journeyman of the guild of torturers and executioners in the far future of earth. Being a curious mix of science fiction, fantasy and classic literature, it sparkles with surprising ideas, interesting characters and gems of language. I rate Wolfe in the same league as Tolkien and Mervyn Peake, and certainly superior to C.S. Lewis.

The stories of the past occuring in the Book of the New Sun are mostly rather hazy. Someone for example tells the story of Theseus, of the ship with the black sails, but it has been garbled by the centuries, the name of Theseus does not appear, the Minotaur has turned into an anonymous ogre and the point of the conclusion of the story is not clearly understood any more.

There is another little gem I want to quote to you in full (from the series’ first book, the Shadow of the Torturer):

The picure he was cleaning showed an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner. The visor of the figure’s helmet was entirely gold, without eye slits or ventilation; in its polished surface the deathly desert could be seen in reflection, and nothing more.

No further explanation is given, and the picture does not have any influence on the story either. It is just there, a small glint of the past, and it remains a mystery for the book’s protagonist.

Well, do you realize what picture Severian was looking at? I think it’s obvious, but anyway, here is the solution.

So much for the masters of the genre. To conclude this article I would like to describe to you my own attempts in this field. It is a story I began some years ago and never finished. Maybe I never will; I find my abilities as a legitimate author painfully inadequate. The ideas are there; it is the execution that falls short.

I set myself the task of retelling the story of the Cuban missile crisis as a myth or fairy tale of the future.

As befits a fairy tale I would depict Kennedy and Chruchev as two kings. In my draft I called them the star king (from the stars in the US banner) and the crescent moon king: there is a sickle in the Soviet emblem, and I though someone in the future might reason that it made sense to interpret it as crescent to match the astronomical theme of the star-spangled banner. Alternatively they might be called the red king (even if no-one remembered what the communists where, the fact that they were the red ones would remain, I am sure) and the blue king.

Fidel Castro would of course appear, without name, as a bearded duke of a little country before the blue border. I imagined that Castro and Cuba are forever linked to Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who became such a pop culture icon that he might find his way into the story, although in reality he had nothing to do with it. Everybody knows that “che” means “pal” in Spanish, so I considered making him a semi-heroic messenger figure called “the friend”.

Considering the barbaric age that might tell this fairy tale, the atom bomb would seem like magic to them, so I turned it into a magic weapon, invented by some legendary sage (Einstein?). I considered describing it in the shape of a small metallic mushroom (the notion of a mushroom cloud would remain in the human consciousness, I thought).

And the danger of radiation! For my (European) subconsciousness it is linked to the Chernobyl disaster, so some allusions to that would enter the story as well (although it happened later than the missile crisis). I think the notion of the “liquidators”, men clad in white doing a grisly radiation-related task in secret which killed them is strong enough to survive the ages and suffuse any story concerning atomics.

Add some random trivia, which might be remembered, for example that Chruchev was bald and did something with his shoe. Would Lee Harvey Oswald fit in the story? I did not come so far in writing, but maybe it would be possible after all. Add some more popular themes of the cold war, and tell the whole thing in the cutesy way in which fairytales disguise darker themes and there you are.

The Name of the Magician

For once I will try to write an article that is not quite as long as most of the others, although I must admit I will probably not be too successful in this. It seems as if prolixity is my chief sin in writing, for which I am sorry.

Some time ago I read the book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke and liked it a lot. It is the first work by her and she is yet to write a second (save for some short stories), but is certainly an impressive debut. Currently Clarke seems to be working on a book that is basically a sequel to it (or at least claimed so once in an interview). Despite the fact that I am generally wary of authors that stop trying something new as early as after their first book (the short stories are set in the same universe as well), Jonathan Strange is so excellent I am probably going to give the sequel a try.

The book is set in alternative version of England during the Napoleonic wars, where real magicians have always existed in the world. I hesitate to call it an alternative history novel outright for two reasons. One is that in such a novel I would not expect magic. The other is that in a way it is much rather an anti-alternative history novel.

In a regular alternative history you have a historic event that happens differently from our history, usually called the point of divergence, which causes the whole subsequent history to be completely different (mostly it involves boring things like wars and certain nations attaining world domination). The craftier the author is, the more minuscule the point of divergence event will be.

Clarke subverts this method completely, by picturing a world with an entirely different history that still turns out, around 1810, to be just exactly the same as in our timeline. It has a history where England had been separated into two realms for centuries, one of which was ruled by a magician king, and still in 1907 Wellington fights Bonaparte in the Peninsular war, and Byron even writes the same poems. It is a most charming idea as long as it is not used too often or because of laziness. I imagine it would become stale quickly.

But so far all this was only introduction. I now want to talk about an amusing detail in the book.

In one of the final chapters of the book an Austrian gentleman addresses the magician Jonathan Strange in German as “der Hexenmeister des großen Wellington” (the sorcerer of the great Wellington). Apart from the fact that it is completely correct German (including spelling), which, sadly, is rare in books, which all too often are really careless with foreign quotes, it uses an interesting word.

In English there are quite a few terms for “magician”: magician, mage, wizard, sorcerer, conjurer, enchanter, warlock and a couple of other less common ones.

In German it is just the same: Magier, Zauberer, Hexer, Hexenmeister, Zauberkünstler, and others. In fact I feel most can be pairwise equated with English terms, e.g. Zauberer=Wizard, Zauberkünstler=conjurer, Magier=magician.

In the 21st century the most commonly used term is “Zauberer”. Gandalf is a Zauberer and so is Harry Potter. But Clarke used “Hexenmeister”. It is a perfectly correct word, but it is not the word a modern German speaker would use. It has a certain old-fashioned ring to it. (In fact the word, literally translated, means “witch-master”, master of witchcraft.) Of course it is possible that Clarke choose a quaintly old-fashioned term to match the setting of her novel, but I see a different reason that convinces me more.

There is a famous poem by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, titled Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer’s apprentice), equally famously made into an orchestral musical piece by Paul Dukas, and later into a Disney animated film. (I mentioned it in this article.) The poem begins with the lines

Hat der alte Hexenmeister
Sich doch einmal wegbegeben!

which is “Has the old sorcerer for once betook himself to some other place!”.

It is one of the most famous poems on magic there is, and it was written in 1797 (published in 1827). I am convinced it is completely impossible for Clarke not to be aware of the poem and not having had in it mind at some point. A novel about magicians in the early 1800s just cannot ignore the most famous poems about magicians from that exact period by one of the most famous poets of all times.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is laden with references to all kinds of contemporary things, including poetry, but there is none to Goethe or his poem. Well, the novel is set in England and nowhere even remotely deals with anything German, so there simply was no place for it. And after all it was published a little too late for the novel’s characters to know it (the novel ends in 1816). But, and that is my theory, Susanna Clarke chose to acknowledge Goethe’s poem by using, in that one passage, a term that was taken straight from the poem.

Tales of War and Futility

Today I set myself the goal of showing you two certain emotions I feel when reading particular passages and books. I want to define and describe those emotions and classify the materials that evoke them. It is not too easy, as all emotions are elusive and become something different when you think hard about them, and furthermore I cannot be sure you feel them in the same way as I do.

Imagine giant nations in an endless war. Imagine mud-filled trenches meandering for hundreds or thousands of miles through desolate landscapes, filled with famished men in field-grey uniforms. Imagine giant and absurd monstrosities of concrete and iron built for killing and for survival. Imagine gun barrels longer than railway cars. Imagine dark and cramped submarines.

Imagine nations pouring millions, tens of millions of lives into the fires of this stalemate. Imagine immense bright laboratories bustling with scientists in white belted lab coats, pince-nezes on their noses or, if they are female, their blonde hair knotted in tight, neat buns, all single-mindedly working day and night to perfect nerve gasses or atomic bombs. Imagine the war never ending.

Images like that never fail to evoke emotions in me, and they might do the same for you. I have encountered them in various books and now I want to distil their essence.

They are images of conflict, and there is something enormous about it. The details may vary greatly and still achieve the same effect. The level of technology can be different, but generally something between 1910 and 1950 works best. The enemy may be just like you, they may be faceless, or they may be never shown. The images may deal with the front, or with other aspects of the war. Even if not a single soldier is shown, it can still work.

The easiest way to encounter these kind of feelings is to read the history books. After all the images I tried to decribe above are basically simplified and exaggerated descriptions of the first and second world wars with a bit of the American civil war strewn in. The horrifying tales of Verdun and of the Somme certainly do evoke comparable feelings.

But there is a problem with that. We like to read horror stories and watch horror movies because in that context we desire to feel the kind of emotions they evoke. We want to feel the thrill and in our case the trill lies in the sheer enormous magnitude of the numbers, the amount of hate, suffering and madness, and of the enormity of the machine. I tried (maybe to no avail) to include that notion in my text above by talking of millions and tens of millions, of monstrosities and of endlessness. It is called the sense of wonder and letting yourself be overwhelmed by it is usually, despite everything, a pleasurable feeling.

This is the problem! It is in principle possible to read true (or at least drawn-from-life) stories of war and atrocities like horror stories, but it is guilty pleasure. And with good reason. We tend to overlook this if the time and place of the story is far from our reality (crusades, Mongols), but the fact is that these things really happened and that they happened to real people. Some are still alive to tell the tales. If you read how 10.000 people were killed in this town, and 20.000 in the next and 25.000 in a third and you remind yourself that all these people, these fates were real, you can only read these stories with appalled dismay. The feeling of enormity remains, but it is not pleasurable any more.

In fact, if we read the stories of real atrocities in this serious manner (which is the only manner in which we should read them) we find that we do not like to read them at all. But if we want to avoid reading about them how much more must we avoid them happening—ever again!

One possible solutions to this dilemma is to take the source of the horror (the Nazis, for example) and put them in a fictional environment (thereby making their victims fictional). Alternative history scenarios do the trick nicely and they are used abundently.

There are quite a few alternate history Nazi novels, for example. I feel that there are issues about them that somewhat transcendend the topic at hand, so I will talk about them some other time. For the moment I will limit myself to mentioning the names of two examples of such novels: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick and Weaver by Stephen Baxter (there are hundreds more).

But you can also go a step further and sever all links with our world completely. You can take the warring nations in a different reality, a different planet, a different species. This has two advantages.

Firstly, you can ramp up the dimensions to heighten the sense of wonder. I don’t want to harp on about this point, but it is done frequently in stories. It is a somewhat cheap trick, but it sure works.

The other thing is that in the case of a foreign species on a foreign planet the reason for the described conflict is always remote. On this earth we love and hate, but whether on some planet the blues or the greens win does not matter to us (unless the author cheats and pictures one of them as evil and the others as good). In other words, their conflict is meaningless. It is futile and random.

Combined with the size of wonder feeling we are astonished how something that large can be that meaningless, astonished, even enraged over the futility and the stupidity of it.

We may also get these feeling when we consider real wars. In fact, many authors have used scenarios like the one above to make a point about the real world (Iain Banks, for one). It is probably not true for all wars, but with some of them you just cannot help thinking, “Why didn’t they just stop fighting, for god’s sake?”

Finally, I want to list a few examples which evoke these feelings in me and which were the reason of writing this article in the first place.

• The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter has two examples. One is an alternate history where the first world war never ended but was still on in the 1930s. It is hampered a bit by Baxter trying to squeeze in as many ideas of H.G. Wells as possible, but still there are some extremely impressive and chilling scenes there.
  The other one is only a short description. A future civilisation built a Dyson sphere around the sun (a habitable sphere with the radius of Venus’ orbit). On its inner surface of perpetual day, millions of earths in area, thousands of cultures are locked in endless wars. The fact that they are never described in detail or even named, that there are so many of them, that there is a vast abundance of space, and that all is built on an enormous scale heightens the feeling of meaningless to a maximum.
• Iain Banks has used images like that several times. The most prominent one may be the dead planet in Consider Phlebas, where fear of nuclear strikes made a civilization undermine their whole planet with vast tunnels filled with railroad tracks, on which their leaders would stay forever in motion, so that they could not be targeted by the bombs. Banks mentions that despite that the people of that planet were all wiped out eventually by biological warfare.
  It has to be mentioned that Banks’ book are usually full of a sense of futility, even when they are describing pleasant things. In his world of billions of populated planets, of electronic mind infinitely superior to people, of unlimited technological abilities nothing has any meaning any more. His descriptions of holocaust evoke a feeling of futility, but so do his descriptions of parties.
• TV series have done it as well. Star Trek tried several times (for example in the episode A Taste of Armageddon) but did not quite pull it off because of a lack of budget.
  But there is an impressive example in Stargate Atlantis, the episode Poisoning the Well. Here scientists of a planet develop a serum that will make them invulnerable to the alien attackers that devour them. They push on with unbreakable fanaticism, despite the fact it turns out that the serum kills half of their population. Much of the episode’s effect stems from the 1940s imagery of the planet and the fanatic hardness of the characters.