The Magi’s Starship
On January. 6th, the Christian church celebrates the visit of three kings bearing symbolic gifts to a newborn child in Judea. Sometimes called “Wise Men” or “Magi,” these shadowy figures were probably astrologers since they were following the appearance of a new star which might have been a comet – or, as Arthur C. Clarke speculated in the classic short story, “The Star,”a supernova that incinerated its own planetary system. That’s all we know about them, really; even their names are a later addition to the tale. Although Matthew tells us they came from the “east” and traveled “west,” this may be due to the fact that the east (Persia, home of Zoroastrianism) was reputed to be the source of both learning and sorcery at the time. This was sufficiently heady stuff that has continued to light the human imagination down the centuries.
We’ve long been fascinated by the magician figure in literature, a fascination that stretches in western civilization from Merlin to Prospero to Gandalf. We want to believe there are some humans – like us but not like us – who can escape the laws of nature that bind the rest of us, bending it to their will. We fantasize about the mysterious few who stand with one foot in our everyday reality and the other in a realm we can never reach. Sometimes that achievement comes with a terrible price, and our folklore gives us the Faustus figure, or Dr Parnassus in Terry Gilliam’s recent movie, The Imaginarium Of Dr Parnassus. There is considerable overlap between the magus, the wizard and the alchemist (one of the most famous of these being Queen Elizabeth 1’s John Dee, who appears as a character in John Crowley’s Aegypt). Alchemists were closest to being proto-scientists, experimenting with the effects of combining different substances and elements, but all three have in their turn held our ancestors in awe.
If we have any doubt about the continuing fascination of this concept, we have only to examine the present-day popularity of stage magicians. Some, like David Copperfield on stage in Las Vegas, may intimate that making the elephant disappear is magic, but in our scientific age we know it’s a clever, well-rehearsed trick. We enjoy the effects, but as adults we aren’t fooled. Yet occasionally, a magician comes along like the late Doug Henning (himself a follower of the eastern sage Maharishi Mahesh Yogi whose followers practiced levitation) who turns the tables on this and earnestly confides in the audience that though his tricks may look like magic, they’re really just tricks. And the more Henning protested the effects were tricks, the more our inner child suspected they were magic. (Another of Henning’s influences, Houdini, seems well on the way to becoming an archetype of the Magus himself.) The fact that we understand we are being tricked but are neither enraged nor disappointed bears witness to the continuing power of this archetype.
Neil Burger, writer and director of the movie, The Illusionist, spoke of the appeal of “the uncanny sense that nothing is what it seems....the idea of coming face to face with something unexplainable.” In other words, a clever magician who fools us with ingenious tricks remains just a talented stage performer, and one whose marvelous effects are attributed to a deity might be a saint, but that’s not the power of the Magus. (We might note that the three kings didn’t claim to have received word from God; they were following a star.)
In mainstream literature, John Fowles’ The Magus, and Stephen King and Dean Koontz’s Shadowland, provide two obvious examples of this trope. Not surprisingly, our own fantasy genre is filled with images of the figure that transcends – or appears to – our reality; some are great wizards, some petty conjurors, all of them performing supernatural tricks, a few rising to the more exalted status of Magus. The difference, trivial perhaps in terms of affect on the reader’s enjoyment of the story, is that in mainstream literature and work like Crowley’s, the strange effects the Magus creates aren’t explained by the laws of science, but we aren’t asked to believe they are magic either. In this, the authors seem to follow the example of Matthew: Here’s the story; take it or leave it.
What about science fiction? Surely a genre that is based on the underlying reality of the physical laws of nature can’t allow itself such a wildly improbable figure as the Magus? But a character that doesn’t base claims to performing marvels on a higher authority is little threat to the reader’s scientific sensibilities. We assume that there are laws of behavior in the physical universe that we haven’t yet/may not ever discover let alone control. How oddly comforting to our trembling inner child at the edge of the Void (from which God has apparently been banished) that somebody is still in charge! Given the persistence of the Magus archetype, we can assume it arises in response to something deep in the human psyche. If this is true, examples should continue to occur even in hard sf in the future.
The problem is, as Clarke put it succinctly for us, any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic (try explaining your GPS to Matthew). This simultaneously allows science fiction writers to cover a lot of ground without the story devolving into explanations – speculations, really – about how the technology works, but it also makes it more difficult for us to distinguish the advanced from the archetype. Great science fiction tends to venture far out in its speculations, and the Magus may not have been entirely exiled from the literature. Two examples of SF authors playing with the sense of things not being quite what they seem are Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, a novel which bounces between an account of intrigues on Mars with its engineered fads, and some truly strange and inexplicable happenings, and Ian Watson’s The Gardens of Delight which introduces us to an unlikely partnership between an alchemist and an AI. Indeed, the new Magus may not be a human character at all. Clarke himself gave us the very Magus-like Monolith of 2001 and the sequels. (Hard to turn Jupiter into a star, however dim, by either magic or known science, but a Magus might pull it off!)
At first glance, then, it would seem that in science fiction at least we have put away childish dreams. Yet the needs of the older parts of our brains aren’t always rational; we still crave the encounter with things that can’t be explained. I would suggest that just as we’re not done yet with the ancient archetypes of the Hero or the Holy Fool, we should be on the lookout for the Magus, possibly on the bridge of a starship.
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.
