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

We are all aliens to someone. Even among ourselves, in familiar groups, no one of us can know what another is experiencing, what he thinks, the depth of his sadness, the intensity of his pain, the height of his joy. We are all aliens to each other. We simply are more or less used to the strange behavior of others and try to put up with it with as little friction as possible.

In dealing with extraterrestrial aliens we are not so kind. There are three ways of treating aliens in fiction that seem to repeat endlessly. First, we treat them as
cuddly animals, larger-than-life kittens, or koala bears, and feel superior to them. Or we treat them as gods, and fear them, because they might, after all, judge us. Or we treat them as enemies who will get us if we don't get them first. And one wonders, is our xenophobia inherent, or learned? The recent experience with the Tasaday people seems to disprove it is innate. History shows good cause to fear outsiders, strangers. Too many instances of friendly natives being slaughtered by explorers and exploiters have left their imprint. We have all been taught to fear the stranger, the alien. Our treatment of aliens in our fiction seems then to be a justification of an acquired human trait that we recognize as unworthy. Perhaps what the stranger is doing is not mysterious and threatening at all; perhaps he is merely reading the latest news from home because he is lonely.

Of course, our xenophobia also goes back to the belief in a geocentric universe. We are the chosen people, and from biblical days to Descartes, we have known it is not only our right but our duty to master and rule over everything lesser than we. Any nation at war tends to treat the enemy this way, and to reinforce their subhuman status, the enemy is called slopes, gooks, krauts, big nose, redskin ....

The geocentric universe theory is dead. The belief that God created man in his image has no scientific basis. The idea that was made not only possible but necessary by these two beliefs, that man is the chosen creature of the universe, lives on, and is examined again and again by writers today.

In fiction superman is doomed. Nietzsche decided the time is not yet right for his appearance. I suspect it never will be right for a solitary superman. He is incontrollable, unpredictable, and a threat, regardless of his intentions. Superman shakes our faith in the laws of nature, and if this goes, it takes everything else with it. It is much easier for primitive people to accept the idea of superman, because they don't believe in the

orderliness of nature anyway. Except in the most ephemeral fiction, we create a superman and then damn him for being different and destroy him, or more often, have him destroy himself. We will trim the hair of every Samson we create.

We have to because a technological civilization is grounded in the logic of cause and effect, of order and predictability, and of stability, which can bend a little, but absolutely must not break.

It can be argued if God created man in his image, then superman must have been created by Satanic powers, and it is man's duty to destroy this manifestation of evil. Or, if man evolved from the lesser creatures, and now presumes to create superman, his creation must be flawed, because man is himself imperfect. The creature must be destroyed. Also, it is vastly reassuring to believe all men are created equal, except for those who are naturally inferior to us.

Nowhere on the bell-shaped curve that represents mankind is there room for superman.

In space travel stories we are competing with the astronomers with the two-hundred-inch Palomar telescope, the giant radio telescopes, computers, records that go back thousands of years, and predictions for thousands of years to come. The Incas were astronomers, the Babylonians, some say the Druids, but in spite of the equipment, the respectable age of science, and all the money and man-hours devoted to it, no one knows today how the universe began, how it will end, even if it began and is destined to end. There are theories that come and go like the seasons-the Big Bang, all matter was condensed into one mass that exploded, or was exploded, and ever since has been rushing from the scene of the original Big Bang. There is the steady-state theory-nothing has changed or will change. It didn't begin, won't end. The universe has been described as a perfect piece of clockwork, a mechanism wound up by God to tick forever. There is the oscillating-universe theory that says it expands,
then contracts, and does this forever. There is the expanding universe theory that says matter is forever being created and the universe is forever growing larger. Every mythology attempts to explain the creation of Earth, if not the universe. Astronomy was one of the dead sciences for a long time. Everything had been learned that could be, but today it is tumultuous. There are new discoveries that are not understood-quasars, pulsars, black holes, white holes. Space travel stories are exciting news stories, complete with photographs. As news or fiction, space travel brings some of this excitement to the reader, probably more to the writer. The universe is mysterious, awesome, beautiful, and we know practically nothing about it.

Probably a caveman looking at the sky was the first philosopher. There have been flat-earthers, hollowearthers, the geocentric universe, the heliocentric universe. Slowly we have found our place in the universe, but the questions remain, even as they must have occurred to that first aware caveman. What is it? Why is it?

Historically the psyche has been the battleground of the materialists and the metaphysicians. Is the mind a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which can be written what man is to be? Or does the mind contain a system of a priori knowledge? Kant said the ultimate nature of reality is conceivable but not knowable. Modern physiological psychologists say there is nothing except the chemical-electrical activities of the physical brain: what we call consciousness is a byproduct. Bergson wrote that consciousness is apart from the brain, arising from it, but not necessarily dependent on it. His analogy was this: a coat on a peg is linked to it, and if the peg falls, the coat goes with it, but the coat is not the peg. It exists as a separate thing in itself. It is not an epiphenomenon of the peg. Metaphysics attempts to discover the ultimate nature of reality, and in this sense the innerspace of science fiction is metaphysical fiction.

This isn't a dead issue dragged from the eighteenth century to our contemporary scene. It is very much alive; adherents from the opposing views are still active. The battleground changes, the weapons bear new names. The war is the same. B. F. Skinner, the best known of a host of behaviorists, is persuasive as he demonstrates his results of operant conditioning, and hypothesizes a future in which man can be trained to become whatever the conditioners decide is best for mankind. Not merely become that, but be happy in that role. Noam Chomsky, also active, well known, gathering disciples all the while, seems able to prove, also decisively, the innate structure of the mind with an inherent grasp of language and its grammar. Jean Piaget, working with children, takes this even further, and is able to demonstrate that certain recognizable human characteristics are physiologically determined, among them empathy (which becomes possible no earlier than eight or nine), deductive reasoning, generalizing, and others. No system of rewards and punishment (conditioning) can hasten these developments, if Piaget's theory is correct; moreover, when the child is ready, the latent (innate) ability automatically becomes operational. Potentiality becomes actuality, and each generation spontaneously rediscovers the mental activities that separate Homo sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom.

This is not merely an idle speculation, material for armchair philosophers. Today the biochemists, the psychologists, the behavior modifiers, the neurophysiologists, the analysts, those in ESP research, even nutritionists are all staking out claims in this area.

How much of man in innate, how much is learned behavior? Children's art from around the world reinforces the validity of Jungian archetypes that affect everyone. The way we see our world is innate, and only with training can we view it with the spectacles provided by our separate cultures. That man can be conditioned is a reality also. The battlegrounds have
been chosen, the lines drawn, the antagonists are in place. This could well be the fiercest battle of all, involving every one of us.
Lost in the exciting phenomena of discoveries, there remains the basic idea, the basic question: What is man?
These are some of the ideas of science fiction. They aren't new. They have been debated over the centuries, and there have been few enduring answers to the imponderable problems raised by these ideas. No one can be disinterested in them because a new discovery in any of these areas would drastically influence everyone alive today, everyone who will live in the future. An immortality serum discovered tomorrow would alter the lives of everyone on earth. There would be a shift in everything we believe in, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Ask the general public what science fiction is all about and the answer will probably be, the future. In a sense this is correct, but only in that science fiction uses and will continue to use the phenomena of the future, its hardware, its extrapolations, its changing cultures, in order to explore ever again the ideas that have always intrigued mankind. And in this lies its strength. In this lies its appeal to a whole new generation of readers who seem to grasp intuitively that these ideas must be kept alive and that somehow science fiction has found this need and is satisfying it.

KATE WILHELM
Madeira Beach, Florida
February, 1974