One of my guilty pleasures is reading sci-fi. It’s mostly trash but my dad was a big fan of Louis L’Amour, and space operas are about the same thing, so I suppose it runs in the family. A few weeks ago I started with a new author (authors) around whom I had read some fascinating buzz. It seems like my life has slowed to a crawl because I’m quite enthralled with the writing.
The authors are Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (†) and the many books are set in a future world, centering on a culture of James-Bond-like people who fly spaceships. The books are best described as “space opera,” a mindless genre conceptually connected to Westerns, that are easy reads for a summer afternoon. While the series is rooted in hard sci-fi, nearly everything else is rooted in stuff I mostly hate.
There’s a healthy dose of magic, and it irritates me when sci-fi authors resort to magic in order to solve plot problems. But the magic is subtle and it was probably not until the third book that I realized how much magic was involved. In fact, the magic is sophisticated enough that it deserves further comment.
I have been deeply influenced by Jonathan Pageau’s work on what he calls “symbolism.” I don’t think it’s the best term because our culture assumes that the symbolic is not real. What Pageau is doing is identifying and describing a generally ignored aspect of reality that holds material reality together. It is what C.S. Lewis called the deep magic of Aslan in his Narnia books. Much of what Pageau delves into might be called “magical” by the hard-core materialists, but Pageau can explain how this mysterious aspect of reality that always lies just beyond our intellectual grasp is the driving force of reality.
Pageau is a product of this current cultural moment. It seems that all the famous materialist atheists are finding religion of one sort or another. Everyone is scrambling to find a way to describe this “deep magic” of the “symbolic” layer of reality, and Pageau has done a great service for the church by being on the cutting edge of this new sensibility. But it’s not only Christians who are exploring these things.
I’m an on-and-off fan of Phil Ford’s and J.F. Martel’s podcast Weird Studies. They are fascinated by everything from Eastern mysticism to the occult to UFOs to the philosophy of Henri Bergsen and Charles Taylor to John Carpenter and Sam Raimi movies to music by Wilco and Brian Eno to Hayao Miyazai’s manga art to Glen Gould’s music (Phil is a pianist and music professor) and the short stories of Arthur Machen. It is an academic exploration of reality beyond the material world and the ways we try to conceptualize it. They are a secular version, and often creepy, version of what Pageau is doing. I listen to them so that I can keep up with this conversation in a secular context (Weird Studies) and in a properly Christian context (The Symbolic World).
What Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are doing is describing a sci-fi world both at the materialist level (hard sci-fi) and at this deeper weird, symbolic, or magical level. As a result, the “magic” of the Liaden universe isn’t spells and powers, it’s the weird reality that exists just beyond our grasp: Trees that can communicate, cats that “think,” but in a decidedly non-human way, and para-normal perceptions.
Most disturbingly (for a red-blooded American male) is that these books are romance novels. But Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are slightly older than me, and the romance is mature, driven by attachments rather than lust. They are most certainly not bodice rippers.
There is a lot of hard sci-fi available to read, and I am dumbfounded that not only have I continued to listen to the stories (Audible is in the process of turning the disparate 25 novels and 33 chapbooks into an organized audio tale), but I have become so enthralled with them that I’m not getting a lot else done.
I began with the original seven-book series (the “Agent of Change” series), which is brilliantly narrated by Andy Caploe. What Lee and Miller have managed to do, and what Caploe is so able to communicate with his voice, is to clearly identify each culture (Liadens, Terrans, the Turtles, the Robot) with the cadence of the language. When the Terrans talk it sounds like lower-class bad English. When the Liadens talk, it sounds like Shakespeare, but with contemporary language instead of the Jacobean and Victorian forms. When the Turtles talk, it is majestic, slow, and mellifluous. I am reminded of Tolkien. Tolkien invented a believable world by inventing languages and building the world around the languages. Lee and Miller invented a believable world by subtly changing the structure of English to match the formality of the Liadens the ancient sensibilities of the Turtles and the rough and tumble everyday talk of the Terrans. When Terrans and Liadens talk to each other, it’s jarring in much the same way a cross-cultural conversation is jarring.
Other sci-fi authors have attempted to do this, but the results typically sound arbitrary and just plain dumb. Sci-fi authors invent words and word order mostly to confuse the reader, it seems to me. Lee and Miller, on the other hand, use a subtle hand so that what one hears is simple English elegantly adjusted to fit the culture who speaks it.
If you are a lover of language, can deal with the mindless idiosyncrasies of a sci-fi space opera, and are willing to wade through the emotional mire of a romance novel … and are looking for a breezy, mindless, summer listen, I highly recommend at least the first seven books beginning with Agents of Change.
[Thanks to M_Delcambre at DeviantArt https://www.deviantart.com/m-delcambre for the image.]
Just Another Jim 