598
MICHEL
BUTOR
scientific jargon and decorate the sky with charming fantasies; the
trick
is turned.
This infinite freedom is a false freedom.
If
we flee infinitely far into
space or time, we shall find ourselves in a region where everything is
possible, where the imagination will no longer even need to make an
effort of coordination. The result will be an impoverished duplication
of everyday reality. We are told of an enormous war between galactic
civilizations, but we see at once that the league of the democratic planets
strangely resembles the UN, the empire of the nebula Andromeda stands
for the Soviet Union as a subscriber to
Reader's Digest
might conceive
that nation, and so on. The author has merely translated into SF lan–
guage a newspaper article he read the night before. Had
he
remained
on Mars, he would have been obliged to invent something.
At its best moments, the SF that describes unknown worlds becomes
an instrument of an extreme flexibility, thanks to which all kinds of
political and moral fables, of fairy tales, of myths, can be transposed
and adapted to modern readers. Anticipation has created a language
by whose aid we can in principle examine everything.
3)
UNEXPECTED VISITORS
The description of unknown worlds, in SF, necessarily becomes part
of our anticipation, however rudimentary it may be; it is natural that
it should affect that anticipation. It is not so much by the improvement
of commercial relations that the invention of the compass transformed
the Old W,orld, but by the discovery of America. The description of un–
known worlds and beings involves the description of their intervention
in the future history of humanity.
We can easily imagine that the inhabitants of other planets have
a civilization in advance of our own, hence that they have a realm of
action superior to our own, that they are ahead of us in discovery.
All of space becomes threatening; strange beings may intervene even
before we know of their existence. Most of the pre-Columbians had no
expectation that a deadly invasion would come out of the East.
It is in Wells's
War of the Worlds
that we encounter this theme for
the first time, and his countless imitators have not added much to it.
It is a profoundly modern theme (it never occurred to anyone in the
sixteenth century that Europe might be discovered in its turn) and an
extremely powerful one (as several memorable radio broadcasts have
demonstrated) .
Thanks to this notion of intervention, SF can assimilate those as–
pects of the fantastic which at first seem most opposed to it: all that
we
