Civilisation and Science Fiction:

Analysing Foundation, Dune and

Hyperion and their Revelations of

Society

Andrew J. Richardson

Under the Supervision of Marc Gallagher M.Phil (TCD)

This work is submitted to American College Dublin, a constituent college of

Irish American University, in partial fulfilment of the regulations for the degree

of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts.

BA in Liberal Arts 2018

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………... iii

Introduction – The Shaping of Science Fiction…………………………………………….1

Foundation – The Joy of Rebuilding ...................................................................................... 7

Dune- The Romantic Push Back…………………………………….................................. 17

Hyperion – Chaos, Judgement and the Unknown ……………………………………… 26

Conclusion – Science Fiction, a Door in the Dark ………………………………………. 35

Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………. 39
Abstract:

This Thesis will discuss Science Fiction and how it reflects on society through the works of

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, Frank Herbert’s Dune and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion. I will

analyse the relationship between the texts and the times in which they were published and

reveal how through the genre of Science Fiction, we can relate to the zeitgeist of these times.

In Foundation I will explore the themes of rebuilding and leaning on technology and science

to do so in the post-World War II Earth and how structure and order were key in doing so

during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. With Dune I will analyse the New Age text in

comparison to the rise of counter-culture in 1960s America and the new hippy movements

and a return to spirituality and mythology in technologically driven times. And finally, in

Hyperion I will examine the more chaotic and unsure era of the 1980s were technology was

beginning to take great leaps and bounds forward and the structure of the world was

unravelling with the end of the Cold War. Concluding with what Science Fiction is revealing

today, I will show how core texts of the genre such as these are instrumental in not only

revealing our current society, but also how we can use them to look to the future.

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 Acknowledgements

Thank you to my wonderful Mother and Father and Science Fiction book club friends Dylan,

Rachel and Bernard for the inspiration and making this possible.

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 Introduction – The Shaping of Science Fiction

In terms of contemporary themes in literature and entertainment, Science Fiction has been

going through somewhat of a bloom period for the past 30 years. The stories and ideas in the

genre have become wildly diverse and adopted across many mediums – from films, books,

comics, television shows and video games, never before has a genre become so revealing

about the world we live in. Seven of the top ten highest grossing movies of all time are under

the science fiction umbrella and the continued popularity of the genre shows no signs of

abating. Indeed, many of the more classical genres such as romance, drama and even the

Western have been moving further under the science fiction umbrella with films such as Her,

Arrival and the popular TV series Westworld all been proven to be popular and well received

by critics and audiences around the world. Why is Science Fiction no longer a fad or a nuance

and becoming the norm in culture and entertainment? To answer this, you must go back to

the roots of the genre and how it has been represented throughout history.

What is often considered the genesis of Science Fiction, and a book which is

celebrating its 200th anniversary this year, is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The book about

how a scientist plays God and creates life only for it to go out of his control was touching on

many themes about society in the early 19th century. It is important to remember the other

title under which Frankenstein goes by, which is The Modern Prometheus, as in that title it

reveals a certain duality which forms the backbone of Science Fiction itself. The Greek

legend of Prometheus and how he stole fire from the Gods of Olympus and gave it to man is

an easier way of understanding the complexities of our own evolution and origin on this

planet from the apes and cave dwellers to the modern civilisation we are today or even the

comparatively modern civilisation of the ancient Greeks. As Science Fiction writer Brian
Aldiss puts it “Frankenstein is the modern theme, touching not only science but man's dual

nature, whose inherited ape curiosity has brought him both success and misery.” Aldiss when

he mentions “success and misery” touches on a core value of Science Fiction – that the more

humanity pushes on in its technological and natural evolution, the more complex society and

culture will become with more ways for us to become successful, but also more ways for us

to become miserable. The further and wider we progress; the more opportunities and dangers

lurk for us.

Frankenstein covers these themes as if you consider when the novel was written there

is a key in understanding the dualities of Science Fiction and society itself in the early 19th

century. Shelley originally wrote the novel in a competition between herself, her future

husband and lover Percy Shelly and Lord Byron – two of the leading poets and writers in the

Romantic movement of the time. Inspired by a dream she had of a corpse being reanimated

and the history of experiments being performed by an alchemist two centuries earlier in the

nearby Frankenstein Castle in which her cadre was travelling through, Shelley wrote the

seminal work of Science Fiction – surrounded by two of the most famous Romantic poets of

the time. Romanticism had emerged almost as a form of counter-culture to the Enlightenment

and scientific revolution of the century previous. An attempt to bring man back to nature and

reach the ‘sublime’ was core to the thinking of Romanticism, compared to the empirical and

scientific truth that was the core of the Enlightenment. Frankenstein captured this transition

in literary form, both the success and misery of this period in history and also the trepidation

of the possible future. The lead character, Victor Frankenstein, is touching the void between

what we know and what we don’t know which leads to disastrous consequences for himself

but also a new realm of understanding for humanity and the society around him. This would

become a key theme in future Science Fiction – that of sacrifice in the name of advancement.

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 Later in the 19th Century, another cornerstone of the Science Fiction genre was to

emerge in the form of the French writer Jules Verne. Whereas Shelley in Frankenstein does

not necessarily touch on the technology involved in the creation of the reanimated monster,

Verne would very much embrace the technology that drove forward his stories. Frankenstein

was more a critique of human nature than of science and technology while Verne in his

stories would comment more so on the technology that would drive humanity to new places.

In his novel From Earth to the Moon Verne imagines a post-civil war gun club and their

attempts to build a massive gun which could literally shoot three people onto the moon.

Written just after the American Civil War, the novel also reveals some of the dualities of

mid-18th century ‘successes and misery’. Weapons technology was increasing at a rapid pace

and the bloody civil war in America was a large step forward compared to the Napoleonic

wars which had occurred in the earlier part of the century. Bloodshed on a massive scale was

becoming easier for humanity to achieve and within a few short years this would be proven

true in the colonisation/scramble for Africa with the Maxim Gun (a prototype machine gun)

being the cornerstone of the successes for the great European powers. Immortalised in the

poem The Modern Traveller by Helaire Belloc with the lines “Whatever happens, we have

got The Maxim gun, and they have not.”

In writing From Earth to the Moon, Verne attempted to calculate how such a cannon

would work and also the materials used in its making – such as guncotton and aluminium

which were relatively new at the time. Verne was absorbing the new wonders of the Victorian

age and Industrial Revolution and using these elements to project the potential for humanity

and where we could go. In what is probably his most famous work, 20,000 Leagues Under

the Sea, Verne again makes bold and somewhat accurate predictions about the future

(Submarines and the exploration of the deep) but also touches on the idea of ‘success and

misery’ as mentioned by Aldiss. What monsters lurk in the unknown for humanity to run

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afoul of and how would we overcome them, if we can? This would become another key

theme in later Science Fiction and is in itself an entire subgenre of Science Fiction, that of the

monster from the unknown (and indeed what the monsters represent). Verne goes into great

detail about the cannon in From Earth to the Moon and of course the submersible the

‘Nautilus’ in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In fact, the Nautilus itself would go on to

become an iconic piece of science fiction and popular folklore, akin to the latter-day USS

Enterprise in Star Trek or Millenium Falcon in Star Wars, two of the most recognisable

pieces of technology in modern Science Fiction. This kind of iconography of the technology

in Science Fiction can become representative of the society around us, almost a projection of

the ‘successes’ we desire or the ‘misery’ waiting for us.

If you take the example of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek, we see a machine that can

guide us into journeys of wonder and fear and also save us at a crucial moment – completely

in tune with the technology of the 1960s when Star Trek was created, the nuclear bomb being

the destroyer and the jetliner being a vehicle which was opening up the world and modern

travel. Equally too in the film The Matrix, the technological ‘vehicle’ (an uplink terminal on

the hovership ‘Nebuchadnezzar’) used to guide humanity into the digital world of the film

takes us both to a place of wonder and magnificence but is also destroying humanity at the

same time – representative of the internet and modern Personal Computer and our hopes and

fears attached to these devices.

These early Science Fiction writers, Shelley and Verne, lay down very important

foundations when it comes to how Science Fiction reveals what is happening in society

around us and also in their future projections and fears for humanity. In the works we will be

focussing on, it is important to remember these key themes and how they impact on not only

the texts themselves but also society. All three texts in this paper, Foundation by Isaac

Asimov, Dune by Frank Herbert and Hyperion by Dan Simmons share the common motifs of

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these seminal works. But in a true extrapolation of science, they all build and expand and

explore these ideas to different and far reaching ends. These novels in turn inspire future

writers in the same vain, building a chain of Science Fiction works which reveal to us the

different aspects and driving forces behind our contemporary society and the futures we hope

to build.

Importantly, all three texts were published post-World War II (in the case of

Foundation 4 of the 5 chapters were written and published between 1942 – 44 in the

magazine Astounding Science Fiction) as the Second World War and the end of the war is

seen as a critical point in human history. German Philosopher Theodor Adorno famously

wrote in his essay Cultural Criticism and Society:

“The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more

paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme

consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism

finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To

write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of

why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which

presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb

the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it

confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.” (Prisms, 34)

This is often misquoted as “There is no poetry after Auschwitz” but what Adorno is

suggesting perhaps is that by participating in the culture that led up to Auschwitz and the

death camps we are only certain to repeat these mistakes and that humanity needs a new

direction altogether. All the poetry, literature and indeed culture that preceded the Second

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World War meant nothing perhaps in Adorno’s view as it failed to stop the humanitarian

disaster that was the war. In the case of Foundation, Dune and Hyperion there is a certain

form of relevance here as all three texts deal in some ways with humanitarian disaster, often

on a cosmic scale.

What each of the texts delves into is a reflection of these disasters, what leads up to

them and how to prevent or save humanity from them. Written at key times in modern human

history – the 1940s, the mid 1960s and the late 1980s, each reveals a different mythos of

Science Fiction and humanities interaction with the wonders of the modern world. Using the

foundations of Science Fiction and of course advancing on these key terms, the novels both

project and inflect areas of not only our own individual thinking of the world but a critique of

society at large and the successes and miseries within.

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 Foundation – The Joy of Rebuilding

The Foundation series written by Isaac Asimov is perhaps the most renown of all the Golden

Age of Science Fictions works. The Golden Age was preceded by the ‘Pulp’ age of the 1920s

and 30s and followed on by the ‘New Wave’ of the 1960s and 70s. Historian Adam Roberts

describes this era as "the phrase Golden Age valorises a particular sort of writing: 'Hard SF',

linear narratives, heroes solving problems or countering threats in a space-opera or

technological-adventure idiom." The phrase ‘Hard SF’ is of particular note as this implies the

‘science’ of Science Fiction to be based in reality, on real science and mathematics as

opposed to ‘Soft SF’ which is almost more fantasy based in which the technology on display

is often hard to fathom in the real world (examples of ‘Soft SF’ would be ‘The Force’ in Star

Wars and for ‘Hard SF’ to be the genetic cloning of Dinosaurs in Jurassic Park – one has no

scientific explanation whereas the other, while fictional, is based on known scientific

possibilities). Asimov himself was a scientist, a Professor of Biochemistry in the Boston

University School of Medicine, and his works, while exploring the vast reaches of the cosmos

and the human mind, were always built on a core of scientific reasoning and understanding.

This is important in Foundation as the basis of the story is to do with science, its meaning

and how it can affect individuals and societies as a whole.

Written during the course of World War II, the themes within Foundation resonate

with not only what was happening during that catastrophic war, but what had preceded the

event and the build up to the war itself. Throughout the course of the Foundation series, we

follow characters who often seem innocuous to the greater scheme of what is happening in

the galaxy, but they always – by way of virtue or fate – have a profound impact on the

grander scheme of things. Asimov in a lot of ways rejects the traditional narrative of

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storytelling and instead the series reads almost as individual historic accounts over the course

of hundreds of years. There is no ‘central’ protagonist of the series, indeed the protagonist, if

any, would be the doctrine of ‘Psychohistory’ in which the titular Foundation is based on.

Asimov describes what he was doing with ‘Psychohistory’ as “I was essentially writing

future history, and I had to make it sufficiently different from modern history to give it that

science fictional touch. And so, I assumed that the time would come when there would be a

science in which things could be predicted on a probabilistic or statistical basis.” The term is

a cover-all for the mix of sociology, history and mathematical statistics in which future

events could be predicted on large scales over the course of thousands of years. It forms the

spine of the entire Foundation series and forms an almost mythological background for the

events of the story.

In the series, ‘Psychohistory’ is conceived by a Mathematician known as Hari Seldon

in the opening chapter of the book. Seldon, predicting the decline and fall of the galaxy

spanning Galactic Empire in which the events of the series take place, forms a plan to

rejuvenate and rebuild society in a far shorter timeframe than the predicted tens of thousands

of years it would take for humanity to pull out of the oncoming Dark Age it was plunging

into. There is an almost very blunt and obvious mirror here for what was happening in the

world outside of the novel. The First World War was a cataclysmic event in human history in

which death and destruction had occurred in an unprecedented scale. The massive old

Empires of Europe had gone to war in the first truly industrial conflict and the scale of death

and despair was unforeseen by nearly all the power brokers of the planet. Post-World War

One writings were notoriously bleak (T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is of particular note here)

and there was a profound impact on culture across the globe. The rise of Fascism and

Communism in Germany, Italy and Russia – new doctrines which were to dictate the events

of the proceeding decades reared their heads and were completely different to the political

8
and social norms of old – were centre stage during the times in which Foundation was

written. The world seemed to be in a state of terrible flux, the future unsure and unpredictable

and in 1939 the even bloodier and deadlier Second World War began.

Against this backdrop, Foundation was taking inspiration from ancient history,

namely that of the fall of the Roman Empire. Much like Rome wasn’t built in a day, it didn’t

fall in a day either and there was no specific event which can be blamed for the collapse of

the Empire, but rather a collage of many different aspects which led to its decline. This is

mirrored in the world Asimov knew as, for example, if Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s driver

had not made a wrong turn in Sarajevo on the 28th of June 1914, Gavrilo Princip would not

have had the opportunity to shoot the Archduke and the course of history might not have led

to the outbreak of the First World War as we know it. But as we also know, it wasn’t this

assassination alone that was the cause of the First World War, it was a culmination of many

events preceding it. Foundation attempts to mirror these kinds of complexities by charting a

course through the myriad of successes and failures of the Galactic Empire in the series.

History is anything but linear and Asimov in writing Foundation takes us through these

complexities and uses the genre of Science Fiction to reveal the grander problems of our own

world and the societies and culture within it.

In the story of Foundation, the aforementioned Mathematician Hari Seldon constructs

what is known as ‘The Seldon Plan’. The plan involves the construction and settlement of a

planet on the far edge of the Milky Way known as Terminus. Here, a group of scientists and

historians are to construct and found what is known as the ‘Encyclopaedia Galactica’, a

massive database of the entirety of human history and scientific knowledge. The Seldon Plan

seems to be an almost religious idea on Terminus, unsure of what the ‘Encyclopaedists’ are to

do, they simply have trust in the Seldon Plan and his vision for the future. Terminus itself is a

bleak, almost resourceless planet and the colonists are forced to reach out to their neighbours

9
in order to build and survive on the world. The ‘Encyclopaedists’ become known as the

‘Foundation’ and in the course of events that follow, they begin reaching out and often come

into conflict with their galactic neighbours, which they often subdue or ‘defeat’ by means of

superior technology or understanding.

A key form of technology in the world Asimov built is that of ‘atomics’. This new

and frightening technology had been unleashed on the world at the end of the Second World

War and ushered in the atomic or nuclear age. The power of life or death man now had over

the world was absolute – we could literally destroy all life on the planet with these terrible

weapons. While in the contemporary age this is something that society is somewhat used to,

and many theories and extrapolations have come about from it – from the scientist John

Nash’s ‘Game Theory’ to the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction, at the time of writing and

publishing the series, ‘atomics’ were a dangerous, unknown and indeed frightening form of

technology in which more was unknown than known. In the world of Foundation, atomics

takes centre stage as the Foundations trump card over the rest of their neighbouring

civilisations. From atomic ‘shields’, power supplies, weapons and even trinkets like watches,

the Foundation begins to assert its power over its neighbours and the Seldon Plan begins to

take a more definite shape. The last two sections of the first novel in the series ‘The Traders’

and ‘The Merchant Princes’ reveal a Foundation that is coming to prominence in its sector of

space due to its unique ability trade with its neighbours and control them politically and

socially through their superior technology. This is almost a form of American style

Capitalism becoming the dominant aspect of culture in the novel as the Foundation gains

more and more power against numerically superior and larger unions in its sector.

There is a parallel in what was happening in the real world and the world of

Foundation at the time. The old-style European Empires were crumbling, with the British

Empire completely devasted by the war and granting more rights and autonomy to its

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territories and the French begrudgingly doing the same. Europe’s place at the centre of the

world and the driving force of technology and civilisation it had been over the previous two

hundred or so years was fading and in its place, new super powers were rising up – namely

those of the United States of America and the Soviet Union. Asimov himself was of Russian-

Jewish decent and had emigrated as a child with his family in the early 1920s when he was

only 3 years old. The prominence of the United States on world affairs was becoming more

and more clear over the early part of Asimov’s life as the continent had remained untouched

during the First World War and in fact had come out as economically the most powerful in

the world due to the massive loans indebted to it by the Allies in the First World War. By the

end of the Second, there was no doubt as to Americas power in the world – it was the country

which had developed the Atom Bomb and some estimates put America’s wealth at almost

half of the entire wealth of the planet in 1945. If there was to be a Foundation on Earth, it was

most certainly the United States as scientists and professors flocked to it from defeated

Germany and sought escape from the oppression of the Soviet Union. What was yet to be

revealed though was how America would use its new-found place as the most powerful and

advanced nation, and this is what Asimov’s Science Fiction and namely Psychohistory sought

to reveal.

During the course of the Cold War the phrase ‘Delicate Balance of Terror’ was used

to describe the manufacture and build up of arms in the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Both

nations wanted to make sure the other knew that if they launched an attack, their counter-

attack would ensure the destruction of their enemy (M.A.D. Mutually Assured Destruction).

The fear and unknown quantity of nuclear weapons and the technology that goes with them

was in essence a driving force of civilisation during the Cold War. The Space Programs of

both countries led to monumental discoveries in science and to great advancements for the

people of the planet – from the Moon landings, to satellites, to computer processors and so

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forth. Foundation in certain ways predicts certain advancements and crucially, what they do

to the civilisations in both the books and the real world. The fear of atomics leads to

subjugation of rogue states in the books and indeed both the Soviet Union and United States

would use this fear to their advantage when dealing with their neighbours. But it is also the

impact of this superiority on the society of the Foundation which comes into play. The young

upstart Foundation becomes almost too big for its boots and comes under the notice of the

declining, but still powerful Galactic Empire in which an experienced and capable General

named Bel Riose attacks the Foundation in its infancy before it can ‘overthrow’ the Empire.

The Foundation, seemingly on the verge of defeat, is inexplicably saved by the Galactic

Emperor himself (Cleon II), fearing the rise and popularity of a military hero and jailing him

before he became a threat. The Seldon Plan seemingly wins out, predicting the greed and

paranoia within such a fragile Empire – rhyming with what was occurring in the Soviet

Union and the various power plays which occurred after the death of Josef Stalin. This again

would be a prediction, as Foundation was written and published before this event.

In describing Science Fiction on these terms, the writer and critic and head of the

Centre for Future Consciousness, Thomas J. Lombardo, Ph.D., comments:

“But in so far as science fiction is dramatic literature and storytelling, the path of

evolution is described not so much as an abstract theory, but as an ongoing struggle

and tension of various forces, represented through fictional characters and societies,

their struggles, and their failures and triumphs.”

It is in the struggle mentioned here which Foundation makes its case as a reflection on

society. The struggles that the U.S. would make in the years following the Second World War

would shape the world and the future of our civilisation. For all of America’s successes, there

would be the greater chance for misery to follow. For all the satellites put into orbit, the

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megaton yield of its nuclear arsenal would increase and for all the freedoms of the media and

communication would enjoy, the confusion and complexity of the world would be revealed to

the everyman. The duality of risk and reward is prominent in Foundation just as it is

prominent in the world that was around Asimov.

Unforeseen events could scupper the plans of even the most stringent and

conservative manifestos and just as Bel Riose was inexplicably struck down from within in

the second book, Foundation and Empire, a new threat needed to rise to challenge the very

fabric of the Seldon Plan. The character known as ‘The Mule’ was seen as a challenge to the

earlier villains in pulp science fiction who would often have names such as ‘The Scorpion’ or

“The Cobra’ or another equally deadly predator. The Mule in the Foundation series

completely disrupted the Seldon Plan by being an individual which couldn’t be foreseen by

the mathematics and science involved in its creation. An extremely powerful man, The Mule

could turn whole planets to his whim by means of his innate psychic powers. This is where

Asimov takes a lunge into softer Science Fiction (although The Mules powers are still based

on ideas of evolution and what humanity could evolve to). The Mule, disguised as a jester

known as ‘Magnifico’ travels with a cadre of the Foundations citizens and even to Trantor

itself, the now collapsed capital of the former Galactic Empire. Along the way he completely

undoes the previous work and building of the Foundation, revealing himself to this section of

the stories protagonists only at the end when it is too late, and the Foundation is seemingly

defeated. Events such as the Berlin Crisis and Korean War would provide similar tests to the

super powers of the new post World War II world. Unknowable entities and individuals

rising up in the chaos to create new paths for society to travel. Asimov looked to history in

his ideas for the character of The Mule, namely that of the 14th Century Warlord Tamerlane

and the disruption he caused to the fledgling Ottoman Empire but one could also point to

individuals nearer Asimov’s time and the massive influence they would have over history –

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people such as Lenin, Hitler and Stalin. The themes of success and misery of science fiction

circling those of challenge and renewal of the real world. On this, in his introduction to the

Foundation series, the critic Michael Dirda comments “Constant challenge and renewal are

necessary to the Seldon Plan, and, as time goes on, the Foundation must be repeatedly shaken

out of the doldrums of self-satisfaction and inertia.” And this is true of the world which

Asimov was part of when writing Foundation – there was no time to rest on the laurels of

victory.

The Mule is eventually undone not only by the frailness of his physical body and

exertion of his powers, but also by that of the Second Foundation, a group set up by Hari

Seldon to ensure the success of the First Foundation should the catastrophic happen. The

mysterious Second Foundation is the subject of the 3rd book of the series Second Foundation

and they are nominally a group of hermits and scientists living in the ruins of the former

capital Trantor. They are powerful psychics, able to manipulate and control the emotions of

others in much the same way The Mule was able to but on a narrower degree. Their hermit

like devotion to the Seldon Plan is almost religious in nature, and indeed the central religion

of the Foundation, Scientism or The Church of Science is an early precursor to what the

Second Foundation represents. The Church of Science disappears almost entirely from the

story after the first book and is used as a uniting force in the early days of the citizens on

Terminus and the surrounding planets. It’s the Second Foundation that bear the weight of the

religious representation within the novel. In his book Science Fiction: Ten Explorations the

literary critic C.N. Manlove “points out that Asimov's fiction lacks a moral dimension”. The

Second Foundation in a way tries to address this, by providing somewhat of a morality to

how they approach their meddling in the affairs of humanity, but ultimately their morality is

only subject to science and the Seldon Plan. Morality in Asimov’s Foundation most definitely

plays a background role to science, progress, challenge and renewal. It is the individual

14
characters whose morality we attach ourselves to – such as Arkady Darell, the teenage

protagonist of the second part of Second Foundation whose moral choices lead her to

unwittingly discover the Second Foundation and persuade them to supply food to Terminus

and the First Foundation. Arkady’s curiosity and belief in her family runs concurrent to the

Second Foundations belief in the Seldon Plan. Where the Second Foundation are devoted to

an abstract ideal based on science, Arkady is devoted to the empirical – her family, friends

and community. In the end, they both seemingly get what they want, Arkady gets the help

Terminus needs and the Second Foundation get to stay hidden, controlling and manipulating

from afar in their fervent belief in the science of the plan. Morality is the realm of the

personal and in psychohistory, there is no space for personal needs – lest they disrupt and

destroy it like The Mule did.

In all, the Foundation series is one where the grand tests of humanity and modern

civilisation are put on display – how much can we really plan for the future and where will

our devotion to science lead us? Is the old world a thing of the past or is it waiting to lurch up

and replace our contemporary society in a cycle destruction and renewal? The complexity of

the unknown that was extremely relevant in the 1940’s is revealed to us in Foundation and as

the Galactic Empire sat on the precipice of the unknown, so too did the entire world in 1945.

New orders, institutions, governments, doctrines and societies were going to be put to the test

and the ‘Foundation’ of the United States of America was going to have to navigate them.

Although Asimov could clearly not see the future, through science fiction he could speculate

on it and warn of the perils we might face. Such futurist thinking was prevalent in Cold War

America in the form of what were known as ‘Scenarios’. Scenarios as described by Peter

Galison in his paper The Future of Scenarios: State Science Fiction were created “In the heat

of the Cold War, military planners began creating quasi-fictional episodes — scenarios — to

explore the way nuclear war might begin and escalate or be blocked.” One such scenario

15
involved how to warn future generations of lethal nuclear waste from the production of

Plutonium used to build nuclear weapons. The U.S. Government, in one of is ways of

thinking to handle this proposed the following: “the one and only Hollywood ending, the

government had wisely established an amusement park above the waste site so that memory,

passed from generation to generation, would remain strong even after rock had crumbled into

dust. Instructed by a deliberately created mythical character, Nickey Nuke (modeled on a

combination of Mickey Mouse, Smokey the Bear, and Adam and Eve) would forever and

successfully warn each generation of children: Do not dig here. Never forget the danger

below.” Foundation explored the ‘below’ and revealed the machinations which would lead to

scenarios such as this. It sat at the precipice of the unknown and used the known history to try

and lay down a guide of how to navigate the road in front of us and the successes and

miseries not only of the time, but those that might await us in the future.

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 Dune – The Romantic Push Back

If Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series was to be enlightened hard Science Fiction, then it is

Frank Herbert’s Dune which was to become the centrepiece of the romantic New Wave genre

soft Science Fiction. The New Wave, in Science Fiction terms, was the era after the Golden

Age which begun to lean the genre towards more spiritual and mythological ideas and

concepts. The predictive foreseeing of the future which was alive in Asimov, H.G. Wells and

Arthur C. Clarkes writing was taking somewhat of a step back to the New Wave of writers,

such as Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick and of course Frank Herbert. It almost mirrors

exactly the move from the Enlightenment of Locke, Voltaire and Kant towards the counter-

culture of Wordsworth, Byron and Blake. Novels such as The Left Hand of Darkness by

LeGuin or The Man in the High Castle by Dick contained themes that were far less reliant on

the technology involved, but more question the spirit and ideals of the characters and society

therein. In describing the mood of the 1960s, Tom Lombardo in his essay Science Fiction as

a Mythology of the Future tells us:

“The 1960s was indeed revolutionary, both socially and technologically. But it was a

complex and unsettled time. It was a time of both faith and anti-faith. The decade saw

the beginnings of a cultural revolution in the modern West against many of the central

images and ideals of modernity. The “military-industrial complex” came under attack,

as well as traditional social norms and cultural values. Economic and technological

progress was rejected by many individuals as too materialistic – there was an

increasingly strong call to get “back to nature” and abandon all the technological and

ideological baggage of modern civilization. The 1960s were a time of great cultural

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 experimentation and revelry – of consciousness raising, free love, and dropping out of

society - of liberation, adventure, madness, and freedom.”

What Lombardo brings up here is central to Dune in how it reflects on society at the time.

Published in 1966, the novel was the inaugural winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel

and was to have a profound impact on nearly all Science Fiction which came after it.

Set primarily on the planet Arrakis in the far future, roughly 20,000 A.D., the story in

some ways follows the linear ‘heroes’ journey’ of the character Paul Atreides as he battles

and takes revenge against the corrupt Harkonnen family and Galactic Emperor himself. The

aforementioned ‘heroes’ journey’ includes the usual, almost cliché, narratives of revenge,

setbacks, grief, enlightenment and love. In a lot of ways Paul’s story is unbelievable and

unrealistic and Herbert himself in commentary on the story and character says, “Dune was

aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says that mistakes

made by a leader (or made in a leader's name) are amplified by the numbers who follow

without question.” And it is in this off balance which we see the ideas of success and misery

creep into the epitome of New Wave Science Fiction. The complexity of Dune, both as a

message of hope and warning of the dangers of individualism is something that has

contributed in making it one of the timelessly analysed and talked about works within the

entire Science Fiction genre. Many attempts have been made to turn Dune into a film or

television series with varying degrees of success. David Lynch’s 1984 version of the film is

notorious for taking liberties with the book and was received extremely poorly by critics and

audiences alike but remains somewhat of a cult hit – and divisive amongst fans of the novel.

As of writing, the Director Denis Villeneuve – famous for Science Fiction hits Arrival and

Bladerunner 2049 is the latest director to attempt to create a cohesive film of Dune for a mass

audience and indeed, has been forced to split his work into two separate films in order to

create a cohesive story, such is the myriad of themes and complexities within the book.

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 In terms of what Dune is reflecting of society in the 1960s, it is important to note the

background to the story in the novel and where Herbert starts us off on Pauls journey. In

Dune, human society has spread across the Galaxy and is ruled by the Galactic Padishah

Emperor (Shaddam IV) at the head of an Imperial society where various Houses rule

individual planets and systems. Technology, especially when compared to other works of

Science Fiction, is quite limited in terms of advancement and in fact computers and ‘thinking

machines’ are entirely destroyed in the Universe of Dune. This is due to an event that occurs

before the book known as the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ (roughly 10,000 years before the opening of

Dune) in which humanity rose up against the computers and androids and exorcized them

from society. In the later book in the series, God Emperor of Dune, the character Leto II

Atreides describes the event as follows “The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as

much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of

beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the

machines were destroyed.” There are clearly romantic overtones in this Jihad, and also serves

to purge the Universe of Dune of what would be traditional technology for Science Fiction

novels. This can be seen almost as a signalling for the New Wave as a direct challenge and

counter to the Golden Age rhetoric that had preceded it, just as Romanticism sought to

challenge the Enlightenment. Taking over from computers, specially trained humans known

as ‘Mentats’ are responsible for the sort of calculations needed to run society and make

predictions. And crucially, in terms of space travel, a race of highly evolved and mutated

humans known as ‘The Guild’ are able to fold space for interstellar travel – achieved by the

drug known as ‘the Spice Melange’ which only grows on the planet which forms the

namesake of the book, Arrakis, known also as Dune.

This direct challenge to technology and a return to a sort of naturalism and

spiritualism is central not only to the book, but also to the culture spreading through the

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United States at the time. The hippy movement and civil rights activists were becoming more

and more popular and visible in the U.S. with a rising awareness of the Military Industrial

Complex and a top-down establishment-controlled society. It is not a far stretch to compare

the drug LSD or ‘acid’ to the Spice Melange found in Dune. By using the Spice, the Guild are

able to fold time and space and gain a measure of prescience of future events. LSD was a

major cultural phenomenon among this new counter-culture movements as it contained

promises to see not only our world in a new light, but peer into other worlds and other

realities. Dune imagines a scenario where an extremely similar drug becomes the de-facto

most important resource in the known Universe and one in which the Imperium itself relies

too heavily on and becomes their Achilles heel. In terms of science fiction, this is most

definitely ‘Soft’ science fiction as there is no real scientific explanation for the Spice, the

reader instead experiences it through Paul’s eyes and how it affects him when he uses it in the

later portions of the book.

In mirroring Foundation, there is a reading into the successes and miseries of society

in 1960’s America. As the undisputed most powerful nation in the West, we see a society

mired in controversy. Although it claimed to be the freest nation in the world, African-

Americans were still subjugated and treated as second class citizens. Second-wave feminism

was taking root in this era with many leaders of this movement moving the issues towards

that of sexuality, employment, families and reproductive rights. Perceived enemies of these

movements were institutions such as the finance industry, the military and of course the

Government itself – seen as corrupt self-interested organisations which had no vested interest

in the betterment of society. Technology and mass communications on one hand was

broadening people’s horizons and expanding on opportunities, but on the other was making

people more aware of their misery and perceived shackles placed on them by the seemingly

omnipotent powers of the establishment. Dune under this lens can be seen as a reflection of

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this confusion and duality – a world which abstains from the promise and ease of automation

but also falls under the same oppressive umbrella of an all-powerful establishment. The

Emperors rule is absolute and through his corruption and manipulations, destroys the ideals

of nobility and spirituality which Paul must fight to gain back.

The birth of Paul Atreides in the book, though not a virgin birth, was a unique birth in

so far that his mother, Lady Jessica, was able to manipulate his gender in the womb to be that

of male. The religious institution his mother was part of, the Bene-Gesserit, are a quasi-

religious all-female order who train themselves and their bodies so that they often appear

superhuman. They are a key social and political force in the Dune Universe and are often

referred to as ‘witches’ by non-members. While seemingly progressive in terms of the

Women’s Rights movements of the time, there can be criticism pointed at them. Lady Jessica

for example only changes the gender of Paul to male due to her love of his father and her

husband, Duke Leto Atreides, and the Bene-Gesserit still retain that stigma of being ‘witches’

who will cruelly manipulate and control society for their own ends. The writer Kathy Gower

in her essay Mother was not a Person criticises the Bene-Gesserit in this regard, claiming

how they are feared by the male characters of the book and how the female characters are less

prominent and largely left to domestic duties. So, while on one hand, the Bene-Gesserit can

seem like an empowering movement, mirroring that of second-wave feminism, the reality is

that they are mired in the stigmas of the past and are yet another power block in the

establishment our hero needs to fight against.

This kind of birth though does reflect on religious symbology. Pauls unique birth

rhymes with other religious figures such as Jesus Christ and there is a glaring resemblance to

Paul as a kind of mythological religious figure, one who is destined to change the world for

the better. Before the death of his father (and triggering point for his ‘call to adventure’), Paul

learns a critical lesson in terms of how to govern and use the planet of Arrakis, his father

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saying “On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power," the Duke said. "Here, we must

scrabble for desert power. This is your inheritance, Paul.” This is a direct reference to how

Paul must use the environment and the ecology of the planet in order to beat the Harkonnens.

The Harkonnens themselves being a rival House who usurp the Atreides family on Arrakis

and take control of the most important planet in the Imperium (a ruse orchestrated by the

Emperor himself). In using the planet and nature, there seems to be a direct comment on

society at the time, about how humanity needs to care more for Mother Earth and through

Earth, lies the key to taking back control of our society from the establishment which keeps

us in check. This kind of ‘Earth Spirit’ can be reflective of the Native American ideals and

religious practices, the original natives of America, and another group represented in the

book, one known as the ‘Fremen’.

In the story, after Duke Leto’s death at the hands of the Harkonnens and subsequent

taking of Arrakis, Paul and his mother Jessica flee to the barren and inhospitable inner lands

of the planet. Water is extremely scarce on Arrakis, in fact one of the main technologies that

is described and given time by Herbert is that of the ‘Stilsuit’ – a suit worn by Paul and the

natives which conserves all the moisture of the body. In these lands, they are taken in by the

tribes native to the planet, the aforementioned Fremen. Proving himself through combat,

Paul begins to teach the Fremen the Bene-Gesserit ‘weirding way’ and realises they can be a

great fighting force. The Fremen themselves use the spice, a side effect being that they

possess almost glowing blue eyes. Paul in turn begins to use the spice and true to his

predicted Messiah qualities in him, begins to uncover his own prescience and psychic like

qualities. He takes the name ‘Muad’dib, which means Desert Mouse, and becomes a rallying

point and leader for all the Fremen tribes, a ‘Mahdi’ for them. There is powerful religious

symbology in play here. Even the term ‘Mahdi’ can be traced to the Islamic prophet or

‘Chosen One’ of the same name from late 19th Century Sudan. Paul through his taking of the

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spice is going through a form of apotheosis and continues to display powers far beyond that

of a normal human, seeing the future and manipulating it to his whim. It is a painful and slow

process for Paul, just like for any similar prophet or religious figure.

These ideas, that of an almost ultra-harmonising with the planet and peering into

different realities, resonate easily with the hippy movements and counter-culture of the time.

In C.N. Manlove’s Science Fiction: Ten Explorations he says of this "Herbert drives us to an

awareness that beneath the individual consciousnesses and desires of his characters lies a

deeper and unconscious prompting over which they have no control". Paul ultimately had no

control over whether he was going to become this Messiah or not, so is Herbert making a

comment on the ideas of these heroes unto which we put our hopes and ideals? Is he saying

how the movements which were alive and well in the mid-60’s are in a way destined to fail

due to this lack of control and Paul is an almost satirical character, purposefully over the top

in his abilities? Indeed, in the climax of the book when Paul and the Fremen attack the

Harkonnens and Emperors elite troops, there is barely a fair fight as their forces are

completely overwhelmed by Paul, the Fremen and the great Sand Worms on which they ride

to battle. Paul doesn’t just win and take revenge for his father’s death and return control of

Arrakis to the Atreides house, he becomes Emperor of the known Universe itself, takes the

previous Emperors daughters as his wife (Princess Irulan, who serves as a narrator at the

beginning of each of the chapters) and unleashes a Jihad across the entire Imperium itself.

The ideas of success and misery, central to Science Fiction, are revealed once more in the

ending. Though Paul becomes everything and more, the miseries and pitfalls for himself and

society become ever more revealing.

The principle villains of the novel, the House Harkonnen, themselves reflect on what

the perceived villains were in 60’s America. Brutish, greedy, industrial, manipulative and

cunning, there are certainly mirrors in place to the establishment and systems which the

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counter-culture was fighting against. Baron Harkonnen himself, the leader and master

manipulator of the novel, is a figure that has entered the world of pop culture as a

representation of the greedy, corporate and uncaring leadership of large business, often

compared to Donald Trump in the run up to the 2016 U.S. election. In the killing of Paul’s

father, Duke Leto, there is commentary on how the Leto would represent the older, nobler

ideas of society – communicating, rationalising and working with the people and subjects of

his Kingdom, being destroyed by the tyranny of the modern world – the uncaring

industrialists and businessmen who show no regard for anyone other than themselves and

how much power and control they can gain. Duke Leto’s death being the death of the ideals

which we once held dear but now seem defunct and ancient – it’s only the return of

spiritualism and harmonising with the planet which can stop this rampant extortion. Just like

in Foundation, it is Baron Harkonnens negligence which leads to his decline and downfall.

The ever-relevant comparison to the Fall of Rome once again is brought up, society in Dune

is on the precipice – just like in Foundation, but in Dune there is a clearer cause of this

decline – that of greed and self-interest and ignorance of nature and ecology, something

which 60s counter-culture is in direct opposition against.

Dune appears to consciously have ideas of adolescent wish fulfilment sewn into its

fabric. The idea of individual destiny and how secret, hidden powers will manifest within

oneself to control the world will take shape. In the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

it is described as “an adolescent craving for imaginary worlds in which heroes triumph by a

preternatural blend of bravery, genius and psi, helped along in this case by a secret

psychedelic drug, melange.” Dune does have certain dualities in it and seems self-aware in its

ignorance in a way the counter-culture movements in America didn’t seem to be. Paul in his

victory certainly over-achieves and is left at the end to try and pick up the pieces (and set the

stage for the follow-on, Dune Messiah) and he is left aware of the mistakes of his victory and

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how the Galaxy and humankind will be consumed by the next great Jihad, that same

awareness didn’t seem to be shared by the movements in the 1960’s as no clear plan of what

comes next or how society would work in place of the establishment was set. This would

become clear later in history with the collapse of the hippy movements and the world

lurching towards a society even more integrated with economics, finance and technology.

There is a satirical edge to Dune and to its ideas of the ‘heroes’ journey’, religion, spirituality

and Romanticism in general. The philosopher John Locke coined the idea of the ‘tabula rasa’

– how each human was born as a blank slate in which would be formed by their surroundings.

Herbert categorically did not share this idea, believing instead in inequality in how society

progresses. He says on this “I now know...that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I

believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that

rebound on the equalizers.” His vision of the society in which he wrote Dune around was one

of a crusade, but where that crusade should lead was unknown and if they were to ultimately

win, like Paul did, would it be worth the pain and suffering which led us there? Through the

narrative of this New Wave Science Fiction we reveal ever more opportunities for success

and misery and an even deeper analysis into the culture which has helped shape the modern

world, the idealised narrative of the hippy counter-culture movement and perhaps lessons that

can be taken into similar movements of today.

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 Hyperion – Chaos, Judgement and the Unknown

The next leap forward in terms of the Science Fiction genre is the Cyberpunk movement. The

most notorious novel and the one which really signalled the beginning of the style is William

Gibson’s Neuromancer. If the Golden Age was hard science fiction which focussed on

technological aspirations of humanity and the New Wave focussed on romantic

experimentation, then Cyberpunk was a step beyond again, taking elements of both and

indeed the ages of Science Fiction that came before those and blended them together. Key

hallmarks of Cyberpunk were that of cybernetic body modification, artificial intelligence and

radical changes in society. Described by the Science Fiction writer Bruce Sterling,

Cyberpunk is a “combination of lowlife and high tech” and the novel Neuromancer which

was published in 1984 does indeed contain and explore these elements. But it is in the world

of Dan Simmons Hyperion, which was published five years later in 1989, where not only is

the genre of Cyberpunk blown wide open, but Science Fiction itself is put through a

scrupulous test of literary technique and form.

Published right at the tail end of the Cold War, Hyperion takes place in the 27th

century where mankind has spread amongst the stars using faster-than-light ‘Hawking

Drives’ and is connected together by teleportation machines known as ‘Farcasters’ which

provide instant travel and communication relays through the fabric of space. Ruling this

Utopia is a Government known as the Hegemony which use the Farcasters and its cyber-

reality derivative the ‘All-Thing’ (a form of Internet) to govern and maintain humanity. This

in a way is a combination of some of the core elements of Cyberpunk and previous

established Science Fiction ideas from the Golden Age – an all-encompassing Empire not too

dissimilar to the Galactic Empire found in Foundation or that of Dune. And just like its

26
predecessors in those works, the Hegemony finds itself on the verge of collapse, with forces

such as the ‘Ousters’ threatening to invade and destroy the carefully built Utopia. The

Ousters are a kind of unknowable and undefinable enemy – not necessarily alien, they are

completely modified humans able to withstand the harshness of life in space. In the world of

1980s, the Ousters could be represented by the new rising threat the West was facing –

International Terrorism originating in the Middle East from a society quite unlike what the

West was used to. Behind all this is a secessionist Artificial Intelligence known as the

‘TechnoCore’, a large and unquantifiable element which often advices and aids humanity, but

also has its own agenda, which becomes clear by the end of Fall of Hyperion (Hyperion and

Fall of Hyperion is the same continuous story published in two books for length and

publishing reasons, but flow into each other much like the volumes in J.R.R. Tolkeins The

Lord of the Rings) – that of using humanity to find what it terms the ‘Ultimate Intelligence’ –

a form of God.

In the 1980s, the United States found itself in a place of almost unopposed power.

While the Cold War was still ongoing, it was becoming clearer and clearer that the Soviet

Union was on the verge of collapse with the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as Premier

and its failings in the war in Afghanistan. The States found itself completely outclassing the

East in terms of technology and military and indeed, the massive investment into the Military

Industrial Complex by the Reagan Administration only confirmed what was already

becoming quite clear – that the United States was the most advanced and economically

powerful world power. If the American military began the decade with post-Vietnam

technology, it would end the decade with Stealth bombers and the possibility of producing

space-based weapons in the notorious ‘Star Wars’ program. The Hegemony in Hyperion

finds itself in a similar position. Its military wields enormous might in terms of Naval power

and with extremely high-tech weapons such as ‘Death Wands’ which are able to vaporise life

27
forms on a massive scale. Productivity and culture within the Hegemony thrives, with

instantaneous travel and the ‘All-Thing’ able spread ideas and people far and wide. Both the

real world of the United States and the Hegemony seem to be on the threshold of great

change, with the potential of both great successes and turbulent misery waiting beyond.

With such a wide and remarkable world built, appropriating elements from all fields

of Science Fiction, Simmons narrative structure in Hyperion is one that harks all the way

back to the past, to the genesis of the English literature. The first book takes the stories of six

characters on a pilgrimage to find a mechanical time-warping creature known as ‘The Shrike’

and tells their tales and why they are on the pilgrimage in a structure similar to Chaucer’s The

Canterbury Tales. Simmons himself is an English teacher with a seemingly great knowledge

and understanding of literature from all eras. Indeed, the name of the book and its follow on

are direct references to John Keats attempted epic poems of the same name, though both are

infamously unfinished. Each pilgrim tells their story to each other over the chapters of the

book, each revealing a different element or idea of The Shrike. The planet on which the

creature is found is named Hyperion and it is of particular interest to the presumed villains of

the story, the Ousters and it is clear that any culminations of the narrative will take place

here. In staging the story in this way, there seems to be a direct acknowledgement of the

history of storytelling, almost as if this mesh of Science Fiction and classical literature is

commentating on the new ways in which humanity will be able to tell its stories – through the

digital medium, the old world will clash with the new and be reborn and indeed retold. The

rise of video games in the 1980s was enabling society to engage in a new way with how we

tell stories, one through which we use the machine to reveal to us different ideas on the

established ones, like those of Chaucer and Keats.

In this light, this is where the character of The Shrike becomes the most interesting.

The Shrike is described as a “thorn-and-steel Grendel” by the character Martin Silenus, one

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of the pilgrims and a poet of some renown. At over 7 feet tall and being entirely composed of

steel, blades, thorns and glaring, unflinching red eyes, it is truly the stuff of nightmares come

to life. Almost gothic in how it is portrayed, it is a brutal nigh-unstoppable killing machine

who butchers its victims in the most gruesome of ways. It only occupies one planet in the

Hegemony, that of Hyperion where it is somewhat of a myth, its existence being undefined

and unsure by the greater galaxy. A type of a cult has formed around it, calling themselves

‘Church of the Final Atonement’ in which they believe The Shrike is a redeemer, come to

punish the Hegemony for humanities sins. It is in this capacity, as a judge and arbiter, where

The Shrike reflects most on society in the 1980s and indeed of society today. A kind of

technological nightmare, The Shrike represents both the success and misery of humanity at

this time. Humanity at the height of the Cold War has the ability to destroy all life on Earth

ten-fold, but at the same time has the ability to compute millions of calculations a second and

send information instantaneously across satellites. A relative peace has settled across the

planet, indeed there had been no war on the scale of the First or Second World Wars since the

conclusion of the last and any threat to engage on a war of that level would result in the

mutually assured destruction of both powers. Humanity is beginning to lean more and more

on technology and our machines, a kind of digital lethargy was taking form as the promise of

a technological wonderland was to be our future. The Shrike, in all its gothic barbarity and

mystery is perhaps representative of an end point of this paradise – will the machines

eventually destroy us on their terms? What if the machines were to judge us? Would they

send a Shrike to tear us apart?

Thomas Lombardo in Science Fiction as the Mythology of the Future in describing

the aspects of contemporary Science Fiction comments how:

“In a world of increasing individualism and human diversity, science fiction literature

has splintered into multiple visions and multiple realities. The great god of secular and

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 technological progress - the original motivating engine of science fiction - has been

replaced by the contemporary mindset of reality as smorgasbord and collage. Science

fiction literature has gone Postmodern.”

It is within this Postmodern framework where the idea of The Shrike as a judge takes form.

The ideas of individualism take root and grow unbound when coupled with technological

progress. The internet of today is awash with ideas of ultimate individualism, so much so that

reality itself is moving beyond the physical and being reshaped in the digital in what has been

labelled as “post-truth” (The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2016). In late 1980s

America, these ideas were in their infancy compared to the world today. Indeed,

miniaturisation has led to vast technological leaps and a problem of Science Fiction in the 80s

was its inability to accurately predict just how far and how fast technology would leap

forward in the very near future – either it was too little in the case of computer processing

power being often under-estimated, or too far with ideas of ‘off-planet colonies’ being the

norm (as in Bladerunner). The chaos which would ensue in humanity under this new

technological umbrella would be something that could lead us to a lethargic, hedonistic state

– as The Hegemony in Hyperion seems to be.

On this idea, the author Neil Postman comments:

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that

there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to

read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared

those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth

would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive

30
 culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some

equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumplepuppy.”

Simmons in Hyperion finds the middle ground between both Orwell’s and Huxley’s future

scenarios. Unknown to the Hegemony, the A.I. known as the TechnoCore is monitoring and

manipulating humanity through its use of the All-Thing and Farcaster network. But at the

same time, humanity is using these machines to lull itself into the irrelevance of Huxleys

worlds through the opportunities opened by these technologies. The opportunity for both

success and misery is being grasped at both ends by society in Hyperion.

In each of the pilgrim’s stories, a central theme is that of pain. In the first story, a

priest recounts the diary of another priest called Paul Duré who was exiled on Hyperion.

Ultimately, the Paul Duré encounters The Shrike in one of the temples on Hyperion and is

implanted with a parasitic lifeform know as a ‘cruciform’. Just like the religious context from

which the name is derived, it is in the shape of a cross and grants everlasting life onto

whoever its attached to. To attempt to remove it causes severe pain and in this attempt, Duré

crucifies himself on a ‘tesla tree’ and is constantly killed and brought back for seven years. In

another story, the scholar Sol Weintraub is forced to witness his daughter Rachel age

backwards until ultimately, she is a baby due to a curse put on her by The Shrike. He carries

the child with him on the pilgrimage, under instruction from The Shrike, in order to cure her.

The poet Martin Silenus believes The Shrike is his muse and will help him write is great and

final work, the Hyperion Cantos, even though his previous experience with The Shrike

destroyed his entire community of scholars and poets in a bloody and brutal fashion. The pain

the characters go through is extremely revealing and in a lot of cases quite shocking. There is

a dissonance here which reflects the world and society of the 80s. Through our new-found

technologies, the pain of the planet was being revealed in new and unexplainable ways. The

famines in Ethiopia during the mid-80s was broadcast around the world in startling images

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and film. Live Aid, a concert set up by Bob Geldof to raise funds for its relief, barely made a

dent on what was actually happening there. The virus AIDS was receiving a ton of press

attention and the devastation it caused not only in individuals, but communities was widely

reported on. The same goes for extreme poverty across the world as modern society struggled

to understand these new, complex and in a way unstoppable forces of misery and pain on the

planet. If we could achieve so much as a race, if we could land on the moon and create

technology which could transform the fabric of society at the touch of a button, why was

there so much suffering and pain? In Hyperion, we witness first-hand the pain of the

characters and their almost mythological and insane pilgrimage to find a being known by its

church as ‘The Lord of Pain’ in order to confront and ask it why. And ultimately, how would

the Lord of Pain judge them?

In this suffering, Simmons introduces us to a character who perhaps quantifies these

mysteries more than anyone else – that of the poet John Keats, albeit a clone of his created by

the TechnoCore in order to better understand humanity. Keats’ story in Hyperion and Fall of

Hyperion mirrors that of the real Keats. In the latter book, we relive Keats’ death at the hands

of tuberculosis in vivid detail. This is not before Keats embarks on a journey through the All-

Thing to meet one of the great intelligences of the TechnoCore itself. The imagery of an 18th

century romantic poet almost subliming himself through a digital reality to meet a form of

God is loaded with imagery and symbolism. In order to unpack it, we can turn to the real

Keats’ line in his poem Ode to a Grecian Urn in which he writes “Beauty is truth, truth

beauty – that is all / Ye know on earth, and ye need to know”. What is revealed to the artist

from the art in this case? What does Keats see in the Urn? This can almost be compared to

Simmons himself and what he sees in the world and the novel and again, what the reader sees

in Hyperion. Human experience, chaos, love, family, rebellion – it is all contained within the

text, but now we are reading Keats through the lens of the digital age. How will technology

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uncover the ‘beauty’ Keats is describing? The Shrike perhaps will act as a judge. The final,

most brutal and nightmarish form of technology being arbiter for the definition of beauty.

The Science Fiction writer David Brin “argues that the Romantic movement of the nineteenth

century was a counter-reaction against the futurist and forward-looking philosophy of the

Enlightenment – a rejection of reason, science, and technology in favour of a more natural,

simpler way of life.” Keats in the world of Hyperion, is a literal embodiment of this

argument, sent to question the Machine-God itself, Ummon, only to find that the machines

themselves have become divided as to the direction of their existence – ‘The Stables’, who

want to continue to co-exist with humanity, ‘The Volatiles’ who wish to destroy humanity

believing they have advanced beyond them, and ‘The Ultimates’ who want to construct the

Ultimate Intelligence program and leave the decision to that. Simmons is not only

questioning the old argument of the Enlightenment versus Romanticism, but he’s looking at

technology itself as an advancement on the fundamentals of life and its meaning and how our

questions would in turn become their questions.

This is the true nature of Hyperion – that of a complex and chaotic and unsure

existence in a world that is seemingly stable. The thawing of the Cold War was a threshold

from which humanity would have to step forward into, and it seemed more and more likely

that technology and science would be the driving force of society. Indeed, in hindsight, this

prediction is absolutely correct as questions over our use of the Internet, Social Media,

Automation and communications take over the old conversations on ideals such as politics,

resources, the economy and employment. The nihilism we see in Foundation and Dune in

regard to their falling Empires of the Galactic Empire and Imperium and the almost

acceptance of it is not entirely present in Hyperion. Indeed, by the conclusion of Fall of

Hyperion, the fall of the Hegemony, All-Thing and Farcaster network is an act of freedom

and redemption. By the books end, the reader is almost praying for an outcome in which

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humanity is freed of its technological shackles in order to prevent the oncoming, brutal

judgement by The Shrike.

Popular Science Fiction in the 80s was riddled with these kinds of warnings. The

popular films in this genre were loaded with warnings of machines taking over and

supplanting humanity in the likes of James Cameron’s The Terminator or the more satirical

take on the subject in Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop. The apocalypse and chaos that followed

was displayed in the Mad Max franchise while dystopian futures of a society gone mad were

on witnessed in films like The Running Man and Escape from New York. Hyperion takes

some of its cues from these popular works but also melds them with the ideas of the Space

Opera, of which the Star Wars franchise was extremely popular, but then also grounds them

in classical literature such as The Canterbury Tales and the works of John Keats. In essence,

Hyperion can almost be seen as a book about storytelling itself. How the different characters

tell of their experiences and how the themes are reflected through the reader and how this in

turn is about how humanity is listening to the stories of the world. The end of the first book

sees our pilgrims eagerly embracing their mad journey, singing ‘We’re off to see the Wizard’

from The Wizard of Oz, but this time behind the curtain, it is not an old trickster, but a “thorn-

and-steel Grendel” waiting to crucify humanity on a thorn of its Tree of Pain. By the end of

the second book, our pilgrims go through their redemption process only to find a radical,

different and in a sense purer world waiting for them, but not without the extreme pain of

conflict with their current world and the machines on which we so rely. Behind the curtain,

Simmons has laid success and misery in far wider and deeper chasms than we thought

possible – a true reflection of the modern, digital world in which we were stepping into in the

late 1980s.

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 Conclusion – Science Fiction, a Door in the Dark

Through the lens of Science Fiction, we can see clear patterns emerging as to how society has

influenced the writing and predictive nature of the text. Through each of the stories of

Foundation, Dune and Hyperion, we are able to reveal standout ideals of the world at the

time they were published and trace a path through the genre right up to the present day. In

Foundation we see a world and society trying to rebuild from a fall and how new ideas and

science would be the guiding light in this process. In Dune we witness a return to a form of

romantic spirituality and mysticism which was somewhat missing from the more formally

structured world of Foundation and indeed the United States itself. And in Hyperion we see a

culmination of both previous ideals but shaped by the new technological and somewhat

chaotic state the Western World was stepping into.

These three phases – structure and order, romantic spirituality and finally chaotic

trepidation, have in turn culminated to the Science Fiction stories society is telling in the

present day. The genre has never been hotter in terms of sales and market share. Though

importantly, those present-day stories are revealing to us both our successes and miseries in

much the same way as the predecessors they are standing on the shoulders of. The

‘Superhero’ or ‘Comic book’ sub-genre has been wildly successful in both printed and visual

media. The individualistic and hopeful stories of the Marvel Cinematic Universe play against

a backdrop of confusion and disorder where ideas of ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ in society

run rampant. It is encouraging to point to a figure such as Tony Stark of the Iron Man

franchise and see ideas of hope and redemption for even the greediest and narcissistic

individuals. But by the same token, perhaps there is an over-reliance on these kinds of

‘heroes’ as celebrity culture and media saturation takes over so many facets of our lives.

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Perhaps we aren’t looking for examples of real life heroes and instead turn to fictional worlds

of supermen to placate our desires of wish-fulfilment, something Dune critiqued and analysed

with Paul Atreides.

The future dystopian novels, which similarly had their cinema adaptations, such as

The Hunger Games or The Maze Runner are also revealing a sense of hopelessness and lack

of structure to the lives of adolescents. How in this new, technological and media rich world

it is easy to lose oneself in the nihilistic fear of the future. In Foundation we found similar

themes, but instead of focussing on the misery, it focussed on the science of the mathematical

‘Seldon Plan’. It is interesting to note that even though the technological difference in society

between the 1940’s and 2010’s is a monumental leap forward, we find stories of destruction

and fall and ultimate misery of society so compelling, especially in our youth. Is the message

that science will not save us? Again, the opportunities for success and misery grow ever

larger.

In films such as The Matrix and Inception we witness worlds in which the lines of

reality are blurred. Larger questions are invoked about our existence and the meaning of life,

all undercut by our use of technology. In Hyperion we witness this also, how the TechnoCore

grants the Hegemony an almost dreamlike existence but is in reality a parasite feeding off

humanity for its own nefarious ends. Is this the world we live in today? A fully connected,

digital society being lulled to what Aldous Huxley believed to be irreverence and Orwell

believed was concealing the truth? A Science Fiction film such as District 9 can comment on

the divisions in our society and communities and another story such as Her can comment on

love in the digital age by asking can we truly love an artificial intelligence and ask what the

boundaries of our emotions are. In a world where the pinnacles of success and pitfalls of

misery are becoming less and less defined, perhaps therefore society is turning more and

more towards Science Fiction not only to entertain us, but to give us answers to these ever

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more complex questions. The digital age has opened a door which humanity was thrust into

and through our science, we are both predicting the potential fall of human civilisation

through things like over-population and environmental disaster, and also the potential

successes such as off-world colonies on Mars or the eradication of global starvation.

In the stories of Foundation, Dune and Hyperion, there lies important materials for

not only future Science Fiction writers, but also present-day decision and policy makers. In

all three stories, one important element is missing from each – that of our planet, Earth. In

Foundation, Earth has been lost and forgotten, in Dune it sunk to irreverence and

unimportance after the Butlerian Jihad and most astonishingly, in Hyperion, the Earth was

seemingly ‘destroyed’ by a human made black hole (which turns out to be the villainous

TechnoCore actually moving the Earth to a distant galaxy). On this, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay,

Jr. in his book The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction comments:

“Ironically perhaps, the conventional Earth in sf is also a fusion of romantic longing

for an originary haven and of Enlightenment rationality as the starting point of the

science-fictional adventure to the stars. The future Earth is rarely the richly varied

planet of historical cultures and nations; it is an emblem of the fate of Enlightenment

rationality. Although sf writers delight in removing Earth from its pedestal—imitating

the move of the great intellectual revolutions in science, and mythologizing a

favourite ideological gambit of evolutionary thinking—relatively few writers can

leave it in its peripheral position. Galactic empire fictions, which should technically

have no need for reference to the planet Earth, often cannot let it go. In Asimov’s

Foundation series, the utterly marginalized Earth turns out to be the secret galactic

centre, after all. In Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos (1989–90), the destruction of the

Earth proves to be intolerable; it must be reconstructed.”

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It is this idea our power brokers seem to lose sight of and what Science Fiction warns us

against, just how much we rely on the actual planet. It is possible that we will wallow in that

Huxley-esque sea of irreverence, believing ourselves to not need the Earth as much as it

needs us, but alas that is a fool’s game. In each story, there is a sort of return to where we

started, albeit in Dune it is a return to the symbiosis with nature and the planet Arrakis, each

story navigating through success and misery until at last, we are home. And that is where

Science Fiction is at its best, taking us on that fantastic journey through the stars or through

digital paradises or nightmares, to the deepest ocean (perhaps 20,000 leagues aren’t possible

on Earth) and most distant times, we all ultimately conclude with what humanity is and what

our society could perhaps go through to get there. The most famous line associated with Star

Trek is ‘to boldly go’, but that isn’t just relevant for the crew of the Enterprise, its true of this

pale blue dot of a world which humanity exists on, boldly hurtling through time and space. In

Science Fiction, perhaps we have a template of a map for this journey and perhaps we need to

learn to understand it in order to avoid misery and embrace success.

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 Bibliography and Works Cited

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005.pdf. Page 5.

Belloc, Hilaire, The Modern Traveller, p. 41

Adorno, Theodore, Prisms, p. 34

Roberts, Adam The History of Science Fiction, p 195, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Gross, Terry. “Interview with Isaac Asimov.” National Public Radio, 25 Sept. 1987.

Lombardo, Thomas. “Science Fiction as the Mythology of the Future.”

Www.centerforfutureconsciousness.com, July 2005,

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Dirda, Michael. Foundation ;Foundation and Empire ;Second Foundation. Everymans

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Malmgren, Carl D. Against Genre/Theory: The State of Science Fiction Criticism. University

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Galison, Peter, The Future of Scenarios: State Science Fiction, p. 1

Galison, Peter, The Future of Scenarios: State Science Fiction, p. 8

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Lombardo, Thomas. “Science Fiction as the Mythology of the Future.”

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Herbert, Frank (1985). "Introduction". Eye. ISBN 0-425-08398-5

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Manlove, Colin N. Science Fiction: Ten Explorations. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

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Lombardo, Thomas. “Science Fiction as the Mythology of the Future.”

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Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

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Keats, John. Ode to a Grecian Urn, May 1819.

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Lombardo, Thomas. “Science Fiction as the Mythology of the Future.”

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Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press,

2011. p. 257

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