Post-Humanity on the edge

kw: book reviews, science fiction, sociological fiction, propriety

Over the past century and more, the central trend I have noticed in Science Fiction has been a shift from a technical to a social emphasis. Early sci-fi and speculative fiction (spec-fi), such as that by Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle (Challenger series in particular), and H. G. Wells, were largely about the science, known or imagined. The human aspect of the story was secondary, even though Verne and Wells in particular used their stories to protest or parody their social environments. While Doc Smith's Lensman series' good-vs-evil conflict limned the recent (to Smith) World War, much of the focus was on the solution to the problem of secure identification, and securing persons of character worthy of that responsibility.

Most of the stories I read in Analog, Amazing, and Azimov's sci-fi magazine in the 1970s and 1980s were, by contrast, about human relations, regardless that most of the beings were aliens: they usually were foils for very human foibles, and the problem-solving in these stories was aimed at accommodating variant cultures or opinions. The grand ballet of good-vs-evil was seldom seen, and the "let's build this gizmo to fix that problem" type of story, even less so.

It was with a story called "My Brother's Keeper," by an author whose name I forget, that I first took note of the circa-1980 emphasis on transcendence without need of high technology: the author imagined a future, a rather near one, in which Social Security falls under its own weight, and explored the result. The protagonist, with the help of a few geriatric, but new, friends, finds a good way to make lemonade with the lemons that drop in their laps. Personal transcendence was the common theme of the stories written by those who, a decade or so earlier, became hippies and drop-outs trying to "find themselves." These are sci-fi only in the sense that they are placed in a future.

The latter 20th and early 21st Century has seen the grand, galaxy-spanning epic move from fringe to mainstream: Star Trek and Star Wars films and books embody the trend. The former is a discovery epic, the latter a conquest epic.

Throughout, sci-fi and spec-fi writers have shown increased sophistication in their portrayal of geopolitics and geopoliticians. While Star Wars spreads a model of very Earthly (5th-to-8th-Century Byzantine, in fact) geopolitics into a galaxy-spanning epic, J. D. Townsend, in The Assassin's Dream, fits his drama onto the few continents of this very Earth. The novel is not just post-Apocalyptic: two Apocalypses have passed, and another is being ushered in as the story closes. Here, personal transcendence is a background issue; group transcendence comes to the fore as two groups of a new kind of human—engineered rather than mutated—struggle to survive among a human race that emphatically not ready to be replaced.

The story posits, both in the Tressalines and in unmodified humans, an advancement in the development and use of ESP. Townsend wisely refrains from speculating on a mechanism. Rather, taking it as a fact, he explores the implications. So, I place this in the spec-fi category. The ending leaves room for a series of sequelae.

I have one major scruple. There are two chapters, largely composed of explicit sex, that could be wholly excised without harm to the story. References elsewhere, to "Sexual Services" as a public function, could easily be toned down to the subdued level practiced by most writers of the 1950s. As it is, the sexual writing is of a sort that I call "writer's wet dreams." I have yet to find a man who can write about women's sexuality without making them into men with vaginas. In thirty years of diligent search, I have yet to find one natural (XX chromosome) woman who thinks like the women in male-written fiction.

A note to authors everywhere: if you want to write about explicit sex, write about it, sell it in the appropriate marketplace, and be done with it. Don't try to make it an "integral" part of a story about something else. The attempt is usually laughable and always distracting. Artists, particularly writers, have the opportunity to ennoble or to debase their audience. In which way would you prefer to be remembered?