"01 - Introduction by Kate Wilhelm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

Aristotle believed everything is cyclical-we exist in a tape loop that will replay itself endlessly. Asimov's story "Nightfall" explores this theory. Surely this is the most fatalistic philosophical construct of all. Schopenhauer carried it further than Aristotle and was reduced to absolute pessimism.

I will be here at this table drinking from this glass over and over again, he said, and there will be the same suffering, the same injustices in the world . . . . The only way to escape, he wrote, was through suicide. And this, too, would recur endlessly.

Theories about time are practically inexhaustible in the literature of philosophy. And science fiction writers come back to them again and again.

Robot stories have religious overtones; they touch on the problems of ethics and morals. From the Golem of Prague, to the Sorcerer's Apprentice, to Frankenstein, to modern Colossus, the machine doesn't perform as expected. It is flawed by the mistakes of its creator. As the dangers of the world increase, the power of the machine to bring about complete destruction grows more evident. The monster in Frankenstein simply wanted a mate and a place to live in peace in the wilderness. It threatened few people, and only after being denied this basic existence. Colossus has the power of life and death over the entire world. What this fiction asks is: is the thing created responsible for its flaws? In human terms, is man responsible? Why does man have to suffer because of flaws he cannot prevent?

These stories say man is not capable of becoming the Creator-at least not yet-and both man and his creation are doomed in the attempt. Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit" demonstrates this inescapably in having master and robot share a psychosis. This line runs through many of the stories: the creator is insane, his creation is insane. Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is another example. There are many.

Side by side with robot stories are those about marvelous inventions, amazing discoveries, spectacular breakthroughs. They examine the same philosophical problems. .

They reflect the attitudes that man, in his imperfect state, will build a better mousetrap that will swiftly catch him. Creator and victim of his creation: that is how science fiction looks at man and his wonderful new toys. These stories are concerned with the problem of good and evil, and the impossibility of separating one from the other. Serious writers have been struggling with the problem of good and evil for thousands of years, and there is no solution yet that satisfies everyone. Voltaire created his most memorable comic character, Pangloss, to satirize the then prevalent attitude that everything created by God of necessity must be good, that man is simply too limited in his vision to achieve understanding of the ultimate good that must be derived from that which is only apparently evil.

A modern example of the impossibility of knowing [ --V in advance if a product is good or evil is DDT. No

one alive today can truly balance the good it has done against the great evils that followed and continue to follow.

So these stories keep alive this cautionary note: man's vision is too narrow to judge. the good and evil he is capable of doing, and the best intentions in the world can't insure good results.

Immortality again goes to the heart of philosophy and religion. Man has been proving or disproving immortality for centuries. Kant reasoned that mart, has an innate morality, a priori knowledge of right and wrong. From this he went on to reason that since man's choice of good over evil is seldom sufficiently rewarded, and indeed often brings him injury, it follows that he must be rewarded in an afterlife. Compensation or, in psychological terms, reinforcement is necessary or the trait or action will be extinguished, but morality continues , to be practiced. A being capable of fulfilling this reward in an afterlife must exist, and that being, of necessity, is God. This is arguing for immortality in an afterlife, with assumptions of an eschatological design for human beings, a divine goal.

In science fiction the immortality is assumed for this ` earthly body, and the weight of centuries of belief in ` the mortality of man comes into question. Is there a divine plan? Is death a long sleep, eternal oblivion? Is there a purpose in the development of intelligence? ` Immortality stories are elitist by nature. The Greeks believed only their heroes could achieve immortality. We have carried this forward and broadened the definition of hero to include ourselves. The maids and the garbagemen and the elevator operators are not immortal. Would this thwart evolution of the species, and is there such a thing? Is man destined to become godlike in the fullness of time? Are we the bridge to superman?

The immortals of fiction are created with the same flaws that show up in marvelous inventions and robots. Eventually they become bored, or they have a fatal '
defect after all. Man has a finite capacity for pleasure or pain, for adventure, for anything that might lure one to wish for immortality, and very quickly, measured on the clock of eternity, he would become sated with living: He is forced to reexamine his attitudes and fundamental beliefs.

If intelligence is accidental, and evolution blind, if there is no divine plan after all, then the hedonists' view of man becomes more acceptable, and immortality no longer seems a sin against our own progeny.

This raises another no less grave problem: can intelligence survive without sufficient purpose? And what is sufficient purpose?

No one has to consider this seriously today, but tomorrow we might, or the day after that.

Granting man has evolved, have the changes been gradual, or is man changed abruptly by an outside force, as in 2001, or by something he does himself? In Darwin's time there was a raging battle between the catastrophists and the gradualists, or evolutionists. The biblical flood was accepted as the first recorded catastrophe that changed mankind. Before the flood man's life-span was measured in hundreds of years; after the flood his life-span was that of modern man. The adherents of catastrophism asked many questions that are still to be answered. Why did the dinosaurs die out? There are theories, but no hard facts. Why did the mammoths stand and freeze to death, with fresh grass in their mouths? Why didn't they try to flee south? What was that cold wind that froze everything in seconds?

The latest battle was fought this century, only twenty years ago, between Velikovsky and his critics who, no matter how they refuted him, could not deny the evidence of worldwide catastrophes: terrible floods, widespread droughts, lands sinking, others rising.,

It has been suggested that Darwin's theory of natural selection, expressed by Spencer in the phrase, "survival of the fittest," was eagerly accepted by the rising

industrialists who saw in it the perfect justification for their own emerging philosophy of economics.

Nietzsche said if man's destiny is manipulable by man himself, then it is man's duty to prepare for superman through selective breeding. And this thought, taken out of context, without the later disclaimers, culminated in the Nazi pogroms of eradication of the Jews, and the eugenics plan designed to bring forth a thousand years of Aryan supermen. Evolution speeded up through man's intervention.

There are people who today believe eugenics is the answer to many, perhaps even most, of the ills that plague mankind-inferior intelligence, hereditary diseases, and so on.

A new catastrophic ice age could accomplish much the same goal: only the cleverest, strongest, most adaptable, most courageous, most life-oriented would survive, and they would breed a new generation in, their image.

William James tells a charming story. A white traveler-explorer in Africa received a newspaper, the first he had seen in months, and he read it word for word, column after column, and even reread parts of it. The puzzled natives watched silently, and when the explorer finally had exhausted the paper and was ready to discard it, the natives asked if they could buy it. He wanted to know what possible use they had for it. And they said it must be powerful eye medicine, or why would he have bathed his eyes in it for so long?