Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

for his Narnia novels), while Ray Bradbury’s story “The Man” used an elusive but thuddingly obvious Christ figure to construct a similar fable of warm faith vs. cold science. Monasticism is treated as a preserver of learning in the post-apocalyptic world of Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, but the novel eventually turns on a church-vs.-state controversy and a familiar critique of self-destructive materialist culture. A few novels, such as James Blish’s A Case of Conscience and Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, sought to engage a more complex interaction between faith and belief, good and evil, while fewer would take on the church itself as a cause of dystopia, as in Lester del Rey’s little-known The Eleventh Commandment, and fewer still, like David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, would openly condemn the pernicious effects of belief itself. And, of course, Vonnegut had his Bokononism. But more often than not, when science fiction turned to religion, the results were uneasy fictions of accommodation, often featuring sensitive and intelligent Jesuit priests puzzling over mysterious aliens and intractable moral conundra. (Perhaps because of their intellectual traditions, Jesuits have long been favored by science fiction writers, who have seemed much more reluctant to take on, for example, Southern Baptists.)

      Here, though, came James Morrow, unequivocal atheist, cheerfully profane fabulist, witty scourge of nincompoop theodicies — the one storyteller who could somehow make logical positivism play out like a battlefield exploit and revealed religion like a Marx Brothers movie. Morrow neither apologized for his humanist stance nor retreated into a clever but facile nihilism (as would sometimes happen with Vonnegut, the author to whom he is most often compared). Morrow would not only proclaim the death of God, but show us his massive corpse being towed across the Atlantic like a dead whale. Readers will find no shortage of such religious satire in Reality by Other Means, from the Church extending its right-to-life doctrine to protect the rights of the “unconceived” in “Auspicious Eggs” to the tiny Martian invaders who decide to conduct their own religion-vs.-reason ideological war on the streets of Manhattan (since they simply don’t have room on the small Martian moons where they now reside). Appropriately, the only ones who know how to deal with the Martians are lunatics.

      But focusing narrowly on Morrow’s religious satire risks overlooking the considerably broader scope of his work — he’s impatient with all sorts of dogma, the dogmas of academia not excluded — or the significant ways in which he has helped to expand the scope of what science fiction can do. Morrow’s relation to science fiction is an interesting one, and not entirely unconflicted. On the one hand, he has long held, as he did in an interview with Samuel R. Delany in that Paradoxa issue, that science is “the best way we have of obtaining knowledge about the outside universe: provisional, tentative, vulnerable knowledge, to be sure, but still astonishingly substantive,” and his fiction reveals a deep understanding of scientific thinking from Newton (see The Last Witchfinder) to Darwin (see Galápagos Regained) to current physics.

      On the other hand, he is far from being a “hard SF” writer, and he doesn’t hesitate to employ pulp pseudosciences when the story at hand calls for them; the magical “Infusion D,” which turns already degenerate men into something like Neanderthals in “Lady Witherspoon’s Solution,” might well have been concocted by Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, and Dr. Jekyll himself very nearly makes an appearance in the form of Dr. Pollifex in “The Cat’s Pajamas,” with his equally magical “QZ-11-4” substance, which somehow turns beast-men into successful local politicians by multiplying their capacity for empathy (don’t ask; just read the story). There’s also more than a touch of Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau in that tale, but tracing the various ways in which Morrow adapts and reshapes tropes from earlier science fiction might well precipitate another essay altogether. The “science” of vibratology in “The Iron Shroud” is an equally unlikely but ingenious construction of a credible-sounding Victorian pseudoscience (the prolific British paperback author Lionel Fanthorpe also imagined such a science). In “Daughter Earth,” Morrow moves beyond imaginary pseudoscience and fully in the direction of surrealism, as a mother gives birth to a miniature Earth, a global biosphere complete with oceans and a rapidly accelerated pattern of evolution (the extinction of the dinosaurs somehow becomes a moving family tragedy weirdly reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth), while in “Spinoza’s Golem” he moves in the direction of Jewish legend — though this particular golem is actually a kind of steampunk robot which “lives not by magic but by springs and cogs, ratchets and escapements.”

      There is also some familiar furniture from science fiction and horror in “The Vampires of Paradox,” which could almost be viewed as Morrow’s answer to Arthur C. Clarke’s famous story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” only in this case it’s a philosophy professor specializing in paradoxes, rather than a computer scientist, whose visit to a remote monastery turns out to alter the fate of the world. Clarke, who often wrote himself into corners that he could only get out of by resorting to a mysticism he didn’t actually believe in, is a good representative of the kind of rhetorical paradoxes in science fiction that Morrow exploits, and “The Vampires of Paradox” brings these to the foreground, beginning with a catalogue of often familiar verbal paradoxes and expanding its scope to include Fermi’s paradox (regarding the apparent absence of other civilizations in the universe) and Schrödinger’s cat (the famous illustration of quantum superposition). Both are among the favorite puzzles of science fiction writers, and Morrow’s examination of them is ingenious — but the story also has its improbable pulp features, such as the roach-like alien “cacos” who feed on paradoxes and attach themselves to humans like Robert Heinlein’s puppet masters, or the Poe-like “tarn” that oozes through a “crack in the lithosphere” and threatens to inundate the world.

      Morrow rarely employs anything resembling traditional hard science fiction extrapolation, but in “Martyrs of the Upshot Knothole” — my candidate for the most gnomic story title here — he has done enough historical and scientific research to make almost convincing the longstanding rumor that one of the massive nuclear bomb tests of the 1950s (called “Upshot Knothole,” which helps make sense of the title) took place just near enough to a downwind movie location for the actors and crew to suffer radiation-induced cancers years later. The movie in question is an actual John Wayne epic, The Conqueror, and Wayne himself, who shows up as a central character, may have been among the “martyrs.”

      This brings us to another fascinating but seldom discussed aspect of Morrow’s fiction: his enthusiasm for popular culture, movies and television in particular, and bad movies and television in even more particular. His decision to invoke The Conqueror — widely remembered as one of the most egregiously misconceived movies of the 1950s, with John Wayne as a wildly unlikely Genghis Khan — suggests that Morrow’s fascination with (and considerable knowledge of) film is not exactly limited to the classics. Caltiki, the amoeba-like monster that the epistemological explorers encounter toward the end of “Fixing the Abyss,” is borrowed from an actual 1959 Italian horror film, Caltiki, the Immortal Monster, to which the story’s narrator, himself a third-rate horror director, has made a number of knock-off sequels. And when the same explorers encounter Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in his giant-insect form, the narrator thinks of the 1954 monster movie Them! The narrator of “The Wisdom of the Skin” is likewise a filmmaker, reduced to boring educational films of the sort that haunted high school students in the 1950s, while the yeti who decides to study with the Dalai Lama in “Bigfoot and the Bodhisattva” displays an encyclopedic knowledge of Abominable Snowman movies, partly due to his having eaten the brain of a dying NYU film-studies professor who was trying to climb Mount Everest. This same yeti forms an attachment with the Dalai Lama over their mutual fondness for James Bond films, and the oddly Buddhist-sounding titles of some of them (Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, et cetera).

      Nor will Morrow hesitate to employ a pop-movie cliché when it suits his purposes, sometimes inverting the cliché as a means of underlining his own satirical agenda. “The Cat’s Pajamas” ends with a classic scene of enraged villagers storming the mad scientist’s lair, but these villagers are a more eclectic group than they might at first seem: “the mob included not only yahoos armed with torches but also conservatives gripped by fear, moderates transfixed by cynicism, liberals in the pay of the status quo, libertarians acting out anti-government