Mythic Questing

No, this post is not about that excellent show Mythic Quest (when is season 4 finally coming out???) What I want to talk about are some of the ideas from – the also excellent – SF YouTube channel authored by Damien Walter.

First off, I’m not exaggerating when I say Damien’s content and ideas are excellent. In my own “quest” to get better at writing, he’s been a fantastic resource about how SF & F have evolved, and what works in stories. But what I’m thinking about today is his view on what makes the greatest science fiction and fantasy stories is myth, that the story connects with the reader and the world in an archetypal way. Now I imagine anyone who’s taken a university English course, or even just read Edith Hamilton, understands that myths are part of our cultural context. When Frodo and the fellowship set out for Mordor – a strategy with almost no chance of success – that makes total sense to us, because we’ve been raised in a culture that “remembers” Orpheus questing into the underworld or Theseus facing the Minotaur. It is well known that Tolkien, an expert in myths like Beowulf, the Norse pantheon and much more, drew upon that in his conception of the world of Arda. When people read Harry Potter, Harry and Dumbledore are easy to understand because of Arthur and Merlin – the hero and mentor.

So, no question that myth provides all of us with concepts that let us relate stories to ourselves and the world.

Myth … or Trope?

Myths are indeed templates for stories. But the same can be said for a related concept, the trope. Tropes are general-purpose narrative constructs; because they are to some extent universal, they appear over and over again. A much-used example is the Ticking Time Bomb – some sort of peril or problem that must be solved in a typically short window of time. Time bomb appears no less than four times in James Bond novels; in the Star Trek universe, the starship auto-destruct with countdown is used (by my count) at least fifteen times.

There’s no ancient myth I can identify that prefigures the ticking time bomb. It seems likely this trope is just that – similar to when a character’s cell phone loses signal at a critical time, or when a hero in a car tells their sidekick, “take the wheel!”, the time bomb is a usage of the modern age. It is nothing more than a familiar, believable device.

But is that always true? Another endemic trope is the con man, a swindler, cheat, shady character, who may or may not have a heart of gold. Harold Hill in The Music Man is a con man, and of course so are Hooker and Gondorff in The Sting; have to include Quark on this list as well. Yes, these are all stock characters in a certain sense, but they have a mythic history: Hermes and Odysseus were con men, so was Loki, the Native American Coyote, and a host of others. The WikiPedia entry on this lists over 70 examples. Looks like some tropes are myths, or at least derive from them.

Meaning

Rather than nerd-out over the difference between myth and trope, I’ll propose a simple answer: Myths have meaning, tropes do not. Let’s take King Arthur as an example. Forgotten as a child, with no expectation of honor or position, Arthur becomes King when he shows his innate virtue by drawing the sword from the stone. Assisted by Merlin, and by The Lady in the Lake, Arthur strives to discover what is means to be a good king. Today anyone who knows the name King Arthur understands it as a symbol of honor, justice, and empathy. This myth is more than an entertaining story or series of clever twists, it tells us something about how we should view the world.

The best stories take myths like these and let us rediscover their meanings in new ways. Who is Aragorn from LoTR but Arthur? Gifted with a sword of kingship, Aragorn is assisted by a powerful mentor, and learns the weak are as important as the strong. Tolkien brought this myth to us in a new way, in a setting of global catastrophe, something that is much feared by those born in the twentieth century.

I submit that the gunslinger Shane is an Arthurian knight, and so is Robert Parker’s Spenser for Hire.

All these examples are entertaining. But they endure as classics of their genres because they have something more: meaning.

Science Fiction and Myths

Seen from my perspective as a writer, this is not all good news. It is hard enough to write entertainment. Now it has to have meaning as well? Can’t I just be satisfied with writing a ripping good yarn?

For the longest time, that’s exactly what science fiction was – genre tales with plots familiar to readers of westerns, mysteries, or adventure, but in settings with spaceships and planets. Yet something happened in the the 1950s. I’ll go with one of Damien’s videos, where he tags Isaac Asimov as a key point of the transformation of SF:

John W. Campbell had already started the transition of SF to be less adventure and more science. As one of Campbell’s writers, Asimov embraced that, but wanted to take a step beyond the engineering centric stories Campbell was himself writing. The Keynesian “economic revolution” of the 1940s was giving way to a more market-driven model – economics and mathematical modeling were certainly topics of interest for Asimov. Add the high-tension politics of the time, with the Cold War starting, and on one hand the nascent Civil Rights movement, and on the other organizations like the John Birch Society, it was easy to envisage a world spinning out of control.

Out of this, Asimov updates the myth of Prometheus the Inventor, creator of the forbidden, into Hari Seldon, the Scientist-Sage. Seldon’s invention, psychohistory, is a kind of economic modeling on steroids – multiplied by a billion. With it Seldon predicts the future of the galaxy, then plans for a sequence of interventions that will push that future in desirable directions. Seldon is not the mentor for the hero, he *is* the hero, the figure who through rationality and perseverance enacts a plan to save mankind. Unlike Prometheus, Seldon is not punished by the gods for his presumption, because in the Seldon myth, there are no gods – only science, and rationality.

Science Fiction and the 21st Century Myth

Thinking through this, it seems to me that science fiction and fantasy are uniquely positioned to bring forward new perspectives on myth. Why? Because like myths themselves, SF & F are stories where we make stuff up. Take a venerable genre like the police procedural. Yes, you can devise an even more cynical, quirky or mentally unique detective, but you can’t change the rules of the story: the crime must be solved, justice must be done. A romance can be in a never-seen before setting, or have colorful supporting characters, or modern day impediments to love, but at the end the principals must live happily ever after.

In SF & F there are no rules. We can decree the world to be any way we like, and then we can test what that means for a myth. Like:

• • What would Troy’s Cassandra do in a world where predictive AI was omnipresent?
  • What if Odysseus’ home was in another dimension?
  • What if the netherworld Gilgamesh journeys to is an electronic repository of the consciousnesses of the dead?

I know these examples are cheesy – I just made them up this moment – but I hope they make the point: Almost all genres of literature address the world as it is; SF & F explore worlds that might be, letting us do the experiment of whether an old myth is still valid, or needs to change, or needs to be rejected.

What are these “21st Century Myths” going to look like? Hard predictions would be foolish, but I do have guesses:

• They are not going to proclaim themselves, we’ll probably only figure out what happened some years after the myth is written.
• They are going to be apolitical. Not that there won’t be lessons that bear on politics, but myth is much, much bigger than politics.
• They are going to offer solutions. Not easy or obvious ones, but for a myth to resonate, it has to do more than warn, it has to offer the possibility of progress.

I’ll bring my ramblings to an end. Many thanks to Damien Walter for sharing all this. Reading back, I don’t see much above that wasn’t in his content to begin with. Nonetheless, I’m the sort who needs to step through something on my own before I can get it.

I’ll leave you with the most mythic Bugs Bunny cartoon ever:

What’s Opera Doc from 2K HistoryClips on Vimeo.

Till next time …