The Care and Feeding of Heresy

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Heresy is the whole point. Essay. 600 words, 3-minute read.

Cardinals Biggles, Ximénez, and Fang. Monty Python’s go-to inquisitors.

The Care and Feeding of Heresy

By Ray Tabler

There are no limits upon the writing of science fiction and fantasy. Any crazy, improbable, even impossible situation the human mind can conceive is fair game. The only constant is the question, “what if?” What if aliens show up? What if we are alone in the universe? What if we could change history? What if fantastic, magical creatures exist and thrive in another realm?

At the end of what-if is a blank space, to be filled in by the writer. Not everyone is comfortable with, let alone capable of, venturing into that white void. And sometimes the reaction to what comes after what-if is negative. Very negative. Often, speculative fiction turns out to be heresy. In fact, heresy is science fiction’s and fantasy’s stock in trade.

Flowers For Algernon, Brave New World, Slaughterhouse 5, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Game of Thrones, and The Golden Compass are examples of speculative fiction which got a lot of people mad. Each is a foul heresy from some point of view. Which by some metrics of SFF is success.

Science fiction and fantasy are a vast workshop, or art studio if you prefer, where people with crazy ideas kludge together concepts in the form of stories. Sheltered from reality, those ephemeral worlds can be examined, debated, and tinkered with for what they might teach us, about us. Occasionally, some scrap of an inspiration might breach containment, and escape to the outside world. Usually with disastrous results.

Within the last five years, thinking machines have come much closer to reality. Perhaps I’m over optimistic, but we are likely in a better frame of mind to deal with that as a result of 100 years of people playing what-if games on the subject. Which doesn’t mean we won’t freak out should cyber citizens become a thing. We just won’t freak out nearly as much. We’ve been inoculated to the concept.

Arms of our government have hinted that UFOs might not be so tinfoil hat after all. Astronomers announced that three separate interstellar objects zipped, or are zipping, through our solar system, and just so happen to be passing close to our planet. At least one of them altered its path in a manner which could be viewed as a deliberate course change. Whether these are alien probes or not, the reaction of the public was, “Meh. What’s on Netflix?” We’ve seen it all before. Let us know if the aliens are here to invade or just say hi.

Ironically enough, the heresies of speculative fiction come from both ends of the political spectrum. Mack Reynolds preached socialism. George Orwell warned about the potholes on the road to that goal. Ursala K. LeGuin provided the same service for anarchy. Robert Heinlein toyed with restricting the franchise to those who shoulder responsibility. People are still arguing vehemently about each of these musings, decades later. And that is the whole point.

Heresy is at the very foundation of this grand and glorious thought experiment we call speculative fiction. Those in charge, formally or otherwise, will always be threatened by new ideas. Any change might present an opportunity to reshuffle the established order, and is therefore suspect. Science fiction and fantasy authors don’t think small either. They envision entirely new paradigms, draped in the sheep’s clothing of a cracking yarn. No wonder they’re labeled heretics.

END.

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