sf, page 13 of 33

I thought, after writing about Margaret Murray’s Witch Cult in Western Europe — a work of questionable scholarship that nevertheless went on to influence popular culture, including the fiction of H P Lovecraft — I’d write about a similar book, from half a century later, which was actually (if indirectly) influenced by Lovecraft.

It’s likely, though, that von Däniken never read Lovecraft. Jason Colavito, in his short book Origins of the Space Gods (which he has made available as a free ebook), traces the “Ancient Astronaut theory” from Helena Blavatsky and Charles Fort to Lovecraft and then to Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels’ The Morning of the Magicians (1960). (Bergier and Pauwels popularised Lovecraft in France, so the influence there is undeniable.) Morning of the Magicians became something of a countercultural source text, though von Däniken at first forgot to mention it in his own book’s bibliography, until a lawsuit reminded him how liberally he’d borrowed from it. But, as Gary Lachman points out in The Dedalus Book of the 1960s: Turn Off Your Mind, von Däniken was no stranger to borrowing, as the international research trips he’d taken whilst writing Chariots had been funded by a series of falsified bank references and credit reports, which led to von Däniken’s imprisonment, for a short time, in 1970. (According to the New York Times, a court psychiatrist described him as “a prestige‐seeker, a liar and an unstable and criminal psychopath with a hysterical character”.) And this, according to his Wikipedia entry, was not his first court appearance on similar charges.

As if this weren’t already so different from the rather cosy-looking Margaret Murray in her knitted shawl and her background in Egyptology, von Däniken is, from the start, resolutely anti-academic. He hasn’t the least interest in even the appearance of scholarship, and instead begins by attacking “traditional” archaeologists, who, in his view, do nothing but:

“…stick a couple of old potsherds together, search for one or two adjacent cultures, stick a label on the restored find and—hey, presto!—once again everything fits splendidly into the approved pattern of thoughts.”

Such closed minds, von Däniken proclaims, will put his book “on the Index of those books which are better left unmentioned”. “It took courage to write this book,” he says at the start, “and it will take courage to read it.”

He’s very much a with-me-or-against-me kind of chap.

Von Däniken’s own method mostly consists of rhetoric rather than proof. Although it’s usually published nowadays without a trailing question mark, the first translated title, Chariots of the Gods? (it came out in England in 1969, and the US in 1970), is a fair representation of its approach. (Its original title was Erinnerungen an die Zukunft, which can be translated as Memories of the Future.) Von Däniken’s technique is to find oddities, puzzles, and things that the average reader might be surprised to find in the ancient world, then point at them and say, “Well, who can say it’s not aliens?”

It’s a worthwhile question to ask. Once it was established that space travel was possible, and that more advanced civilisations may exist on other planets, it is worth asking if they’ve visited us in the past. But von Däniken is too invested in the answer being “yes” to take a measured approach or look for more likely alternative explanations. It’s aliens or nothing. This can result in him appearing a little ridiculous at times, or merely hectoring at others. Gary Lachman characterises him as “a pub pontificator, laying down the law with a slam on the bar”, and this does seem to fit. It’s tempting to do a von Däniken-style revision of von Däniken himself in summarising his approach:

“…stick a couple of old oddities together, search for one or two presuppositions, slap a theory on it and—hey, presto!—once again everything fits splendidly into the von Däniken pattern of thoughts!”

Certainly, once you start checking what he says with even a superficial internet search, you see holes not just in his arguments but his premises. Too often it’s like what Wolfgang Pauli said of a fellow scientist’s new theory: “It’s not even wrong.”

For instance, he claims the Ark of the Covenant was “an electric conductor of several hundred volts”. Which is meaningless, as a conductor doesn’t have a voltage. (The idea, though, that the Ark was a sort of primitive capacitor (two sheets of statically-charged metal separated by wood, an insulator), has been around since 1745. See the Jewish Bible Quarterly, “An Electric Ark: The History of an Interpretation”, by Stephen A Newman.)

To give another example, von Däniken says that carvings on the ancient Gate of the Sun at Tiwanaku depict a legend:

“It tells of a golden spaceship that came from the stars; in it came a woman, whose name was Oryana, to fulfill the task of becoming the Great Mother of the earth. Oryana had only four fingers, which were webbed. Great Mother Oryana gave birth to 70 earth children, then she returned to the stars.”

I was particularly interested in learning more about this myth, because it sounds similar to the plot of David Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor. But I could find no reference at all to “Oryana”, except in another book about alien visitors, which said she may be same as “Orichana” or “Orejona”, but even these names only seem to be mentioned by other, later books on a similar theme. I couldn’t find anything about this myth of a Great Mother from the stars. And, from what I can find out about the Gate of the Sun from more conventional accounts, it features a male god, and no “golden spaceship”. Here’s the carving:

Turning his attention to myth, von Däniken finds evidence of alien visitations everywhere. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, he focuses on a passage where “the sun god” seizes Gilgamesh’s companion Enkidu, and lies “like lead” on his body. “How on earth could the old chroniclers have known that the weight of the body becomes as heavy as lead at a certain acceleration?” von Däniken demands, ignoring the fact that it’s a common metaphor. (This incident is from the seventh tablet of the epic, and actually occurs in a dream Enkidu relates to Gilgamesh. This translation has the phrase “press’d me down”, with nothing about “lead” at all.)

Eventually I gave up checking von Däniken’s evidence, in part because I got fed up of finding he was so often vague (even his bibliography gets authors’ names wrong), and also because von Däniken’s Wikipedia entry rebuts so many of the major points, it started to feel too much like work that had already been done.

Most disappointing from my own point of view, though, is that von Däniken doesn’t really spin out his own theories into something even imaginatively interesting. He wants to ask lots of open questions, nod significantly, and pour scorn on any potential opposition, but he’s not as forthcoming on his own juicy stuff.

His pronouncements as to what these ancient aliens might have done when they came to Earth are framed speculatively, in terms of what we might do, if we travelled to another, more primitive, planet. Impress them with our technology, teach them a few laws, perhaps get them to work for us, and, of course:

“A few specially selected women would be fertilized by the astronauts. Thus a new race would arise that skipped a stage in natural evolution.”

Um, what? Von Däniken presents the idea as so self-evidently obvious that he never questions the likelihood that human astronauts travelling to another planet, or aliens coming to ours, would attempt to procreate with another, intelligent or semi-intelligent, but entirely different species. And that it might actually produce viable offspring. And that those offspring would be superior to the existing stock. It’s all a bit bizarre, and it’s a pity, here, that von Däniken didn’t read Lovecraft, because at least Lovecraft had his alien races lift mankind up the evolutionary ladder by fiddling with their genetics, not actually, you know… their jeans.

There was a copy of Chariots of the Gods? in our house when I was growing up, and I would every so often pick it up and look at the photos (which are the best part of it, really — or, I should say, the captions are) and wonder at the idea that our distant past might be full of hints of ancient visitors and buried, stone-encrusted fragments of advanced technology. But for some reason I never actually read the book at the time. I think I can now see why. It’s so much better to leave the idea as a distant imaginative possibility than to have it so disappointingly presented in von Däniken’s (often surprisingly quite boring) style, and find how lazy, inaccurate, and uninteresting he so often is.

(And I’ve come to feel it’s far more interesting to think that human beings — our distant ancestors — did all these odd, crazy and wondrous things in the past. Saying aliens helped them actually detracts from the wonder and oddity. Even the craziness.)

The idea of ancient astronauts was already in the culture by the time von Däniken’s book came out, thanks to Lovecraft and those inspired by him, as well as Nigel Kneale, whose Quatermass and the Pit is far better than anything von Däniken comes up with. But Chariots had a definite, if minor, impact on popular culture. Rod Serling fronted a US TV series based on the book in 1973, In Search of Ancient Astronauts, and its popularity perhaps fed into a few films, though the only ones I can think of are Stargate, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and apparently Ridley Scott has mentioned it in connection with Prometheus. So, we’re not exactly talking top-grade cultural material.

It’s certainly not the source-text Margaret Murray’s book was, though Chariots of the Gods? and its like have had perhaps a wider, continued cultural impact. Not, though, from the text itself, but the ideas its hints and questions might inspire.

Von Däniken’s technique is, in a way, similar to Lovecraft’s, who wrote that “no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax” — for instance, peppering it with enough references to facts and genuine mysteries that it bamboozles the reader into wondering if the story being told is actually real. But Lovecraft was writing fiction, and did it far better.

One of the things that really impressed me about Blade Runner 2049 was its soundtrack. I love the score to the 1982 original, and was pleased that, though 2049’s soundtrack quotes it at moments, it doesn’t try to imitate Vangelis’s lush romanticism. It even sometimes seems to be doing the opposite, feeling, at times, like an oppressive aural assault, particularly when it brings in that alarming, motorcycle-like roar. The different ways the soundtracks work says a lot about the two films.

Vangelis’s soundtrack provides a necessary counterpoint of emotional texturing to the 1982 film’s noir-ish future: it conjures the suppressed, battered emotional lives behind the characters’ cynical facades in an otherwise dehumanising world. Although electronic, it isn’t bleakly electronic; it’s awash with melody and (oddly, for something so technological and futuristic) with nostalgia, too. That nostalgia is for a long-gone romanticism, the sort of thing to be found in the likes of Casablanca or The Big Sleep, as if Blade Runner’s world is so dystopian, it looks back on even the dark, psychologically twisted worlds of film noir with longing.

In a way, then, the 1982 film’s use of an electronic score could be seen as highlighting how its future is a debased imitation of a more authentic-feeling past. But at the same time, Vangelis’s score used its electronic instruments to point out how human emotion could still come through an electronic device, be it a Yamaha CS-80 synthesiser or a replicant called Rachael.

Vangelis’s soundtrack being electronic was unusual for the time — particularly after Star Wars set the rule that what science fiction needed was the warmth and familiarity of an orchestra to ground it in a recognisable human reality. But nowadays we’re used to technology; what we need is to be jolted with a reminder of how dehumanising it can be. This seems to be the purpose of Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s score to Blade Runner 2049, which doesn’t attempt to mimic or outdo the Vangelis soundtrack, but quotes it, as though it were “quoting” moments of humanity amidst what is otherwise a wash of very dark and jarring electronic whooshes, roars, jangles, groans, screeches and rattles.

The 2049 soundtrack’s first task, perhaps, is to make sure there’s no chance the viewer is going to watch the film thinking something like, “Oh, how nice, a sequel to that lovely film Blade Runner.” It’s there to remind you of the danger of the future. Just as Vangelis’s score worked to humanise its film’s technology, this score is there to remind you that this is an oppressive, dehumanising world, and that technology is part of that oppression. We’re too used to seeing modishly dystopian futures in movies, and need to be reminded how closely linked this future is to our present, and just how bleak a thing it would be to live in.

There’s still a longing to the score, but its longing is that much more distant. It longs for something human, something real, in a world where it’s difficult to tell what is human, what is real. As Police Lt. Joshi (a human) says to our replicant protagonist K: “We’re all just looking out for something real.”

So how do you tell what’s real? Both films have sequences where non-human characters are put through a procedure to test their humanity. In Blade Runner, it’s the Voight-Kampff test, which measures levels of empathic response to determine whether the subject is a human (empathic) or a replicant (not). In Blade Runner 2049, it’s the far more brutal “baseline” test, a rapid-fire verbal assault designed to ensure a replicant’s emotional responses remain within acceptable (i.e., tightly controlled, and far below human) limits. In 2049, passing the test is not about proving empathy, but lack of it.

But is this the definition of “humanity”, and therefore “reality”, we should be using? After all, our replicant hero K fails the baseline test, which means he’s starting to become insufficiently inseparable from his human masters. How else, then, do we determine what’s real, in a world of replicants and 3D holographic AIs?

At the heart of it is K, a replicant, and Joi, his holographic AI home-companion, and the question of whether what they feel for each other could be described as love. Neither is “real” (i.e., human). The advertising slogan used to market the Joi AI is “Everything you want to hear. Everything you want to see.” So, she’s designed around the idea of self-gratification and imitation. When she decides K is “real” and ought to have a name, she chooses “Joe”, the same name a giant, billboard version of her uses later as part of its advertising spiel, so is “Joe” a term of Joi’s affection, or a result of her programming? And what about when she says “I love you” — programming or genuine? How can we tell?

Perhaps it’s Jared Leto’s Niander Wallace who provides the answer, in amongst all his other tiresome verbiage: “Pain reminds you the joy you felt was real.” So, the thing you don’t want to hear, don’t want to see, and don’t want to have to feel; the opposite of self-gratification.

Blade Runner 2049 seems to be saying what’s real can still be found even in the midst of the unreal, like genuine human emotion coming through Vangelis’s synth sounds in the 1982 film. After all, Deckard, grizzled and battered by love and loss, is clearly (replicant or not) “real”, but where is he found? In the home of unreality, Las Vegas, whose lack of reality is heightened by the presence of a jittery 3D holographic Elvis. But Deckard likes the song. And he has his own test for what’s real. When asked if his dog is real, he says, “Ask him.” And I feel the same applies to K as he wanders the streets of 2049 LA near the end of the film, bereft. Was the love between him and Joi real? Ask him. That does seem to be real pain he’s feeling.

And I think this reality-unreality comes through in the score, too. It’s in the moments where Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s music quotes the Vangelis original, harking back to that film in the same way that film harked back to the days of black & white Hollywood romance — days of unreality, yes, as they’re films, but within their reality, perhaps, something human, something real, can be found, however artificial it might appear to be.

A few Mewsings ago, I reviewed H M Hoover’s Morrow books, in the first of which a pair of children living in a semi-barbarous, post-apocalyptic society escape to the more technologically advanced society of Morrow. In Angela Carter’s (not YA) Heroes and Villains (1969), the opposite happens. Carter’s heroine Marianne (a young woman rather than a child) leaves her home community, a fenced-in remnant of the pre-“blast” civilisation dwelling in the buildings that survived this particular future’s apocalypse — mostly farmers and soldiers with the added “intellectual luxury of a few Professors who corresponded by the trading convoys” — for the wastelands, in the company of a barbarian man, Jewel. Whereas Hoover’s Tia and Rabbit leave because of their telepathic abilities and outsider status, Marianne goes because she’s bored with the possibilities offered to her by her society. She’s always been drawn to the barbarians — by their freedom, their vivacity, their bright colours. In Carter’s post-apocalyptic future, it’s the technological society that’s the most repressive (the soldiers are “developing an autonomous power of their own”, and look set to take over once the last few Professors die out). The barbarians can afford to be more free — in part because they live by raiding the farmers every so often — but are nevertheless beset by disease, physical ailments, and, crucially for Marianne, superstition. Hoover’s Tia left “the Base” because they thought she was a witch; arriving at Jewel’s people’s latest home, Marianne finds herself believed to be a witch, too, and doesn’t even have Tia’s witchy telepathic abilities to make up for it.

Carter, though, is less interested in the differences between the two types of communities, as to the dichotomy Marianne is caught by throughout the book, two poles she can’t escape because she carries them within herself, and often finds difficult to tell apart: desire and need.

Jewel takes Marianne to his people, currently living in a large, semi-ruined house beyond the swamps and forests that surround her former home. There, she meets Mrs Green, the tribe’s matriarch, herself an escapee from the world of the Professors. Mrs Green is motherly, and treats everyone as though they were just big children, which, in a sense, they are. But these barbarians also have a dark father-figure in the shape of Doctor Donnelly, a former Professor who, “bored” and “ambitious”, went out into the world and, Kurtz-like, turned himself into a shaman and holy man for this tribe, frightening, guiding, and controlling them with his fits, his visions, and his stuffed snake. He feels like a character that’s appeared in the other Carter novels I’ve read (though quite some time ago), the puppeteer/shop-owner of The Magic Toyshop and the titular doctor from The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffmann. Unpredictable, entirely self-serving, helping Marianne one moment, plotting to poison her the next, Donnelly is undoubtedly the book’s liveliest character, also its most dangerous. He instructs and warns Marianne through a series of slogans daubed above his door, most of which are nonsense, but one of which is:

“OUR NEEDS BEAR NO RELATION TO OUR DESIRES”

Marianne is obviously drawn to Jewel, but not quite enough to want to stay with him. When she attempts to escape (after Jewel’s brothers threaten to rape her) Jewel tracks her down and rapes her himself. She’s then brought back to the house and told she’s going to marry Jewel, even though his people are all convinced Marianne is a witch and ought to be burned. (Motherly Mrs Green’s sympathies are all with her boy, Jewel, who she felt had no choice but to do what he did.) Marianne and Jewel spend the rest of the novel alternately hating and needing one another, hurting and healing one another, breaking up and coming together, giving in to each other one moment, struggling and fighting the next. For most of its second half, Heroes and Villains is like being forced to witness the often verging-on-violence tussles of a quarrelsome couple who can’t live together but can’t live apart either. Morrowian telepathy might help, but I can’t help feeling, in Carter’s world, it would only make things worse, as the real battle is within each character, with their own human nature. Carter’s post-blast future is not, like The Death of Grass or Day of the Triffids, an exploration of how easily civilisation might give way to barbarism; it’s more about how the world changes when you grow up and leave the (here) boring world of childhood for the dangerous and never-satisfying world of adulthood, and meet with only frustration, pain, and more boredom:

“Boredom and exhaustion conspired to erode her formerly complacent idea of herself. She could find no logic to account for her presence nor for that of the people around her nor any familiar, sequential logic at all in this shifting world; for that consciousness of reason in which her own had ripened was now withering away and she might soon be prepared to accept, since it was coherent, whatever malign structure of the world with which the shaman who rode the donkey should one day choose to present her.”

And at the heart of it, that constant inner struggle between desire and need:

“Night came; that confusion between need and desire against which she had been warned consumed her. If it was only that she desired him, then it became a simple situation which she could perfectly resolve while continuing to despise him. But if he was necessary to her, that constituted a wholly other situation which raised a constellation of miserable possibilities each one indicating that, willy nilly, she would be changed.”

It’s evident Marianne will never decide one way or the other. She and Jewel sometimes fit each other’s desires, sometimes fit each other’s needs, but rarely for long or at the same time. It’s all rather despairing (“There’s nowhere to go, dear,” said the Doctor. “If there was, I would have found it.”) — and not because this is a post-apocalyptic, ruined version of our world, but because it’s an emotional picture of the world as it can be now, if you’re caught between incompatible desires and needs, and perhaps trapped in a marriage you sometimes want and sometimes hate. The post-apocalyptic wasteland just exists to add that note of hardly-necessary hopelessness to an already hopeless domestic situation. As Mrs Green says:

“It’d be hell with your Dr Donnelly running everything, real hell, no respect for the old or nothing. Only tortures, mutilations and displays of magic.”

I can’t help feeling, though, that Dr Donnelly is running the world in Heroes and Villains, or at least his approach is the only one that works. He’s given up all attempt at being rational and consistent, and has embraced a sort of wilful madness. As a child, Marianne lived in a world of carefully-protected reason; bored with that (and after the death of her father) she left it, to find that nothing would ever be the same again:

“When I was a little girl, we played at heroes and villains but now I don’t know which is which any more… Because nobody can teach me which is which or who is who because my father is dead.”

So, the comparison with H M Hoover’s Children of Morrow is less about the two authors’ ideas on technological as opposed to barbaric societies, and more about differing complexities in their characters’ inner worlds, the simplicity (or not) of their needs and desires, the difference, perhaps, between childhood’s easy answers and adulthood’s impossible questions.