Non-fiction: Review of Wisdom of the Mythtellers by Sean Kane

Journey to the West, one of the ‘four great novels of the Chinese canon’, is most often attributed to Wu Chengen.  Author and title requisite for fiction these days, most take for granted that indeed, he is the one who penned the story.  Wu is, in fact, the person who collected, collated, fit, polished, and presented in finished form the myriad pieces of the magnificent tale of Sun Wukong, Sanzang, and their quest for the holy sutras.  The original story having undergone thousands of iterations by street corner storytellers, the result is a narrative that holds its history in episodic rather than escalating form.

But this simple transition in the evolution of storytelling in China, from oral to written tradition, is but one minor—and late—step in the history of storytelling as a whole.  Before street corner storytellers were bards, and before bards, shamans, and before shamans simple gossip over the campfire—thousands and thousands of years of human culture and existence covered in this simple statement.  Tracing story and myth all the way back to its roots, another observation can be made in the manner in the evolution of stories: humanity’s subservience, or lack thereof, to nature.  From the Paleolithic to the Mesolithic, Neolithic to the Bronze, Iron to the Information Age, humanity, an idea in this context identified by the West, has shifted its stance on the power of the Earth and its inherent forces.  Where once gods inhabited every rock and shadow, it was whittled down to a pantheon, and from the pantheon, distilled into one ruling god, and from one god to the belief mankind holds its fate in its own hands.  Science fiction the mode of discourse which most obviously represents the latter, we are left with scraps and tatters of what remains of the former.  Enter Sean Kane’s Wisdom of the Mythtellers (1998).

Review of Transfigurations by Michael Bishop

Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is one of the science fiction’s landmark works.  A philosophical and psychological study of a man confronting the inherently unknowable, the imagery, events, and overall experience of the novel lodge in the mind, begging questions for which one uncomfortably has no immediate answer.  So strange and haunting, a person can only think of the main character’s experiences as the most figurative representation of ‘alien’ possible.  Bringing the idea closer to home corporeally but no less existentially is Michael Bishop’s “Death and Designation among the Asadi” (1973).  The premise so fertile, he revisited the novella years later, extending the story into the novel Transfigurations.  Layers upon layers, it possesses the same quest for understanding in an irrational scenario as Solaris, but adds an anthropological element, tying in evolutionary and biological aspects.  No less uncomfortably thought provoking, Bishop’s novel is likewise a classic of the genre.

Transfigurations is the story of Thomas Benedict.  Living on Bosk Veld, he is in regular contact with a friend, the anthropologist Egan Chaney, who is in the field studying the mysterious aliens who inhabit the planet. Chaney’s notes becoming more erratic as his experiences with the monkey/lion Asadi become increasingly bizarre, Benedict begins to fear for his friend’s life.  The Asadi openly copulating, having staring contests with psychedelically pinwheel eyes, participating in randomly violent acts, appearing subservient to a flying homunculus, and disappearing into the jungle as soon as the sun sets every day, Benedict’s fears are well-placed.  Jaw-dropping descriptions of a sacred pagoda the last word he gets from Chaney, all communication is suddenly cut off.  It thus takes the appearance of Chaney’s daughter on Bosk Veld, a young woman named Elegy and her chimpanzee biomodified to look like an Asadi to motivate Benedict to enter the mysterious jungle and find his friend.  Benedict likewise becoming subsumed in the desire to explain the behavior and doings of the Asadi, he soon finds himself stepping in familiar footsteps.  With Chaney’s notes as a guide and the fresh discoveries of Elegy and her chimp opening doors, the mysterious pagoda lies ahead.