Views from Crestmont Drive

This 1959 novel is one of the most popular and celebrated science fiction novels of all time. It’s set in the years following an atomic war, it portrays religion in a relatively favorable way (in contrast to the skeptical or dismissive attitude of much other SF), and it dwells on the theme of man’s destiny, and its possibly inevitable fate in cycles of building and self-destruction. It’s sober and deadly-serious in parts, and it’s also quite funny in parts.

As this book is so well-known, I’ll summarize the plot only briefly. The book is in three parts.

The first part, Fiat Homo (Let there be man), is set some 600 years after a ‘Flame Deluge’ has destroyed civilization. (Some years pass in this section, at the end of which it’s the year 3174, so the book’s nuclear war apparently doesn’t take place until the year 2500 or so.) In the desert southwest Brother Francis Gerard at the Leibowitz Abbey stumbles upon (what we recognize as) an ancient fallout shelter, and discovers artifacts which may have belonged to Leibowitz himself – including what we realizes are radio parts and a blueprint, but which no one at the abbey understands in the slightest. Messengers arrive from New Rome, because Leibowitz is under consideration for canonization, and there’s a concern the artifacts may be fake and would jeopardize that process. Eventually New Rome approves, and Brother Gerard is allowed to attend the ceremony, though on his return journey (– spoiler –) he is killed by mutant ‘sport’.

The second part, Fiat Lux (Let there be light) is set 600 years later. Society is recovering, as a political leader in Texarkana is anxious to unite the continent, dealing with various local tribes to do so – planning to wipe them out with cattle plagues if necessary. A secular scholar, Thon Taddeo, still curious about the authenticity of the Leibowitz documents, travels to the abbey, where the brothers have managed to re-invent a dynamo and an arc lamp. Taddeo studies the documents and reports his findings, careful not to offend the brothers. News come of another war, and a message that the surviving mayor of Texarkana has broken with the church.

The third part, Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy will be done) is set another 600 years later. Technological society has recovered, and there are spaceships again, and even colonies on worlds of several stars. This section reads like a contemporary political thriller, with rumors about use of atomic weapons. A secret plan of the church goes into effect – to launch its own starship to Alpha Centauri, with sufficient volunteers to establish a new church hierarchy. As the bombs fall and the abbey is destroyed, priests at the launch site in New Rome lift children into the rocket ship, and the ship takes off, escaping the earth.

Major points

• What I had mismembered from reading this novel decades ago was the nature of the escape at the end. The novel’s arc goes from destruction to civilization to destruction again – with the rocket launched by the Church implicitly saving the last gasp of humanity to survive on another world. But – humanity has already settled other planets! (We’re told this at the beginning of Part Three.) The only thing being saved at the end here is the church itself. That’s why there’s concern in the final weeks about the proper composition of the crew on the rocket—they need the correct church officials on the new planet so they can perpetuate church hierarchy. The book leaves you with the flavor that the church has saved humanity. But it hasn’t.
• Given that understanding, the novel still gives great credit to the church for preserving knowledge over hundreds of years that otherwise would be lost. But—it’s always ‘the’ church, the Catholic church of course, and there’s never the slightest acknowledgement that there might be other religions in the world, or even protestant churches. (Ironically, it was Islam in Europe’s Dark Ages that preserved knowledge of the Greeks that the Christian church condemned.)
• At the same time, as the author takes the church business very seriously – as another example, the passionate debate about euthanasia for those poisoned by radiation (Ch 27) — he surely is wise to the ways of human culture and how stories grow in the telling, how other species might think the world created for themselves, and so on.

Other interesting notes and quotes

• P62, how after the first atomic war, the populists strike out at the elites [to use modern terms] to destroy what’s left:
  

  So it was that, after the Deluge, the Fallout, and plagues, the madness, the confusion of tongues, the rate, there began the bloodletting of the Simplification, when remnants of mankind had torn other remnants limb from limb, killing rulers, scientists, leaders, technicians, teachers, and whatever person the leaders of the maddened mobs said deserved death for having helped to make the Earth what it had become. Nothing had been so hateful in the sight of these mobs as the man of learning, at first because they had served the princes, but then later because they refused to join in the bloodletting and tries to oppose the mobs, calling the crowds ‘bloodthirsty simpletons.’

• Is it odd that Brother Francis takes it upon himself to create an illuminated copy of the ancient blueprint he’s found? Perhaps, like the medieval monks, these latter brothers have little else better to do.
• There’s a fantasy element in the novel in the implication that the pilgrim at the beginning is the actual Leibowitz – or is he the famed Wandering Jew? Note, p168b, how the hermit seems to remember thirty-two centuries.
• There is occasional broad humor. How Brother Francis is dimwitted; the battle with the Autoscribe machine in Chapter 24; the story of the brother’s discovery grows in the telling, p88:
  

  Brother Francis closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. He had told the simple truth to fellow novices. Fellow novices had whispered among themselves. Novices had told the story to travelers. Travelers had repeated it to travelers. Until finally—this!

  “No halo?” “No heavenly choir?” “What about the carpet of roses that grew up where he walked?”

• Who decides? 220b; debate 221.9. On the responsibility of academicians to control the power they give rulers: p220.8
  

  But you promise to begin restoring Man’s control over Nature. But who will govern he use of the power to control natural forces? Who will use it? To what end? How will you hold him in check?

• In Chapter 22 (p228) the scholar discovers a book that suggests the man is not descended from Adam, but is a servant species created by the original humanity. Others reply that what he is reading is just a play, and speculate on his motives. (After enough time has passed, how can you tell between history, myth, and fiction?)
• Ch 12, a scholar and a politician debate why civilizations fall.
  

  “How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely?”

  “Perhaps by being materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.”

  “…during the time of the anti-popes, how many schismatic Orders were fabricating their own versions of things, and passing off their versions as the work of earlier men. You can’t know, you can’t really know. … But where is the evidence of the kind of machines your historians tell us they had in those days? Where are the remains of self-moving carts, of flying machines?”

  “Beaten into plowshares and hoes.”

• Each section ends with an appearance by buzzards, Section 2, p239:
  

  As always the wild black scavengers of the skies laid their eggs in season and lovingly bed their young. They soared high over prairies and mountains and plains, searching for the fulfillment of that share of life’s destiny which was theirs according to the plan of Nature. Their philosophers demonstrated by unaided reason alone that the Supreme Cathartes aura regnans had created the world especially for buzzards. They worshiped him with hearty appetites for many centuries.

  And the book ends with a rather different passage about sharks.

This science fiction novel, from 1957, is by an author known for anthropologically informed works; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Oliver.

(The edition I read, the only edition I have, is a 1975 Avon Equinox trade paperback, one of its “SF Rediscovery” series that ran some 27 volumes. (http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?4). Alas, I didn’t acquire all of them, but I do have at least half of them. Page references are to that edition.)

The novel opens as a contemporary man, Weston Chase, is caught in a storm in the Colorado mountains and stumbles into a cave occupied by, as it turns out, an alien being, Arvon, who has hibernated in this cave, along with four associates, for thousands or millions of years.

A huge chunk of the middle of the book is devoted to Arvon’s tale. (In a recurring plot crutch of SF novels of this era, the aliens quickly learn English, rather than human characters learning the alien language or pretending that some kind of translation device exists.) Arvon tells about his ship, the Good Hope, that traveled through ‘not-space’ using a ‘distortion field’, from the planet Lortas, with a crew of nine. Their mission was to find other planets and other species whom they might connect with. Their own culture has peaked, and they need others to contact, to learn from and grow. But again and again, they’ve found only three types of natives on other planets: primitives in the Stone Age; pre-industrial, war-like cultures; or technological cultures that have blown themselves up. He describes having landed on a planet of Alpha Centauri, and finding only a dead city, overwhelmed with sand.

Their next try took them to Earth. But their field drive failed and their ship was wrecked. And so they used their ‘sleeping technology’ to wait thousands of years until, perhaps, a technological society might emerge on this planet. There are some vivid scenes depicting their encounter, in what is later called Asian, with local tribes, before the survivors’ retreat into a cave…

And so in the present Weston Chase is faced with trying to help these aliens build a spaceship to return to their own planet, here in 1956 America. They head for Los Angeles, and..

(spoilers follow)

Chase, still nominally a captive, is cooperative, but the surviving aliens soon survey LA and decide their cause is hopeless; the technology doesn’t exist to build the spaceship they need. They release Wes, who returns to his home to find his wife has given him up and taken up with another man. With nothing left of his old life, Wes gets an idea: using the aliens’ sleep serum, he convinces them all to go back into sleep, himself included, and wait. He knows Earth won’t blow itself up. And so thousands of years later they all awake, emerge, and see a gigantic spaceship flying overhead. They made it, he’s still young, and still has time.

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The overriding concern here is about whether an advanced industrial society will blow itself up or not. This was a grave concern in the 1950s, only a decade or so after Hiroshima, and though the Cold War has passed, that concern hasn’t gone completely away. It’s an obvious answer to the Fermi Paradox—if planets and presumably life are so common, why haven’t we met, or at least heard from or seen evidence of, other intelligent species? Well maybe because they all blow themselves up, within a time-scale that makes coexistence of intelligent species over billions of years unlikely. Indeed, some current thinkers aren’t sanguine about humanity’s future; Harari, e.g., thinks we might have only another 1000 years, and sooner than that the effect of climate change might curtail continued technological development by its survivors.

As science fiction, this book is all too typical of the way aliens are depicted in most early science fiction, and in some varieties of ‘space opera’ to this day. They act and sound just like humans. The play similar roles: captain, navigator, novelist, anthropologist, etc. Their ship has a library, and even a bar, on board. SF has only rarely tried to imagine truly alien beings, but the standard of aliens as just like humans except for funny clothes or facial features has become entrenched in popular culture via Star Trek and Star Wars. Indeed, reading some of these 1950s SF novels, as I’ve been, it’s been startling to see how exactly the clichés of that era inspired Trek and Wars in the ‘60s and ‘70s and have become unshakeable decades later.

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Other interesting notes and quotes:

• The aliens’ reasoning about the plausibility of other intelligent races, referring to themselves and equivalent creatures as ‘men’ and ‘human beings’, p48-9: “Man was not a rare animal in the universe, and it was the height of egotism to imagine that he was. All isolated peoples believe that they are the only human begins in the world, and when a planet thinks itself alone, before the ships go out into space, it is difficult for the people on that planet to conceive of other human beings elsewhere among the stars…  It was not that man was foreordained, built in from the beginning. It was simply that the evolution of intelligence, of the ability to develop culturally, necessarily proceeding along the road of trial and error, change and modification. A culture-bearing animal had to be warm-blooded, for he needed the energy, he had to be big-brained, he had to have free hands and specialized feet. A manlike form was the mechanical answer to one trend of evolution, and if conditions permitted he came along sooner or later.”
• There’s also a clever line of reasoning, p74, about the wisdom of finding a cave to hide in. The aliens came down in Asia, but decide to hole up in what was then a mostly empty continent, in Colordao. “He pointed again to Europe. ‘One day, when ships get good enough, men with a fairly complex culture will cross this ocean here, or possibly the other one; it doesn’t matter. They’ll find a virtually untouched land, and they’ll take it from its original settler. Then that area will boom, and that’s where you’ll want to be.”
• There’s quite a bit of detail at the end about Los Angeles, covered with “a gray pall of fog, mist, smoke, and that special urban effluvium called smog” p127. Union Station, Hollywood Freeway, Sunset Boulevard, Beverly Glen, UCLA, Santa Monica. The opening of the story, p16, mentions Chase’s “home on Beverly Glen off Sunset” and his “Westwood office.” Oliver seems to have known LA, and the Colorado mountains, fairly well.

Clifford D. Simak’s CITY, published in 1952 but composed of stories published in magazines from 1944 onward, is a story cycle that tells the future of humanity as it abandons cities for country estates and then moves off Earth to settle other planets, and in parallel the rise of an artificially created Dog civilization. The individual stories are prefaced by the latter, that is, tales of an ancient past from the point of view of the Dogs, telling stories about ‘Man,’ whom they think are mythical. It’s a well-known, enduring work, having won one of the very earliest awards for SF or fantasy, the International Fantasy Award, in 1953 (http://www.sfadb.com/International_Fantasy_Awards_1953). It’s Simak’s most popular book along with his WAY STATION, published a decade later.

(It’s also listed in the recent 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List, by former A Common Reader co-founder James Mustich, which I’ve just compiled this week at sfadb.com: http://www.sfadb.com/1000_Books.)

The book consists of eight stories plus an (later-written) epilogue. The edition I’m reading, with pages references below, is the very handsome Old Earth Books edition of 2004. (http://www.oldearthbooks.com/).

The first story, “City,” is set about 50 years in the future of Simak’s writing in 1944 or so, and it projects the development of several technologies – helicopters, planes, hydroponics, atomics – into a future in which cars are obsolete, cities are unnecessary “huddling places”, and most people have chosen to live out in the country (since transportation is so easy and economical). The story concerns the problem of unoccupied houses in the unnamed city where John J. Webster lives, and what to do with them.

Subsequent stories follow succeeding members of the Webster family. The second, “Huddling Place,” concerns Jerome A. Webster living comfortably on the Webster family estate surrounded by benevolent robot servants, as his son Thomas is about to head for Mars. Jerome is uncomfortable leaving home even to see him off. When an urgent request comes for Jerome to journey to Mars himself, to treat Juwain, a Martian philosopher he once knew, he can’t bring himself to do it, having understood the condition of agoraphobia that has settled into the human instinct.

In the third story, “Census,” a World Committee has formed, planets in other star systems are being settled, and there is a hidden population of ‘ridge runners’ who have chosen to live in the hills unaccounted for – extraordinary people who in the past were successful artists, politicians, or crooks. An enumerator, Richard Grant, visits the Websters in search of them, and meets their talking dog Nathaniel; the Websters have pursued the options of advancing dogs into a sentient species. Grant tracks rumors of a mysterious stranger in the woods, Joe, who has created an advanced ant civilization. Grant reveals he is searching for someone to finish a thesis by that Martian philosopher Juwain, one that might change mankind—and the dogs. But Joe, reading a fragment, sees an error and will not reveal it. He’s not interested.

The single most striking story is “Desertion,” set on Jupiter, in which men are transformed into a creature able to survive on its surface and sent out to explore. (The plan is, p98b, “Man would take over Jupiter as he already had taken over the other smaller planets,” an expression of the manifest destiny common in 1940s and ‘50s SF.) A sixth man, Fowler, prepares for his expedition, knowing that the previous five never returned, and no one knows why, and this man takes his dog Towser. They are both transformed and sent out, and both overwhelmed by the experience, perceiving and understanding more than they ever could before; The man realizes they’re now using their brains fully; “Maybe the brains of Earth things naturally are slow and foggy. Maybe we are the morons of the universe…” 107.7 And 108t: “perhaps because we were human beings… Poorly equipped for thinking, poorly equipped in certain senses that one has to have to know. Perhaps even lacking in certain senses that are necessary to true knowledge.” And they realize, they can’t go back. –Spoiler!—because, as expressed in the last lines,

“I can’t go back,” said Towser.

“Nor I,” said Fowler.

“They would turn be back into a dog,” said Towser.

“And me,” said Fowler, “back into a man.”

The next story, “Paradise,” was first published two years after the three prior stories, as if Simak thought a while before deciding to continue. It picks up where the last one left off. Fowler decides to return, to explain. The news reaches Earth, where Fowler meets the latest Webster, who worries that the news that Jupiter is a paradise could spell the end of humanity as it’s been, subverting its “destiny”. Joe is still around, revealing that he and the other mutants have stolen Juwain’s philosophy—which has to do with sensing the viewpoints of others, achieving complete understanding, a kind of ‘semantics’. The mutants don’t need it – they have telepathy – but humans do.

In “Hobbies” Jon Webster exists in a world in which almost all humans have left Earth, and those left behind are too rich, and have nothing to do except pursue hobbies, like painting or creating elaborate cocktails, or writing the book he is writing. He returns to the family estate, where he learns about the “cobblies,” perhaps other dimensions or planes of access, that the dogs have learned about. The dogs are building a brotherhood of animals, “in a direction that man passed by without a second glance.” Webster realizes mankind has wasted its time, and returns to Geneva, where the last 5000 humans on Earth live, and seals it off from the outside world – giving the dogs their chance.

In “Aesop” a dog civilization has come into being, having all but forgotten humans, thinking of them as ‘websters’ in lower case. They live by the Canons, which prohibit any destruction of life; animals don’t eat each other, they eat from feeding stations manned by mutant humans or robots. Jenkins, the head robot, is now 7000 years old. The dogs and robots decide the past doesn’t exist; each moment is a new world in a series of parallel realities. But they now face a world of overpopulation, since the animals don’t eat each other. The solution is the parallel worlds the mutants have accessed.

The final story, “The Simple Way,” brings Jenkins and Jon Webster together again, to solve the destiny of the ants, to whom the world is left.

An “Epilog,” written years later in 1973 (and so not in early editions of the book), tells of Jenkins on a world of mice and ants, as he discovers the ants are dead. A spaceship lands, with Andrew, a wild robot, who tells of other worlds: “There are worlds out there, and life on some of them. Even some intelligence. There is work to do.” And invites Jenkins to join them.

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There are lots of brilliant ideas here, and startling developments, but at the same time it’s a kitchen-sink novel in which each story develops a new concept, often to solve the problem set up by the previous story. When I finished it, I wrote, It’s a vague mélange of sentimental themes not thought through, especially by current knowledge. Perhaps this is unfair. That Simak could take an initial premise, about the transformation of human civilization by technology, and extend it, again and again, with notions of bootlegging the intelligence of dogs (and ants) and speculations about how the world is must vaster than the tiny portion humans have perceived, and how humanity might well give way to other species, is an impressive achievement.

But I’ll made these specific points:

• The most striking aspect of the book – in the “Notes” to each tale, added in the book publication – is the retrospective introductions to the stories by the latter dog scholars, who don’t quite believe that humans actually existed. They are a myth. They describe the setting and context for these myths about the strange creatures and their strange concepts. Like ‘city.’
• The first story especially reveals an antipathy toward technology that recalls Ray Bradbury, in its character’s irritation with an automated lawn-mower.
• Simak makes an intelligent insight: that as humanity has dispersed from cities, the threat of nuclear war is reduced (since there are no more centralized targets).
• There’s an aside in the first story about a “Bureau of Human Adjustment” in which it’s revealed that humans are being ‘adjusted,’ mostly covertly, to new ways of life now that the old jobs have disappeared, see p26. This has a modern ring to it [Harari]! And presumably it explains the agoraphobia revealed in the second story.
• It’s amusing how the Dogs (in the latter-day introductions) assume the robots were invented by them, since the robots’ functions are so ideal – they serve has the Dogs’ hands! This is a clever insight, mocking the way human creationists assume the universe exists for their own sake. (The Dogs also dismiss the notion of traveling off the planet as fantasy, since “everyone knows” that stars are just lights hanging in the sky. p40b)
• “Huddling Place” emphasizes the idea of country living, away from the cities: “a manorial existence, based on old family homes and leisurely acres, with atomics supplying power and robots in place of serfs.” And with devices [like VR] to transport one’s image and presence anywhere, in order to transact business anywhere in the world, with the twist of a dial, p45.
• Yes, the stories assume the existence of an intelligent Martian race – as did other books of the era, by Heinlein, Clarke, Silverberg, et al.
• The first couple stories are highly parochial; what’s happening in the rest of the world? Is *everyone* living on lavish family estates with robot servants? Everybody? The unexamined assumption here is that most people would prefer living on country estates, not in cities. But I suspect this merely reveals the author’s personal bias. Simak grew up in rural Wisconsin, where many of his stories are set, and though he lived most of his life as a newspaper man in Minneapolis, he apparently missed his childhood environment, and presumed that most other people would be attracted to it as well.
• The third story “Census,” in which it’s revealed that the Webster family has pursued the option of advancing dogs, through surgery, has a Lamarckian element to it, but anyway it’s an “uplift” event, in the term later popularized by David Brin.
• “Desertion” has a couple crucial themes. First, that perception outside the narrow range of human existence might be extraordinary, full of experiences humans can literally not imagine (however close SF writers like to try). [EO Wilson has emphasized this theme.] OTOH the idea on p107 is off the mark; humans minds are optimized for their environment. More to the point, p108, about ‘true knowledge.’
• In “Paradise” there’s a reference to semantics, and I know that something called “General Semantics” was something of a craze in the 1950s, but I don’t know enough about it to think if Simak was alluding to that.
• Again in “Hobbies” we have the idea of a vaguely mystical theme about some higher truth that mere men cannot access.’
• Here’s a key thought from late in the book: the ants have been successful because they are *stable* in their environment. Humanity, at least in the past 10,000 years, is notably *un*stable – especially in the past few decades and centuries, as humanity is changing the planet’s environment — and that may be why we are doomed.