We’re taking a break tonight from high fantasy as Jeffersonian Democrat’s great series on wyrd in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion has wrapped up for now. If you missed it, it’s a thorough analysis about how the Old English concept of wyrd, or fate, works on the Elves through The Silmarillion and into The Lord of the Rings. I recommend it highly; it’s dense and tightly-argued, as the publications of professional academics have to be, but it’s more accessible than most academic papers I’ve read (and a few I’ve written), so cheers and thank you to JD and his important work — it’ll be a landmark in Tolkien studies in years to come, and we got to read it here!
As I’ve been working on another project (history, nonfiction), the concept of wyrd has stuck with me, as well as questions of free will and fate. Narratives of fate, or wyrd, or karma, etc. etc, at work in the world all presuppose some kind of organizing or balancing principle to ensure that everything comes out right in the end.
The opposite view is of the existentialist: the question of an organizing principle (a deity, a Big Boss, or just a reversion to the mean) is irrelevant. In other words, you can believe in a deity or not; it doesn’t matter. Spirituality, atheism, agnosticism, religiosity — it’s unprovable; it hangs above our pay grades and we’re left with to decide for ourselves, each of us, on our own, on top of a mountain or beside a ocean or alone in the dark: what purpose life has.
Of course Camus takes existentialism out for a good airing, and ever since, so have the rest of us, in our own ways. What purpose is there in life? I mean, there has to be something, especially since the alternative is to drown in despair and ennui, and that’s just boring.
So I’ve been reading, and musing about wyrd, and it’s given me an interesting lens through which to view my recent reads, and to re-evaluate some old favorites. This particular thread of thought was set off because I recently finished Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, which I had been avoiding because I mistakenly thought I’d have to be a lot more up on physics than it turns out I needed to be.
The story is fascinating and compelling, but I found myself tripping over the character Ye Wenjie and her role, whose life is changed by reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring:
The book dealt only with a limited subject: the negative environmental effects of excessive pesticide use. But the perspective taken by the author shook Ye to the core. The use of pesticides had seemed to Ye just a normal, proper — or, at least, neutral — act, but Carson’s book allowed Ye to see that, from Nature’s perspective, their use was indistinguishable from the Cultural Revolution, and equally destructive to our world. If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil.
As she continued to mull over these thoughts, a deduction made her shudder: Is it possible that the relationship between humanity and evil is similar to the relationship between the ocean and an iceberg floating on its surface? Both the ocean and the iceberg are made of the same material. That the iceberg seems separate is only because it is in a different form. In reality, it is but a part of the vast ocean. . . .
It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race. (pp. 27-28)
No spoilers, but Ye is really a Khan Noonien Singh figure, someone so psychologically damaged that she has become less a character and more a force of nature. I would have thought her unbelievable in an otherwise carefully-drawn narrative but that Liu adds a scene where Ye meets three of the four women who executed her father during the show trial that opens the novel. Despite the years that have passed, it’s obvious that the Cultural Revolution broke victor and victim alike, putting them all beyond the land of second chances. Ye’s purpose is horrifying, but she embraces it with such a joy, almost a religious devotion, that it’s easy to see how purity of purpose can beget horror.
If fulfilling your destiny is one pole marked by Ye Wenjie, then SecUnit, the protagonist of Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, is entirely another.
Murderbot was lauded early on because, from the first novella All Systems Red, everyone identified with SecUnit. How can you not? It is the ultimate outsider. Critics especially saw the character as a metaphor for transgender protagonists. Readers on the autism spectrum saw in the character a kindred spirit struggling to analyze and modulate its emotions, as has everyone who ever felt like an outsider not entirely sure of welcome. But recently, and by recently I mean, like, recently, Wells has begun to refine the character. In her short story, “Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory,” published in April by Tor, she raises the question of purpose. For the first time, SecUnit is not the narrator, and the point of view belongs to Ayda Mensah, SecUnit’s favorite human, and she’s arguing with another character:
Ephraim asks her, “Can you separate that person from the purpose they were created for?”
Now that’s an argument. SecUnit is a person, a potentially very dangerous person. But right now, Ephraim and the other councilors who agree with him have no evidence to suggest that SecUnit would act on that potential.
….
Ayda spreads her hands, palms up and open. “I couldn’t. The person separated itself.”
It’s one thing to have been created (and yes, although it’s a person, SecUnit was created and is an uncomfortable fusion of machine and human) for a purpose, but what happens if you reject the purpose for which you were created? It’s one thing to fulfill your purpose (or your programming) — that’s something we tell ourselves and each other all the time, that we have purpose to fulfill, potential to tap and explore and exploit — it’s quite another to decide that although you were made to be a relentless killing machine, you can choose not to be. You can reject your programming. You don’t lose the potential to destroy, but your decision to not destroy is what defines you. (This is a more elegant stating of the thesis than the conversation between Dumbledore and Harry Potter about how our decisions shape our actions.)
So we’ve got the Purpose of Life (another way of thinking of destiny or wyrd) taken to horrifying extremes in The Three-Body Problem, and rejected entirely in the Murderbot series.
Then there’s John Scalzi, the extremely popular Twitter guy with the great cats who also happens to write novels, and those novels are all action-centered. And in every one of them, he sneaks the thinky bits in under cover, whether it’s a parable about the climate crisis (The Collapsing Empire) or the morality of war (Old Man’s War) or a tribute/ retelling of H. Piper Beam and meditation on sentience and environmentalism in Fuzzy Nation. Or the ultimate tie-in schlocky in-joke of all time in science fiction: the incomparable Redshirts.
Reshirts, if you haven’t read it, starts out as a joke, a riff, if you will, on Star Trek’s disposable engineering ensigns. It’s a meta-novel — really an experimental novel — that involves multiple overlapping realities and it’s a great romp, especially when Kerensky gets stuck in a hotel room without his pants, but at its core, it’s a meditation about purpose in life. As the characters learn not only what the Narrative is but how to separate themselves from it, they face that existential question: what is the purpose of life, and how do you live it. Hanson tells Dahl,
“Whether you’re an extra or the hero, this story is about to end. When it’s done, whatever you want to be will be up to you and only you. It will happen away from the eyes of any audience and from the hand of any writer. You will be your own man.”
“If I exist when I stop being written,” Dahl said.
“There is that,” Hanson said. “It’s an interesting philosophical question. But if I had to guess, I’d guess that your creator would say to you that he would want you to live happily ever after.”
(sorry, it’s the Kindle version, so I don’t have pages)
This may be a bit of a cop-out, to say that if there’s a G-d, it would want us all to live happily ever after. But in this existential world — the real one, the one we live in, not any fictional reality — we get to choose our purposes. And we can choose to either be crushed by the weight of existentialism, or we can decide we’d rather live happily ever after, no matter what the Narrative throws at us.
Which is why I really like Scalzi. Even the most dogged “I read only for recreation” type who reads him is going to pick up the thinky bits.
Here’s where I stop so we can talk about the poles of destiny or whatever the hell it was I was thinking about. Oh, purpose — that was it. Why are we alive? What do we do with the time we have? (Cue Peggy Lee and start the dance music.)