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The Professional Hero

/ Rick Ellrod / 5 Comments

Glory Road

A couple of comments by Kevin Wade Johnson in connection with my last blog post (now a long way back!) triggered a line of thought about heroes and the hero business.

Glory Road cover

Robert A. Heinlein’s 1963 novel Glory Road looks like a swashbuckling fantasy at first blush, but it turns into something entirely different.  Our hero, E.C. “Oscar” Gordon, kicking around the world after leaving the military, is recruited by an incredibly gorgeous woman to assist her with a quest that involves traveling to other universes and swordfighting.  This is just the kind of adventure he was craving.

As Kevin observes, the first three-quarters of the book are action-adventure, with sizable side dishes of comedy, scandalous liaisons, and cynical social commentary.  At that point the quest is fully resolved—at page 208 out of 288, in my copy.  What, then, occupies the rest of the book?

Gordon returns with “Star,” the beautiful woman he’s now married, to her home universe.  It turns out she’s the empress of a multiuniversal polity that is in some respects a high-tech Utopia.  All Gordon has to do is relax, allow himself to be fêted by the population, and sleep with anyone he finds interesting (the late Heinlein’s polyamory is fully on display here).

He hates it.

What Utopia doesn’t satisfy is Gordon’s lust for adventure.  He doesn’t want to be a dilettante or a “kept man.”  He wants wonder, excitement, the stimulus of danger.  He likes being a hero, with all the occasional discomforts and perils of that role. The placid happy ending of a retired hero holds no attraction for Gordon.

It’s unclear whether Star feels the same way.  She’s willing to consider going in on a kind of adventuring “business” with her slightly tarnished knight.  But first, she says, she’d have to train a replacement for her unique position—and that would take many years.

The solution is for Gordon to head off again on the Glory Road without Star.  He’ll pop back in now and then, but not to take up residence in the Twenty Universes utopia on a permanent basis.  He and Star will remain in love with each other, perhaps, in some sense of the term—but not in a sense that requires fidelity on either’s part.  In Heinlein’s polyamorous world-view, passing romantic involvements are just part of the adventure:  “Knights errant spend their nights erring” (p. 271).  Gordon’s happy ending is the continuing adventure.

The Unsettled Adventurer

This idea comes up from time to time in adventure stories:  the hero (or heroine) who seeks out danger and isn’t content without it.  John Carter of Mars displays a little of this, though in the violent world of Barsoom, he seems to be able to get his fill of trouble while still remaining home-based with the enthralling Dejah Thoris in her city of Helium.  There’s something like this idea in the conclusion of The Good Place—boredom with utopia—as we’ve seen.

The really extreme case can be found in an old-time fantasy by E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1922).  The swashbuckling nobles of Eddison’s imagined world fight the good fight against their sinister enemies, the Witchlanders.  At the end of the novel, those adversaries are conclusively defeated.  Cue the victory feast.  And yet . . . Our Heroes are not quite satisfied.  Things just won’t be as interesting without the Witchlanders constantly scheming and warring against them.  At the very end, the heroes’ fanciful wish is somehow granted:  a herald announces the arrival of an emissary from the bad guys—the same event with which the novel opened.  (Hence the title:  the legendary serpent that swallows its own tail.)

The Series Protagonist

I’ve previously expressed some doubts about whether happy endings really need to be static and boring—so let’s not adopt the Glory Road doctrine too hastily.  (In its extreme form, Eddison’s circular epic, one may feel the opposite dissatisfaction in the sense that all the heroes’ striving and suffering has been for nothing.)  But these examples highlight a difference among types of action heroes.

In a long-running action series, unless a hero is improbably falling into one adventure after another against their will, we have to assume that the hero likes what they’re doing.  James Bond seems to be pretty content with his secret-agent life.  Indiana Jones yearns for opportunities to climb out the window of his stuffy professorial office and strike out on some treasure-hunting chase—even at an advanced age, as we’ve recently seen.  Captain Kirk, who’d been promoted to admiral by the beginning of Star Trek II, isn’t suited for a desk job.  At the end of the three-movie cycle he’s demoted to captain again—ostensibly as a punishment for flagrant violations of Starfleet regs, but we’re to see this as a step forward for him, his best destiny.  Yoda accuses Luke of this kind of unrest in The Empire Strikes Back:  “Adventure! Excitement!  A Jedi craves not these things.”

The same is true of almost all superheroes.  Retirement is almost unheard-of.  The occasional counter-example makes for an interesting tale precisely because it runs against type:  Hank Pym in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Jack-in-the-Box in Astro City.  In a somewhat similar way, continuing campaigns in Dungeons & Dragons or similar games tend to assume the existence of a class of professional adventurers who enter willingly into a life of battle and treasure-hunting, as distinct from an assembled-for-one-purpose group like the Fellowship of the Ring.

This character trait does make things convenient for the writers.  They have a believable rationale for the main character’s continuing adventures.  Otherwise, after a while it would start to seem implausible for one person to keep getting drawn into danger purely by accident.

The Hero By Trade

The Star Trek captains, and other officers, illustrate a type of case where the character really is a professional hero—one who’s taken up a profession or vocation where danger and challenge, and hence the opportunity for heroism, come with the territory.  Anyone pursuing a military or quasi-military career fills that bill.  Honor Harrington, for example, reflects more than once that she’s good at war; it’s her calling, what she was born to do.  Professional police officers, firefighters, or rescue workers—first responders generally—also fall into this category.  (John McClane of Die Hard fame, mentioned above, is in a danger-prone profession, though it’s probably rare for a cop to run into the kinds of major crises he does.)  Unsung heroes like medical personnel may find themselves in the same position.  They may not categorize what they’re doing as heroism (it looks better on them if they don’t); but they are putting themselves “in harm’s way” where acts of heroism are constantly called for.

This is why military SF lends itself so easily to long-running series like Honor Harrington’s.  (The same is true outside the SF genres, as we can see, for example, in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin sea stories.)  The same is true of private detectives, secret agents, and the like.

The Reluctant Hero

But not all heroes are professional heroes.  An equally perennial favorite is the reluctant or accidental hero—the person who answers the call to adventure, but does wish to return to a peaceful life afterward.

Jim Butcher’s Introduction to Jim Butcher & Kerrie L. Hughes, Heroic Hearts (NY:  Ace Books, 2022), puts it this way:

Real heroes . . . [are] the everyday humans who happen to be standing there when something bad happens, and when there is a sudden need for skill, courage, or intelligence.  They’re the regular people in irregular circumstances who find themselves considering others first and standing up to do whatever needs to be done.”  (p. xi)

Some do manage to go back to their ordinary lives after the crisis has passed.  Cincinnatus, and George Washington, are famous for pulling off the transition:  they took over the reins of the state when they had to, but willingly ceded power afterwards.  On a more modest scale, the “citizen soldier” concept, as in the American National Guard, aims at the same thing.  It’s part of the mystique of the American World War II armies, the so-called “Greatest Generation” model.  You rise up to serve when necessary, but happily return to civilian life when it’s done.  Contemporary discussions are more likely to emphasize post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the difficulty of the return to civilian life; but it remains an ideal with considerable drawing power.

In fiction, the contrast between heroic acts and ordinary life provides rich soil in which to grow interesting stories and characters.  Tolkien, for example, gives us some characters who do manage the return to everyday existence—Sam Gamgee—and others who find it impossible, such as Frodo.  Of course Frodo does in the end find peace in Valinor, but that requires a literal removal from the circles of the world, a transcendence not available to the average hobbit-in-the-street. 

The situations can become fairly complex.  In the Song of Roland, after the heroic deeds of the story are finished, a weary Charlemagne at the end finds himself called back unwillingly to new conflicts.  In the TV series Chuck, the eponymous Chuck Bartowski is initially appalled to find himself embroiled in spy activities, but the sheer coolness of it all grows on him, and by the fifth season he wants to start his own secret-agent business.  Scott Lang (Ant-Man) at the beginning of Quantumania is resting comfortably on his laurels, and has to be dragged back into action in the name of helping others.

Detectives in mystery stories fall into both camps.  We have professional private eyes like Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe.  But then we also have amateurs like Chesterton’s Father Brown and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who always just seem to be in the right place at the right time.

The Author’s Choice

If we want to write a heroic adventure story, one of the early decisions we have to make is what kind of hero we want to feature.  Sometimes the tale may call for someone who’s automatically in a position to encounter danger, like a military officer.  Sometimes we may prefer to drag the hero into action against their wishes, or by happenstance.  The whole point of Roger Thornhill’s predicament in North by Northwest, for example, is that he has no desire to become involved in skulduggery and is baffled by the strange things that are happening to him.  Like so many other accidental heroes, however, he rises to the occasion.  This is a narrative arc that may be both more interesting and more inspiring than that of the professional hero; because most of us live relatively ordinary lives and can only hope that if called upon, we too could become the kind of hero we admire.

Portraying the Transhuman Character

/ Rick Ellrod / 7 Comments

More Than Human

Kevin Wade Johnson’s comments on my recent post about The Good Place raised a couple of issues worth a closer look.  Here’s one:

Lots of science fiction, and some fantasy, deals with characters who are greater, or more intelligent, or more gifted in some way, than mere humans.  But we the authors and readers are mere humans.  How do we go about showing a character who’s supposed to be more sublime than we can imagine?

It’s one thing to have characters whose capabilities are beyond us.  Superman can leap tall buildings with a single bound; I can’t.  But I can easily comprehend Superman’s doing so.  (I can even see it at the movies.)  On the other hand, if a character is supposed to be so intelligent I can’t grasp their reasoning, or has types of knowledge that are beyond me, that’s harder to represent.  I can simply say so:  “Thorson had an intelligence far beyond that of ordinary men.”  But how can I show it?

Long-Lived Experience

There are a number of ways this can come up.  For example, if a character lived a very long time, would their accumulated experience allow for capabilities, or logical leaps in thinking, beyond what we can learn in our short lives?

I’m thinking of a Larry Niven story—I’m blanking on the name:  maybe one of the “Gil the Arm” stories?—in which a character who appears to be a young woman turns out to be centuries old, and when she drops the deception, she moves with uncanny grace—she doesn’t bump into anything or trip over her own feet, because she’s had that long to train herself in how to move (without the limitations imposed by our bodies’ degeneration from aging).

Of course, a story about long-lived people doesn’t have to take long-lived learning into account.  The depiction of the “Howard Families” in Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children and Time Enough for Love almost seem dedicated to the opposite proposition, that no matter how long we live, we’re basically the same kinds of personalities; we don’t learn much.

Galadriel, radiantIn a similar way, Tolkien’s immortal elves may seem ineffably glorious to us, but their behavior often seems all too human—especially if you read The Silmarillion, where elves make mistakes, engage in treachery, and allow overweening pride to dictate their actions in ways that may surprise those of us familiar only with LotR.  On the other hand, the books and movies do succeed in convincing us that characters like Galadriel and Gandalf are of a stature that exceeds human possibility.

Logic and Language

There are other ways to have transhuman abilities.  As Kevin observes, Niven’s “Protectors” fit the description.  Niven imagines a further stage of human development—something that comes after childhood, adolescence, and adulthood—that we’ve never seen, because when our remote ancestors arrived on Earth from elsewhere, they lacked the plants hosting the symbiotic virus necessary for transition to that final stage.  The “trans-adult” Protectors are stronger, faster, and more durable than ordinary humans.  They also think faster.  Thus Niven shows them as following out a chain of logic with blinding speed to its conclusion, allowing them to act long before regular humans could figure out what to do.  Because this is a matter of speed, not incomprehensible thinking, Niven can depict a Protector as acting in ways that are faster than normal, but are explainable once we sit down and work out the reasoning.

Sherlock Holmes, arena fight sceneA visual analogue is used in the 2009 and 2011 Sherlock Holmes films starring Robert Downey, Jr.  Unlike most other treatments of the character, Guy Ritchie’s version supposes that Holmes’ incredible intelligence can be used not only for logical deduction, but to predict with lightning speed how a hand-to-hand combat may develop.  Holmes thus becomes a ninja-like melee fighter, so effective as to confound all opponents.  The movie shows us this by slowing down the process that to Holmes is instantaneous:  we see a very short montage of positions and moves as they would occur, or could occur, before we see Holmes carry out the final “conclusion” of his martial reasoning.  This allows us to appreciate what the quasi-superhuman character is doing and why, without actually having to execute the same process ourselves.

Preternatural intelligence may be more subtle in its effects.  Such a person may, for example, be able to understand things fully from what, to us, would be mere hints and implications.  So, for example, when Isaac Asimov introduces the members of the Second Foundation in his Foundation series, he tells us that their tremendous psychological training allows them to talk among themselves in a manner so concise and compressed that entire paragraphs require only a few words.

Speech as known to us was unnecessary.  A fragment of a sentence amounted almost to long-winded redundancy.  A gesture, a grunt, the curve of a facial line—even a significantly timed pause yielded informational juice.  (Second Foundation, end of chapter 1, “First Interlude,” p. 16)

Second Foundation coverBreaking the fourth wall, Asimov warns us that his account is “about as far as I can go in explaining color to a blind man—with myself as blind as the audience.”  (same page)  He then adroitly avoids showing us any of the actual conversation; instead, he says he’s “freely translating” it into our ordinary language.  This move illustrates one of the classic ways of presenting the incomprehensible in a story:  point out its incomprehensibility and “translate” into something we can understand.  (Note that this is much more easily done in writing than in a visual medium such as TV or the movies.)

A similar technique is used by Poul Anderson in his 1953 novel Brain Wave, which starts with the interesting premise that in certain regions of space, neurons function faster than in others.  When Earth’s natural rotation around the center of the galaxy brings it into a “faster” area, the brains of every creature with a central nervous system speed up, and human beings (as well as other animals) all become proportionately smarter.  Anderson notes that the speech of the transformed humans would be incomprehensible to us and, like Asimov, “translates” it for our convenience.  When a couple of the characters, in a newly invented faster-than-light spaceship, accidentally cross the border back into the “slow zone,” they are unable to understand the controls they themselves designed until the ship’s travel brings them out and lets their intelligence return to its new normal.  (Anderson’s concept may have been the inspiration for the “Zones of Thought” universe later developed in several fascinating stories by Vernor Vinge.)

Showing and Telling

We can glean some general principles from these examples.  If the extraordinary acts don’t actually have to be shown in the medium I’m using, I can simply point to them and tell the reader they’re there.  In a written story, I can say my main character is a world-class violinist without having to demonstrate that level of ability myself.  (Although if I have some experience in that particular art, I’ll be able to provide some realistic details, to help make my claim sound plausible.)  But if the supernormal achievement is something that can be shown in our chosen medium, we have to be able to demonstrate it:  a movie about the great violinist will have to exhibit some pretty masterful violin-playing, or those in the audience who know something about the art will laugh themselves silly.

Flowers For Algernon coverWe should note that there are good and bad ways of telling the audience about a character’s superiority.  In the unforgettable short story “Flowers for Algernon,” which consists entirely of diary entries by Charlie Gordon, the main character, the text vividly shows us the effects of an intelligence-raising treatment on a man of initially lower-than-normal intelligence.  The entries improve so radically in writing competence and understanding that when Charlie describes how his brainpower is beginning to exceed that of ordinary humans, we believe him, because we’re already riding on the curve of rising ability up to our own level that is apparent in the text—a true tour de force of writing.  On the other hand, in the drastically worse movie version, Charly (1968), the screenwriters are reduced to having Charly stand in front of an audience of experts and scornfully dismiss the greatest intellectual achievements from human history—a weak and ineffective technique at best for conveying superiority.

Summary

This quick review of the problem turns up several methods for handling supernormal abilities in a story.

 

  • If the superior ability is intelligible to us ordinary people in the audience—maybe it’s just doing normal things faster—we can have the wiser or super-enabled person explain it to someone less wise: our last post’s Ignorant Interlocutor.
  • If the advantage is mainly a matter of speed, we can slow it down to a speed at which regular people can follow the action.
  • If we can get away without actually showing the ability in question, we may be able to point toward it, or “translate” it into something we can understand, and convincingly tell the audience about it—if we can achieve the necessary suspension of disbelief.
  • If a character is supposed to be, let us say, preternaturally wise, and there’s simply no way to avoid showing that in the dialogue, the best we can do is to evoke the best we can do—have the character be as wise as possible—and imply ‘like this, only more so.’ This method—like “projecting” a line or a curve—is the method of “supereminence,” which is sometimes employed in theological talk about things that are inherently beyond our full understanding.

 

Kicking around this question makes us aware that portraying the more-than-human character is only a special case of a more general problem.  When our stories try to incorporate anything that’s indescribable, incomprehensible, how do we handle that?  Our F&SF stories frequently want to reach out beyond the boundaries of human experience, yet in a tale written for ordinary humans.  We’ll talk about the more general question next time.