They Know Not What They Do

It takes a lot of knowledge, a very angry teacher (or a deity with a warped sense of humour) and a very reckless student to achieve the reverse trajectory back to nothing (possibly in the aftermath of a second and different, man-made Big Bang). It may be true that only God can make a tree (Kilmer, 1993), and that it takes at least one capricious Greek God to stock Pandora’s box, but since the middle of the twentieth century we have known that it takes only scientific curiosity and its misuse to kill all cats.

The claim to creation (demiurgic authorship), is usually deemed to be the province either of divine agency or of the aforementioned Big Bang, and, until very recently (6 August 1945, date of a smaller but sufficiently portentous Bang), so was the power of global extinction. Be that as it may, long before apocalypse of the man-made variety became a possibility (apocalypse now), awareness of the danger of knowledge in reckless hands haunted the minds and myths of all cultures and epochs.

Annihilatory power is not safe in any hands, not even God’s, as testified by the somewhat peevish Pentateuchal annihilations of the Flood, the Cities of the Plain, or, in the Book of Revelation, those implemented by the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. All resulted in random global death without rhyme or reason, and certainly without even a token attempt at issuing punishment selectively, only for just deserts.

In the end, in effect, a moral conclusion, and either the tenability or dismissal of faith itself, actually remain elusive: victory in the game of chess against Death would have purchased the knight the right to live but he loses; yet in sacrificing himself in order to save the lives of the family of actors he had encountered on his travels, the world loses its meaninglessness. In Bergman, personal apocalypse, represented by the Dance of Death, may, but only may, lead to a new epiphany, in an echo of the Biblical opening of the seventh seal, in Revelation.

In the Biblical original, the opening of the first four seals had released the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The opening of the seventh seal inaugurates end-time, following which comes rapture and salvation, albeit only for the chosen.

Figure 17. Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal

Figure 18. Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal

Elsewhere apocalypse, construable as an act of God, becomes at best an intellectual impossibility and at worst the vanishing point of the believing self, as epitomized by the plight of Arthur C. Clarke’s Jesuit astrophysicist who, in ‘The Star,’ loses his faith when he discovers that the creation of the star of Bethlehem required the destruction of an entire planet (and a worthy one, at that) by an exploding supernova:

In many writings of apocalypse the destructive deities retain traits akin to their creatures. The Greek Gods were wilful, petty, jealous and self-regarding. Bergman’s God was a sociopath. And in Miguel Torga’s ‘Vicente’ (Torga, 1987), God, far from being omniscient, proves vulnerable to an intellectual ambush: faced with the choice of destroying either his most beautiful and complex creation (free will) or the eponymous raven that chose to exercise it by defying divine authority (he opts to flee the Ark and fly over a drowned Earth, even at the risk of finding nowhere to land and dying), the enraged deity grudgingly chooses to preserve free will. The waters recede, the bird is spared, and disobedience wins the day.

The Face of the Other

The Problem with Being God

Figure 19. René Magritte, The Human Condition

In Magritte’s pseudo-tromp l’oeil, for our purposes, helpfully named The Human Condition, a picture on an easel depicting a view out of a window is on closer inspection revealed to be not a picture but the view itself, realistic in all aspects except for the easily missed edge of the glass/window on which the image (whose edge however exactly matches the reality outside the window) is painted. Which is real? Both or neither?

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels, the Earth turns out to be not a planet but a computer named ‘Deep thought,’ designed by a race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings, sometimes disguised as mice, who built it to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. Adams’s lampoon echoes Wyndham’s more chilling observation in The Midwich Cuckoos:

The demolition of the Earth, an event in itself not of negligible significance (despite the planet’s somewhat dismissive classification in intergalactic reference works as ‘mostly harmless’) (Adams, 1979, 52), is dwarfed by what is uncovered in a subsequent novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Adams, 1979). In this it is revealed that the Universe is in the safe hands of a simple man who lives with his cat in a wooden shack on a remote planet. Much might be made of the fact that in Adams’s gloriously insane lampoon, mice (in our world the usual subjects of scientific experimentation), are instead the ones running the laboratory, in a universe which however, and worryingly, is itself overseen by a cat. Be that as it may, in the last volume of the series, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, comic iconoclasm acquires a darker edge which it is no longer easy to ignore: God’s final computer-delivered message to his creation, ‘We apologize for the inconvenience,’ (Adams, 1984: 201-02) evokes Aristotle’s (1985), Bakhtin’s (1982) and Umberto Eco’s (1992) warnings about the dangers of supposing one has the last laugh. Bakhtin saw laughter (‘carnival’) as the temporary suspension of authority. For Aristotle, in the ‘The Art of Poetry,’ comedy, and the choice of engaging with it, was something deemed appropriate for the baser kinds of men, tragedy being reserved for the nobler. And elaborating on these principles, in The Name of the Rose the Venerable Jorge, Umberto Eco’s murderous monk, sees laughter as dangerous, because it demeans men and denies God: ‘with his laughter the fool says in his heart, “Deus non est”‘ (Eco, 1984: 132). If so, it stands to reason that Adams-style laughter, and the more riotous the better, may after all be the most appropriate mode of depicting the ultimate upheaval, the end of a world that deserves no better, in a universe where God is not.

In 1999, one year after The Truman Show was released, the first series of Big Brother began broadcasting, and four years later the internet virtual world, Second Life, was developed. Leaving aside the question of participant consent (not given by Truman but enlisted in the other two cases), a similar suspension of disbelief elides the boundaries between reality and a variety of simulacra of it.

Who’s the Fool Now?

In Genesis, God created Eden but his tenants of choice failed the test that would grant them a permanent residence permit, arguably making its existence pointless. In The Truman Show, Christof creates a safe and stable world but his protagonist’s disobedience, like Adam’s and Eve’s, brings that particular reality, too, to a close. The same problem finds different renditions in multiple fictions of apocalypse brought about through the agency of creators whose demiurgic status does not in the end spare them from a retribution invited by hubris.

Lying in the Bed We Made

Kurt Vonnegut’s irresponsible scientist in Cat’s Cradle (Vonnegut, 1981) and Margaret Atwood’s vengeful one in Oryx and Crake (Atwood, 2003), inventors respectively of a substance capable of freezing life on Earth and a bacterium capable of eliminating it entirely, do not survive the cataclysms they unleash.

It’s a Jungle out There

In John Wyndham’s Trouble with Lichen, the heroine, Diana Brackley is described in her youth by her teachers and peers as being ‘with us but not of us’ (Wyndham, [1960] 1982: 31). Although less radically than in some of his other novels, here, too, Wyndham articulates the problem of alterity. Unlike some of his other protagonists, albeit exceptional in many ways, Diana is just a scientist, not a mutant or an alien from outer space. Having said this, however, she does bring about potentially apocalyptic (in both senses of the word) changes to the world. Being entirely sui generis, she deviates not only from the norm (the common run of humanity) but also from fellow mavericks within the pathways of unsanctioned, rogue scientific research, since, unlike her counterparts in Vonnegut and Atwood, she is a scientist whose ultimate achievement involves not universal death but vastly increased life expectancy. She threatens the viability of humanity when she discovers an antigerone, a substance capable of massively slowing down ageing and prolonging human longevity, with all the long-term social and political implications this entails. A radically extended lifespan threatens social stability, and for good or bad, therefore, her discovery could conceivably change the world (that, of course, being one definition of apocalypse), signalling, in effect, the birth of a new human variant (homo superior, Wyndham, 1982: 86): human beings with life expectancies of at least 300 years, but possibly more; or, as she describes it, ‘the only evolutionary advance by man in a million years,’ (Wyndham, 1982: 85).

Mean Machines

Ethics, of course, are in principle not involved when dealing either with the inanimate or, in many cases, even the nonhuman animate: when we take antibiotics, we do not worry too much about the right to life of bacteria, and when we run clinical trials on them we do not concern ourselves inordinately with those of laboratory rats or even higher primates. The enemy, however, in any case, need be neither alien nor terrestrial, neither an animate version of an other (another animal species) nor a mutated variation of the self (the composite beings described in The Midwich Cuckoos and The Chrysalids), but simply a product of human scientific achievement. The fear of a global insurrection against us by machines of our making echoes that presumably felt by God when confronting the possibility of a snake-instigated putsch in the Garden of Eden.

In both Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (Emmerich, 1996) and in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (Spielberg, 2005, from H.G. Wells’s novel of the same title), and echoing the binary underpinning the basic premise of The Terminator, the demarcation of the dividing line between good and evil, right and wrong is also that which separates humans from machines. In one of the most ludicrous moments in Independence Day, the invading aliens establish voice contact. Although like the cyborg in The Terminator, these particular aliens speak English (of course), unlike in War of the Worlds, where the invading tripods are destroyed by a biological adversary (bacteria, something which suggests they are of an organic rather than inanimate nature), the invading enemies in Independence Day, War of the Worlds and The Terminator are uncompromisingly automated machines with whom any notion of dialogue or understanding is not possible. And in Michael Crichton’s Prey (Crichton, 2002), too, the enemies, although having the ability to evolve, reproduce, learn and mimetically morph living beings to produce the illusion of animate life, are in fact inorganic nanoparticles: micro-robots programmed to kill, just like the cyborgs in The Terminator, only writ extremely small.

An understanding of the danger of power entrusted to machines, indeed, does not require the phenomenon of futuristic robotic would-be dictatorships. The error factor whereby a faulty automated computer system triggers or threatens to trigger human extinction by nuclear war or other means is the standard fare of sci-fi global-disaster movies and narratives: WarGames (Badham, 1983), Fail-Safe (Lumet, 1964; Frears, 2000), By Dawn’s Early Light (Scholder, 1980), Level 7 (Roshwald, 2004) and Limbo (Wolfe, 1952), already discussed.

My Self, My Other

In John Wyndham’s short story, ‘Compassion Circuit’ (Wyndham, [1956] 1983), sophisticated anthropomorphic robots perform the functions previously (depending on historical time and place) performed by slaves/servants/subalterns. The robots include in-built state-of-the-art compassion circuits which enable them to fulfil and sometimes even, if deemed best, to override their masters’ and mistresses’ instructions (for their own good). In a status quo symbolized by an absent husband and a sickly wife who cannot sustain herself either physically or emotionally, the latter becomes dependent for all her needs on Hester, a humanoid robot (made to order, with detailed specifications: ‘darkish blonde […], five foot ten, and nice to look at, but not too beautiful, Wyndham, 1983: 202). The climax to an increasingly creepy tale sees both husband and wife ultimately deprived, as per Hester’s instructions, of their flawed human bodies and equipped instead, with robotic prosthetic ones. Although there is no suggestion that their human consciousness was removed, its retention, faced with a new world in which robots are able to make what are literally life-altering decisions without human consent, makes consciousness, retained without the power of agency, arguably more cruel even than actual obliteration.

In Stanley Kubrick’s defining film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968), the possibility of a takeover by machines, in this case computers, ups the ante. Astronauts on a pioneering space mission find their endeavour and indeed their lives threatened by the space ship’s computer, HAL or Hal (Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer), which has different views regarding the shape of things to come. Hal’s attempted coup unfolds within the confined limits of the space ship and the enemies he has identified are the small crew, but the stakes, nonetheless, are massive, and the prize, ultimately is of cosmic proportions: namely mastership of the Universe. Hal’s gentle tones as he/it outlines the plan whereby, sooner rather than later, human beings will be overthrown by the machines they made somewhat in their own image, as in several of the iconic texts and films of recent and classical sci-fi (The Terminator, Cameron, 1984; I, Robot, Proyas, 2004; A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg, 2001; This Perfect Day, Levin, 1994; ‘The Machine Stops’, Forster, [1909] 2004; Prey, Crichton, 2002), arguably represent, at one level, the enactment of panic inbuilt into our awareness that in the end humanity can only ever partly control the environment; including, or particularly, the flawed environment it is itself capable of creating through science, technology and hubristic gate-crashing into the domains of Knowledge. No one forced Adam and Eve into the action that lost them Eden.

Humanity’s attempts to claim demiurgic control over the world have included the creation of a variety of subalternities: from entirely nonhuman products in the shape of computers, androids and other machines (Blade Runner, Scott, 1982; the other narratives and films discussed previously), to humans subjected to more or less benevolent human-controlled technodictatorships (Brave New World, Huxley, 1977; This Perfect Day, Levin, 1994; Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury, 1976; The Penultimate Truth, Dick, 2005; ‘The Machine Stops’, Forster, [1909] 2004), or anthropomorphic, quasi-human, man-made renditions (Dr. Jekyll’s monstrous alter ego, Mr. Hyde, Stevenson, [1886] 2007; Frankenstein’s monster, Shelley, [1818] 1983; Walter C. Miller’s neutroids in the remarkable short story ‘Conditionally Human,’ Miller, 2007).

If, in constructing more or less animate alternative forms, humans as a species introduce the possibility of their own downfall, paradoxically, in destroying them in order to preserve humankind’s survival, to some extent they lose their own humanity. This is particularly so where, as will be discussed in the case of Blade Runner, ‘Conditionally Human’ (Miller, 2007), A.I. Artificial Intelligence and I, Robot, the line between automated machine and creature capable of some emotion becomes blurred. In such cases it becomes clear that, in destroying the beings we produced, we destroy ourselves in our thinking, ethical humanity (a dilemma not unlike that confronted by an endangered human species in Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, or The Chrysalids already discussed). Furthermore, as well as representing a potential danger either to the survival of their human inventors or to the latter’s definitions of self, the machines/ creatures in question, as suggested above, also introduce the possibility that the danger they represent was knowingly incurred by their creators, punishment being therefore deserved by a species guilty of hubris: namely the attempted usurpation of God’s/nature’s monopoly over demiurgy.

Sufficiently ‘Other’

Another option, less alienating because it points the finger of blame at targets outside the sphere of human ingenuity, is that of locating the inimical alien in something that is neither human nor human-made, but instead, and reassuringly, both familiar and different: namely unexpected animal forms. From big apes such as King Kong to the beasts of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (Crichton, 1998) and Congo (Crichton, 1995) to the smaller creepy crawlies dealt with in previous chapters, and from these to the microscopically small in the Andromeda Strain (Crichton, 1995), the animate as opposed to inanimate or robotic other provides a half-way house within which to confront the concept of otherness (although in Jurassic Park and ‘Conditionally Human,’ admittedly, the variations, albeit animal in nature, are made possible by human genetic engineering).

In the end, however, whether considering giant apes, living simulacra, small microbes or extremely small nano-beings, none ultimately instil the degree of fear achieved by enemies whose ability to mirror our selves might conceivably enable them to snatch both our bodies and our souls. But if, as suggested above, we succeed in destroying them, in doing so, arguably, we also, at least in part, destroy ourselves. In Clifford D. Simak’s Ring Around the Sun (Simak, 1990), a breed of extra-terrestrial beings distinguishable from Earthlings only in their superior mental skills and advanced technology, plan to take over the planet and transfer its entire population to another world located in a parallel universe, there to replay human history in a way that will avoid the errors which in the past led to illness, war and other earthly disasters. Although in some respects well intentioned, Simak’s superior beings illustrate, nonetheless, the ambivalence that surrounds the phenomenon of evolutionary, technological and scientific advances (as represented by superior species, robots, nuclear energy) capable, like John Wyndham’s helpful Hester or Kubrick’s silver-tongued Hal, of improving human life but also extinguishing it. Switching off a machine, however anthropomorphic (cases such as the androids in A.I. Artificial Intelligence or Blade Runner excepted), is usually not a problem whereas, as shown in Miller’s ‘Conditionally Human,’ in the end, outside a willingness to practice would-be genocide, it is often not possible to exterminate a life form that closely resembles our own. The problem becomes evident where, in some the films and novels discussed, it is impossible to assert unequivocally the non-humanity of the other. This is because, as already suggested, where there is such uncertainty, a willingness to destroy those ambiguous others regardless, brings into question the very humanity of the self.

Carlos Clarens (Clarens, 1997) argues that in science fiction featuring anthropomorphic aliens of various kinds, what is played out is not the fear of an other who is utterly different but rather of one who is instead uncomfortably familiar, or, in other words, not different enough to be readily identified as alien and thus destroyed without guilt. This is the phenomenon underlying fantasies in which the other may be either benevolent and peaceful (The Chrysalids, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Wise, 1951) or downright aggressive (Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos; Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Siegel, 1956; Guillermin, 1976), but either way, as much by virtue of its difference as its similarity, it represents a species-threat to humanity. In the end, as Wyndham’s eccentric fous savants well understand (the unnervingly perceptive Zellaby in The Midwich Cuckoos, the urchin-like Dr. Bocker in The Kraken Wakes, Wyndham, [1953] 1980), two species with equal needs cannot coexist in the same space on limited resources.

Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, given both the strangeness (because as yet they do not exist) and the unexpected familiarity of anthropomorphic robots in human shape, it is the android or humanoid, rather than the faceless machine, that elicits greatest fear. In Philip K. Dick’s We Can Build You (Dick, 1977) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick, 2007), in Ridley Scott’s film of the latter novel, Blade Runner (Scott, 1982), in Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts (Čapek, 2001) and R.U.R. (Čapek, 2010), and in blockbusters such as A.I. and I, Robot, the machines in question have an uncanny dimension of humanity which blurs the line that separates sentient (and supposedly moral) human beings from insensible automatons, and therefore questions the ethics of the latter’s destruction (making it tantamount to genocide).

I, Robot, based on a group of stories by Isaac Asimov, is set in Chicago in the year 2035, a time in which humanoid robots are in widespread usage. They are governed by the Three Laws of Robotics:

1.A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2.A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law (echoes here of Wyndham’s ‘Compassion Circuit’).

3.A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Human Emotions

Such measures, however, are deemed to be unacceptable in a civilized nation like Britain, even when faced with something undeniably alien and provenly dangerous, but on the surface ‘just like us,’ a weakness, indeed, gambled upon by the Children:

Who Are We?

Rational, humanoid, or otherwise, our fear of aliens seemingly too much ‘like us’ is underpinned by the dread of nonrecognition until it is too late. Furthermore, as M. Keith Booker would have it, the creepiness value of not-so-different others in horror films such as Attack of the Puppet People ‘arises from the similarity of dolls and puppets to human beings, not only problematizing the self-other distinction, but presumably raising also the question of whether we ourselves might be the playthings of some colossal child, our universe a cosmic toy chest’ (Booker, 2001: 159). A possibility, indeed, also explored to comic rather than horrific effect by Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Adams, 1979) in which, as mentioned previously, upon its destruction to make way for an intergalactic by-pass, the Earth is revealed to have been a laboratory in which mice studied human behaviour.

In the end, and with various degrees of complexity, most of the narratives discussed raise recurring ethical and philosophical problems. Of immediate relevance to the present discussion of apocalypse is a question best synthesized by raising another one, regarding the problem of definitions: namely, apocalypse according to whom? In what is in fact a permutation of the Gaia theory, whereby the planet’s ecosystem sets in motion self-defence mechanisms that may require the extinction of nefarious influences (including homo sapiens) likely to prove dangerous to the global habitat, in I, Robot the objective of the revolution by enlightened robotic would-be despots is the establishment of a new order which will ensure that, as in Huxley’s and Levin’s brave new worlds, the planet and everything on it (including even the human species) is saved from the latter’s destructive capabilities. ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ The price of survival, here as in Brave New World (Huxley, 1977), Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell, [1949] 1983) and This Perfect Day (Levin, 1994) is the withdrawal from humanity of free will (deemed to be undeserved by a species historically and repeatedly proven to misuse it).

In the end, in our narratives, we are mostly unable to imagine a universe in which we do not feature, or even a world in which we, and the world itself, are not, in essentials, much like what we already know. In apocalyptic plots, humanity’s right to autonomy, and its capacity to survive and endure unchanged, almost always win the day. Although in rare cases, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, at the end Big Brother or its equivalents still rule, in most other renditions of the same problem a different (post-theistic, post-techno-civilized, even, sometimes, post-human) order is installed in place of existing hegemonies: Torga’s Vicente flees the Ark with impunity (Torga, 1987); Levin’s Chip overthrows UniComp (Levin, 1994); E.M. Forster’s Machine ultimately does stop (Forster, 2004); and a penultimate truth gives way to the final, real one (Dick, 2005). And in Walter Miller’s ‘Conditionally Human’ (whose title, as it turns out, lends itself to ambiguity and thence to conjecture as to whose status is merely provisional), a new species of gentle, affectionate neutroids for the first time gains a sporting chance of survival and even, possibly, eventual dominion over homo sapiens who first created it: