Star Mores

Introduction.

    Conceive a 25-ish white boy--short legged, thin enough to appear muscular, simian arms, long neck, large Adam's apple, shoulder-length dark hair perpetually tied back in a ponytail going through a baseball cap--wearing a faded tank top exposing a large tribal-ish tattoo on his bicep, the image being both obviously present and imminently forgettable. His face looks young and tired, perhaps on account of a sparse goatee and a slight overbite, and his nose is long and mouse-like (or rat-like, if you prefer). That's the way the Shit Hippy looks!!!
   The way the Shit Hippy thinks is surprisingly parallel to his appearance: somewhat intentionally deviant (i.e. the tattoo, the long hair), yet apathetic towards life in general (i.e. the tattoo, the long hair). Don’t think the Shit Hippy is stupid, he's actually quite intelligent--just burnt out. Times 1,000. He says very interesting things about pragmatism versus idealism, and admits he has wanderlust--and then goes on to say he cures it now by getting drunk at bars and then sleeping in the back of his VW van (with a bumper sticker that implores "peace, please"). He once lived in an "anarchist collective" and was very politically stimulated . . . yet, being around him now, it's clear he's smart, just somehow ruined.
   I started working at this terrible special events company doing stagehand work in fall 2004. The work was mindless, the hours were bad, the boss was a passive-aggressive asshole--crappy job stereotypes were rich and plentiful, plentiful and rich they were. And yah, the boss scheduled me to work with the Shit Hippy maybe my second day of work . . . dear reader, understand that this boy is a void of all happiness and nice things in life, and being around the Shit Hippy simply makes you feel like shit too. I got an old friend a job with me at this company, and they made the mistake of scheduling him with the Shit Hippy on one of his first days there--and he actually quit BECAUSE OF THE SHIT HIPPY. However, the Shit Hippy didn't make me quit--I was lucky enough to have read this passage on addiction and longevity from a science-fiction novel the day after I worked with him:
         “Finagle's festering testicles! Chmeee, I'm two and a quarter centuries old. I've been
         everything. I've been a master chef. I helped build and operate a wheel city above Down. I
         settled on Home for a while and lived like a colonist. Now I'm a wirehead [futuristic
         equivalent of a heroin addict]. Nothing lasts. You can't do any one thing for two hundred
         years. A marriage, a career, a hobby--they're good for twenty years . . .” 6
From this passage I gleaned that yah, my job sucks really hard, but it's not forever. And yes, the Shit Hippy is a terrible depressing black hole for joy, but who says he'll always be that way, and what care of it is mine? The quotation is from a book called The Ringworld Engineers, by Larry Niven. It’s about a fantastic world built by aliens, in the shape of a ring with a star in the middle of it. Niven introduced this conceptual world first in his 1970 novel, Ringworld, and some characters from the story return to the Ringworld in The Ringworld Engineers to save the structure (which allots about 600 million million square miles of living space--i.e. a cure for futuristic overpopulation) from collapse into its star due to structural problems. As a sci-fi novel, The Ringworld Engineers is among one of the most seminal ever written . . . but what of it as a self-help novel? Huh.
   I learned a lot of valuable things from The Ringworld Engineers: 1. Crappy jobs don't have to be forever. 2. We are products of our societies--and thus, view other worlds/cultures/customs through our (often unfair/unjust) standards (see page 7 of this book for the quotation from Niven). 3. Escapism and wanderlust are normal psychological occurrences (see pages 8 and 9). These are all truisms I could have learned easily in one of my old college classes on postmodernism or psychoanalysis--but let's pretend I never went college. Would I have read Adorno or Lyotard or Jung on my own initiative? One can find these "life lessons", or rather, clues to understanding our own cultural/societal environments by sometimes separating ourselves from our worlds--and splicing ourselves into bizarre fictional ones, vastly different from our own. If you trust your analytical and imaginative capacities, to look at your life from the perspective of a sci-fi novel can be absurdly liberating. It's the damnedest thing!
   My father lent me the novels I quote in this book, thinking he was just giving me something good to read, while unwittingly imparting "fatherly wisdom" upon me in a roundabout way. In his well-read opinion, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination is not only one of the best sci-fi novels ever written, but also one of the best unsung fictional novels ever written. Loosely based on Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, the novel tells of an animalistic protagonist who refines himself into a wealthy, rational human being--for the sole purpose of killing the operator of a ship that left him abandoned in outer space. As a scientific novel, Bester's book is laughable--the concept of jaunting, or teleporting oneself to pre-destined places many miles away through thought alone, fascinates the reader while frustrating the scientist--yet it succeeds as a story of revenge and the power of will against a futuristic backdrop (which, ironically enough, is dated--The Stars My Destination was written in 1956, with nuclear explosives plaguing the collective unconscious).
   The images on pages 10 to 12 contain quotations from a couple of Geoffrey Household's novels: Rogue Male, which is about a skilled hunter who tries to assassinate Hitler on a whim, subsequently finding himself hiding in a hole in the ground in rural England to save his life; and Dance of the Dwarfs, which tells the story of an agricultural scientist conducting research at a rural Colombia village, and his horrific encounters with "monsters" in the jungle which inspire unfathomable fear in the native populace. Both novels deal heavily with human capacities for fear and strategy, much like Bram Stoker's Dracula, but furthermore, relate surprisingly well to C. G. Jung's writings on "The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits." I'm unsure if Household had read these specific writings, but the quotation, "It is well known that Europeans have very curious psychic experiences if they have to live under primitive conditions for a long time, or if they find themselves in some other unusual psychological situation,"5 applies directly to the quotation on page 12.
   Page 13 contains a quotation that also deals with religion and fear, but it is from an evangelist's sermon at a prayer meeting in the novel The Fool Killer, by Helen Eustis. Eustis' novel is by no means sci-fi or fantasy by any strict definition--rather, it's a coming-of-age fiction novel set in the southern United States after the Civil War. The story relies heavily on folklore about a giant who kills stupid people with a large axe. I chose to include passages from this novel to relay a "life lesson" of my own: namely, that as individuals capable of intelligent thought, it is not beyond our ability or initiative to find answers to questions about our immediate environs (i.e. societal enlightenment) within even the most pulpy, cheesy, populist literature. Continuing education IS the world around us, if we let it be so.

--Ann Everton, February 2005

Works cited:
1. Bester, Alfred. The Stars My Destination. New York: Vintage Books, 1956. Quoted in second (Bester, 256) and third (Bester, 251) image, clockwise, starting from upper left.
2. Eustis, Helen. The Fool Killer. New York: Pocket Books, Inc., 1954.
3. Household, Geoffrey. Dance of the Dwarfs. New York: Penguin Books, 1968. Quoted in seventh (Household, 118) image clockwise.
4. Household, Geoffrey. Rogue Male. New York: Pyramid Books, 1939. Quoted in eighth (Household, 108) image clockwise.
5. Jung, C. G. Psychology and the Occult. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton university Press, 1977. Quoted in Introduction (Jung, 110).
6. Niven, Larry. The Ringworld Engineers. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980. Quoted in fourth (Niven, 266) and ninth (Niven, 258) image clockwise, and in Introduction (Niven, 55).

To Angus