A good author with which to start would be J.R.R. Tolkien, arguably the most influential author of modern fantasy. Tolkien had written an extensive collection of myths and legends that he later incorporated into The Lord of the Rings as its mythological background. When seeking a publisher for both works together, he wrote a lengthy letter to one potential publisher, most likely late in 1951. (The Lord of the Rings was published separately in 1954, but the other material was not published until after his death as The Silmarillion in 1978.) In that letter, he included the following description of the earlier mythological material:

[The] stories […] arose in my mind as ‘given’ things. […] Always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’. (Letters #131)

In another article in this issue, Laura discusses science and religion in Madeleine L’Engle’s Many Waters. L’Engle, an American writer best known for her young-adult fantasy novels like A Wrinkle in Time (1962), L’Engle told an anecdote along similar lines about writing The Arm of the Starfish (1965). Her ten-year-old would listen to sections of the book as they were written, until one of the characters died.

He got very excited and upset. “Change it,” he demanded. […]

“I can’t. I didn’t want [that character] to get shot, either, but that’s what happened. I couldn’t stop it.”

“But you can. You’re the writer!” […]

He was so angry with me for allowing [that character] to die that he wouldn’t read anything else I wrote for several years. […] Now he has grown up and understands that the artist cannot change the work at a whim, but can only listen, look, wait, and set down what is revealed. (Walking On Water 185-186)

This moving and highly personal anecdote demonstrates to me in a powerful way that L’Engle took this aspect of her work quite seriously.

In a previous article, I discussed 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing’s book Shikasta in terms of mythical thinking. At the beginning of Shikasta, published in 1979, Lessing included some introductory remarks:

As I wrote [Shikasta] I was invaded with ideas for other books, other stories. […] It was clear that I had made — or found — a new world for myself. (Shikasta x)

Neil Gaiman, perhaps one of the best-known authors of speculative fiction writing today, expressed something similar regarding the title character of his popular comic book series The Sandman. The series, which ran from 1989 to 1996, has subsequently been published in eleven volumes. In an afterword to the first volume, written in 1991, Gaiman wrote:

Looking back, the process of coming up with the Lord of Dreams seems less like an act of creation than one of sculpture: as if he were already waiting, grave and patient, inside a block of white marble, and all I needed to do was chip away everything that wasn’t him. (Afterword 238)

I discussed the magnificent carved columns of the Pacific Northwest and their relationships to mythic narratives in a previous article on totem poles. Bill Reid, one of the great totem pole carvers of the twentieth century, described his art with these words:

With half my mind, I know I do believe that the figures on that totem pole I’m carving […] grew inside that tree as it was growing. And all I have to do is peel away the outer layers and there they’ll be. And the other half of my mind tells me that’s complete nonsense and romantic balderdash. I can live with both points of view — and enjoy them both, actually. (Bill Reid 4:50-5:30)

Reid’s first point of view — that the figures grow inside the cedar trees — resembles the other statements by the authors. These all reflect mythical thinking (mythos), which approaches the world through intuitive means and subjective insights. They all explain their art in terms of other worlds or hidden realms, which is a common element found in many products of mythical thinking. The land of the gods above the skies or faraway places over the seas are familiar expressions of this element, but mythical thinkers also often posit an invisible reality or hidden plane of  existence within our own world. I imagine that these authors and artists did not deduce the existence of their characters or their stories from objective experiments or impersonal proofs; rather, they posited these objects to describe the very subjective — but also very real — feelings they experienced while creating their art.

But do such invisible realities exist? Did the figures Reid carved actually grow inside the trees? Could L’Engle really not have changed the story to satisfy her son? Logical thinking (logos) might look for something more objective than hidden realms to explain these subjective feelings. A logos-only thinker might perform experiments on cedar trees, looking for the hidden figures. Such experiments would (presumably) produce no objective evidence for these figures, and their existence would then be rejected. Reid’s second point of view — that this is all “complete nonsense and romantic balderdash” — reflects the conclusions of such a logos-only approach. But Reid did not think that logos offered a superior or more satisfying way to think about his art, and I think all the authors I mentioned above would have agreed with him on the complementary nature of mythos and logos in this regard. Mythical thinking provided all these authors a method to make sense of their own work and to share that sense with others.

Works Cited

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. 2nd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
• L’Engle, Madeleine. Walking On Water. Bantam Books, 1982.
• Lessing, Doris. Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta. New York : Random House, 1979.
• Gaiman, Neil. “Afterword.” The Sandman, Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes. New York: DC Comics, 1991.
• Bill Reid. Directed by Jack Long. National Film Board of Canada, 1979. (Full documentary available online.)

[Editor's Note: The conversation below is the first part of a single interview. The second part of that conversation appeared in another issue as Native America & Speculative Fiction.]

Randy Hoyt: In the very first issue of this magazine, I proposed a working definition of myth that encompasses more than just traditional mythology, including fantasy and science fiction. What do you think that all three of these have in common?

Amy H. Sturgis: All three are involved in the project of answering the question of what it means to be human: the nature of humanity; the nature of humanity’s relationship to the earth, the cosmos, the infinite; and other questions like these. The very first storytellers, through their mythological stories, parables, and other tales, were trying to come to some sense of the world and to figure out their place in it. I see mythology as a “mother figure” out of which the other two have grown. I would group all these under the umbrella “speculative fiction,” along with much of horror. I would also emphasize that some of the sub-genres of science fiction like utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and weird fiction or Gothic fiction fit under this heading. I think all of these forms of speculative fiction originate from the same impulse that was first shown through mythology.

RH: I like that term, “speculative fiction.” Could you explain a little bit more what you mean by that?

AHS: I think the easiest way to describe it is to consider what does not fit in speculative fiction. On the one hand, you have the kind of fiction that describes the world as we can see it or taste it or feel it, a world that is already familiar to readers: “mundane fiction.” These stories take place in the time and place in which the readers live or one with which they are familiar from history. For example, when reading Jane Austen, readers don’t have to be told how gravity works in order to understand her story because it’s taking place in a world that they already recognize. Speculative fiction is the opposite of that. These stories use imaginative tools in order to answer the important questions about the human experience, attempting to explain everything from what happens when we die to what makes thunderstorms occur to how the earth and its inhabitants came into being in the first place.

RRH: In what ways would you say that fantasy and science fiction differ in their approach to these questions?

AHS: I think the impulse to draw a line between these two types of speculative fiction is something with which the critics are more concerned than the practitioners, those telling the stories. Some of my favorite authors move fairly easily between the two: Lois McMaster Bujold, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Orson Scott Card, for example. But as a critic, the distinction that is helpful for me — inspired by some of the work that scholar James Gunn has done — involves describing science fiction as the fiction of change and fantasy as the fiction of difference. In a work of science fiction, it’s our world, our universe; we recognize its natural laws as identifiable and familiar to us; but there’s a change. Artificial intelligence might exist, or we might have interstellar travel or time travel. It’s our world with a change added to it, a “what-if.” That change requires plausibility, if not probability: the change could really happen. Fantasy, on the other hand, is more about overall differences. When you are in Middle-earth or in Narnia, there’s a different set of rules in effect there. Even in the wainscot fantasies like Harry Potter, with the wizarding world that butts up against our own, things are still different in that secondary universe. This is what Tolkien wrote about in “On Fairy-stories,” a believable world of fantasy with its own internal dynamic and its own laws that hold true for that world. I think this angle — change vs. difference — helps me to move any given work in one direction or another, but I think there’s an argument to be made that some works incorporate both, some blur the lines, and other are just not easily pigeon-holed in either one.

I think it’s interesting to see whether science fiction or fantasy gains an ascendancy over the other one at different times. In the 1950s, for example, there was a sense of wonder and excitement about the future and technological progress — “We’re going to go to the moon!” and “Think of all the things we’re going to accomplish!” At that time, there was a greater interest in science fiction than in fantasy, particularly with science fiction becoming popular in young-adult fiction thanks to the juveniles of Robert A. Heinlein, Andre Norton, and others. Contrast that with today, when the national polls say that young people don’t think their life is going to get better, that they don’t think the world their children will inherit will be as good as the world their parents lived in, when there’s a general societal concern about what the future holds. Today, you see the trend moving sharply from fantasy and away from science fiction. I’m not saying there’s a definite causation, but there is definitely a correlation between the way we view the past and the future and which of the two genres speaks to us. At a given time one seems more popular than the other in part because of the way we feel about the state of our affairs today.

RH: When would you say that modern science fiction as a genre began?

AHS: I think that all speculative fiction has a very long past. In terms of the greater tradition out of which science fiction emerged, you would have to go all the way back to something like the Epic of Gilgamesh or Plato’s Republic to find the seeds. As scholars again, more than as fans or practitioners, we pinpoint when certain movements began or shifted. Scholars differ about the beginning of modern science fiction as we know it, but I think the best case can be made for Mary Shelley’s 1818 publication of Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus. Elements of science fiction can be found in earlier works, but Shelley really combines all of the necessary ingredients for what we consider modern science fiction. The next important figure would probably be Edgar Allan Poe. The genre really came into its own with people like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells writing at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

Science fiction has of course gone through many different stages, waves, or movements since. The thing I like most about the history of science fiction is how closely it is connected to the question of what it means to be human. The science part of science fiction keeps expanding. It starts out as biology and chemistry, then takes in physics, then takes in linguistics and anthropology and sociology. As more disciplines get brought in under the science part of science fiction, we get new insights into what it means to be human. I think at some level, we always answer the question “What is human?” with something like “Whatever is like me.” That is just our frame of reference. But as science fiction has expanded its lens by incorporating the tools of different sciences, the notion of “what’s like me” gets bigger and bigger. So the answer starts out to include only well-educated, land-owning white men and then evolves to include people of both genders and all races. But then, what traits must a computer or an artificial intelligence possess in order for us to think of it as something like a human? What about different biological creatures, like a primate on our planet or a different life form on another planet? What of clones? What is necessary for us to consider any life human enough to be treated as human? Some of the most innovative questions about the very nature of how we understand the universe have come from writers using science fiction to get at these questions in a different way.

RH: For people who want to get started with science fiction, what classic works would you recommend?

AHS: Mary Shelley is a good starting place. Frankenstein (1818) is a work of absolute genius, but I really love her less-known but equally-brilliant book The Last Man (1826); I try to foist that on people whenever I can. You can’t wrong with anything by H.G. Wells; his work stands up incredibly well. I would particularly recommend The Time Machine (1895).  I’m also a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft, who is as much a science-fiction author as a weird-fiction or horror author; The Color Out of Space (1927) would be a good one to read first. I would also include three books that were instrumental in my own adolescence: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), and Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1966). These classic works give a sense of the possibilities and the breadth of science fiction.

RH: You teach classes on the history of science fiction at Belmont University. What do you cover in those classes?

AHS: There are three classes in particular, and each of them has a bit of a different perspective. The one I’ve taught most is called “The History of the Future”; it essentially looks at one hundred years of history through science fiction. We look at science-fiction texts and ask how the works reflect the concerns of the authors about their own time period. It’s a history course, but the premise is that the science-fiction authors — no matter how remote the worlds they describe, how furry the aliens, or how chartreuse the ray-gun beams — are actually talking about their own time and place and reacting to it in some way. Joe Haldeman’s classic work The Forever War (1974), for example, is set in the distant future at a time of interstellar travel. It is a story about people sent away from home to fight on the front lines. Because of the way time works with space travel, they return from the war to encounter a place that is literally a different world than the one they left, and these soldiers must suffer through the difficulty of finding their place in this alien world. But Haldeman is writing about his experience in Vietnam as a soldier, serving in the U.S. Armed Forces and then returning home to a less-than-recognizable United States. Students can learn much more from that rich text about the experiences of the Vietnam Era than they can get from reading a history textbook.

Another class I teach is called “Worlds Gone Wrong,” a class specifically on the dystopian tradition. We start with E.M. Forrester’s The Machine Stops (1909) and look at different dystopian works from the last hundred years to see the different warnings that authors have given. These descriptions of worst-case scenarios tell us about the concerns of the time periods in which they were written: totalitarian governments, moral decline, rampant consumerism, and other concerns. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), for example, discusses drug abuse and gangs and the disintegration of the cities; we look at how that book relates to the early ’90s but also to our concerns today. A lot of the students are really interested to find out that environmental concerns — something they associate with today’s mainstream media — show up quite early in dystopian works.

The third class in which I use science fiction is about the frontier and US Exceptionalism. We look at the idea that started back in the late nineteenth century with Frederick Jackson Turner called the “frontier thesis,” which suggests that the United States is unique among all other nations because it had the experience of the frontier. We bring that idea forward to consider what the frontier means in different eras in the United States’ history. Is the United States really unique? If not, why did we come up with this idea? If so, how do we look at it in a twenty-first century context? It is not strictly a science-fiction class, but we do look at works like Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) and David Brin’s The Postman (1985), as well as the science-fiction television series Firefly (2002), to think about the frontier in different ways.

RH: What about more recent science fiction? Is there an anthology or some other resource that would expose people to work going on today?

AHS: There is a great anthology series called The Road To Science-Fiction (1979-1998) edited by James Gunn. It contains six volumes, with each volume addressing a different time period. The last several volumes include contemporary stories from around the world. The series as a whole is an excellent introduction for anyone interested in the history of science fiction.

I have also found podcasts to be a great resource for recent stories. There are a number of great podcasts in speculative fiction, such as Escape Pod and SciFiDimensions. I am personally involved with a podcast run by Tony C. Smith called StarShipSofa, which spotlights new science fiction stories published in the last year or two. Tony has persuaded some tremendous authors — authors who are in a good position to shape the genre in the twenty-first century — to donate their stories. I am very fortunate to do dramatic readings of these works for the podcast. I’ve narrated stories by the likes of Jeff Carlson, Vonda McIntyre, and Paul di Filippo, among others. Last year and this year, the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) allowed StarShipSofa to run dramatic readings of all of the stories they shortlisted for their Best Short Fiction award — the highest science-fiction honor for short stories in Great Britain. (In February, I was honored to do the dramatic reading of M. Rickert’s 2009 BSFA-nominated story.) StarShipSofa will also be putting up has also just put up dramatic readings of all seven nominees for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story awarded by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

RH: Not only do you do dramatic readings, but you also write and read fact articles on the history of science fiction. I have really enjoyed listening to those and getting some historical context on the genre. I found your articles on Francis Stevens, the Arkham House Sampler, and the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in particular to be quite fascinating.

AHS: Thank you so much! I greatly appreciate it. The other main goal of StarShipSofa, besides spotlighting new authors, is to try to rescue some the forgotten pioneers of science fiction. I hope my fact articles contribute to that end. It gives me great joy to be a part of the podcast and to shine the spotlight on authors and works I think are too important to be forgotten.

I have included links to all the books and podcast episodes Amy recommended during the interview below. You can learn more about Amy’s work by visiting her web site, amyhsturgis.com. She is currently working on what sounds like an exciting new book, The Gothic Imaginations of J.R.R. Tolkien, Madeleine L’Engle, and J.K. Rowling, for publication with Zossima Press in 2010.

[Editor's Note: The conversation above is the first part of a single interview. The second part of that conversation appeared in another issue as Native America & Speculative Fiction.]

Recommendations

• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus. 1818.
• Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. 1826.
• Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. 1895.
• Lovecraft, H.P. The Color Out of Space. 1927.
• Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. 1950.
• Herbert, Frank. Dune. 1965.
• Heinlein, Robert. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress . 1966.
• Haldeman, Joe. The Forever War. 1974.
• Forrester, E.M. The Machine Stops. 1909.
• Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower. 1993.
• Brin, David. The Postman. 1985.
• Firefly. Directed by Joss Whedon, Tim Minear, and Vern Gillum. 2002.

• Gunn, James. The Road To Science-Fiction. Six volumes:
  • Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to Wells. 1979. Scarecrow Press: 2002.
  • Volume 2: From Wells to Heinlein. 1979. Scarecrow Press: 2002.
  • Volume 3: From Heinlein to Here. 1979. Scarecrow Press: 2002.
  • Volume 4: From Here to Forever. 1997. Scarecrow Press: 2003.
  • Volume 5: The British Way. White Wolf Publishing: 1998.
  • Volume 6: Around The World. White Wolf Publishing: 1999.

• Dramatic readings of the finalists for the British Science Fiction Associations award for best Short Fiction from the past two years are available at StarShipSofa.
  • 2007 Shortlist (Winners Announced March 22, 2008)
    • Whates, Ian. “Gift Of Joy.” Narrated by Alex Foster.
    • Brenchley, Chaz. “Terminal.”
    • Chiang, Ted. “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.” Narrated by JJ Campanella.
    • MacLeod, Ken. “Lighting Out.”
    • Reynolds, Alastair. “Sledge-Maker’s Daughter.” Narrated by Diane Severson.
  • 2008 Shortlist (Winners To Be Announced April 11, 2009)
    • Rickert, Mary. “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment:One Daughter’s Personal Account.” Narrated by Amy H. Sturgis.
    • Chiang, Ted. “Exhalation.” Narrated by Ray Sizemore.
    • McAuley, Paul. “Little Lost Robot.” Narrated by Matthew Wayne Selznick.

• StarShipSofa will be adding added on April 2 dramatic readings of the finalists for this year’s Nebula Award for best short story. (Winners To Be Announced April 25, 2009)
  • Allen, Mike. “The Button Bin.”
  • Ford, Jeffrey. “The Dreaming Wind.”
  • Hoffman, Nina Kiriki. “Trophy Wives.”
  • Johnson, Kij. “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss.”
  • Jones, Gwyneth. “The Tomb Wife.”
  • Kelly, James Patrick. “Don’t Stop.”
  • Nestvold, Ruth. “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide.”

The strangeness of this adventure is something the Murry twins are not prepared for at all. They are self-described skeptics, “not believing in anything that can’t be seen and touched and proved one hundred percent” (105). Unlike Meg and Charles Wallace, the twins are very down-to-earth, practical problem-solvers, without an interest in theoretical physics or mystical runes. Yet, somehow, quite by accident, it happens: one moment they are standing in their father’s laboratory, and the next moment they find themselves in a burning desert, being rescued by someone named Japheth, a name they do not recognize at first as belonging to one of the sons of Noah. Later, when Sandy and Dennys finally hear the name “Noah,” they remember the basic outlines of the story from Sunday School. “I wish I had a Bible” (105) one of boys remarks — but a Bible would just be the beginning of what they need to understand the world that L’Engle has created, which draws on a wide range of extra-Biblical sources, including the Jewish and Christian apocrypha, the Kabbalah, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, to name just a few.

Most notably, this Biblical world is populated not just by humans and animals, but also by celestial beings, the seraphim and the nephilim. The seraphim are those celestial beings who are still in touch with the god El, and who are living on Earth by choice. They have the ability to transform from the state of matter into energy, and they are also able to travel through time. The nephilim, on the other hand, have turned away from El, and are condemned to remain on the Earth, having lost many powers which the seraphim still possess. The nephilim are led by Eblis, and unlike the seraphim, they consort with mortal women, who bear their children, a strange intermingling which is mentioned in the Book of Genesis (6:1-4). For the conflation of the nephilim and the fallen angels, however, L’Engle has drawn upon the Book of Enoch and other apocryphal texts.

In addition to going beyond the bounds of the Bible, L’Engle has also probed the gaps in the Biblical text itself. For example, one of the most important questions she asks is about the daughters of Noah. We know that the sons of Noah and their wives were saved in the Ark with Noah and his wife, but does that mean that the daughters of Noah — for surely, he must have had daughters — were drowned in the flood? Both Sandy and Dennys fall in love with Yalith, one of the daughters of Noah, and her fate provides one of the most important dramatic subplots of the novel. Noah has been told by God that he cannot take Yalith or any of his other daughters on the Ark, nor can he take Sandy and Dennys, who have become like members of the family. So, not only do the boys need to find a way to return home, they must do so before the floods begin.

To devise a way to return home, the boys rack their brains to understand something of their parents’ experiments in theoretical physics, a topic that had not been of any special interest to them before. From sharing their memories of those experiments and from talking with the seraphim (who have some knowledge of theoretical physics themselves), the boys realize they need to make a quantum leap, crossing from existence into non-existence and back into existence again by means of virtual particles. In Noah’s world, these virtual particles exist in the shape of unicorns, mythological creatures inspired by quantum theory, beasts which “have to be believed to be seen” (290). Thus building on the notion of the implied observer in quantum physics, L’Engle turns the twins not just into observers but into believers, which allows them to harness the paradox of the virtual particles in order to return at last to their own world.

By using theoretical physics to provide access to this Biblical world, L’Engle manages to reinvigorate the Noah story, which had meant little to the boys previously. Hearing the story in Sunday School had left them only with “vague memories,” something about “God being angry at the wickedness of the world, and sending a flood, but telling Noah to build an ark and bring the animals on. And then there were terrible rains, and finally a dove brought Noah a sprig of green, and the ark landed on Mount Ararat. Not much of a story unless you were part of it” (161). By stumbling into their father’s experiment in particle physics, the boys do get a chance to become part of that story, and to meet Yalith, one of the daughters of Noah. You will not find this remarkable virtual woman in the pages of Genesis, unless — like L’Engle — you have the wherewithal to read between the verses. As for the fate of Yalith when the flood waters came, I’m not going to give that away: you’ll have to read the book to find out.

Work Cited

• L’Engle, Madeleine. Many Waters. 1986. New York: Square Fish, 2007.