508
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
toward such forerunners of the mode (still more allegorical
than
prophetic) as Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells and George Orwell.
But the influence of Science Fiction can be discerned in poetry as
well, and even in the polemical essays of such polymath prophets as
Wilhelm Reich, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, perhaps
also
Norman O. Brown. Indeed, in Fuller the prophetic-Science-Fiction
view of man is always at the point of fragmenting into verse:
men are known as being six feet tall
because that
is
their tactile limit;
they are not known by how far we can hear them,
e.g., as a one-half mile man
and only to dogs are men known
by their gigantic 'Olfactoral dimensions.
...
I am not now interested in analyzing, however, the diction and
imagery which have passed from Science Fiction into post-Modernist
literature, but rather in coming to terms with the prophetic content
common to both: with the myth rather than the modes of Science
Fiction. But that myth is quite simply the myth of the end of man,
of the transcendence or transformation of the human-a vision quite
different from that of the extinction of our species by the Bomb,
which seems stereotype rather than archetype and consequently the
source of editorials rather than poems. More fruitful artistically
is
the prospect of the radical transformation (under the impact of ad–
vanced technology and the transfer of traditional human functions
to
machines) of
homo sapiens
into something else: the emergence-to
use the language of Science Fiction itself- of "mutants" among us.
A simpleminded prevision of this event is to be found in
Arthur
C. Clarke's
Childhood's End,
at the conclusion of which the mutated
offspring of parents much like us are about to take off under their
own power into outer space. Mr. Clarke believes that he is talking
about a time still to come because he takes metaphor for fact;
though simply translating "outer space" into "inner space" reveals
to
us that what he is up to is less prediction than description; since
the post-human future is now, and if not we, at least our children,
are what it would be comfortable to pretend we still only foresee.
But what, in fact, are they: these mutants who are likely to sit before
us in class, or across from us at the dinner table, or who stare at
us with hostility from street corners as we pass?
