INTRODUCTION: ANTHROPOLOGICAL / SCIENCE / FICTION
by Joe Sanders
Let’s begin by roughly defining science fiction as a branch of literature playing with the belief that science(s) can or will be able to understand/control our interactions with the universe. That should at least distinguish sf from fantasy and indicate the kinds of issues that noteworthy science fiction considers—sometimes hopefully, sometimes dubiously. A lot of science fiction ponders the notion of “understanding/control”; the conclusion of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, for example, suggests that the product of all human evolution could be merely “a round thing, the size of a football perhaps,” hopping aimlessly on a twilit beach. Just so, George Orwell’s 1984 is appalled by the prospect of human beings’ deliberately creating a future that one could distill to the image of a boot stamping on a human face forever. Nevertheless, sf writers keep testing, playing with scientific concepts and attitudes to speculate about, and dramatize, issues that haunt all fiction: “Where are we headed?” and “What if?”
In mid-to-late twentieth-century sf, writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Chad Oliver, and Michael Bishop explored the human condition by using “soft” sciences such as sociology and anthropology. Early in his writing career, Bishop was especially drawn to anthropology because it let him maneuver characters (and readers) into confronting unfamiliar establishments or cultures. It enabled scrutiny of many important questions: “How have these people found this unusual way to live? By examining what they have discovered, can we better understand the way we live? And what, if anything, should we change, as individuals or as a culture?”
You’re looking at a copy of Transfigurations, Bishop’s sixth book and the first of his early novels that he has revised for this series of trade-paperback reprints. (Don’t be misled by titles: this series’ A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire [2015] is not a reprint of his 1975 first novel but a slightly revised reprint of that novel’s thoroughly reimagined 1980 version, Eyes of Fire.) By the time he published Transfigurations, Bishop had attracted much positive attention for his short fiction and, at the rate of about one a year, had produced four impressive novels: A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire in 1975, And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees in 1976, and both Stolen Faces and A Little Knowledge in 1977. By the time Transfigurations appeared in 1979, he had learned a lot about writing fiction. All these novels provide variations on a classic theme: The Man Who Learns Better. But Funeral (first version) is a dire melodrama, Strange a much-muted bildungsroman, Stolen a mercifully oblique chunk of Grand Guignol, and Knowledge a story developed through a mosaic of viewpoints. Thus, when Bishop began Transfigurations, he had a formidable arsenal of writing skills to employ.
In his early novels, Bishop also experimented with different visions of human potential. Funeral shows (not quite convincingly) a young man diving headlong into heroic self-sacrifice. Strange pictures far-future humanity deliberately modified to prevent its individuality from competitive, destructive expression. In Stolen, humanity presumes that it has control of every crucial matter, but has arranged things so that no one person can be blamed for whatever goes wrong. This last, unpleasant vision of humanity is embodied in the interstellar civilization Glaktik Komm, referenced briefly in Funeral but more fully in the background of two short stories, “Blooded on Arachne” (1975) and “The House of Compassionate Sharers” (1977). A pitilessly efficient system, Glaktik Komm manages without nurturing. If that’s the best that we human beings can do, our “success” seems ultimately trivial.
In the late 1970s, the young Bishop was a writer with high ambitions, fresh-honed skills, and serious concerns. Thus primed, he accepted a suggestion from David Hartwell, his initial editor at Berkley-Putnam, to use his well-known novella “Death and Designation among the Asadi” (If, Feb 1973) as the basis for a longer fiction. Expanding “Death and Designation,” which readers and fellow writers had respectively shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula awards, offered interesting technical challenges. The project also encouraged Bishop to use the tools and the mindset of anthropology to explore how closely we dare to relate to alien creatures that may turn out to be unexpected reflections of ourselves.
Bishop decided not simply to inflate “Death and Designation,” but instead to incorporate it into a larger narrative tackling larger questions. After all, “Death and Designation” constitutes an assemblage of partial information: “enthnographic notes, journal entries, on-site recordings, and various animadversions by Egan Chaney, the xenologist on the ground,” as Bishop describes it. Although Thomas Benedict, Chaney’s colleague and assumed friend, has put the montage together to resemble a scientific monograph, readers must extrapolate from this incomplete, relatively raw data to figure out what Chaney was actually doing and what happened to him. Ostensibly, Chaney was studying the Asadi, an oddly behaving tribe of hominids on the newly discovered planet BoskVeld. How long have the Asadi been chaotically brutal savages? And how can they survive as a species in what looks like a state of barely repressed hostility? But Chaney’s reasonable-sounding design for anthropological study goes awry when, unfortunately but inevitably, he mixes his own concerns with those of the Asadi. Consequently, he forfeits any semblance of objective focus and the novel’s narrative veers off into “Heart of Darkness” territory.
Transfigurations is anthropological fiction in more ways than one: It’s a story about an anthropological project that allows its readers to study the anthropologists themselves. The novel reboots the original story, as Chaney’s daughter arrives on BoskVeld years later and recruits the aimlessly drifting Tom Benedict, supposedly to study the Asadi but actually to track down her father to recreate the close family unit that she yearns for. Note how well Chaney’s description of the Asadis’ condition as “Indifferent Togetherness” applies not only to the history of his own family, but also to the novel’s initial assemblage of characters and to Glaktik Komm itself. Although it looks like a more traditional narrative than “Death and Designation,” Transfigurations also asks readers to assume the role of anthropologists by weighing their observations of its characters’ behaviors and evaluating Thomas Benedict’s final extrapolation from the raw data, however uncertain that effort may prove.
In short, Transfigurations both fits and stretches the definition of science fiction set forth at the beginning of this introduction: It examines, tests, and plays with the notion that human beings can understand and/or control how they interact with the universe. The word transfiguration suggests an abrupt, total transformation, but the novel implies that such a change may not always, or ever, be possible. What the novel instead shows is a ragtag bunch of people learning to use their resources as best they can as they acquire experience that reveals more and more of their complex natures to one another and to themselves. These characters turn out to be less rigidly fixed than they at first seem, and the interaction of personalities makes livable compromise possible.
The anthropological/science/fiction novel Transfigurations displays remarkable degrees of invention, energy, and compassion. You’re lucky to have the experience of reading it in front of you. So, for now, forget about this introduction. The story will take you where you need to go. Just follow Egan Chaney and his pursuers into the Calyptran Wild.
Joe Sanders is a retired Professor of English at Lakeland Community College, Kirtland, Ohio. He has been writing about science fiction and fantasy for over sixty years. His most recent book-length publication is The Heritage of Heinlein (with the late Thomas D. Clareson) [McFarland, 2014].