Redeemed Somehow
Once upon a time, I picked up Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, and was immediately a fan of science fiction. Sure, I’d already been exposed to stuff with elements of science fiction; but nothing that didn’t stray beyond the bounds of speculative science and firmly into fantasy at one point or another. Asimov’s terse style and grand, sweeping imagination enveloped me completely.
Eventually, I found such staples as David Brin, Greg Bear, and the incomparably talented William Gibson, and became inspired not only to consume, but to both develop a sort of command of science, and then to produce. I created worlds, extrapolated future technologies from current ones, and found people around whom to wrap these endeavors. I read more, I studied, and made notes and plans for stories. I filled notebooks and floppy disks.
Over time, the more I read, the more I planned, the less compelled I was by the genre. It was quite a struggle to find or weave something which didn’t read like a laundry list of clever ideas forced out the mouths of crudely carved puppets. Rarely did I come across a story whose characters wiggled their way into my head and expanded into personalities. Typically, the characterization was earnest but flawed at best, the taping of photocopied faces onto papier mache heads. When porn stars, even futuristic porn stars, rap fluently about biochemistry and psychology, I had to put the book down.
In recent years, for a variety of reasons, I’ve found it difficult to read much of anything. In fact, it took a year or two to read Slant, and since then I’ve poked into one thing or another without any drive or purpose. So far this year, however, I’ve finished one book and have a handful of pages until I finish the second. The latter begins:
I had lost my faith in an interesting way. I believed in the existence of everything: Heaven, Hell, the Angelic Host, demons and possession, redemption and growth, the value in spiritual terms of the suffering of the innocent, our place in the Universe and the Universe’s place in Creation. I believed in God and all His glory. I believed in the Immaculate Conception and Original Sin. I believed in something I called Original Sainthood. I believed in Santa Claus and that men had walked on the Moon. I believed that an educated man who does not believe in miracles is not a realist. I bought it all. Always had. Still do. My loss of faith derived from the continual reminder, on a moment-to-moment basis, to me and everyone I ever loved, that we were insignificant. It was about my realization that the imminent possibility of the loss of our lives and even our immortal souls did not matter a damn, either to God or to His emissaries on Earth.
It was a world without a Superman.
In the hardcover novel Kingdom Come, Elliot S. Maggin solidly adapts the graphic novel of the same title by Mark Waid and Alex Ross. The headliners are at once familiar and accessible, and freshly and vividly introduced. The world is fantastic and mundane, surprisingly more the latter, and all the better for it. We find that superheroes—or, more generally, “metahumans”, as the notion of a “superhero” is not surprisingly taken to task—are people before they are anything else. They have emotional baggage. They have to make a living; they have to feed themselves; they have debts. They are, ultimately, like you and me, if we could fly or melt things with our extremities.
I’ll say that I’ve enjoyed immensely the drama and tedium, and have found new respect for classic DC creations (I was once quite the Marvel fanboy—we all have skeletons). Beyond that, however, I have found in Maggin’s tale what might be the best example of what science fiction ought to be. True, this isn’t science fiction; but it shares with science fiction both an empirical tone and a credible otherworldliness. Analog Science Fiction and Fact defines the type of story it’s looking for as a story “in which some aspect of future science or technology is so integral to the plot that, if that aspect were removed, the story would collapse.” I agree that that creative integrity is important, central even; but it’s so easy to interpret that to mean that the science should be the primary character at the expense of others. That is how I interpreted it when I wrote the stuff, way back when. This same class of standard exists for any work within which some element of otherworldliness exists, even if that standard is adapted to one or another particular genre, including the universes of superheroes; and, as with much of science fiction, super powers and clever costumes often overshadow everything else.
The problem with Analog’s definition is that it would seem to be difficult to include humanity in the characters and their machinations while at the same time shoehorning science into things. I mean, if you’re telling one of the universal human stories, the sort of narrative that echoes throughout each of us and which can completely absorb our attention, how can science be “so integral to the plot that, if that aspect were removed, the story would collapse?” These universalities were so long before what we consider “science” became a significant endeavor. The same question holds for any genre work.
Elliot Maggin answers strongly. The basic points of Kingdom Come’s plot curve can be found in all kinds of stories: the search for the meaning of life; coming to an intimate knowledge of one’s self; class struggles; the ravages of war; love and loss. It’s the way in which the points are connected, and how the lives of some of the most popular among all superheroes are woven into that curve, which sets this book above the standards of genre fiction, and into the realm of literature. Maggin uses the familiar customs and costumes of heroes and villains alike to draw out that which is fundamental to the human condition.
There are passages in what is predominantly deftly articulate and smooth prose in which you’re reminded of the source material: comic books. I doubt any other writer would have less trouble reconciling the intricacies of superheroes with the mundane world.
The man looked out across his wheat field as he patted the little dog. Then he went into the barn and came back out carrying the tractor balanced on one hand over his head. He set the machine down facing the edge of the wheat field and went inside for the thresher attachment.
“He came to Earth,” my guide told me, “with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men.”
“Oh my dear Lord,” I said. “It’s Superman.”
Kingdom Come is among the most compelling reads in quite a while, notwithstanding these flawed excerpts. Compelling enough to make me once again want to tweak the universe and find out what happens.
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