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Douglas Barbour wrote: > > >I put in my vote for C. J. Cherryh. Uneven writer - I found her Cyteen > >series almost as boring as Doris Lessing's sf efforts - but Forty > >Thousand in Gehenna and Wave Without A Shore are marvelous. > > Interesting choice, Frederick. I agree, & her recent series of Foreigner > books is good too. > > > >Haven't read all this list but hope someone has mentioned Stanislaw Lem > >- Solaris (source of the Tarkovski film), His Master's Voice etc. - and > >Arkadi & Boris Strugatski, whose Roadside Picnic was the source of > >Tarkovski's "Stalker." > > Yes to all of the above, not least the two films, which are masterpieces... > > Doug > > Thanks, Doug. I've been speculating about what the appearance of this thread suggests about the needs and desires of poets. I've always liked science fiction and my own work is influenced by it. (My book Happiness was reviewed not as poetry, but in the science fiction column of the Washington Post book-page.) Four thoughts: 1. Ancient myths, perhaps mythology in general, are by definition of the past, and have become thematically overdetermined by ages of cultural use. Even when a poet tries to see them fresh - and there's a big new anthology of recent poems on Greek myths - problems emerge: the stories are suffused with patriarchy, hierarchy, fatalism, lack of historical sense (or an assumption that history is circular). Many American feminist poets have tackled the Babylonian myths of Inanna, but the problem here is precisely that she is a goddess, not a mortal. To psychologize myths - to see them as patterns of emotion rather than of interpersonal behavior - doesn't rid one of their cultural baggage. (I dislike Jung, and think that archetypes and the Collective Unconscious are two of the worst ideas artists ever played with. While seeming to flatter artists, they place the imagination in a ghetto and give it a deeply conservative role. The only art they can't hurt is visual; Jackson Pollock, some later surrealists benefited from their flirtation with Jung. Because mandalas, once actually seen, are boring, and the creation of "new, individual" archetypes disproves the theory.) The best modern treatments of traditional myths invert and satirize them. (I avoid the word "deconstruct," hoping it will die a natural death). Les Mamelles de Tiresias, Gide's Promethee are examples. One of my sacred books - I urgently recommend this - is Cesare Pavese's (prose) Dialogues with Leuco, myth-treatments in which it is precisely hierarchy, sexism, fatalism etc. that are under attack. However, using myth to critique myth and its ideological baggage has itself become old. What artists want are positive hints for themes and structures - a guide, as it were, without a secret agenda. 2. Barthes was right to see advertising as modern myth. That's exactly the function it serves - the aesthetic surround of everyday ideology, of common sense. As such it can't be used well artistically; it can't be dramatized. Satire of advertising falls flat, or is absorbed by it. The cynical, self-mocking tone of recent advertising suffuses society, and it's hard to say which reflects what; that tone is part of our everyday ideology. (Increasingly, Hollywood and American television are auxiliaries of advertising, but I don't want to get into that.) Myths are morally and ontologically "thin"; they are visions of life for people who don't have the time, ability, or desire to think about it. (Philosophy from the beginning has mistrusted such visions and attacks myth.) Only in retrospect, when they have grown obscure and haunting, do they seem "thick." It wasn't until the end of antiquity that critics tried to read myths, especially Homer's, as coded parables. What Cultural Studies does with advertising is not that kind of reading; in however small a way, it is philosophy. But for poets who want to renovate both language and spirit, neither modern myth nor its critique are very useful. 3. For me, science fiction is not mythology but its successor. Compare the stock properties, the gimmicks of sci-fi - First Contact, time travel, alternate worlds, robots, AI, Galactic Empire, mutants, etc. - to the motifs of classical myth - lustful or vindictive gods, betrayed humans, endless skeins of unintended consequence - and you see the difference. The mechanisms of sci-fi are impersonal. They contain no inherent social or moral injunctions and are not predicated on customs or traditions. They suggest the primacy not of God, gods, fate, or even nature, but, whether for good or ill, of human power. Most importantly, they assume that history is open. They are blanks, into which writers can insert whatever hopes or meanings they want. Those hopes and meanings become, if only in imagination, effectual, rather than merely the quirks of one's protagonist or the subjective data of lyric. The idea of final darkness (from Wells' Time Machine up to Ballard and Stephen Baxter) is itself only another content to be fit into a blank. Only a few prose writers have fully utilized this freedom, this new resource. Poets have so far barely noticed it. 4. I think, however, that there is an ethos - a hidden agenda, if you will - in science fiction as a whole. It is: you must try to realize the Alien. The poignance of this commandment is that it's impossible. (So far. Perhaps in the distant future we'll have full telepathic understanding of very different intelligences. And men and women will talk.) Perceived clearly, it is the injunction of imagination itself, which changes over time and always manifests itself first in despised genres. In Greece, where lyric poetry was the lowest genre, the challenge of imagination was to get in touch with one's feelings. In the 17th century, while the novel was viewed as we view "Romance," the need was to notice the social world. Our challenge, whether we like it or not, is the Alien - whatever that might mean. I think here, of course, of Lem, who said that the ruin of science fiction - what keeps it from claiming its inheritance - is domination of the field by Americans, "who are incapable of imagining the inhabitants of downtown Warsaw, let alone those of Sirius III."