Ad Luna #4: The Essay, Part 1

(aka ‘how many numbers can I get into one post title before it gets confusing?’)

I didn’t just read Lucian before I wrote Ad Luna – I studied him at university. In fact I studied him twice, using the True History as the basis for both my undergrad and MA dissertations. Admittedly I decided to do so on my own, much to the despair of various course administrators and tutors, who were eventually kind enough to let me write about Star Trek instead of any of the things I’d actually been taught over the four years of the degree. (They gave me good marks so it can’t have been that painful for them…)

In the first essay I explored why the TH was sci-fi in generally – in the second one I got into specifics and wrote about it as, basically, Star Trek for the 2nd century AD. I spent months watching Star Trek, reading and rereading Lucian and cobbling together an essay that ended up being several chapters too long to actually submit. In the end I was pretty proud of it – and the research I did definitely influenced Ad Luna – a lot.

So, as I’ve been talking about Ad Luna for a few weeks now, I figured why not let you all read it?

A few warnings: it is long (12k words), so I’ll be posting it in chunks for a few weeks. If I add in the cut chapters (and I might…), it’ll be even longer. It’s also an official essay, so the first bits are somewhat box-tickingly academic (listing sources, setting out the questions to be answered, etc.), and thus get dull in places. Apologies for that. But the meat of the essay, now that’s some good stuff. Or at least UCL thought so.

So, without further ado, the introduction. If you want to know the history of the True History, then read on.

Fade in from black.

Narrator: Last time, in 200 AD: A Space ‘Odyssey’:

Scene: Bridge of the USS Enterprise-D. DATA, TROI, and RIKER are at their stations.

Enter CAPTAIN PICARD.

Picard: Number One, report.

Riker: Mr Data has discovered something very interesting in the derelict’s archives, sir.

Picard: Data?

Data turns to face the captain.

Data: It is a text from Earth’s Second Sophistic, sir. By Lucian of Samosata.

Picard: The satirist, yes. We studied him at the Academy.

Data: Correct, sir. However, this piece is not just satire.

Picard: I’ve read most of Lucian. What’s it called?

Data: The ‘True History’, sir. It is a cosmic voyage narrative, and appears to have been the inspiration for authors such as Cyrano de Bergerac and even Jules Verne. In many ways, Lucian could be said to be the founder of science-fiction as we know it.

He passes Picard his padd, which the captain reads briefly.

Picard: Or at least ahead of his time. But what’s so important that you called me here?

Riker: Counsellor?

Troi: Captain… the events of this book are disturbingly familiar. Very similar to the events of our own time.

Picard: Which events?

Troi: …our own mission, sir.

Picard: Onscreen.

The view-screen shows illustrations of Lucian’s first meeting with the Selenites. Picard looks slowly more and more astonished.

Narrator: And now the continuation:

LUCIAN

THE NEXT DISSERTATION

Lucian’s True History as Star Trek for the Second Sophistic

In my undergraduate dissertation, I sought to prove that Lucian of Samosata’s True History was not only satire, but science-fiction – and not only science-fiction (SF), but SF incorporating concepts only otherwise found in modern SF. The True History (TH) is one of the first cosmic voyage narratives. In his marvellous journey Lucian and his crew visit the Moon, are swallowed by a giant whale, fight aliens from the Sun and fish-headed monsters, meet Homer on the Isles of the Blessed, and more. This cosmic voyage commences a direct line of descent from Lucian through Francis Godwin and Cyrano de Bergerac all the way to Jules Verne’s moon stories, and thence to modern SF as we know it today. Other scholars such as S.C. Fredericks and Katelis Viglas have remarked on Lucian’s status as SF; I expanded on this discourse by exploring Lucian’s apparent use of modern SF concepts – alien contagions, advanced technology, and even generation ships – through comparison to modern authors, including Iain M. Banks and Robert Reed. Lucian was not coincidentally ‘anticipating’ these tropes, but creating them, or at least sowing the seeds for their creation. I concluded that modern SF, rather than originating in the modern age of advanced science and actual cosmic exploration, in fact expands on a tradition whose roots were present long ago: a tradition begun by Lucian in the TH. In this essay, I will expand on this conclusion, by directly comparing the TH to another piece of modern SF, perhaps the most enduring and defining of all: Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek.

Gene Roddenberry cited Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as an influence on his initial concept; as Swift was influenced by Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone, which was itself directly inspired by the TH, it could be argued that Star Trek (Trek), like Jules Verne’s lunar narratives, a direct descendant of Lucian’s work! But the similarity between the two works runs deeper than this superficial connection. The central premise of Trek is summarised in its iconic opening monologue:

“To explore strange new worlds… to seek out new life and new civilisations… to boldly go where no-one has gone before.”

Compare this to the opening of Lucian’s narrative, almost two millennia before:

“…the motive and purpose of my journey lay in… my desire for adventure, and in my wish to find out what the end of the ocean was, and who the people were that lived on the other side.”

The stories comprising the TH would, with a little adaptation, easily pass muster as episodes of Trek. Just like the crews of the various starships Enterprise, Lucian’s crew in the TH encounter a succession of alien beings, in a journey to lands where no-one has gone before. Even Trek’s episodic nature is paralleled in Lucian; each ‘island’ of the narrative is a self-contained adventure, with its own marvels, monsters, and ethical conundrums. But most importantly, Trek constantly draws on and exaggerates contemporary society. So too, I believe, do the various episodes of the TH. Roddenberry always intended Trek to be a socially progressive show, to address real social issues of its time; “sex, religion, politics”, racism and colonialism, and more. These were, and are, difficult subjects to address directly even in fiction medium – and thus Roddenberry employed the core device of SF, ‘cognitive estrangement’: the exploration of real issues through a distorting mirror, in a world not quite our own. As long as Roddenberry’s stories were “happening on other planets to little green people…” he was safe from conservative network censors, able to “slip ideas” about the real world into his fictional one. I believe that Lucian, in the True History, can be read as doing the same thing: holding up a distorting mirror to the society of the Second Sophistic, “locating the staple mechanisms of Greek (and Roman) life and culture… in fantastic settings”, and allowing his audience to reflect on that society’s social and political issues. In this dissertation I will explore Lucian’s use of ‘cognitive estrangement’ for social reflection through comparison to Star Trek, legendary for doing the same.

This essay will comprise several case studies, taking particular ‘episodes’ of the TH and comparing them to episodes of Trek featuring similar issues and storylines. I will consider how Trek presents its social issues to its audience, how each episode might relate to real events, and how the conflicts are resolved, before considering Lucian’s approach to his similar scenarios; his chosen issues, his resolutions, and how his ‘episode’ may relate to contemporary Roman events. Differences in each approach to cognitive estrangement will reveal much about the differences between each society being mirrored. Case studies will include ‘first contact’ scenarios, and how conflicts with ‘enemy’ species like the Cardassians and the Bullheads may be reflections of contemporary conflicts; the dramatic contrast between modern and Roman attitudes to gender equality, and how Trek may be closer to Roman ideals than we might think; and the fears evoked by the assimilating Borg and the Vine-Women, of both cultural and literal contagion.

“Mr Worf… fire.”

With these words, Jonathan Frakes forced Star Trek fans to wait three months before discovering the fate of the Enterprise-D. Lucian, too, ends the True History on a cliff-hanger – but does not resolve it. Along the way, however, there are myriad adventures to be had, and, just like Trek, those adventures are more significant than mere fantastical tales. Underneath their fantastical veneer they are stories about us, whether we be denizens of the Second Sophistic or the 21st Century: the people who read and watch and wonder.

 

Steer, Huw, 200 AD: A Space Odyssey (2017)

ibid, p.19

Roddenberry, Gene, in Altman & Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years (Thomas Dunne, 2016), p.66

See any episode of the Original Series or The Next Generation.

Lucian of Samosata, The True History, trans. A.M. Harmon (Loeb Classical Library, Vol. 1, 1913), book 1, 5

Mossman, Hannah, ‘Narrative Island-Hopping: Contextualising Lucian’s Treatment of Space in the Verae Historiae’ in Bartley, Adam (ed.), A Lucian for Our Times (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009), p.50

Roddenberry in The Fifty-Year Mission vol. 1, p.67

I will fully explain this concept (Darko Suvin’s definition of SF) below.

Roddenberry in The Fifty-Year Mission vol. 1, p.67

Georgiadou, Aristoula & Larmour, David, Lucian’s Science Fiction Novel ‘True Histories’ (Brill, 1998), p.47

William Riker, Star Trek: The Next Generation, 3.26: ‘The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1’, dir. Cliff Bole (Paramount, 18/6/1990), 0:44:23

Tune in next week for the next bit. Maybe even sooner…