Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction

Six: The Ultimate Cosmos: A New Heaven and a New Earth in Three Science Fiction Writers: Arthur C. Clarke, George Zebrowski, and Walter M. Miller, Jr.

129 C H A P T E R S I X The Ultimate Cosmos A New Heaven and a New Earth in Three Science Fiction Writers: Arthur C. Clarke, George Zebrowski, and Walter M. Miller, Jr. Science fiction has confronted eschatological issues since its beginning in utopian fantasies and romances during the eighteenth century. Science fiction writers have created narratives within the framework of the four typesof eschatologydescribedbyJohnDavenportintheintroductiontothis book:prehistoricalprotoeschatology,insomescientificoriginormythicstories that never deal with historical events; ahistorical eschatology, in psychologicalsalvationstoriesthatdealwithinnertransformationbutleavehistory a meaningless cycle of events; apocalyptic eschatology, in end-of-the-world stories that destroy the world but provide an afterlife that is fundamentally a continuation; and radically historical eschatology, in cosmic transformation stories that deal with the “last things” as teleologically related to history . Most analyses of ultimate issues in science fiction, however, categorize science fiction narrative by themes, any or all of which can be present in individual stories. These themes can be reduced to three issues: 1. Death and survival after death: body-soul, resurrection, personal identity, and so on. These themes express the nature of the human person. 2. End of the world: utopias, apocalypse, disasters, transformation, omega points, and so forth. These themes express the nature of the cosmos and history. Leigh.indb 129 Leigh.indb 129 7/25/2008 9:31:36 AM 7/25/2008 9:31:36 AM 130 Apocalyptic Patterns in Twentieth-Century Fiction 3. Ultimate reality: God, gods, nature, heaven, hell, presence, space, time, and so on. These themes express metaphysical questions of being and becoming, especially regarding ultimate realities. If we use the definition of apocalyptic literature provided by Reddish, then these issues are all included in it: “A revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality” (Reddish 20). Death and survival stories deal with the “human recipient” of revelation and his or her final relationship to the “transcendent reality” beyond time and space. End of the world themes refer to the process by which the human recipient moves from the historical to the ultimate cosmos of the transcendent world. Ultimate reality narratives personify the “otherworldly being” and dramatize the “supernatural world” disclosed through apocalypse. Recent Critical Approaches to Ultimate Issues in Science Fiction Recent critics have approached these eschatological issues in science fiction in a variety of ways. The distinctively religious approach made by Paul Fiddes in The Promised End works primarily with theological categories , using one or two examples of literature from science fiction and classic genres to raise ultimate questions. As we noted in the introduction Fiddes , using theoretical concepts from Northrop Frye, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricoeur, spends chapters on several important eschatological issues: death, waiting with hope, time and eternity, divine presence, and the ultimate human state. His chapter on the question of human survival after death uses Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor and Planet 8 as texts to work from. A later chapter on time and eternity discusses Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow as a starting point for speculations. In his analysis, Fiddes sums up his agreement with Paul Ricoeur’s method: “Ricoeur thus understands texts as eschatological, but not only in the sense that they defer meaning forwards, as in Derrida’s thought; in their very meaning, in their sense (structure) and reference (creating a new world) they present a hope by which human beings can live” (45). Leigh.indb 130 Leigh.indb 130 7/25/2008 9:31:37 AM 7/25/2008 9:31:37 AM The Ultimate Cosmos 131 Using a more thematic literary approach, Robert Galbreath uses the notion of “transcendence or the transcendental” to divide up science fiction apocalyptic narratives into three types. By this term, he means “that which from the human viewpoint lies beyond or goes beyond human limits as they are defined by spacetime, death, the biology of the species, and the cognitive norms of human understanding” (Galbreath 53–82). In science fiction, he finds what he calls metaphors or transcendental analogues in such fictional beings as overminds, superaliens, godlike humans, technological angels, and cosmic destinies. He categorizes science fiction stories with regard to how they relate the transcendental and the natural as ends or means. The first type of story, for Galbreath, speaks of transcendental beings using transcendental means to ultimate ends—for example, Robert Hugh Benson’s Lord of the World, Charles Williams’s The Place...