Science Fiction Authors Fear Their Creations

To the humans who don't want to be human

I.

The inexorable makes us. We are that which does not change and at the extremes of our being, we find the same limits over and over again. Only this immutability keeps us sane. We are life and we are death. We are walkers of the earth and dreamers of the sky. We are one and we are all.

Oh, what would become of us and that permanence of the unfathomable, if we could change those boundaries at will? If we could design life and kill death. If we could transform the earth and conquer the cosmos and the secrets that hide in the distant lights of the deep nights. If we could stop being “I”, the liquid identity, and stop being “we”, the solipsistic existence.

That is what we are doing.

And that scares us; even those who, in fits of courage, decided, from the fragile security of their imagination, to create distant worlds in which the laws of the mundane and the divine are intertwined. Because they, great authors of fictitious futures, entered the dreamlike while knowing their firm tranquility back in the waking world.

But now, without intention or desire, their fantasy, which was to them an escape from which we cannot now flee, is being realized.

II.

The static laws of life and the world give us sanity, stability, and structure.

Without them, it would be impossible to make sense of anything because nothing would be sensible. If we are pattern seekers, we need patterns to seek. Without laws and patterns—or firm game rules that do not change at the random whim of a demon who laughs and lies at our expense—we would be nothing more than deformed and wretched amoebas.

We owe them our lives. We owe them also our arrogance and the untimely defiance we make of them. As we play god, we lose ourselves in a labyrinth of infinite possibilities, all beyond our flimsy understanding of the own and the foreign.

But, what can we expect from higher animals who claim to be rational but are not in control (or at least management) of their very being? Simple emotions overcome the bravest among the brave, and yet, perhaps out of desperation to escape, like those science fiction authors, from a reality they hate, or perhaps out of purely resigned submission to the incomprehensible, they are willing to send us all to the other side of chaos.

That is what they are doing.

III.

The calm of the earthly, the known, and the familiar was always accompanied by a tangibility of our own mortality. We feared the night, which snatched away what was dear to us on the most placid sleep, without warning or apology. We feared the day, which burnt us and devoured us from within with unsatisfied hunger.

And so we built a fortress. A bastion of civilization. We ran forward, to placate the day and dominate the night. We had to, as a moral imperative, learn to play as best we could the game that was offered to us. A game we didn’t choose. That’s why, in a fit of power and madness, we’ve decided that we no longer want to play.

But if we ever break free, out of the bars of the mundane, and witness the whole universe falling apart before our eyes and under our feet, make no mistake: We will be again, in an instant, those frightened animals we once were, only able to embrace our own insignificance.

Because a drop is too small for a glass

And it wouldn’t quench our thirst,

But a glass is even smaller for an ocean

Which can drown us, the accursed.