LI 'GHTER THAN AIR
Ill
has been for the birds and what the ship, the wheel, and the horse
have been for man in times past. It is this perhaps which has saved the
literature of space travel from becoming the exclusive property of the
lunatic fringe.
The contact points between psychopathology and the imaginative
writing about space travel are, even so, not too scarce. The motive of
space travel can be used as a potent release: once it is postulated, the
rest can be left to free-floating imagination; in a world from which we
are separated by the formidable barrier of space, neither the physical
laws of our universe nor our moral laws have to be accorded validity.
Both the psychotics who have imagined themselves in space and the
science fiction writers who have produced stories of voyages to stars
have made use of that liberty.
Looked at from this angle, though, it is astounding how little
they have dared. They have carried the soil of the Earth on their soles
to the most distant parts of the heavens. How timid they have been in
stripping off the laws of Earth, how much allegiance to our prohibitions
they have so faithfully preserved!
Arthur C. Clarke, who is known as a writer of tales, is also one of
the ideologists of the science fiction movement. As chairman of the
British Interplanetary Society (perhaps the very one that Lewis had
in mind when he spoke of the "little" societies) he wrote
The Explora–
tion of Space,
a best seller. This is the alluring prospectus that he un–
rolls before the eyes of future frontiersmen:
The importance of planetary colonization will lie in the variety
and diversity of cultures which it will make possible.... They will, of
course . . . all be based on a very advanced technology. Yet though the
interior of a colony on Pluto might be just like that of one on Mercury,
the different external environments would inevitably shape the minds
and outlooks of the inhabitants. It will be fascinating to see what effects
this will have on human character, thought, and artistic creativeness.
These things . . . may be of far more importance than its purely
material benefits, considerable though these will undoubtedly be. . . .
With the expansion of the world's mental horizon may come one of the
greatest outbursts of creative energy ever known. The parallel with the
renaissance. . . .
Interplanetary travel is now the only form of "conquest and em–
pire" compatible with civilization.
Shades of Raffies and Clive rather than of Helen, whose face would
launch a thousand space ships, of Kipling rather than Homer !
If
Main–
street, Ohio, looks like Mainstreet, Iowa, let's add a Mainstreet, Pto.,
and a Mainstreet, Mry. Since our empires of yesterday are one with
Nineveh and Tyre, let's build new ones in the sky.
