Tellers of Weird Tales

Weird Tales #367, from 2023, is a themed issue. The theme is cosmic horror. I'm not sure that a themed issue is a good idea. What happens if you as a reader don't like the theme? Well, you go elsewhere for your reading, and your money follows you. That was one of the really good things about the original Weird Tales: no matter what your tastes were when it came to weird fiction, fantasy, or even science fiction, you would probably find something you liked in every issue.

There has been a proliferation of genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres in genre fiction. It's pretty ridiculous actually. I'm not sure why there should be such proliferation except that I think everybody is trying to be extraordinary. Democracy has its discontents. People ask themselves, if we're all equal, how am I to stand out from everybody else? How am I to show myself to be above others? One way of doing it, I guess, is to make yourself extraordinary within a subset or sub-subset of our larger society and culture, even if you have to invent that subset or sub-subset for yourself. The other day, I wrote about an interview that one contributor to the Cosmic Horror Issue conducted with another. In his introductory paragraph to that interview, Nicholas Diak wrote of "The Forest Gate" by Samantha Underhill: "Using cosmic horror and existential dread poetic styles, this poem . . ." and so on. So I guess cosmic horror and existential dread are poetic styles and the proliferation extends into not only genres but also forms and styles. I have used the word proliferation here. Actually I think it's a balkanization of culture, more accurately an atomization. People working in culture are in pursuit of the infinitesimal, for if you can divide culture finely enough, then you can be extraordinary within your own self-created infinitesimal. If your world is your navel, then you can easily occupy your whole world. You can be within it the greatest of anything and everything you can think of.

So what is cosmic horror? Well I'll let you know that my title is a trick. I don't know what it is. But then I didn't invent the thing. I'm not sure that it even exists. The other day, I pointed out that cosmos and chaos are opposites. Cosmos is order. It is the universe. It's where we live and it's a place governed by laws. Although there is emptiness in the universe, the emptiness is not what counts. The important parts lie among the emptiness. If time is what keeps everything from happening all at once (a quote attributed to Ray Cummings), then emptiness--space--is what keeps everything from happening all in the same place.

Chaos is cosmos' opposite. It is disorder, confusion, emptiness. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains its meaning as "gaping void; empty, immeasurable space." The original Greek word, khaos, means "abyss." Those two words, void and abyss, appear again and again in the Cosmic Horror Issue. That was my point in suggesting that cosmic horror should probably be called chaotic horror, for the horror appears to be in encounters with or contemplation of the void or the abyss. Alternatively, this invented, theoretical, or critical (versus natural, organic, or evolved) sub-sub-genre could be called abyssal horror or voidal horror. There isn't any such word as voidal, I guess, but if we can invent one thing, we can invent another.

I have a copy of Otto Struve's Elementary Astronomy, published in 1959 and reprinted in 1961. Struve's book is brimming with black-and-white photographs of immense galaxies and countless stars. In the first page of text, there are numbers representing immense quantities: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe, a like number of cubic inches of almost empty space in the Milky Way galaxy. That's a lot of zeroes, kept from emptiness or void by an initial non-zero integer. More such numbers appear on the next page. These, then, are cosmic scales, cosmic here having mathematical value but being empty of any value judgments, or at least any outright negative value judgments. Dr. Struve was a dispassionate scientist after all. Even though they are cosmic, we can still write about things of this scale. Otto Struve did it in his textbook. Other authors have done it in their fiction. I should add that zero represents nothing. The numeral looks like a hole, an opening, a gaping maw.

I guess cosmic horror is an expression or a feeling of horror that arises from apprehending or contemplating the cosmic scale of the universe. Maybe it's not the cosmos itself that gives rise to this feeling, though. Again, cosmos is order. Chaos is its opposite. In the biblical story of the creation of the universe, what we call cosmos was preceded by chaos, emptiness, a void:

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep

or:

the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep

or:

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

(Genesis 1:2)

We live in an atheistic and nihilistic age. Maybe the horror that some people feel in their contemplation of the universe is the horror not of cosmos but of the void that preceded it. In intervening and in his act of creation, God put an end to chaos. The void, which was non-existence, is now doubly non-existent. There cannot be a void if there is cosmos. But people don't believe in God any longer. I suspect that many if not most of the authors and poets who contributed to the Cosmic Horror Issue are non-believers, if not atheists, materialists, nihilists, or even anti-natalists, as Thomas Ligotti (not a contributor to this issue) so famously (or infamously) is. And so if there is not God to keep back the void--if it can poke through wherever he is not on watch--then horror might emerge and erupt and engulf. If you don't believe in God, then maybe you must fear the void.

In his first paragraph of Elementary Astronomy, Dr. Struve wrote that the word astronomy is from two Greek words, the first, obviously, for "star," the second, significantly, for "law." To fear or to feel horror at the great scale of the universe in terms of both space and time is, I think, off the mark. It is to ignore the fundamental order and lawfulness of the universe. There are people who feel small or insignificant, their lives essentially meaningless, when they think about the immensity of the universe. Why should that be? They're having, I think, an inappropriate response. I would say that their response is actually self-centered, possibly tipping into a kind of solipsism. If you feel this way, you need to get over yourself. If you think these things, you're actually putting yourself at the center of the universe in that you're thinking about the effect the universe has on you and that your feeling this way is somehow significant, that it is indicative of something that is out there instead of in here. Or maybe you're trying to make of yourself the universe, or vice versa.

Carl Sagan had a better view of it, I think. He saw us as the products--perhaps the end-products--of an orderly universe. "We are star stuff," he famously said in his series Cosmos. The stars have existed so that we might also exist and grow to contemplate them, ourselves, and the cosmos in which we live. We are the mind and consciousness of the cosmos. He gloried in the immensity and magnificence of that great structure, process, and more after which he named his show. I still remember a montage from Cosmos over which exultant music, composed by Beethoven, played, a montage of us, made from star stuff, formed from the dust of stars, set about our tasks of living, thinking, loving, and creating.

At the end of his novel Contact, Dr. Sagan indicated that the universe is actually designed, a curious conclusion for an atheist. And though he might have been an atheist, he was obviously not a nihilist, nor was he negative, depressed, anxious, or fearful in his contemplation of the universe. He could hardly have studied it and accomplished what he did if he had felt those kinds of feelings. In that he was wise. Those who are horrified by the cosmos are, I think, unwise.

I suspect that cosmic horror is actually not based on anything especially serious or meaningful. As Nicholas Diak wrote in his essay, it's actually something done for fun. We like thrills. We like to be scared. Especially when we return from reading, return to what is safe and sure. I think it best to look at it this way, that cosmic horror in storytelling is done for fun. Unfortunately, most of the works in the Cosmic Horror Issue are pretty limited in their approach to cosmic horror. Again, there seem to be two main themes or images in these pages: the void or the abyss, and the alien presence. If there is a cosmos through which chaos occasionally breaks through, and if there is actually a genre of cosmic horror, then the possibilities for telling stories within that genre would seem vast, theoretically endless. Why limit ourselves? Why have the authors of cosmic horror so limited themselves? Maybe it's because we as a culture--and the creators of our culture in particular--have run out of ideas. And maybe we have run out of skills, too, and so we accomplish almost nothing of note.

Now comes the really fun part in all of this, for opposite cosmic horror is cosmic insight, cosmic happiness, cosmic transcendence. Richard Matheson, a teller of weird tales, wrote the screenplay for The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). In the end, that film shows itself as a vehicle for an uplifting, even exultant, philosophical and theological conclusion. Here are the final words spoken by the title character (with my own paragraphing of a transcript of the narration):

I was continuing to shrink, to become . . . What? The infinitesimal? What was I? Still a human being? Or was I the man of the future? If there were other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across seas and continents, would other beings follow me into this vast new world?

So close, the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept. The unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.

I looked up, as if somehow I would grasp the heavens, the universe, worlds beyond number. God's silver tapestry spread across the night.

And in that moment I knew the answer to the riddle of the infinite. I had thought in terms of Man's own limited dimension. I had presumed upon Nature. That existence begins and ends is Man's conception, not Nature's.

And I felt my body dwindling, melting, becoming nothing. My fears melted away and in their place came acceptance. All this vast majesty of creation, it had to mean something. And then I meant something too.

Yes, smaller than the smallest, I meant something too.

To God, there is no zero.

I still exist.

"My fears melted away," he says. "To God, there is no zero." Those, I think, are proper responses as we contemplate the cosmos. And I should point out that The Incredible Shrinking Man closes with swelling music played over photographs of the stars and galaxies, just as in Otto Struve's book, which is full of so many zeroes, all of them made from nothing into something by God's word and law.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Here's another long one, but just remember: we're going back billions of years here.

* * *

Primordial ooze, primordial slime, and primordial soup have become accepted terms and accepted concepts, even though they describe something that no one has ever observed in nature nor created or recreated in a laboratory. Like the ether of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these concepts are based on lots of assumptions, furthermore in the absence of any evidence or any real knowledge regarding a persistent and nagging scientific problem. In the case of ether, the problem involved the propagation of electromagnetic waves through space. In the case of primordial ooze, the problem has to do with the origins of life on earth. Nobody of a scientific mind seems to question the idea that life here originated in ooze. A belief in its existence would appear dogmatic.

So what are the origins of ooze? Well, the earliest use of the expression "primordial ooze" that I have found in American newspapers is from November 9, 1899, in reference to Sir John Murray's explorations of the ocean floor on board the HMS Challenger. (Sir John Murray, 1841-1914.) The article I found (in the first of its many appearances in stateside papers) is "Floor of the Sea" in the Washington, D.C., Beacon. In its original, the article was in the London Spectator and was written by F.T. Bullen. Bullen's article treats "primordial ooze" as if knowledge of the concept was common. Evidently, even in 1899, it had been around for a while. Murray is considered the father of oceanography. He has an octopus named after him, Cirrothauma murrayi, thus he has connections both to cephalopods and slime. If you're an oceanographer, you'll have that.

The earliest occurrence of "primordial slime" that I have found is in a review of a scientific article called "Bathybius and the Moneres" [sic] by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) in Popular Science Monthly, October 1877. The review, entitled simply "Periodicals," is in the Boston Evening Transcript, October 4, 1877, page 6. In it, reference is made to Haeckel's discovery of a "peculiar slimy substance" on the Mediterranean seafloor. Haeckel called this substance Bathybius or "The Primordial Slime of the Sea Depths." It was supposed to have been a substance that was giving rise, even in contemporary times, to life.

Mention of "Bathybius and the Moneres" leads to the article itself, entitled "Bathybius and the Moners." (I'm not sure which is the correct spelling, but even in Haeckel's article, "moneres" is the spelling used.) In that article, there is more talk of slime, ooze, Bathybius-ooze, and even amoebas. There is also an organism called Vampyrella, though I doubt it's the one with which we're familiar. Again, check the spelling.

The concept of Bathybius was older even than Haeckel's article. The stuff was supposed to have been brought up from the ocean floor during the deep-sea soundings made for the laying of the transatlantic cable in 1857. (Remember that part.) In 1868-1870, Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) and Haeckel went back and forth in some excitement to claim that Bathybius: a) was a type of protoplasm; b) covered the ocean floor; c) was constantly coming into being; and d) was a link between life and non-life. Scientists on board the Challenger blew lots of really big, Fearless Fosdick-sized holes in those claims. Huxley admitted his error in 1879. A poem in Punch from 1879 (see below) poked fun at the concept of Bathybius. Yet there were still people who believed in it or at least failed to question it.

To wit:

The earliest reference to "primordial soup" in an American newspaper that I have found is, surprisingly, from 1960. And guess who referred to it? Twenty-five-year-old Dr. Carl E. Sagan (1934-1996) of Yerkes Observatory, that's who! In "Life on Jupiter, Astronomer Says" (Oakland Tribune, May 11, 1960, page 11), journalist Tom Riley wrote of how Dr. Sagan had "suggested that a process of organic synthesis is going on over Jupiter's surface in much the same way as the primordial soup of earth evolved millions of years ago." Dr. Sagan famously said later that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So where was the proof of organic synthesis, either on Jupiter or on the primordial earth? To paraphrase a well-known bandito: Proof? We don't need no stinking proof! When it comes to the abiogenesis of life, the message is clear: We have faith! No evidence is needed!

By the way, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) studied biology under Thomas Huxley, and so maybe we have a line of descent for the concept of primordial ooze, from Huxley and Haeckel to Wells . . . thence to Anthony M. Rud? And from him, to lots of other creators of slime creatures, ooze monsters, and things that arise from muck, mire, and the swamplands of the earth? I can't say for sure, but I'm getting ahead of myself in any case.

In his article of October 1877, Ernst Haeckel wrote:

With this formless primordial organism of the simplest kind, which, occurring in thousands of millions, covers the sea-bottom with a living layer of slime, a new light seemed to be thrown upon one of the most difficult and most obscure problems of the history of creation--namely, the question of the origin of life upon the earth. With Bathybius, the ill-famed "Urschleim" (primordial slime) appeared to have been found, of which it had been prophetically affirmed, fifty years before, by Oken, that from it was sprung the whole world of organisms, and that this "Urschleim" itself had sprung from inorganic matter at the sea-bottom in the course of planetary development.

At last (I think) we have arrived at the origins of ooze. And they are evidently in the work of another German, a natural philosopher called Lorenz Oken (1779-1851), who wrote, in 1805:

[A]ll organic beings originate from and consist of vesicles or cells. These vesicles, when singly detached and regarded in their original process of production, are the infusorial mass or protoplasma (urschleim) whence all larger organisms fashion themselves or are evolved.

So, in the beginning there was urschleim, the first slime, the slime that is life and from which all life arises in the form of cells of protoplasm, which bind themselves to each other to form ever-higher forms through some unexplained process of genesis and evolution. And now here we are: we came out of slime, we are made of slime, and each of us carries within him or her an ocean floor, a tidal pool, a warm little pond, a swamp.

Thirteen years after Oken wrote came these words:

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. 

They're from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1797-1851).

* * *

From Oken to Huxley and Haeckel to H.G. Wells, ooze, blobs, jellies, and slime found their home in the oceans, either on the ocean floor or in tidal pools. "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud is set in the piney woods and swamplands of southern Alabama. In his account of what happened at Cranmer's lodge, Rud's narrator uses ooze and similar words to refer mostly to the remnants of the scientist's giant amoeba, which perished in the enclosure that he had constructed for it after it had eaten his son, daughter-in-law, and manservant. Those remnants now lie in a disgusting, fishy-smelling residue over the grounds. But at least once, that narrator also seems to use ooze in reference to the substrate of the surrounding swampland. So, questions arise:

• Was Rud aware of the concept of primordial ooze or primordial slime as a putative source of life on earth?

• Did he move primordial ooze or primordial slime from the oceans onto land, specifically to the swamplands of the American South?

• If so, was he the first to do so? In other words, was Rud's giant amoeba the first science-fictional, weird-fictional, or pseudo-scientific swamp monster--that is, a monster that arises from the swamp--in American popular culture?

We should be clear here that Cranmer's giant amoeba didn't make itself. It did not arise spontaneously from swamp-ooze. Instead, the author Rud replaced spontaneous generation with a pseudo-scientific or science-fictional process: the amoeba was created by a super-scientist in his laboratory using rearrangement of its chromosomes.

Cranmer didn't mean to do what he had done. "Mine is the crime of presumption," he wrote in his final notebook entry. He aimed too high and because of that fell far. His science was Frankensteinian, but he was not like Dr. Frankenstein. Rud's narrator writes that John Corliss Cranmer "believed in both God and humankind." In fact it was not he, the scientist, who brought on disaster but his son, the writer, who did it. The father understood fully the danger posed by the amoeba. He instructed his son to destroy it. The son, though, was more ambitious, and more than a little foolish. He believed at some level that nature can be controlled. There is a phenomenon in the world of today of sons who lack the moral, physical, and intellectual development of their fathers. We see that all of the time. It may be an irreversible trend. The loss of the first of John Corliss Cranmer's twin beliefs might be the best explanation for that.

One more convention appears in "Ooze," that of the widowed scientist, only this one has a beautiful daughter-in-law rather than daughter. This isn't exactly hopeful science fiction though--in this case it's more like fateful weird fiction--and so they all die.

* * *

"In the womb of the world," an illustration for Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Deep-Sea Cables" drawn by William Heath Robinson; from A Song of the English (1909). That looks like ooze to me.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a near contemporary of H.G. Wells. It's safe to say that Kipling was an entirely different kind of man and artist than was Wells. Like Wells and the men who preceded him, Kipling knew about ooze and slime and the deep sea except that he wrote about these things from a nonscientific viewpoint rather than a scientific one. I don't want to sound like Garrison Keillor, but here's a poem for today by Kipling:

"The Deep-Sea Cables" (1896)
By Rudyard Kipling

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar--
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world--here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat--
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth--
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"

"The wrecks dissolve above us," by Robinson.

Here's another:

"In the Matter of One Compass" (1892)
By Rudyard Kipling

WHEN, foot to wheel and back to wind,
The helmsman dare not look behind,
But hears beyond his compass-light,
The blind bow thunder through the night,
And, like a harpstring ere it snaps,
The rigging sing beneath the caps;
  Above the shriek of storm in sail
    Or rattle of the blocks blown free,
  Set for the peace beyond the gale,
    This song the Needle sings the Sea:

Oh, drunken Wave! Oh, driving Cloud!
  Rage of the Deep and sterile Rain,
By Love upheld, by God allowed,
  We go, but we return again!

When leagued about the 'wildered boat
The rainbow Jellies fill and float,
And, lilting where the laver lingers,
The Starfish trips on all her fingers;
Where, 'neath his myriad spines ashock,
The Sea-egg ripples down the rock,
An orange wonder dimly guessed
From darkness where the Cuttles rest,
Moored o'er the darker deeps that hide
The blind white Sea-snake and his bride,
Who, drowsing, nose the long-lost Ships
Let down through darkness to their lips--
Safe-swung above the glassy death,
Hear what the constant Needle saith:

Oh, lisping Reef! Oh, listless Cloud,
  In slumber on a pulseless main!
By Love upheld, by God allowed,
  We go, but we return again!

E'en so through Tropic and through Trade,
  Awed by the shadow of new skies,
As we shall watch old planets fade
  And mark the stranger stars arise,
So, surely, back through Sun and Cloud,
  So, surely, from the outward main
By Love recalled, by God allowed,
  Shall we return--return again!
  Yea, we return--return again!

The first poem is easier for me to understand than the second, but both have imagery of the ocean and its benthic regions: ooze, slime, jellies, cuttlefish, "the blind white Sea-snake," and so on. If we consider one or both of these poems to be genre works, then we have some early examples of ooze and slime in such works.

To be continued . . .

Cirrothauma murrayi, an octopus named for Sir John Murray.

Finally, "Bathybius," a poem from Punch, reprinted in British newspapers in 1879.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

A correspondent has let me know about two recent losses in the worlds of science and science fiction:

Radio astronomer Frank Drake died on September 2, 2022. He was ninety-two years old. Born on May 28, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois, Dr. Drake studied at Cornell University and Harvard University. From 1958 to 1963, he worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia. In 1960, he began Project Ozma, a search for extraterrestrial intelligence by way of radio waves. Frank Drake followed Otto Struve (1897-1963) and was followed by Carl Sagan (1934-1996) in a line of scientists who have speculated on the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence and who carried out a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI. Science fiction author James E. Gunn (1923-2020) fictionalized their efforts to some degree in The Listeners (1968-1972, 1985).

Horace Chandler Davis, known as Chan Davis, died on September 24, 2022, at age ninety-six. Dr. Davis was born on August 12, 1926, in Ithaca, New York. He received his doctorate at Harvard University and taught mathematics at the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto. Science fiction fans know him better as an author of a-dozen-plus-one short stories that appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, Planet Stories, Star Science Fiction, and other titles from 1946 to 1994. His first was "The Nightmare," published in Astounding Science Fiction in May 1946. That credit surely made him one of the last living authors of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, calculated to have run from 1938 to 1950. Dr. Davis' widow is the historian Natalie Zemon Davis.

We send condolences to the families of both men.

An early example of the destruction of the Statue of Liberty in science fiction, William Timmins' cover for Astounding Science Fiction, May 1946, illustrating Chan Davis' story "The Nightmare." I was going to make a catalog of such images but someone has done it before me and has done it well. Look for Joachim Boaz's blog Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations: Reviews of Vintage Science Fiction (1945-1985) and an entry called "Adventures in Science Fiction Cover Art: The Statue of Liberty on Pre-1968 Magazine and Novel Covers" from October 1, 2012, here.

Four years ago, on the day after Flying Saucer Day, I wrote about James E. Gunn and his novelette "The Listeners," originally in Galaxy Magazine in September 1968. Since then I have looked for the book version, which collects all of Mr. Gunn's stories in the series, originally published from 1968 to 1972. I finally found it this summer in one of my trips to Half-Price Books, a store that I hope stays in business forever. And this summer I read it.

First I should let you know that James E. Gunn died at the end of last year, on December 23, 2020. He was ninety-seven years old, another of that interwar generation who did so much, accomplished so much, overcame so much, even unto the end. We send condolences to his family and friends and I guess to the world of science fiction in general. James E. Gunn was born in the same year that Weird Tales began, 1923. Surely he was one of the last of the authors first published during the Golden Age of Science Fiction, 1938-1950. His first story was called "Communications" and it appeared in the September 1949 issue of Startling Stories. Communications would seem to have been a theme in his work.

The Listeners is episodic. Like Mr. Gunn's life, it is spread over nine decades, from 2025 to 2118. It is set mostly in Puerto Rico, at the site of a great radio telescope, an ear directed at the heavens, waiting to hear words from on high. The main character is Robert MacDonald, a middle-aged (and older) administrator and head of the listening project. (Yes, his surname is Scottish and, yes, he is an engineer.) MacDonald is hanging on, hanging on, waiting for the communications he's sure must come. He carries the Project on the back of his faith.

James Gunn was completely conversant in the history and culture of Listening. In his book, he referred to Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, Otto Struve, and other figures in the what is now called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He quoted from some of them, too, in his inter-chapter "Computer Run" compilations, which were, I think, new to the book version, first published in 1972. (They remind me of the "Newsreel" sections in John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy.) He and Dr. Sagan seem to have formed a mutual admiration society, in fact. Dr. Sagan's blurb on the cover of the Ballantine edition reads: "One of the very best fictional portrayals of contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence ever written!" In his turn, Carl Sagan seems to have lifted Mr. Gunn's religious leader straight out of The Listeners and plopped him into the movie Contact (1997). The radio message returned to Earth in order to get our attention is also seemingly from The Listeners.

The depiction of that religious leader is a flaw, I think, in Contact, less so in The Listeners. I don't know what things were like in 1968 or 1971-1972 when James Gunn first wrote, but his character Jeremiah (cute name) verges on stereotype. Carl Sagan called him Joseph and was far less understanding. I think what both authors failed to understand is that Christians are far more tolerant of the idea that there may be other people in the universe than are the Listeners that there are not. It is, after all, the core belief of Christianity that we are not alone. It would be intolerable for the Listener to learn that we are, though. As James Gunn wrote:

And then maybe Adams was right. Maybe nobody was there. Maybe nobody was sending signals because there was nobody to send signals. Maybe man was all alone in the universe. Alone with God. Or alone with himself, whichever was worse. (Ballantine, 1985, p. 3)

MacDonald may or may not be an atheist. I think only Jeremiah calls him that. I'm not sure that he ever thinks or speaks of these things himself. Curiously, his ghost seems to keep appearing to people after his death, curiously, that is, for a story that is otherwise what I would call hard science fiction and in which the tone is essentially agnostic.

I gather that James E. Gunn was a midcentury American liberal. As that and as an author of science fiction, he seems to have believed in progress, perhaps especially in material and scientific progress. His story is set in Puerto Rico, at the site of a radio telescope. In his version of the story, that radio telescope and the listening project go on for decades, far into the twenty-first century. In the real-life version of the story, the radio telescope at Arecibo came crashing down on December 1, 2020. You could take that as emblematic of a kind of decline and decay of the American and/or scientific project. Maybe it doesn't mean anything like that at all. Anyway, science fiction author James E. Gunn died three weeks and a day later. (3 x 7) + 1: prime numbers all.

Science fiction is not prediction. But here is an excerpt from The Listeners. Take as much or as little of it as prediction or extrapolation as you want. Remember that Mr. Gunn wrote this in the early 1970s.

It is 2028. MacDonald is talking to Andrew White, the first black president of the United States (who would of course be played by Morgan Freeman in the movie version):

     "The function of government is 'to promote the general welfare,'" MacDonald said.

     "It is also a deliberate policy. Poverty and injustice are evils, but they are endurable evils in a world where other problems are greater. They are not endurable in a complex, technological society where cooperation is essential, where violence and rioting can destroy a city, even civilization itself."

     "Of course."

     "So we turned ourselves around and set this nation to the task of eliminating poverty and injustice--and we have done it. We have established a stable social system where everyone has a guaranteed annual income and can do pretty much what he pleases except procreate without limit or harm others in other ways."

     MacDonald nodded. "That has been the great accomplishment of the past few decades--the welfare movement."

     "Except we don't call it welfare anymore," White said. "It's democracy, the system, the way things are, what people are entitled to. What makes you think that science is not part of the system?"

     "It creates change," MacDonald said.

     "Not if it is unsuccessful," White said. [. . .] "The important task of government, you see, is to keep conditions stable, to hold down disturbances and unrest, to maintain itself, and the best way to do that is to give everybody the opportunity to do what they want--except change things. [. . .]" (p. 149)

I don't want to hit you over the head with this, but it's plain that the people of 2028 and before have tried to construct a kind of Utopia. Welfare, entitlements, a guaranteed income, happiness, democracy, and zero population growth are features of their Utopia, but the ultimate purpose is stasis.

Futurism is prediction. Here is another excerpt, from one of the "Computer Run" sections of The Listeners:

The year 2000 conditions could produce a situation in which illusion, wishful thinking, even obviously irrational behavior could exist to a degree unheard of today. Such irrational and self-indulgent behavior is quite likely in a situation in which an individual is overprotective and has no systematic or objective contact with reality. For example, there are probably many people for whom work is the primary touch with reality. If work is removed, or if important functions are taken from work, the contact these people have with reality will be to some degree impaired.  The results--minor or widespread--may become apparent in forms such as political disruption, disturbed families, and personal tragedies--or in pursuit of some "humanistic" values that many would think of as frivolous or even irrational.

Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Weiner, 1967 (p. 165)

Illusion, wishful thinking, obviously irrational behavior--Kahn and Weiner called it in the year before "The Listeners" went to print. Kahn was an atheist. Did that give him special insight into the problems of a future populated by non-believers?

One last excerpt. A second message comes from Capella in the year 2118. Before it is displayed for all to see, a short "Computer Run" section intervenes. From it, these lines of verse:

[. . .] somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
                                   --William Butler Yeats, 1921

The imagery here, from Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," stands powerfully on its own, but it also strikes me now as a counterpoint to Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias," about which I wrote last time. In "Ozymandias," the statue--and by extension the man and his power--lies in ruins. But in Yeats' vision, the statue, the power, the rough beast in the form of a half-man, awakens, moves, slouches to be born. In this vision, Apocalypse is our future.

Yet The Listeners ends in hope--hope at least for the Listeners.

The Listeners by James E. Gunn (1923-2020), published in 1985 by Ballantine Books, with cover art by Rick Sternbach.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Last week, commenter Iberdot left an excellent summary of the argument in favor of intelligent life in the universe. I'll quote him or her:

Here is how you "prove" the existence of intelligent ET life. List the number of stars in the universe, then come up with a percentage with planets (any number will do--doesn't matter), then continue inventing percentages with favorable conditions and so on. Due to number of stars, you can come up with any number you want and people will believe it.

I think his or her allusion is to the famous Drake Equation, developed by Frank Drake (b. 1930), which, truth be told, can be used to "come up with any number you want":

(From: We Are Not Alone: The Search for Intelligent Life on Other Worlds by Walter Sullivan [McGraw-Hill, 1964].)

I think the Drake Equation is an exciting and thought-provoking idea, but it can't really be thought of as a way of reaching a surefire answer. And I don't think it was meant to. I think it was meant only as a jumping-off point for discussion. Anyway, as soon as I read Iberdot's comment, a cartoon by Sidney Harris (b. 1933) leaped into my mind. Here it is:

Science is not supposed to be about miracles or counting on miracles, nor is it supposed to be about wishing or faith or superstition. And yet we have so-called "science" and scientists doing just those things, not just about stars and extraterrestrials but about all kinds of things. Anyway again, a lot of astronomers, astrophysicists, planetologists, cosmologists, and just plain laymen and -women seem to believe in these magical expressions: insert a miracle into the Drake Equation and you have proof that there are other intelligent species in the universe. They sound like a lot of emotional teenagers, telling themselves in the dark, "It has to be true, it just has to be true, my life won't be complete unless it's true . . . "

Maybe someday I will be proved wrong and we will discover that there are other intelligent species in the universe. That would be an exciting thing, too. But until there is proof, I think that every science-minded person has to remain skeptical on this question. Or, as Carl Sagan (1934-1996) said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." You can have faith, but that goes somewhere else, in a different box not called science.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

I have one more possible innovation in Robert A. Heinlein's novel Beyond This Horizon (1942). I'll begin with a quote from the Signet edition (no date, p. 125). It concerns an ongoing project in the book called the Great Research, which has within it several major subsidiary projects . . .

The distribution of life through the physical universe, for example, and the possibility that other, nonhuman intelligences existed somewhere. If there were such, then it was possible, with an extremely high degree of mathematical probability, that some of them, at least, were more advanced than men. In which case they might give Man a "leg up" in his philosophical education. They might have discovered "Why" as well as "How."

Those words were written nearly eighty years ago, and yet the idea is alive today: a full faith that there are intelligences superior to ours in the universe and that these intelligences have discovered--or at least might know something about--the nature, purpose, and meaning of the universe. I think that by extension a superior intelligence would also know about the nature, purpose, and meaning of human (or sentient) existence. I'm not sure that Heinlein took the next step, though, which is that we, because we are not superior intelligences, are not able to figure these things out for ourselves; that we might actually be a danger to ourselves because we are not able to figure them out; and that if we don't reach these extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI) and learn from them, we might only destroy ourselves. There may have been a writer and thinker of the next generation, though, who took that step.

* * *

Not long before I read Beyond This Horizon, I came across an article in a magazine I had never heard of before. The magazine is called Salvo and it's published by The Fellowship of St. James. The article is "ETI in the Sky: What the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Life Means for Us," and it's by Hugh Ross (Spring 2016, pp. 34-37). I remembered Dr. Ross' article as I was reading Heinlein's novel because of the subject of the article, which is Carl Sagan and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) to which Dr. Sagan devoted so much of his career and which has continued since the 1960s.

Hugh Ross was a graduate student at the University of Toronto during the latter part of that decade when he took a summer course taught by Dr. Sagan. SETI came up in discussions in and out of class. It was one of Sagan's driving passions at the time of course. Mr. Ross writes:

Sagan finished the course by listing over a dozen currently existing problems on earth that could bring about the end of human civilization. He then pointed out that the nations of the world had failed to develop, or even propose, a single viable solution to even one of the problems on his list. Therefore, he asserted, mankind's only hope was to get counsel from an ETI civilization far more advanced than ours. Such a civilization, he was sure, would have produced something on the order of an Encyclopedia Galactica, which--as he was also confident that the civilization must be benevolent--it would be motivated to broadcast to beleaguered planets like ours. (p. 35)

I have always liked and admired Carl Sagan, but he, like anyone, had his shortcomings. One is here on display: a lack of faith and confidence in humanity and in our ability to solve our own problems. Instead, he placed his faith in a purely hypothetical intelligence residing somewhere else in the universe. Sagan seemed to be saying, There is where our salvation lies--mine, too.

That idea seems to me utopian in its way: somewhere out there is perfection, or something like it. It may also be related to Heinlein's concept of the superior man. More than that, though, I think that it's an essentially religious idea, one perhaps specially made for scientists, materialists, and, yes, atheists. There are still those among us who yearn--so yearn, the way a child yearns for a pony--to come into contact with those superior intelligences, to learn from them, perhaps most importantly of all, to draw from their existence the meaning and purpose of our own. I sense that yearning among astronomers, astrophysicists, and others whenever I read about their efforts. So many of them seem to have an emptiness inside of them which they are not willing to fill with anything we might know or believe here on earth. It also seems to me that they seek spiritual salvation by material means. What they may not be considering--what they cannot even countenance--is the possibility that there are no other intelligent species in the universe, or that if there are, that we may be, as C.S. Lewis posited, under quarantine for our "bent" nature, and may not reach them. (1)

* * *

Carl Sagan was not only an astronomer, astrophysicist, and planetologist, he was also an author, including of science fiction. He of course wrote the novel Contact (1985) and co-wrote the story for the film version. I have written about Contact before. I mean to circle back to it, pun or no pun intended. The movie is one thing. The book is another. I'm not sure that many people realize that it closes with the very strong implication that the universe is a product of design.

* * *

Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was younger by a generation than Robert Heinlein (1907-1988). He was born during a decade of science fiction, the same decade in which Heinlein had his first story published ("Life-Line" in Astounding Science-Fiction, Aug. 1939). Even as a child, Sagan had a science-fiction imagination. When he was ten, a friend introduced him to the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. At age twelve--what we know to be the golden age of science fiction--he discovered Astounding Science-Fiction, a magazine for sale in a local candy store. "With some effort," Sagan remembered, "I managed to scrape together the purchase price, opened the magazine at random, sat down on a bench not 20 feet from the store and read my first modern science-fiction short story, Pete Can Fix It by Raymond F. Jones, a gentle account of time travel into a post-nuclear holocaust." (2, 3) Sagan's interest in science fiction continued into his college years. While at the University of Chicago in the mid 1950s, he was president of the Astronomical Society and a member (or president?) of the Science Fiction Club. His yearbook picture from his graduation year, 1954, appears below.

Like Sagan, Hugh Ross believes that "our only hope is to take counsel from the Encyclopedia Galactica." Unlike Sagan, he writes: "It seems that we really are alone." Dr. Ross concludes his article with these words:

When Sagan waxed eloquent about the great text during the course he taught at the University of Toronto, I nudged some of my fellow students and commented, "Don't we already have an Encyclopedia Galactica? And it isn't Carl's problem that he refuses to read it?" They all knew, of course, that I was referring to the Bible." (p. 37)

That is Hugh Ross' take on the idea. I won't call it my own. What I will say, though, is that I think we already have in us what we need if we are going to solve our own earthly problems. We don't need people from other planets to do these things for us. And I think it's a pretty risky thing to place our chances at salvation on people who may not even exist, or if they do, on people we might never know.

Notes
(1) And before you say that it is almost an impossibility that we are the only intelligent species in the universe, please provide your evidence, mathematical or otherwise, that we are not.
(2) From "The Real Sci-Fi Freaks Should Read" by Carl Sagan in the Miami Herald, June 18, 1978, pp. 271-273.
(3) "Pete Can Fix It" by Raymond F. Jones was in Astounding Science-Fiction in the issue of February 1947. Sagan had turned twelve in November 1946. In his article, "The Real Sci-Fi Freaks Should Read," he seems to have had his timing mixed up, as he wrote that he had encountered Jones' story during a summer when he was presumably eleven years old. But that's no reason to quibble: as a child, he was bitten by the science fiction bug and presumably never recovered.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley