Fantastic Voyages
Humans are born with wanderlust; the lure of the long migration out of Africa is in our blood. And I suspect that as soon as boats were invented, our ancestors discovered the thrill of the sea voyage into the unknown. I think of this when I walk my dogs along the bluff in Long Beach and see two great ocean liners, one the Queen Mary that will never go to sea again, and the other a ship of the Carnival Cruise Line that journeys up and down the coasts of Southern California and Mexico with its load of holiday-makers and sightseers. When we are prevented from voyaging in person, by finances or health or circumstance, we have always turned to the next best thing, the tales of other explorers’ adventures. One of the first of these ancient, popular accounts of exploration by sea voyage still moves us today with its images of strangeness and danger: Homer’s Odyssey.
The Venetians made their reputation as formidable explorers of the watery world early on; they were joined by the Norse, the Portugese, the Spanish, and later the English. And we cannot forget the voyages undertaken on faith across an uncharted expanse of Pacific Ocean by the peoples of Micronesia. Nor should we overlook the voyages of trade and exploration of the Chinese fleets during the Ming Empire. An interesting facet of these Chinese voyages is the thousands of non-sailors who were aboard the junks for other purposes than manning the boats or fighting battles once they landed. These people included diplomats and concubines, farmers and animal caretakers (for any colonies that might be settled along the way), mapmakers and scribes, translators, Buddhist priests, and those rich enough to buy the experience of discovery. This wasn’t only an Oriental custom; Francis Drake’s Golden Hind sailed around the globe in the sixteenth century with a number of English nobles and their pages along for the excitement – and possible treasure – and incidentally contributing much-needed funds to the operation. Like the Chinese a century before, Drake provided musicians as well as navigators, and a parson to minister to these sea-faring souls, the tourists, we’d probably call them today.
And here perhaps we have the beginning of that modern trend: the ocean cruise. Whether it’s a brief weekend trip to Mazatlan, or a cruise through Alaska’s Inner Passage or the Caribbean, or the New York to Southampton run on one of the Queen Mary’s younger siblings, or something much longer, today’s passengers – like those on the Chinese junks and Drake’s galleon – expect food, entertainment, enlightenment, medical care, even spiritual counseling. We seem to take our culture with us when we go to sea for all but the briefest voyage. Our behavior on board can change too. Without the pressures and constraints of daily life, cruise ship passengers often exhibit characteristics that may have been suppressed before they took to the wide open spaces of the sea. Excessive eating and drinking are the norm, entertainment, games and other recreations are all part of the journey. Shipboard romances, even illicit ones, are not uncommon. And we know that people unanchored from their home reality often behave in a foreign port in ways they would never dream of at home.
Our planet has been rather thoroughly explored and charted by now, and there are only so many destinations on this planet we can choose , so we’re ready for the next phase, cruising among the stars. We’ve already witnessed the first wave of rich tourists paying large sums of money for the experience of shuttling up to the space station. We’re not quite ready for the next step, the luxury starliners touring space with thousands of ordinary folk aboard. But we have the next best thing, the science fiction tale of what it might be like.
Early examples of the “Tourists in Space” theme that has developed include a number of Jules Verne’s works (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (which might as well be a voyage into outer space), From the Earth to the Moon), and A.E. Van Vogt’s Voyage of the Space Beagle. A little later, we find Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero in this category too. One such science fictional voyage (Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001) even has the subtitle “A Space Odyssey.”
From these rousing adventures, it’s a small step to the television series, Star Trek. Large-canvas stories about space and the future – sometimes rather dismissively called “space opera” – fall into two major categories, tales about voyages of discovery, and tales about empire. Star Trek is one of the former, and Star Wars the latter. The Enterprise becomes a world unto itself on its long voyages; romances are not uncommon (although if they involve Captain Kirk, they are destined to end unhappily), and later iterations of the series even have elaborate entertainment features such as the holo-deck on board for the crew to while away the long time between ports-of-call.
To my mind, though, one of the most thought-provoking and imaginative of these future tourists-in-space accounts is Norman Spinrad’s 1983 novel, The Void Captain’s Tale. No priest or parson on the ships of Spinrad’s fictional line, but cruise directors and the entertainment they provide make for a vivid sub-plot. Unshackled from what Spinrad terms the ‘quotidian world,’ the passengers engage in bizarre behaviors and sexual rituals. In fact, the novel describes in some detail the culture of customs and recreation that develops on ships of the Second Starfaring Age. Spinrad continues this exploration through Child of Fortune, published two years later.
Are there any sociological lessons we can draw from these fantastic voyages? Science Fiction has long explored the idea of the generation ships that will be needed for truly long voyages in space , absent the discovery of FTL drives. What Spinrad gives us to think about is the notion that we won’t be just exporting human culture as we know it (or as our descendants will) when we voyage out into deep space. We will be landing on those far away planets with something unexpected and unknown, for our culture will change with and be changed by the trip itself. We may program the computers with our science and our arts, and stock the DNA so we can replicate the flora and fauna of Old Earth that we want to take with us, but no matter how hard we try we won’t be able to control the culture our voyagers land with. ‘New Earth’ won’t be much like ‘Old Earth.’ Customs we can probably not even dream about may have evolved. Certainly new fashions, new cuisine, new laws.
And will the long conversations with the stars on those odysseys bring about new takes on religion and philosophy, requiring new priests, parsons and prophets? I don’t see why not.
The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds. To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.
2 comments so far.
I remember as a kid listening to an interview with Sir Edmund Hillary, just after he climbed Everest. “Why did you do it?” the interviewer asked. “Because it was there,” Hillary replied.
It’s in our DNA!
1. Allison Cornell on 30th June 2009 at 10:37 pm
Humans created as restless beings… wanderlust and wondering… always in search of (???) Why is it that we always push the envelope of what is possible… Can we climb Everest? Find the North Pole? What exactly is over the horizon? Can we put a man on the moon? Mars? A planet in the Alpha Centauri system? Such wonderings certainly make for great science fiction.... which may one day be science fact… Amazing to look at what was fantastic fiction 50-100 years ago and where we are today… Science fiction and the human spirit of wondering “What if...” seem to create new realities…