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RANT FROM MARCH 1997 "When Life Imitates Art" |
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Art means fiction -- novels, stories, plays -- not how-to handbooks, like HIT-MAN or HOW TO ASSEMBLE AN ATOMIC BOMB IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD OUT OF SPARE PARTS FROM YOUR LOCAL MILITARY BASE. Writers of fiction imagine things, and then humanity hastens to bring into being what has been described in fiction. Life imitates art. Carel Capek, a Czech playwright, wrote R.U.R., in which he invented the word, robot. Now we all use it, and many have been built and many factory workers have been replaced by them. Capek forced us to ponder the human-like qualities of the robots right off the bat in that very first attempt, and later fiction continues to wrestle with that same topic. A comic strip called BUCK ROGERS entertained the little kids of my generation fifty years ago. Now rockets and laser ray- weapons are less entertaining, since my generation has to pay for them and duck and weave to dodge their effects on human life. Mary Shelley scared a lot of people with Dr. Frankenstein's antics, and this week's top story is about scientists thrilling some and scaring more, by cloning sheep and monkeys. Humanoid monsters will without doubt be next. We will do it, moral questions to the contrary notwithstanding, because we can. Hubris will be harder to harness than ever. I have bumped into several instances in which life has imitated the art in my own fiction. In Duke City Alchemist, in DUKE CITY TALES, the alchemist unleashes an influence that alters conditions. One of these influences results in this situation: if the person sitting in the driver's seat of the car or truck is legally drunk, the car won't run. For me, it was alchemical power, i.e. magic. Now in reality, inventors have presented judges with the opportunity to sentence habitual DWI offenders to vehicles rigged with a device which measures the driver's blood alcohol content, and if any is detected, the ignition system will not function. In A WORLD FOR THE MEEK I describe the dolphins of the future as so free of ego, i.e. meek, that they and their culture and science constitute the great hope for our planet. The only human survivor finds himself moving beyond ego and possessions and pre-conceived axioms, through keen awareness of his having lost everything and aching gratitude that the dolphins have found him, that he, too, is becoming meek. At one point I note that he is going Zen-crazy. Then years later a newspaper article appears, in which philosophers and dolphin-researchers declare and illustrate how dolphins are already advanced Zen Buddhists. And now just this week I find my opening story in VERMIN, Johnny Plutonium, acted out in real life. In the story, the protagonist places little heaps of blow-sand in the grass at the zoo, with a little sign labeling the material, plutonium, pu. When accosted by police, he declares that he is pointing out the truth of the little-known and not-at-all publicized fact that there really is plutonium in the grass at the zoo. A newspaper story now tells how Edward Grothus, proprietor of The Black Hole, a surplus materials shop in Los Alamos, buys canned vegetables, removes the creamed corn or string bean labels, and replaces them with illustrated labels that state, Organic Plutonium. He sells the cans from his store. His activity hit the papers because he sent one of those cans as a Christmas present to William Clinton, President of the United States of America, at the White House. The Secret Service was not amused, and came visiting. Life imitates art. It's a good reason to write, and to read, fiction. It stretches the mind. |
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