Has Science Fiction replaced the Myth in modern society

Great Debates
1

People have often used myths as a means of moral plays and a source to validate and mantain society along with its religious purposes. Myths are stories that contain a cultural truth about the world that is to instruct others about how they are to conduct themselves. Myths are effective due to their ability to catch an audience in the story while imparting these cultural truths.

As American society becomes increasingly secularized, it will continue to lose many religious myths and stories. Over the last couple of decades, we have seen previously American historical, mythological figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin amongst others come under scrutiny. In our pursuit of truth, we have stripped these men of many of the myth like qualities. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, merely an observation.

So where do we find the stories and means to communicate to kids, both young and old, important lessons that our culture holds on to? Part of the problem is trying to define a universal American culture. It just doesn’t exist. Secondly, no one medium is able to communicate across the nation. TV, video, movies, video games, internet, music, and books are too different of ways to try to communicate any coherent message.

This leads me to believe that a genre versus a medium is more effective at communicating across American culture and science fiction seems the best at carrying the message. Currently, it is not the best genre since it “seems” to appeal only to adolescent males. Also, a large portion of science fiction, in whatever medium, tends to lead to escapism versus myth making.

However, science fiction is best suited to handle the intracacies of myth-like story telling. The story is not limited to the real world but can incorporate whatever tools are necessary to reflect the truth. The stories can be fun and escapist but can still contain a proverb or moral to build around. One need only think of books like 1984 or A Brave New World. It can also explore new technology on the horizon and how we as a society will have to adapt to it.

I have heard science fiction described as male mastubatory fantasy or dismissed as not applicable to the real world. While these charges can often be true, they fail to understand that setting a story in the fantastical does not rob it of its message and relatibility to the human condition.

So that was very long winded explanation to hear what you think. Is science fiction a viable form to replace the cultural need of myths? Or are myths and their function no longer needed in today’s society?

2

For my money, conspiracy is the modern myth.

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm
http://www.conspiracy-net.com/index.php

They say that Sidney Portier was a blind man.

3

I’m inclined to agree… to some extent.

Conspiracy as the modern myth satisfies a lot of the criteria. The main morality play here is “don’t trust the government, don’t trust big business, don’t trust anyone too rich and too powerful,” and these aren’t bad lessons.

I’m not sure whether “UFOs” could fall into the “conspiracy” category, but I’m quite sure that future generations will put “grey aliens” into the same categories that we put “fairies” into these days.

I think “urban legends” also qualify. Many well-known urban legends could stand in quite neatly as little morality plays for teaching the young… the one springs to mind where the girl is sitting in the car, waiting for her boyfriend, hearing the gentle drip of the rain… only to discover it’s her boyfriend, hung up over the car by the serial killer on the loose! stands as an excellent example.

Other urban legends have a variety of morals. “Don’t be a crook.” “Don’t be an idiot.” “Don’t play with dynamite…”

Science fiction, on the other hand, is just that: fiction. I don’t think, in all honesty, that Star Trek or Star Wars – the biggest and most durable sci-fi our society has produced – are still going to be shown in a thousand years.

But the story of the guy whose dog “fetched” the stick of dynamite may well go on forever.

4

Wolverine writes:

> Currently, it is not the best genre since it “seems” to appeal only to
> adolescent males. Also, a large portion of science fiction, in whatever
> medium, tends to lead to escapism versus myth making.

This is a superficial view of science fiction. It sounds like what someone who has only seen a few movies or TV shows would think of the genre. Science fiction is, first of all, literature. Movies and TV shows are only a later spin-off of written SF. Furthermore, only a small part of SF is escapist. Perhaps it’s true that most people’s experience with SF is more from movies and TV than from books and more from escapist stuff than better-written examples of the genre, but that’s the fault of the people who mass-market it (i.e., the TV networks, the movie producers, and the shlock publishers) than the fault of the people who write it.

5

Count me as another supporter for “conspiracism” as a potential new source of myth, probably as a subset of a combination of propaganda, publicity, advertising and what we call “spin”.

Science Fiction itself, as a potential mythogenic agent, is not intrinsecally superior to any other form of genre fiction, it’s just more flexible – Of course, if the author is clumsy enough to telegraph that she is intentionally recasting real-world controversies or moral quandaries into an alternate-universe scenario it may work against its rising to myth proportions.

On the other hand, some elements from SF have entered the collective consciousness as common symbols. But so has happened with much literature in modern times. Think of the figure of idealism-realism tension in the phrase “tilting at windmills”, derived from a Cervantes novel from the 1600s. America’s mythology of the taming of the Wild West, began in the 19th century with sensationalized newspaper stories, followed on with Wild West Shows, and became the movie and TV Westerns, and to this day is used in the characterization fo the President as a “cowboy” by his detractors. “Big Brother”, watching and snooping on everyone, has emigrated from Orwell’s pages to Western Culture in general (and too damn close to reality).

What I’m not too sure of is if we would need to create a specific set of stories to communicate the lessons of “American culture”. Like the English language, “American culture” is a syncretic construct – just like many of our words form irregular plurals and have phonetically counterintuitive spellings due to the rules of their original source language and their filtering through others, we will probably press into service various preexisting myths, “adapted” to fit the new circumstances. Which may give them the form of SF, OR police procedurals, or sitcoms, or advertising, or conspiracy theories.

6

I think conspiracy is probably part of a larger mythosphere called Advertising, which I think is more of a modern mythology than science fiction. Science fiction is more of a storytelling discipline that uses mythic themes (as all fiction does), but it only approaches status as a modern mythology when it advertises (aliens, future, technology, etc.). It promises these things and sells them to you as belief that you can use to explain the universe, the world, and yourself. That’s the function of a myth, certainly, but there are other many other things in today’s society that try to do the same thing.

And things are changing too rapidly as the world (for the most part) leaps from pre-industrial to industrial to technological manifestations. All of this in less than 200 years!

No mythology can establish itself in that turmoil. But advertising comes closest.

7

I’m not sure if SF has replaced myth, but I do think that celebrity has replaced messiahdom.

8

It seems to me that the story that is being told again and again in movies, books and TV is that of “Righteous Revenge” where the wronged eventually get to kick all sorts of bad guy ass in a myriad of ways. That seems to be the major theme for our times in fiction. I wonder how many people, due to this programming are unconsciously dieing to pull it off themselves.

9

What are you basing this belief on? I’ve read SF and fantasy since I was about 8. My grandfather had a subscription to Analog, and an enormous library of SF. Up until the 60s and early 70s it’s true that SF readers (there was precious little fantasy to be had) were mostly male and mostly teens or young adults. However, the genre’s readership has matured, while still attracting new readers. What’s more, not only are there a lot of femmefen (female SF fans), but there’s female SF WRITERS, as well. I’d say that there’s still a male majority in SF, but it’s nowhere near as bad as when I started reading it. I don’t think that any bookstore clerk who had worked more than a couple of weeks would blink an eye if a woman came up to the checkout counter with a stack of SF. I hang out in a comic and games shop, too (it’s where my daughter and I play with our D&D group) and again, it seems that the majority of customers are male, but still there’s quite a few girls and women who are browsing the comics and buying them, along with the games and fiction books.

The science fiction and fantasy genre of today is NOT the same as it was in my grandfather’s time. And for the most part, I’m glad.

As Wendell Wagner noted, the popular view of SF is mostly gleaned from visual media, but that’s NOT where the real SF and fantasy is, for the most part. The visual SF is decades behind written SF in development. For instance, Star Wars (the first one that came out, A New Hope) came out in the late 70s, but the motif and story would have been very much at home in the pulps of the 30s. SF that’s written for TV is so excruciatingly bad that I avoid just about all of it, on principle. I do watch Red Dwarf, not because I think it’s good SF (it isn’t, it’s very bad SF), but because I think it’s hilarious.

Dammit, now I wish I’d paid more attention to my English literature classes. I know what I want to say, but I don’t know how to say it.

At any rate, don’t judge SF by the visual representations of it, even if a particular movie or show wins awards. It may have won those awards because it’s the best of a bunch of crap. However, the best crap in a group of crap is STILL crap.

10

Yeah…it’s always the fault of the mass-marketers. Maybe a significant % of the population simply does not want to read technobabble about going-ons on some other planet.

11

Myth will exist as long as humans are around to tell stories.

While Wendell Wagner has addressed the issue of the depth of SF as literature (and msmith537’s toss-away dismissal line hardly refutes that point), I doubt that any single genre (or medium) will ever be “the” source of myth. Even with the broader and deeper genre into which SF has developed, it remains a niche market. For all the “deeper thoughts” that may (or may not, depending on one’s perspective) have informed the creation of the Matrix series, we found an awful lot of people who watched Finding Nemo, Pirates of the Caribbean, Bruce Almighty, The Return of the King, X2, Elf, Terminator 3,and Bad Boys II–many of whom never saw the Matrix group. (And of those who watched the Matrix series, how many invested the energy to see the “deeper” meaning?)

Westerns had a pretty strong run at representing 20th century American mythology through the heart of that period (with occasional contributions, even today), but the American myth appears throughout most genres and all media. The Western (in one pervasive myth) took the Medieval/Renaissance knight errant and cast him (in defiance of the historical record) as the solitary cowboy, riding about the country, righting wrongs and standing up to tyranny. Another durable myth has been the flouter of rules who, whether a soldier who violates orders or the “rabble” who (again, in defiance of actual history) won the War for Independence by refusing to fight in the ordered columns of the “foolish” British and Hessian troops, achieves his or their goal through the expression of their individualism.

The myriad tales of the hero as individualist supply a strong sense of identity to the American citizen who takes that attitude into many areas of life, shaping the way the country is run and the directions we choose as a nation. Without making the silly claim that this explains or determines every action taken in American society, aspects of it can be seen in such recurring themes as isolationism, hostility to unions, and the recurring popularity of politicians or celebrities who are perceived as “rebels” or outsiders. (It probably also feeds into and interacts with some of the perceptions of conspiracies that have been mentioned earlier in the thread.)

I do not believe that we can identify an individual genre and look to it for our myths. Our myths will arise among our novels, our movies, our music, and other forms of storytelling, regardless of their particular modes of expression.

12

If the story is simply “technobabble about going-ons on some other planet” then it is most assuredly not good SF, and was most likely bought by someone who does not know what good SF is. Indeed, I’d say that technobabble (scientific sounding words which, when examined, are pure nonsense) is the very antithesis of good SF. Most Star Trek shows, while being the best of TV SF, are really very bad SF. The Star Trek aliens are usally not true aliens, they are simply personifications of a particular human trait (avariciousness, logical thinking, warrior personality, etc.) The “science” in ST is laughable, and would be more accurately called magic in most cases.

It’s true that science fiction and/or fantasy is not to everyone’s taste. My main problem is that so many people only know about the really bad examples of the genre, and judge the whole genre by that. Would you judge mainstream literature by an Archie comic?

The mass marketers look at, let’s say, The Lord Of The Rings and decide that trilogies* are what’s hot right now. So they will encourage their stable of hacks to write trilogies, not caring whether or not the story should be that long. (Stories have natural lengths, some should be short stories, and some should be series.) The marketers will put similar pressure on their better writers, as well. Some of the better writers will refuse to bow to market pressure, and won’t get published for a while, or ever again. Some will refuse, and because they are popular enough, they can force the publisher to bring out the story in an “unpopular” form. And some will agree that maybe they can pad out the story to make it stretch over three books, instead of allowing it to be published as a single volume, and these authors will start down the slippery slope of hackdom. This all happened in the fantasy/SF market some years ago, I believe between 15 and 20 years ago. For a while there, it seemed that EVERY book was being marketed as part of “An exciting new fantasy trilogy!” as if fantasy simply didn’t come in any other length. These days, it’s all about huge fantasy books that are part of a neverending series. I think…I HOPE…that this fad is ebbing, as the enthusiasm for the Wheel of Time books fades.

*What’s REALLY funny is that LOTR isn’t really a trilogy at all. It’s one novel, which is published in three volumes simply because of its length. A true trilogy is three books which are related, generally by a setting, especially if the same characters are used in that setting.

13

I would suspect that technology, or to some extent science itself, will become the new fodder of myth making. It may also involve those that create some of these technologies.

Consider that early myth about gods and such had to do with filling in the gaps that existed in human knowledge before we could take a scientific approach to understanding the world around us. Now, even the layman has an idea why the sun rises and sets, what makes the winds blow, etc. They make many of the old mythologies seem quaint, although their morals still stand. And there are still some larger questions such as why do we die that also found some resolution in myth making and still do. Perhaps some of those are explored on this board.

But now, as technology starts moving beyond the grasp of the modern person, we again find ourselves, to a small degree, falling into ignorance. Most of us don’t understand many of the processes as to how the laser printer works, or how a satellite functions, or how we can move individual atoms around with a tunneling microscope. In a generation or two, if one has grown up with Smart Houses, and genetic engineering and stuff considered rather wondrous to us now, there might be large gaps in practical understanding that could give rise to persistent myths.

This is compounded if societies develop different classes of people where some will be surrounded by sophisticated, seemingly alive technology, and those at the low end of this scale that will not.

This isn’t to say that science fiction may not have its place. Indeed, perhaps one of the earliest examples of technological mythology is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. To this day, it is a complicated myth that we have only begun to grapple with. We are more capable than ever in our arts of creation, be it machine or flesh. In addition, there are morals in that tale that also caution us as to how we should view our part in that creation.

Frankenstein may be the benchmark against which other works of fiction may be judged in terms of how they might to contribute to new mythologies, especially after a number of generations.

14

Yeah, they’d rather watch technobabble about goings-on on other planets. Sheesh. I’ve got several thousand volumes of sf that don’t meet your definition.

Anyway, how do you define myth anyway? It seems that ancient myths explain how things work, and why we are here. SF doesn’t do much of the former, since we have science, but a lot of it addresses the latter.

Are Westerns really myths, except in the sense of not being true? They seem more like heroic sagas to me. Is the Iliad a myth besides its incorporation of the gods? If these heroic sagas are myths, sf certainly qualifies, since it supports plots with larger than life characters doing heroic things in new settings. But Tom Clancy books might qualify also, so sf is hardly the only mythmaking genre around.

15

In the anthropological sense, there is nothing about myth that requires it to be “not true.” In fact, one working definition is that myth is Story that describes Truth for a people. I would not assert that Ernest Haycox or Luke Short or John Ford (or even Louis Lamour) was creating myth in their works. I would say, rather, that they were expressing the American myth.

The “how things work” definition of myth is usually applied to the smaller tales that describe Phaeton’s chariot burning the skin of the Ethiopians or Demeter refusing to let anything grow during the period when Persephone had to reside with Hades. However, the greater truths that were embodied in myth generally shed light on the pervasive attitudes of a people (e.g., the fatalism of the Norse expressed in the story of the great final battle of Ragnarok, when even the gods, themselves, would be overthrown) or on the psychology of individuals (e.g., the story of Narcissus in which a person falling in love with himself stagnates and dies, withering away in self-contemplation).

Even with the “how things work” stories, the true meaning is not so much in the tale of action, but in the psychology of the characters. The burning of the Ethiopians is a mere comment in the tale of Phaeton, which is really a study in what happens when rash youth overextends itself without the power and control of aged wisdom. The Demeter-Persephone-Hades tale has been churned over in many guises, but it is frequently described as the story of the struggle between male and female (in lots of different ways–as I said, it has been churned over quite a bit).

16

SF hasn’t but it could and should.

There is great range in the quality of what gets called science fiction. The good stuff has significant SCIENCE that is what makes it truly significant fiction. STAR WARS is almost the worst example. It is really old good and evil myth dressed up in a glitzy superficial sci-fi paint job. It does get across the idea of outer space and other galaxies tho.

I think BABYLON 5 is the best video sci-fi created to date. Anybody that doesn’t read SF and wants to see what it is really about should watch the entire BABYLON 5 series.

CONSPIRACY anyone. Tha Narns in B5 are like Blacks in America. The Centauri are Europeans with a past empire. Londo Molari is a typical ambitious man making a Faustian deal with the devil.

The psy corps is like corporations pl;aying mind games on us with television commercials. There was an episode with a commercial for the psy corps that had a pseudo-subliminal message in it. If you used a VCR you could read it but it was long enough to notice something was there a normal speed. A true subliminal wouldn’t show.

The corps are mother. The corps are father. Go into debt to the corps.

There are religious overtones in SF vid lately. DEEP SPACE 9 with wormhole alien gods. THE MATRIX with ship Nebachadnezzar. Nebs dream may have been about the split of the Roman empire into east and west. BABYLON 5 with Vorlon angels vs evil Shadows.

Vorlons are Vulcans on Zen!

Dal Timgar

p.s. do a search on “killer accounting from”

17

Looks like my site has disappeared from google again.

http://presidentjackson.no-ip.org/knavelacademy/kafos01.html

Dal Timgar

18

While the second part of Wolverine’s quote may be a generalization that is off base, the first part (Adolescent males) is very true. Science fiction is a genre, and like romance novels, appeals to a rather narrow segment of the population, albeit a very large percentage of Dopers.

19

Lamar Mundane writes:

> Science fiction is a genre, and like romance novels, appeals to a rather
> narrow segment of the population, albeit a very large percentage of
> Dopers.

Cite? Do you have any statistics on the percentage of science fiction readers who are adolescent males? Wolverine said that SF appeals to “only adolescent males.” Clearly that’s not literally true, since I know of many counterexamples. I don’t think that it’s even approximately the case. I spend a lot of time at science fiction conventions and clubs, and the average age is about 40. About 40% of the people there are women. Now, the people there might not be typical of SF readers in general, but if you’re going to make a statement like that, you’re going to have to back it up with some statistics. I don’t have the statistics on all SF readers, but in my experience the number of adolescent males among all SF readers isn’t even a majority.

20

I remember an editorial in F&SF a while ago concerned that there were too few adolescent males (and females) reading - magazines at least. I suspect the adolescent male myth came from the '50s when most girls felt social pressure against reading that science stuff, and older people thought it was silly. Now those adolescent males are still reading, and it is okay for women to read and write sf.