Getting In Touch With Your Demons

One distinction science fiction always has claimed is that it's a literature of ideas, a quality that may be positive (because its boundlessness permits investigation of social orders, myth, creation itself), or negative (when its "ideas" are simple reaffirmations of received wisdom and excuse the absence of basic literary values).

"Aboriginals playing at rebellion," a consul says early on in Celestis (Tor Books, 1995), "after we've stuffed them full of Thomas Jefferson and Mao Tse Tung. Everything they are, they owe to us. It makes you sick." There are 5 million of them, 17,000 of us.

Simon Mayaram, consular newly arrived from Earth, is taken hostage during a terrorist raid. Abducted with him is Katharine Styreme, daughter of a local, aboriginal governor. Extensive, vastly expensive surgery has turned Katharine into a fair replica of humanity whose transformation and fetching appearance is maintained by drugs.

With them are a Demon and its dying sister. Years ago the Demons appeared spontaneously among the Abos, "raising them up" or enslaving them, depending on viewpoint. Possibly these Demons are an alien species, possibly another aboriginal species, possibly a projection, from alternate/"dreamworld" reality of the Abo's own psyches.

As their time in captivity passes, Simon and Katharine fall in love. Denied her drugs, Katharine begins steadily to revert. In one horrifying scene, she tears open her own face, pulling artificial steel teeth from their sockets, ripping out tiny pumps of tearducts abrim with unshed tears.

Paul Park is one of a generation of writers exploring new terrain in science fiction even though his interests and style seem inimical to science-fictional preoccupations. He came inadvertently, one suspects, to the genre.

Primary among Park's interests is religion, not religion's dogma but the concept of it: its intellectual constructs, the ways in which it defines and alters personalities, groups and whole civilizations. This was his theme in the acclaimed trilogy of novels known collectively as the Starbridge Chronicles, especially in the last The Cult of Loving Kindness, profoundly influenced by park's travels in India.

There is to Celestis, resonating strangely with its profound sociological aims and resolute ordinariness, much of the Starbridge Chronicles' epic feel.

In paraliterature each work is a commentary on, a critique of, all previous works. Here the writers coming first to mind are Phil Farmer, Algis Budrys, Edgar pangborn, Samuel R. Delany and Kim Stanley Robinson.

The narrative design of this novel, by contrast, is resolutely literary, the language transparent, reminiscent of Graham Greene more than anyone else – and with good reason.

For the novel's theme is colonialism in which everything is recast – planet, roadways complete with chauffeur-driven Rolls; finally, the indigenous population itself – to the newcomer's own image.

Park's achievement is to write a novel at once believably the story of another world, and at the same time one whose archetypes and symbology resonate at every interface with this one. In a way, in the sense of André Gide's statement that he wrote to be reread, Celestis is not one novel – albeit a thoughtful, brilliantly conceived and realized, profoundly symbolic, and, at its heart, classic novel – but a series of novels.

One measure of Park's mastery is the manner in which the book's language mirrors precisely its structure, elegantly formed sentences comingling in rhythm and movement those borders where perception of external world and working of individual mind overlap like Venn diagrams, its narrative a transparency through which one sinks into unsuspected depths.

This is never more manifest than in a handful of chapters representing the alternative reality/"dreamworld" that may be the Aboriginals' true reality and is certainly the Demons'. The matter-of-factness of these passages, their evasive intangible beauty, are without parallel. They represent what science fiction at its best can be.

The Abos needed their Demons, one chauvinist insists. To make maps, to pull out what they wanted and make it real.

Don't we all?

Perhaps the Demons are Atman, the God we enclose, the free thing within us that alone can halt, make sense of, the sensory flow: the organizing principle, our genius. "You called them demons, but they were gods. They're gone now." By which measure Park entwines Gnosticism into the stream of philosophical/theological discourse central to the novel.

Lionel Trilling insists that all our literature is a variation on Don Quixote, reality vs. appearance.

If a thing takes on a human form, Parks asks, is it, then, human? Is it truly, indefinably some new thing in the world? Or merely another cheap-jack copy of some real thing?

And so we have Celestis, a fine novel of ideas, whose final message is that we are what we think we are, what we strive and yearn to be, as much as what our actions make us – and that both have the capacity to destroy or redeem us.