Men, Monsters, Hobbits, Hobgoblins
A reader asks what seemed a question about Dungeons and Dragons or Traveler games, but may be more. Reworded slightly, his questions were these:
“What makes something a monster? Why are dwarves and hobbits not monsters, but orcs and hobgoblins and gnolls are? I think that the difference must lay in their inhumanity.
“What makes humans human is the Image of God. This is often said to be our ability to reason and to speak, but may be more than this. It is our capability to create, and to love the things we have created, and to love others. Monsters are beings that lack these capabilities, but have the capacity to reason. Must they also have animosity towards humans to be monstrous? What about unreasoning beasts?”
He goes on to mention a game of Traveller, where, as moderator, he places in his background robots, clones, genetically modified humans, and a few ‘uplifted’ animal races, but has no aliens. He defined modified humans as fundamentally human in mind and soul, with some added or altered body parts, such as wings or gills. He asks how to introduce beast-human hybrids as monsters into his game, while making them distinct from humans and modified humans.
My comment:
It is a fascinating question, because it is deeper than it appears on the surface. To know what is monstrous, we must first know what is Man.
This is, as all men know, a difficult thing for men to know.
We can touch on the core of the matter by saying: man is the earthly animal who reflects the heavenly likeness of God.
God is the Creator, hence we have the power of creative thought. God is Love, hence we can know love. God is Lord, hence we are the stewards of the created world. The Word is God and is with God, hence we are rational creatures, and can use the faculties of speech and reason.
The Fall of Man distorted and marred that image. We men not only have free will, we have an overwhelming craving to abuse free will. Creativity invents new tortures and crimes; love becomes lust becomes perversion; authority becomes tyranny; speech becomes slander and rumor; reason becomes rationalization and rhetoric.
What makes something a monster?
The word comes from the Latin word monstrum, which means omen or warning.
In times past, it was believed that when men did deep evils, and the stars shed disastrous influences, nature herself would react to the curse polluting the land. Nature would bring forth distorted & aberrant creatures to vex mankind. Monsters were a visible sign of an invisible reality.
Monsters hence were sins made flesh.
Monsters are the distorted image of man in nature, even as man is the image in nature of a supernatural deity.
Few readers these days believe in literal monsters, but if the fictional monsters are to be monstrous in truth, and to have the stature and stage-presence they had in times past when men believed them to be real, this requires they have this selfsame ominous mood and atmosphere of distortion and aberration. Monsters are to be crooked men whose pride has swollen them to giant’s size, or whose greed and petty envy has dwindled them to dwarfs.
For example, Godzilla, at least in the original film, is a monster in a way that King Kong simply is not. Kong, while mighty, is a beast. He is killed by beauty. The theme of the original film is that nature is wild and dangerous, but that nature is no match for man, especially when armed with flying machines with machine guns mounted. His death carries a note of sorrow. It is the melancholy of seeing the Wild West finally tamed, and barbed wire fences enclosing what was once open range.
By way of contrast, Godzilla in the original movie is summoned up from the depths of undersea caverns by atomic bomb testing at sea. Modern audiences, especially the Japanese, have always regarded the atomic bomb with a frisson of awe and horror, a dark genii science called up which cannot be bottled again.
His destruction at the end of the first film is not carried out with a melancholy note, but with ominous foreboding, for the terrible weapon that destroyed the monster is itself a monster.
Godzilla is a giant with radioactive breath because he is the sin of science run amok made flesh. He is not literally supernatural in the film, but he might as well be. He is named after a supernatural whale monster from Japanese myth, and his sudden appearance from the sea below is as unearthly in tone and mood as the sudden appearance of a UFO from the sky above.
In times past, elves and dwarves, while manlike, were still monstrous, at least in the sense that to see the Wild Hunt, or stumble upon the fairies dancing, or little men playing ninepins, or to see the marriage procession of the foxes, was a disaster for the belated peasant who violates their hidden world. Lucky for him if he merely escapes with a few decades of his life vanished in an enchanted sleep, or his head turned into the head of an ass.
Tolkien, odd as this sounds, was actually a modern, naturalistic writer. His elves and dwarves were treated as natural creatures, solid as men, nor were they spirit-beings, omens, or apparitions. The wore armor and carried swords and had kings and held court, and in all other ways behaved like men, albeit the glamour of the otherworldly and unearthly still clung to them, at least in part.
But it was not so from times past. The aesir and psychopomps and dwarves from Wagner might seem manlike enough when they treat with each other, but the moment men come onstage, Odin becomes a wanderer as strange as an prophecy seen in a dream, the Valkyrie becomes the vision of a man doomed to die, and Alberich becomes a voice Hagan hears in his sleep.
Likewise, in Medieval songs and tales, the elves of the otherworld are indistinguishable from the ghostly lords of the underworld.
Tolkien’s elves, being immortal, retain a trace of this ghostliness. Even wicked elves in Tolkien have the dignity of ageless prelapsarian man. But the dwarves merely seem to be Germans, less strange to the reader than Tibetans. Thorin Oakenshield and Gimli, to be frank, are mundane.
Gary Gygax in his Dungeons and Dragons, accelerated this reduction to the mundane by making dwarves into playable characters. They are not monsters at all, but merely stout, short men from a foreign parts who work in mines: they might as well be Pennsylvania Dutch.
Likewise, older literature treated monsters, like Grendel, not as men from foreign lands, but as omens and signs of evil incarnate. They were distorted men. Grendel particularly, as a Son of Cain, is exiled with all his race from all civilization, and is explicitly said to be the brother of elfs and ogres and evil phantoms. He is maddened by the songs of the bard singing of the beauties of Creation, and decides to afflict the high and golden house of Hereot out of sheer malice.
He has tools and weapon, such as a bag made of dragon skin where he keeps the corpses of men he means to gnaw later, and he walks upright, and reasons, but he creates nothing, speaks no lines, has no beauty or admirable traits named by the poet.
Turning to Traveller, we turn from the supernatural genre of high fantasy to the naturalistic subgenre of science fiction of writers like Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke.
This subgenre was promoted by John W Campbell, Jr., as “hard” ergo scientifically accurate versus “soft” ergo scientifically inaccurate. The terminology is commonplace but awkward, since Campbell promoted science worship, not scientific accuracy — how many Analog stories had faster-than-light drive, time travel, or psionics? Science worship is a cult whose credo includes the doctrine of naturalism. For this essay, it is more convenient to refer to tales of the type promoted and purchased by Campbell as “Campbellian science fiction.” By and large, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek is Campbellian, as is the role playing game Traveller.
So if Campbellian SF is naturalistic, so is Traveller. People planets as you will with mutants and aliens, none are monsters properly so called.
The main difference between a supernatural and natural view of the universe, is that in the natural view, nothing has any innate meaning, morality, virtue, truth, or beauty. A man is simply a hairless ape with a swelled head in the natural view; a lie can be a useful or useless thing to say, prudent or foolish to believe, and likewise a crime might be productive or unproductive, helpful or harmful to some given goal at which man aims, but the universe itself will not notice or care.
With exceptions too rare to notice, high fantasy is set in a supernatural scenery, and Campbellian science fiction is set against a backdrop of inanimate and mechanistic nature, such as that which science studies.
This is not to say that nature scenes are rare in fantasy or common in science fiction. Quite the opposite. Rare is leaf or tree in science fiction compared to cratered moonscapes, empty vacuum, or crowded cities of super-skyscrapers abuzz with aircar traffic. Common are the trees of Elfland.
Naturalism is the presupposition that there is nothing more to life than empirical facts. Supernaturalism is the supposition that this life is nothing when one loses sight of the next. Despite the similarity of names, naturalism reduces nature to being merely biological mechanism engaged in a vain and mindless Darwinian struggle for self-replication, a war of xerox machines made of wood and or flesh and blood. Supernaturalism makes nature into the handiwork of heaven, and a sacrament of the unseen.
A monster is, in this sense, always supernatural, both in the sense that a monster is an omen from nature that nature is rebelling against the sins of man, and in the sense that a monster is outside the ordinary course of nature.
In a story with a supernatural setting, a character can be more than man thematically representing an idea outside the story, to the reader, he can be the incarnation of it within the story.
But in saying this, a distinction must be made between the literal meaning of a work or literature, and the nature of the work. Not all science fiction is Campbellian. Far from it.
For example, the monster in the movie ALIENS is literally supposed to be an alien, a beast from another planet no more supernatural than a shark, but its roles in the story is that of a horror from a haunted house, a spooky monster who might as well be the inhuman embodiment of the inhuman greed of the all-too-human human war profiteers secretly organizing the expedition. The crucial moment comes when the monsters shut down the power to the complex in which the human soldiers are trapped. The short-timer asks in panic how they can shut down the power — they are just animals, aren’t they?
The answer of course is that they are not animals, but the sins of man arising in the shape of a nightmare designed by H.R. Geiger to afflict mankind. The mother thing protecting her eggs whom Ripley kills bears an uncomfortable, distorted resemblance to Ripley herself, maternally protecting the child Newt.
A horror story taking place in a science fiction background does not necessarily share the tropes of Campbellian science fiction. Monsters are rare among the works of Heinlein, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, or Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. Far more common is a monster found to be a mother protecting her eggs, or the dying last member of a species merely doing what she must to survive. Likewise, anything that seems to be an angel or a god is an energy being or a computer fated to be destroyed by Kirk to free its devotee to live more naturally as men, flaws and all. This is because, in a naturalistic background, there is no innate good and evil, no angels or devils, only creatures like ourselves driven by the same Darwinian survival instinct as drives us.
In a film like 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY or Carl Sagan’s CONTACT, the aliens are allegedly mortals like us, merely more evolved, but their treatment in the work shows them to be supernatural. They are the gods of naturalism, holding forth the promise of how humans one day will evolve into the superhuman, like them. Like gods, these beings are never seen, except by means of their instruments, like a black monument, or when assuming a human form for human convenience. The book CHILDHOOD’S END has a similar sleight of hand, using mortal aliens in the role of immortal angels, but, in this case, fallen angels: The Overlords of this book are literally the devils of Christian lore, complete with batwings and pointy horns. The Overmind whom the Overlords serve is a perfect image of the Gnostic Pleroma, whose coming dissolves the false prison of the material earth.
The point here is that when aliens are kept offstage and spooky they are handled far differently than Vulcans or Kzinti or Rigellians or Wookies. These are mortals like us, even biology and psychology differ.
Science fiction that is not Campbellian includes, to list four works at random, the Lensman books by E.E. Doc Smith, the New Sun books by Gene Wolfe, the television show BABYLON FIVE, and the Matrix films.
The Eddoreans are merely monsters in the Lensmen, just as the Arisians are merely genii who grant the super-policemen of the future the magic amulet, the Lens, needed to overcome the monsters. The Arisians, as is fitting in a scientific romance, are the fathers of man, and creatures of pure brain, therefore (at least according to Smith) purely good. The Eddoreans are creatures without sex, family, love, or any civilized bond, existing only to dominate, conquer, and destroy. They are also shapeless, forming limbs and tools at need out of their own plastic flesh. A better symbol of the tyrants of the Twentieth Century, and the formless philosophy naturalism promotes is hard to picture.
Again, Scylla, Erebus and Abaia are space aliens growing on Earth to the size of mountains in the Gene Wolfe books, but they are purely monsters, images of the cold decay that await the world should the sun finally die. They are glimpsed only in dreams and speak only through their servants, just as Sauron the Great is glimpsed only in a vision from the seeing stone, and speaking only through a nameless envoy.
If the Shadow of Z’ha’Dum are not monsters, the word has no meaning; indeed, they are one of the more interesting monsters of all science fiction, as invisible as devils, granting mortals their desires in order to destroy them, reducing men to mere cyborg instruments in their machines, spreading hate and war in order to provoke evolution.
They are, in fact, the monster provoked by rebellious nature as an omen against the idea of naturalism itself, for, if naturalism is correct, men live only for their desires, men are merely meat machines, and hatred and war are necessary evils needed to produce the good of evolution.
The machines of the Matrix form a simpler and more horrid monster: the Demiurge of the Gnostics. To reduce men to mere instruments, the machines trap the world in a false world. Since man made these machines, the rebellion of nature against the sins of man is literal.
Animals, even dangerous ones, are not malign, for they kill only as their natures direct. A monster is like a beast in that it is vain to reason with one, and forms a deadly danger to man, but like a man in being partly spiritual, albeit always a dark spirit.
So introducing a man-animal hybrid in an otherwise Campbellian background merely introduces another mortal like us, made in our image as we are in the image of God.
To make it a monster, by the definition of monster given above, the hybrids must take on a moral theme, a symbolic nature, and be the incarnation of human hubris and pride no less than a Frankenstein’s monster, that is, not be capable of creativity or love, tormented by their self knowledge that their bestial innocence has been raped away, and seeking revenge on their makers. In role playing terms, this would make them not a playable character, since player characters have free will and sometimes make moral decisions. Orcs played by player characters are basically like Scythians or Apaches, mortals like us, but from cruel and barbaric backgrounds.
In Tolkien’s Middle Earth, orcs were meant to be monsters, representing the ugly side of man as elfs represent the glorious, but he could not follow this through to its logical conclusion, saying the whole race was damned.
If orcs were mortal beings, genetically degenerate creatures warped by Morgoth, then a wizard or some other angelic being could have unwarped them, and at least some orcs be redeemed, and made into good and lawful creatures again; but if orcs are monsters, they are living symbols of the sins of men, as eternal as war or poverty, which shall dwell among us until the end of time.
It was, oddly enough, Tolkien’s ambition to portray fairy tale things by the naturalistic conventions of modern novels that caused him endless puzzlement on this selfsame question of what made a monster different from a mortal.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
