It is pleasing to report that I have managed to re-read Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in the CS Lewis Space Trilogy. I hoped to achieve some insights to bring to you, gained in that crucial third reading, but I have nothing. I can’t even remember a good portion of the re-reading because I kind of blanked out during some of the more tiresome parts where he and all his hrossa and sorns have yet another go at how wicked and crazy and unnaturally evil humans are, and the despicably patronizing main character Ransom just nods like one of those kids in Sunday school who made like they liked church just to annoy other people.
So really, instead of coldly and dispassionately subjecting the work to razor sharp analysis, I just kept mentally looking at my watch and eating snacks. It looks as if my intellectual capacity peaked in my forties, and my forties are a fond memory now, a hazy and indistinct one. Like Out of the Silent Planet.
Okay, major confession:
Halfway through the re-reading I thought about reading Jack Chalker again. I’ve mentioned his books in this blog before, and I don’t care to revisit the shameful nature of the original association between his Well of Souls books and my teenage self, but I still enjoy the epic sweep of his stories, and I believe he tried to do justice by his female characters, if in the manner of a kindly pimp (lots of sexualization, but some of them are smart and can beat people up, like Lara Croft or the women in Marvel Movies). He also explored transformation and gender bending, eye opening stuff to a kid who group up Mormon in Utah, but a gay or transgender person might find his stuff exploitative - actually anyone might.
Chalker published his first novel and his biggest hit, Midnight at the Well of Souls, in 1977, at the same time Star Wars came out. I find this interesting because In his book, Chalker describes a spacefaring humanity, an interstellar civilization, but that interstellar civilization is a backdrop for his story, a given. Much like Star Wars, he tells a story about people traveling around in spaceships that could just as easily have been about people traveling the ocean in sailboats. The plot does not revolve around how spaceships work, it’s basically a fantasy set over a traditional “sci-fi” background, or a sci-fi skin set over a sword and sorcery tale.
I think Isaac Asimov might have done this first, with the “Foundation” series, which is about a “galactic empire” in which people travel all over the galaxy in spaceships as casually as we might take a flight to the coast, like it’s no big deal at all. The story isn’t about space travel at all, except that Asimov does insert a paragraph here and there where the characters muse about space travel in a very abstract and philosophical way in verbiage that could just as easily have emerged from the mind of a chemistry PhD living in New York City with a great memory and a fear of flying.
Asimov knew a lot of science and he certainly knew that “hyperspace” was a plot device, and he knew that if humans ever do send spaceships out of the solar system, that it will take those spaceships hundreds if not thousands of years to go to even the closest stars, and that any galactic empires that might develop would not bear any resemblance to the societies described in his books, unless you took an extremely abstract view of his stories, meaning you took them as a story about an interstellar civilization with the elements tweaked, with the people described as normal humans like us even though they would have to be hundreds or thousands of years old to live through multiple interstellar trips. And of course we now know about genetic engineering and computers and the society changing effects of them. The people and the communities and governments of a civilization that could manage intergalactic travel wouldn’t look like ours at all. They would actually start to resemble the creatures in a Lovecraft story. His aliens don’t resemble humans, and experience time on a much different scale than ours. I think a true representation of these interstellar galactic empires should be a mashup of Star Wars and the Mountains of Madness. Which of course I certainly would set out to write if it weren’t for all that copyright stuff.
But I will provide an illustrative discussion of a future member of an interstellar species:
To begin with, they would have to be equipped with internal radios/smartphones, so they could communicate in the vacuum of space. This means they would have metall in their skeleton, in order to provide maximum reception and transmission capability. So obviously, we’re talking robotic skeletons with data storage capacity, vastly augmented memory and intellectual ability. Obviously this would entail greater strength and durability, but at the expense of weight. So we could give this future human a much thinner skeleton. Next, let’s talk tentacles and antennas. I’m envisioning a set of antennas and intermediate tentacles on the top of the head, replacing the useless hair so prized by primitive humans. Next, a tentacle instead of a tongue, and jointed mandibles for more efficient chewing. I think almost anyone would agree that a third set of limbs would be tremendously helpful. These should be long enough to reach the ground, so you could use them for locomotion or use the finger tentacles on the end like extra hands. Next, a long prehensile tail and a pair of wings. The wings would actually be tentacles with a little rocket engine on each tip. And an extra eye to see in infrared. And metallic scales as skin. This human would run on electricity instead of food, but we’ll definitely keep the stomach in order to house useful bacteria. This human should not require oxygen, but just as with the stomach, the lungs will be kept in order to store useful chemicals in gaseous form.
Of course by now you might be thinking that this creature might look strange or repellent to us. Picture this creature as the cast of Star Wars. Darth Vader would look comparatively benign.
But that’s not all. The ships these creatures would ride across the galaxy would not look anything like the movie set spaceships, where people sit in what looks like a couch from a winnebago and talk or play space chess for a few minutes while someone flips a “hyperdrive” and they teleport to wherever they want to go. These ships would take hundreds or thousands of years to go to other stars. Nobody could sit on a couch and wait it out. They would have to be cryogenically frozen if they wanted to physically make the trip. Or, hear me out, they could make the trip as a hologram. Their thoughts would be downloaded into a transmitter and sent in a radio transmission to a receiver on a planet a hundred light years away. I picture holographic starships, beamed across interstellar space, carrying a host of holographic passengers. Once at the destination, they could rent a solid body or float around in holographic form. And of course they would be a copy of the original, who would still be hanging around on earth.
Try and work through the plot of Star Wars or the Foundation series after these adjustments
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