Hyperion and Science Fiction

Because I have a lot of grading to do, I thought I’d read some Keats in order to fortify my soul before its drain. I have been thinking about Hyperion but I hadn’t yet reread it. In the poem, I find a wish for magic. That is a wish I understand. It’s the same desire that leads me to science fiction. Keat’s Saturn longs for the power to create another world, an alternative physics to the one he finds around him. Listen to him as he wakes under this gravity: “But cannot I create? / Cannot I form? / Cannot I fashion forth/ Another world, another universe, / To overbear and crumble this to naught?/ Where is another Chaos? Where?”

Saturn discovers what all adults who enjoyed childhoods full of fiction find: in this reality, radical creation is not possible. Fiction cultivates in us the expectation that life includes resolution and radical innovation: in stories – especially in fantastical stories – the heroine or hero can enjoy an adventure that include a changes in the very structure of space time. She lives forever (Tuck Everlasting), she can travel time (A Wrinkle in Time), she can change the form of her beloved (Beauty), she will meet a wizard who will deliver her intended loves (The Once and Future King). Such a childhood leaves a reader of fiction with a distinction sensation of Fall, l’ecarte: a separation not from grace but innovation: heaven is parted from thee, and the earth/ Knows thee not, thus afflicted for a God.” This earth does not recognize our secret self as the environment of Harriet the Spy ultimately acknowledged her potential and gave her super-natural powers. Keat’s Saturn expresses the love of ever reader and writer of fiction and poetry: the possible rather than the actual. Upon leaving the childhood of fiction, like Keat’s Saturn: “I am gone / Away from my own bosom; I have left/ My strong identity, my real self / Somwhere between the throne and where I sit / Here on this spot of earth.” My own “strong identity” formed when I read those books. To discover their ultimate impossibility is to be ever disappointed in “this spot of Earth.” Such disappointment can, of course, also provide great motivation to write, to make that world of possibility, so that “there shall be / Beautiful things made new, for the surprise / Of the sky-children.”