To Hell With Space Elves: Misanthropy in Science Fiction

[Laskar]

I just read a short sci-fi story, Final Exam, by an anthropologist named Chad Oliver. It's... hold on, let me quote the introduction:

"Final Exam" should not be considered realistic science fiction, in this day of Mars probes and Lunar landings. Consider it instead an allegory about exploration and conquest-- and what might have happened if the Indians had been a little better equipped when the settlers came.

In short, it's eleven pages of revenge porn. The Martians are stand-ins for native Americans, except instead of dying off due to disease and tribal warfare, they only pretend to die off due to disease. In reality, they number in the millions and they're hiding in secret underground bases, stealing technology from us long enough to build their own rockets and exterminate us. In the meantime, a handful of them stay aboveground and play stupid for the tourists, who they later murder in cold blood.

Chad Oliver tried to do the standard horror movie trick of making you loathe the tourists so much that you want them dead. They're every flavor of stupid, shallow, petty, and vain that you can think of. The problem is, it doesn't work. The elves are still evil little jackasses because they can read minds and aren't susceptible to smallpox, and what they choose to do with those two gifts is lie low and play stupid until they can get their genocide on.

Ordinarily I'd just turn the page and keep reading, but A: The next story in the anthology is written by Ursula K. LeGuin and B: Is it just me, or is the only reason why anyone would write this kind of story is if they're so misanthropic that they think Humanity deserves to get wiped out by the Martians, or rather that Europeans deserved to get wiped out by the Native Americans?

I'm not starting this thread to rant about space elves. The general consensus of Western Civilization is that space elves are a blight upon science fiction, and this opinion has been thus ever since Avatar hit theaters. Since it's not my objective to preach to the choir, I'm just wondering about misanthropy in science fiction. Has anyone else noticed a strong strain of misanthropy and/or Malthusianism running through classic science fiction?

Maybe I'm blowing things out of proportion. I'm reading through an anthology, The Best From Fantastic, which is a collection of the best stories to be published in Fantastic magazine as of 1973*. And if these are the best stories to be published in that magazine over a span of twenty years... I dunno. They're good, but not great. And a lot of the stories are downers.

The first story was I'm Looking For Jeff, by Fritz Leiber, a supernatural horror story. This is followed by another story, Angels in the Jets by Jerome Bixby, which I hated until about thirty seconds ago when I realized it was another horror story. I mean, if you're on a planet where spores in the air will turn you into a stark raving lunatic and you're the only one of the crew who hasn't lost his mind yet, and your oxygen supplies are dwindling, your only option is to join the lunatics without a hope of rescue or regaining your sanity. Well, I guess you could also fire up your aircar and drive it into a mountainside, but our protagonist chose lunacy.

After Angels in the Jets comes Paingod by Harlan Ellison. I haven't read that one yet because Harlan Ellison is a wonderful old bastard who you have to be in the right headspace to enjoy. After Paingod comes Sally, which is the weakest of Isaac Asimov's robot stories. It's generally considered non-canon because it is one of two stories where robots violated the Three Laws of Robotics to kill someone/let someone die, and the other story was a joke.

And then there's The Roller Coaster, wherein time travelers from the future come back to torture us, murder us, and drive us to torture and murder each other. It's a game, you see, like a theme park. The future is perfect, so these time travelers come back to get their Westworld murderboners on. And that's why the 1970's had such an awful violent crime rate- no, wait, this story was published back in 1953!

The Roller Coaster is a good horror story, but it's one of many in an anthology that's supposed to be the best of a 20-year-run of a science fiction magazine**. I'm not finished with the anthology yet, but if I have to rely on Poul Anderson, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Harlan Ellison for uplifting stories, something has gone horribly wrong somewhere.

Science fiction has such wonderful range to it. At its heart, it's about problems and solutions. Sometimes the problems don't have solutions. Sometimes there's a solution in search of a problem. But within the confines of the genre, there is so much you can do. You can make the reader laugh, you can make him cry, you can awe him or horrify him or enrage him.

So why, with this incredible range, are most of the stories in this anthology devoted to horror and anger?

*Fantastic Magazine was a science fiction and fantasy periodical that ran from 1952 to 1980.
**Admittedly, some of those years were full of reprints. Those decades were the heyday of science fiction magazines, but it was a brutal and unforgiving market.

 

[Laskar]

So, I did finish the book. To my great surprise, I somehow left the best stories for last.

Paingod, by Harlan Ellison, was a little difficult to get into, at first. It is the story of a god of pain, a transcendent being whose job is to inflict pain on all creatures in the universe, from tiny swamp flies to great leaders of interstellar empires. The Paingod does as he does because it is his job, and it is his job because other transcendent beings created him to do so.

But doubt is starting to creep in. Why pain? Why anything? Why cause harm, and is harm evil?

These doubts grow over the eons, until the Paingod sets forth to find answers. He knows that other paingods have done so, and chose to never come back to their station. He takes the body of a dead wino, a drifter who knew nothing but failure before he expired, and he strikes up a conversation with a failed artist named Colin. A statue-maker who is no good at what he does, who watched a promising career stutter out because he couldn't sand, he couldn't chip, and he couldn't make the chisel do what he wants it to do.

The Paingod does the cruelest thing he can do. He takes Colin's soul by the hand and shows him the wonders of the universe, the lights of other galaxies and the little whirly-winged insects and the great man-machines that rule two sectors of the universe. In doing so, the Paingod finally understands the pain he has inflicted upon countless trillions, and what its purpose is.

Colin wakes up back at his studio, at the foot of the most beautiful statue he has ever seen. And he carved it. Somehow he carved it, and yet he knows that his hands will never carve another statue to match that beauty.

The Paingod goes before its creators, and tells them what he has learned.

"I know that pain is the most important thing in the universes. Greater than survival, greater than love, greater even than the beauty that it brings about. For without pain there can be no pleasure. Without sadness, there can be no happiness. Without misery there can be no beauty. And without these, life is endless, hopeless, doomed and damned."

The Paingod knows what has become of the other paingods. They reached this realization, and they could not take the next step. But he understands. He returns to his post, and he will send more pain than ever before. More and greater.

And in knowing his purpose, he has found happiness.

There's some other stories in there, but they'll have to wait for another day, perhaps tomorrow. I'm thinking of turning this thread into a general review of some old, obscure science fiction.