Jan
26Off the beaten tracks of science fiction, one of the interesting rarely-encountered themes is that of the ‘planetary intelligence’ - the conscious mind of a world. One may note in passing that it is in some sense the successor of the medieval concept of a guiding Intelligence - a member of one of the nine angelic orders - looking after one of the spheres in the Ptolemaic cosmos. Dante made an interesting and original addition to the scheme when he made the goddess Fortune into the Earth’s Intelligence (Inferno, Canto VII).
James H Schmitz in The Witches of Karres (1966) uses the word “klatha” to describe a certain type of power, what we would call a paranormal power, and though he never defines it - though his characters can’t define it - its nature, due to Schmitz’s wizardry as a writer, becomes in a sense familiar to us as we read his unforgettable tale. At one point the protagonists become stranded on a planet made dangerous by the presence of a malign “planetary” klatha entity. It summons storms which almost destroy the humans before they can take off.
A more sustained treatment of the theme is to be found in Susan Cooper’s Mandrake (1964). Here we are treated to a marvellously sinister “Back to Nature” political movement, inspired by the all-powerful Mandrake, Minister of Planning, who gradually restricts the right of travel, causing society to sink into a localist, xenophobic array of small communities. This tendency is ultimately revealed to be inspired by an Earth Intelligence. Understandably, from its point of view, the planet itself is trying to weaken mankind, so as to avoid the risk of damage that humans might cause to its body by nuclear bomb testing and nuclear war.
This theme, of the world itself scheming to restrict the power of the life that inhabits it, appears also in the Ooranye Project, though here the World Spirit of the giant planet Ooranye (Uranus) is not out to destroy so much as to preserve a balance of power among the many species’ civilizations that inhabit its immense surface.
C S Lewis’ Mars (in Out of the Silent Planet) and Venus (Perelandra) are looked after by ruling Intelligences, which Lewis does occasionally refer to, in a technical sense, as angels, though not in the books themselves. In the books they are the Oyarses or archons of their worlds. The archon of ‘Thulcandra’ (Earth) has become evil (he whom we know as Satan); he tried to spread his evil to Mars, damaging that planet and forcing its Oyarsa to create the “canals” which are actually huge rift valleys into which all Martian life had to retreat, geological ages ago. In Perelandra the Evil One sends an emissary from Earth to corrupt the planet Venus…. In the third novel of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength (1945), there is a superb chapter, ‘The Descent of the Gods’, in which the planetary intelligences of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn actually in some sense come down to Earth’s surface to infuse power into a human agent for a special purpose. The description of these beings, the effect of their presence, is tackled by Lewis in what I can only describe as a miracle of English prose.
Finally, on a quaint and much more trivial note, I would mention Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘When the World Screamed’ (1929), where Professor Challenger drills through the Earth’s crust, pricking the planet’s living body and causing it to convulse. Here we are departing from planetary minds as such and entering upon the related but somewhat different “Living World” theme, where the world entity is alive but not necessarily a conscious mind. In the category of Living Worlds we would need to class tales in which the ecology of the planet is so integrated that it becomes an organism in its own right, a sort of SF extension of the Gaia hypothesis.
Robert Gibson is caretaker of the Ooranye Project, creating a fictional giant planet which can be explored on www.ooranye.com The project’s aim is to meld the subgenres of Future History and Planetary Romance, resulting in over a million years of civilization with its own societies, customs, conflicts, triumphs and disasters, politics, philosophies, flora and fauna, empires both human and non-human, and adventures that range over an area ten times that of the surface of the Earth. Lovers of planetary adventure are invited to view the history, comment on the progress of the project, access the tales and keep in touch with the developing destiny of Ooranye.
Tags: Arthur Conan Doyle, C S Lewis, James Schmitz, Planetary Intelligences, Science Fiction, Susan Cooper
