While fiction certainly cannot be taken for granted as a purveyor of definitive truths about reality, there is little doubt that imaginative storytelling has had some place in helping to spur scientific and ethical advances throughout the course of history. And, not unimportantly, stories are fun. Fun is part of what makes existence wonderful. And fun is one of the things likely to keep making existence wonderful long into the distant future. If one persistently seeks out complex and interesting stories -- whether through reading them, watching them, or even playing through them in a video game -- it is quite possible to garner much in the way of enrichment and expansion of one's capacity to think, feel, and understand. All fiction, regardless of its lack of factual relationship with objective reality, is informed by this reality -- as a friend put it recently:
A lot of the lessons of literature have this wet, human quality to them that makes them knowledge, which is compiled from facts but has no basis in reality separate from the human experience because it is not a fact itself. When I think of this I always think of 1984 and that old prole that Winston talks to who has a bunch of memories in his head but no framework to put those memories in irrespective of his own life. Writers put forth patterns but make up the data points.
My personal fiction preferences have tended to lean toward science fiction and fantasy for as long as I can remember. I started watching Star Trek with my father when I was probably still a toddler, and became absolutely enthralled by Star Wars at around age 8. I was also a fairly voracious reader, with childhood favorites including Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time (along with its sequels, A Wind In The Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet), Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising Sequence, and miscellaneous titles like The Girl With The Silver Eyes (by Willo Davis Roberts).
As I entered adolescence I started becoming more fascinated with authors like Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison, and also devoured Roger Zelazny's Amber series. I sought out short story anthologies in libraries and garage sales, and even attempted to write my own stories. Coupled with concurrent interests in various areas of science fact (particularly physics and biology), most of my life has seemed an exercise in wonder, observation, and exploration. And regardless of the fact that I definitely prioritize reality over imaginary worlds, those imaginary worlds and the stories that inhabit them will always have a place in my life.
Personal Resonance: When The Story Says It For You
This assertion might seem counterintuitive at first, but fiction can sometimes actually serve as a form of communication, especially when the goal is to transmit an uncommon or complex (and difficult to express) viewpoint. Some of the patterns I've come to know as a result of looking at the world and participating in the dance of feedback loops, algorithms, emergent properties, and cycles are very difficult to explain through original phrasing.
For example, I have always had something of a sense of exquisite "unfolding" and "layering" with respect to the process of living and being mindful in the world. I never really knew how to express this observation (and the preceding sentence certainly does not do it justice), but then I came across the following passage in Michael Ende's Momo:
Momo had never seen so exquisite a flower. It was composed of all the colors in the spectrum -- brilliant colors such as Momo had never dreamed of. While the pendulum hovered above it, she became so absorbed in the spectacle that she forgot everything else. The scent alone seemed something she had always craved without knowing what it was.
But then, very slowly, the pendulum swung back, and as it did so, Momo saw to her dismay that the glorious flower was beginning to wilt. Petal after petal dropped off and sank into the blackness below. To Momo, it was as if something unutterably dear to her were vanishing beyond recall.
By the time the pendulum reached the center of the lake, the flower had completely disintegrated. At that moment, however, a new bud arose near the opposite shore, and as the pendulum drew nearer Momo saw that an even lovelier blossom was beginning to unfold. She walked around the lake to inspect it more closely.
This new flower was altogether different from its predecessor. Momo had never seen such colors before, but these colors seemed richer and more exquisite by far. The petals, too, gave off a different and far more delicious scent, and the longer Momo studied them, the more marvelous in every detail she found them.
But again the glittering pendulum swung back, and as it did, the glorious blossom withered and sank, petal by petal, into the dark and unfathomable depths of the lake.
Slowly, very slowly, the pendulum proceeded on its way, but not to exactly the same place as before. This time it checked its swing a little way farther along the shore, and there, one pace from where it had previously paused, another bud arose and unfolded.
To Momo this seemed the loveliest lily of them all, the flower of flowers -- a positive miracle. She could have wept aloud when this perfect blossom, too, began to fade and subside into the depths, but she remembered her promise to Professor Hora and uttered no sound.
Meanwhile, the pendulum had returned to the opposite shore, another pace farther along, and a fresh bud broke the glassy surface.
As time went by, it dawned on Momo that each new blossom differed entirely from all those that had gone before, and that it always seemed the most beautiful of all.
The quote above from Momo very vividly and accurately describes a lot of how I experience existence, though I'd never have thought of expressing it in exactly the way Mr. Ende has done. If anyone wants to understand some of the underpinnings of my support for life extension efforts, they ought to try reading the quote from Momo above multiple times. There is so much in that passage that resonates with a sense I've always had of the uniqueness of every moment, and the unlimited potential of reality to keep generating beauty (so long as a person knows where to look for it).
Pushing Past Bias: Story as Catalyst for Complex Thematic Exploration and Social Change
In addition to the potential for finding articulate descriptions resonant with one's observations about reality, many people are drawn to speculative genres in particular because science fiction and fantasy can allow for the exploration of very complex and difficult themes in ways that force them out of their usual mental boxes and into spaces they might never have otherwise entered. While story emerges from culture, it also has the uncanny ability to occasionally transcend culture and thereby permit people to learn things about the human condition (or perhaps more appropriately, the "condition of persons") that would otherwise remain obscured by linguistic artifacts and local biases.
Certainly, the original Star Trek series is no paragon of progressive virtues when viewed through the lens of twenty-first century sensibilities -- some of the early episodes are difficult to watch despite their campy charm because of the way the female characters are portrayed and spoken to. Nevertheless, the show was one of the first to demonstrate any semblance of humanistic philosophy; it portrayed the future as one in which humans (of all different races and ethnic origins) working side by side, and even embraced certain non-humans as persons worthy of respect. And there is no doubt that this "radical" depiction of interpersonal relations (on a space ship, no less) influenced a fair portion of those who first saw the show during the 1960s and 1970s. Diana M.A. Relke of the University of Saskatchewan writes in Roddenberry's Humanist Vision: Using Star Trek in Women's Studies:
What Roddenberry did succeed in retaining in his second pilot was a communications officer who was not only female but also Black. Back then, in those pre-feminist days, I was no fan of television, and had even less interest in the silly genre of science fiction, yet I can distinctly remember sitting up and taking notice. This was an important first for television in an era when we had little in the way of an understanding of the relationship between racism and representation, and had not yet invented t he word "sexism."
The point I'm trying to make here is that no matter how limited Roddenberry's depiction of gender equality was in the original Trek and continued to be in The Next Generation, it was his instincts about the inevitability of women's professionalism and authority that earned Star Trek a substantial female following.
Star Trek was, quite likely, able to get its proto-humanistic message across more effectively owing to its use of temporal displacement. If the show had been set in a contemporary (1960s-era) military base or office, the notion of having women (of color, no less!) and "aliens" working side by side with white men probably would not have flown with any of the television networks at the time. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, setting the character interactions in the future and in outer space helped to make those interactions more believable and therefore more acceptable than they would have been perceived as in a more familiar setting. Whether this strategy was employed consciously or not, the result ended up being that at least some people who saw the show started becoming more comfortable with diversity and less prone to depersonalizing "the other" as a matter of course.
A more current example of a progressive, humanistic, culturally penetrating fiction is Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer series (as well as its spin-off, Angel). Despite its undeniably fluffy title and sometimes garish hipster aesthetics, Buffy is quite possibly one of the most thematically demanding and politically powerful series to emerge over the past decade or so. With a strong female lead, the presence of supportive and nurturing males, musings on the nature of "monsterhood" and the other, studies in the interaction between technology and tradition, and a grand, overarching existential story arc, Buffy provides a seemingly endless supply of philosophical avenues to discover and discuss.
I knew I was going to need to watch the whole series somewhere in the middle of the first season, when it became clear that this was not your average teenagers-and-cartoonish-monsters adventure romp.
One of the early episodes, for instance, involved a demon who was somehow "released onto the Internet" -- he'd been bound into text in a book somehow centuries ago, with the clause that whoever "reads" the text would end up releasing him. A character ended up literally scanning the book using an electronic scanner, so it ended up being the computer that released the demon. While the premise here is certainly silly on the surface, the point that episode drove home for me was the notion that new technologies can end up having some very strange interactions with existing or even ancient entities. I do not believe this to be a neo-Luddite message at all, but rather, an interesting observation on the nature of interactions between the "old and mysterious" and the "new and known". In some respects, the uploading of a "demon" onto the Internet might be said to parallel the way in which formerly-esoteric and difficult to obtain information can now be transmitted all over the world within a few seconds of a mouse click.
This theme continues throughout the series, probably reaching its apex in one of the later seasons, when it becomes clear that sufficiently motivated humans can be every bit as dangerous as vampires, monsters or demons -- and every bit as capable of doing great good as more benevolent mythical figures. From a sociological standpoint, this is important, as it seems to mirror the reality of cultural evolution that gradually diverts from superstition and fear of the mysterious toward a realization that we (as in, real people) actually have quite a bit of power (along with plenty of capacity for both good and ill).
Additionally, one might consider Buffy to be the logical successor to Star Trek from the "progressive social justice" standpoint. Buffy asserts quite a bit of fairly radical commentary (by today's standards) on matters of personhood, discrimination, and stereotyping. Buffy has been praised, for instance, for being the first series to portray a long-term same-sex relationship in a matter-of-fact, non-sensationalistic manner. And in a manner perhaps analogous to Star Trek's use of "the future" as a backdrop, Buffy manages to use its own backdrop of danger and demons to the effect of making mere lesbians seem downright mundane. And the series doesn't even stop there -- though in the beginning of the series there seems to be something of a firm dividing line between "people" and "monsters", this line eventually begins to blur as well.
Demons are not initially portrayed as sentient for the most part (except in the case of one vampire in highly unusual circumstances) -- but as the episodes progress, we start to encounter more and more cases in which it becomes impossible to assume a being's sentience or intentions based on the species to which he or she belongs. This "graying" of the line between easy-to-detect personhood and the ambiguity of monster-personhood is most obviously explored in the show's fourth season, when a secret military operations group is revealed to be assigned to the task of capturing monsters (referred to euphemistically as "Hostile Subterraneans" -- a nice example of depersonalization through labeling) either in order to subdue them or in order to experiment on them. Some characters end up going through near-breakdowns in the process of having their comfortable worldviews shattered in the face of having to accept that "monster" does not necessarily equal "thing to which no moral consideration is owed".
In fact, by the end of the series I was left wondering if perhaps the entire notion of "monstrousness" (when applied to a type of being as opposed to a set of actions any type of being is potentially capable of) is itself based in ignorance rather than knowledge and good, ethically conducted science. Some categories of humans have, after all, been assumed "monstrous" or "demonic" throughout the ages on the basis of similar ignorance, so I am certainly in favor of stories and media which might help to perpetuate (at the very least) the inclination to question such assumptions. All in all, Buffy stands out as a wonderful example of storytelling at its limit-pushing, boundary-defying best.
Of course, neither Star Trek, nor Buffy, nor any of the many novels noted earlier in this article are "perfect"; some would probably disagree as well with my portrayals of these works. Indeed, there is plenty of room for criticism of any particular story with regard to that work's potential to contribute toward improved cross-cultural communication and social justice. But part of the joy of story is that there is just so much of it -- no single viewpoint or tale is capable of summing up or expressing everything about reality that storytelling serves as an appropriate medium to express. Taken as a whole, however, the set of "good literature" (and good film, and good audio)acts in a manner similar to the diversity of individual human viewpoints. In short, we're all helping to compute the universe, and our stories can help us along the way.
And while it is important to avoid focusing too much on imaginary worlds at the expense of attempting to act in the real world, it is equally critical to keep communication in mind as a paramount goal when it comes to progressive activism and action. With that in mind, it still cannot be denied that stories (regardless of the media by which they are transmitted) represent a tremendous opportunity for learning and inspiration toward positive change.
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