[In the following essay, Guffey asserts that the similarities between Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris are “largely the result of the strong influence of the unconscious of each writer during the creative process.”]

[A writer] floats on the heavenly lake; he steeps himself in the nether spring. Thereupon, submerged words squirm up, as when a flashing fish, hook in its gills, leaps from water's depth.

—Lu Ki, Wen-fu

A writer psychoanalyzes himself, not with a psychiatrist, but with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions of readers.

—Larry Niven, Science Fiction Voices #2

Those of us who come to fantasy and science fiction after years of studying the poetry and prose of the earliest periods of English and American history do so with considerable delight. We are delighted, first, because a substantial amount of the fantasy and science fiction published since 1950 is quality literature. We are delighted, second, because of the rich research opportunities the field offers.

Shivering and squinting in dark, dank cubicles, we in the past studied the crabbed, ambiguous handwriting of minor church functionaries, hoping thereby to settle longstanding arguments about the birthplaces and birthtimes of literary figures of major and minor importance. Similarly, we laboriously collated faded manuscripts of doubtful authority against multiple copies of badly printed folios, quartos, and duodecimos, with the modest hope of learning something, no matter how little, about the creative imagination of Shakespeare, Dryden, or even Traherne. As we went about our scholarly tasks, we now and then pictured in our mind's eyes the relative affluence of colleagues who had chosen to specialize in more modern periods. Surrounded by holograph manuscripts, galley proofs, personal letters, and taped interviews, those happy devils, in our imaginations, clucked and chortled to themselves as their typewriters rattled away.

Although on the whole exaggerated, that picture of modern scholarly affluence does contain a significant amount of truth. Our age, unlike the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, not only places a high premium on the works of the individual writer, but also attempts in general to preserve as much of his personal history as possible. Many modern authors are, of course, uncomfortable about the dogged attention paid to their lives and therefore cover their tracks whenever and wherever possible. They destroy their juvenilia, refuse interviews, and go to great lengths to avoid personal contact with the reading public. To the delight of critics and scholars interested in the creative process, a few, and here fantasy and science fiction writers seem generally to fit, happily write autobiographical articles for magazines, mingle with their fans at conventions, and grant interviews of various sorts. It is with provocative comments made by some of these writers in recent interviews and articles that I wish to begin my essay.

1

One of the staples of fantasy and science fiction magazines, amateur and professional, is the interview with a successful writer in the field. Because many readers of these magazines are themselves would-be writers, the interviewers tend to focus on the practical problems of writing, especially the writing of novels. In other words, although they may or may not delve deeply into the educational backgrounds, political philosophies, or reading tastes of the writers they are interviewing, they almost always ask the two questions of most interest to beginning writers of fantasy and science fiction: Where do you get your ideas? and How carefully do you work your stories out before you begin to write?

The answers elicited by these and similar questions fall roughly into two categories. A few writers say that a considerable amount of conscious preparation is necessary before they actually begin to write. Here, for example, are the responses of Poul Anderson to questions about his writing habits:

Writing a novel is a complicated task. Once I determine, in a general sense, what I'm going to do, I'll sit down and start planning it in great detail. I'll try to figure everything out I possibly can about the world I'm trying to build. After I've calculated the mathematic skeleton of the story, I'll work on several more arbitrary things, such as drawing maps, identifying place names, researching life on the planet. I'll usually end up with pages and pages of closely written notes, just on that one planet, getting down to elaborate descriptions of flora and fauna. Then I'll start developing individual characters.¹

Anderson, a fabricator of “hard” science fiction, is well aware that some writers work in a less conscious, less systematic way. In an autobiographical article published in Algol, he has distinguished two extreme methods of composition:

Some artists proceed in a kind of frenzy, unheeding of what they are about until the project is finished. This is not necessarily bad. A numbe[r] of our finest works have been created thus. No two makers have identical methods. Of course, if he's any good, the headlong artist has all the skill and understanding that he needs; they just operate less on the conscious level for him than they do for most people.

At the opposite pole we find the completely cerebral person who plans everything out beforehand, takes careful note of what he is doing while he does it, and afterward goes back to ponder over each smallest detail and revise until he is satisfied. People of this kind also produce their share of greatness.²

Lester del Rey, although not given to extensive revision, seems in general to follow a procedure similar to Anderson's. In an interview which appeared in Science Fiction Review, he says of his writing practices: “I know what my story is going to be before I ever write it. This I work out in great detail. I'm never surprised by the development of a character because I've known that before I ever put it on paper, because I've planned that all out ahead of time. …”³ And, interestingly enough, L. Sprague de Camp, generally a producer of fantasy and science fantasy, appears to be one of Anderson's “cerebral” writers, not one of his “frenzied” ones. “I'm one of these meticulous outliners,” he says. “Some people sit down and the whole thing pours out. … I don't work very much that way. I have a general idea, and then gradually fill it out, add more detail, add more complications and the like.”⁴

Although Poul Anderson, Lester del Rey, and L. Sprague de Camp evidently construct their stories with the rationality and efficiency of an aircraft engineer working out the design of a new jet engine, a great many of the fantasy and science fiction writers interviewed during the last four or five years have indicated that their own creative processes are neither very rational nor very efficient. Gregory Benford, for one, notes that, knowing he is a scientist, many of his readers suspect him to be a “very rationalist writer, like Fred Hoyle.” Actually, he says, “it seems to me that I'm a little more of a subconscious sort of writer.” He does not, he adds, know where the “stuff” of his stories “comes from,” and he is only able to put large chunks of his material together over long periods of time. A good case in point is his novel In the Ocean of Night, which grew out of previously published pieces of short fiction. He describes the making of that novel:

I knew I was going to write the book for a long time, but I had to work out the details. … In the summer of '75, I sat down and tried to start on page one and go through and modify everything … and try to pull it together. It was mostly a subconscious process because I actually didn't know how major things in the book connected up with other major things. It was a series of revelations. I was in the middle of the book and just going along thinking about the plotline that I had laid out, and about 300 words before it happened I discovered that Nigel Walmsley's wife, Alexandria, was going to rise from the dead. I didn't know that! I suddenly realized that all that had been planted before, was all set up, and I hadn't even realized that I was planting it. … It was that kind of assembly work in which you slowly understand what is going on. … This seems to be the way that I have to white books. It takes a long time to put together the ideas and figure out what it means.⁵

According to the Jungian school of psychology, a frequently appearing symbol for the unconscious is the ocean.⁶ In light of the large part that Benford's unconscious seems to have played in the creation of In the Ocean of Night, the title he chose for his book is peculiarly fitting. Among the various words one might use to characterize the unconscious, “ocean” and “night” would have to be at the head of the list.

Writing in Algol, Joe Haldeman recently discussed at length the problem of “getting ideas” for science fiction stories. Before suggesting a solution for writer's block, he described R. A. Lafferty's theory of artistic inspiration:

R. A. Lafferty, than whom there is no more original writer in science fiction, claims that there's no such thing as an original idea, and writers who think they sit down and go through some rational process to arrive at a story are kidding themselves. He claims that all ideas float around as a kind of psychic public property, and every now and then one settles on you. That sounds dangerously mystical to me, subversive, but I think it's true.⁷

Again, the image is Jungian: ideas “float around” in a psychic ocean, which is accessible to everyone. Surely we are here only a half-step away from Jung's theory of the archetypes and the collective unconscious.

At times a writer finds that his, in Haldeman's words, “imagination has frozen solid,” that “no ideas come floating down” to him. Here is Haldeman's solution to that, for a writer, most vexing problem:

Start typing. Type your name over and over. Type lists of animals, flowers, baseball players, Greek Methodists. Type out what you're going to say to that damned insolent repairman. Sooner or later, perhaps out of boredom, perhaps out of a desire to stop this silly exercise, you'll find you've started a story. It's never taken me so much as a page of nonsense. …⁸

The science fiction writer who seems to have thought most about the part the unconscious plays in the creative process is A. E. Van Vogt. His introduction to the subject came about, he tells us, as a result of his attempts to find a successful treatment for a chronic medical disorder:

I fell out of a second-storey window when I was age two and a half, and I was unconscious for three days, near death. Later, using hypnosis, and then still later, dianetics, in an effort to reduce the trauma of those three days, I discovered that unconsciousness has “on it” (in it) endless hallucinations. The normal part of my brain has probably spent a lifetime trying to rationalize the consequent fantasies and images. This could explain a lot about my bent for science fiction.⁹

Over the years, Van Vogt, who like Haldeman and most other writers at times suffered from writer's block, developed a unique way of freeing his blocked unconscious and thereby initiating stories or resuming halted ones. Noting that when he went to bed after a period of unsuccessful labor he often later in the night awoke with a solution to the problem which had frustrated him, Van Vogt, in order to prime his creative imagination, embarked on a demanding regimen: “Thereafter, I used an alarm clock to awaken me every one and a half hours. Throughout my career as a writer, I awakened myself by an alarm clock—and later with an industrial timer—about 300 nights a year. Thus, I enlisted my subconscious … in my ceaseless search for ideas and story solutions.”¹⁰ Eventually, Van Vogt's ruminations on the workings of the unconscious led him to a full-blown theory of composition which included, in addition to aspects of aesthetics, elements of archetypal epistemology and metaphysics as well:

I had the theory that every grain of sand, every rock, every living cell contains within it a record of its ancient origin. The theory postulated that if we could but “read” that record, we could know the beginning of all things, and their subsequent history. Obviously, science has long attempted to use its methods to comprehend this record. My method, however, was more exotic. At a certain point in each science fiction story, I would let my subconscious mind freely associate within the frame of the ideas of that story. My hope was that, as time went on, as more stories were written, my subconscious would progressively spew forth ancient images; and that a picture of the truth of the universe would gradually emerge.¹¹

I could quote numerous additional fantasy and science fiction writers on the subject of the role of the unconscious in the creative process, but time and space will allow for only two more. When an interviewer recently asked Stephen R. Donaldson where he got ideas for his stories, Donaldson replied, “Where? from the un- or sub-conscious recesses of my own mind. … When I'm receptive, they can be fished to the surface [that Jungian image, again] by almost any kind of external stimuli (one whole sequence in The Power That Preserves was triggered by a can of disinfectant in a restaurant washroom).”¹² A little later in the interview, he added, “The single most crippling obstacle to this process is self-consciousness: Self-consciousness blocks receptivity.”¹³

Finally, in describing the origin and completion of Sword of the Demon, Richard Lupoff emphasized not only the contribution of his “personal” unconscious, but also the indirect contribution of the racial unconscious, through the materials he first absorbed from Japanese myths and then subsequently incorporated into his novel. The following is his description of the complete process:

The very opening of the book, the first chapter of it, just occurred spontaneously. It had no particular source that I knew of. The famous well-springs of the subconscious, or whatever. I had no awareness of it having come from any place in particular, it was just there. And I didn't know where to go with it. It sat in my desk untouched for a couple of years because of that. Finally, I was looking through The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology and spent about the next six months reading Japanese cultural mythology. Just submerged [my italics] myself in it. All the characters and most of the incidents in the book are taken from Japanese mythology, but the book itself is not a literal retelling of any one particular story. … This book was produced by turning my head into some sort of solvent and filling it up with Japanese mythology until I got a supersaturated solution, and this book is the precipitate.¹⁴

Most lovers of literature find such vivid, personal statements about the creative process intrinsically interesting. What makes these statements especially interesting, however, is the remarkable way they echo key passages in C. G. Jung's most influential book, Symbols of Transformation. In the second chapter of that book, Jung's primary goal is the distinction of two fundamentally different kinds of thinking. One kind he calls “directed thinking”; the other he calls “fantasy thinking.”

Directed thinking is, above all, verbal: “If we … follow out an intensive train of thought—the solution of a difficult problem, for instance—we suddenly notice that we are thinking in words, that in very intensive thinking we begin talking to ourselves, or that we occasionally write down the problem or make a drawing of it, so as to be absolutely clear.” Directed thinking, Jung adds, is logical thinking. It is difficult, even exhausting. It copies reality and produces adaptation to it. Certainly, the “clearest expression of modern directed thinking is science and the techniques fostered by it.”¹⁵

On the other hand, “What happens,” Jung asks, “when we do not think directly?” “Well,” he answers, “our thinking then lacks all leading ideas and the sense of direction emanating from them. We no longer compel our thoughts along a definite track, but let them float, sink or rise according to their specific gravity.” Unlike directed thinking, this kind of thinking (fantasy thinking) does not tire us, and it “leads away from reality into fantasies of the past or future.”¹⁶

Although directed thinking is a conscious phenomenon, most fantasy thinking, according to Jung, goes on in the unconscious. For the clearest, most concise description of this fantasy activity and of the two parts of the unconscious psyche—the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious—we must resort to another of Jung's works, “The Psychology of the Child Archetype”:

Modern psychology treats the products of unconscious imagination as self-portraits of what is going on in the unconscious, or as statements of the unconscious psyche about itself. They fall into two categories. Firstly, fantasies (including dreams) of a personal character, which go back unquestionably to personal experiences, things forgotten or repressed, and can thus be completely explained by individual anamnesis. Secondly, fantasies (including dreams) of an impersonal character, which cannot be reduced to experiences in the individual's past, and thus cannot be explained as something individually acquired. These fantasy-pictures undoubtedly have their closest analogues in mythological types. We must therefore assume that they correspond to certain collective (and not personal) structural elements of the human psyche in general, and, like the morphological elements of the human body, are inherited. … the fantasy-products of the second category (as also those of the first) arise in a state of reduced intensity on the part of consciousness (in dreams, delirium, reveries, visions, etc.).¹⁷

Very clearly, then, the first group of writers I quoted—Anderson, del Rey, and de Camp—are, in the language of Jung, “directed thinkers.” Highly conscious and highly logical artists, they perform mathematical calculations, do extensive research, draw detailed maps, and make elaborate outlines before they actually begin to write their stories. The second group of writers—Benford, Haldeman, Van Vogt, Donaldson, and Lupoff—are, to varying degrees, what Jung called “fantasy thinkers.” Less conscious and less logical as artists, they depend greatly on the promptings of the unconscious.

2

At first glance, the two books I wish to examine in some detail in the remainder of this essay would appear to have little in common. Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles is notable chiefly for its masterful stylistic effects. It holds our attention with its sensuous diction, its hypnotic sentence rhythms, and its skillful onomatopoeic devices. The scientific and technological materials of the book are unfortunately not so impressive; they are not only frequently self-contradictory, but they are also often in conflict with those of the world we actually inhabit. Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, on the other hand, is a masterpiece of philosophical fiction. In dealing with matters scientific and technological, it is always informed and sophisticated. Its rigorous and detailed epistemological speculations are in the main successfully integrated with fascinating character portraits and suspenseful incidents.

Surprisingly enough, these very different books do have, as we shall see, some significant points of contact. Those points of contact, I shall argue, are largely the result of the strong influence of the unconscious of each writer during the creative process. To begin, I must turn to the public statements Bradbury has made about his own methods of composition.

If his public comments about his methods of composition are to be trusted, Bradbury is a determined practitioner of what Jung called “fantasy thinking.” In a speech in 1975, he rejected the notion that the conscious part of the mind should play a significant role in the creative process: “I have had a sign by my typewriter for the better part of twenty years, now, which says, ‘Don't think.’ I hate all those signs that say Think. That's the enemy of creativity.” Melville, the author of the greatest American novel, did not intellectualize; he relied on emotion. “Emotion, emotion wins the day. Intellect can help correct. But emotion, first, surprises creativity out in the open where it can be pinned down! Learn from Melville!” Like Melville, and Plato's Ion, for that matter, Bradbury is, he says, at the mercy of his Muse when he writes. He is not in control. Having written, however, he is better balanced, better adjusted: “I've only been to a psychiatrist once in my life. I don't happen to believe in it. … I think good friends, or the act of creativity itself, sustains us and saves us more often than not.”¹⁸

In an interview published only last year, Bradbury again emphasized that, for him, writing is essentially an undirected process: “I never plan ahead. Everything is always spontaneous and passionate. I never sit down and think things out. I also do a great deal of daydreaming. Oh, I do some thinking in-between, but it's a very loose thing. I'm not super-intellectual. If it feels right, then I'll do it.” How does he get ideas for stories? “Basically, I just go [into my office] with the idea of writing something. I usually start off the day with poetry. I go through a process of free association. I do the same thing with short stories.”¹⁹

Like many fantasy and science fiction writers, Bradbury admits, then, to a significant amount of daydreaming. To a psychoanalyst the daydreams of an individual are at least as significant as his nightdreams. When an individual daydreams, his psychic energy (or libido) manifests itself as a stream of images linked by association, a stream which flows freely in the direction of least resistance. Good writers such as Bradbury differ from ordinary daydreamers, of course, by possessing an ability to abstract ideas from their fantasies and objectify them in good literary form. Before analyzing Bradbury's finest achievement as a writer of fantasy, The Martian Chronicles, I must first place one of its dominant themes in a more general context.

One of the most common themes in nightdreams, daydreams, and myths is that of transformation, or metamorphosis. All of us have had nightdreams in the course of which inanimate objects, plants, animals, or people have changed into very different inanimate objects, plants, animals, or people. Among the materials collected and published by Freud and Jung, numerous examples of such transformations can be found. Here, for instance, is a short transformational nightdream collected by Jung and printed in his Essays on a Science of Mythology: “A white bird perches on a table. Suddenly it changes into a fair-haired seven-year-old girl and just as suddenly back into a bird, which now speaks with a human voice.”²⁰ Another dreamer provides a longer, even more intriguing example:

We go through a door into a tower-like room, where we climb a long flight of steps. … The steps end in a temple. … The temple is of red stone. Bloody sacrifices are offered there. Animals are standing about the altar. In order to enter the temple precincts one has to be transformed into an animal—a beast of the forest. … On the altar in the middle of the open room there stands the moon-bowl, from which smoke or vapour continually rises. There is also a huge image of the goddess, but it cannot be seen clearly. The worshippers, who have been changed into animals and to whom I also belong, have to touch the goddess's foot. …²¹

As far as transformational daydreams are concerned, the ones most familiar to us are those involving wish fulfillments. In our reveries we are often temporarily transformed into powerful heads of state, heroic soldiers, world-class athletes, celebrated musicians, prize-winning authors, glamorous movie-stars—the list of possibilities is virtually endless. Freud and Jung frequently touched on the subject of daydreams, and Jung even went so far as to publish a number of the most significant ones he had collected. Of those printed by Jung in Essays on a Science of Mythology, one, from a woman “in middle life,” is especially relevant to the thrust of this essay. Richer, more bizarre than the transformational daydreams of most of us, it is especially interesting for its ending:

A magician is demonstrating his tricks to an Indian prince. He produces a beautiful young girl from under a cloth. She is a dancer, who has the power to change her shape or at least hold her audience spell-bound by faultless illusion. During the dance she dissolves with the music into a swarm of bees. Then she changes into a leopard, then into a jet of water, then into a sea-polyp that has twined itself about a young pearl-fisher. Between times, she takes human form again at the dramatic moment. She appears as a she-ass bearing two baskets of wonderful fruits. Then she becomes a many-coloured peacock. The prince is beside himself with delight and calls her to him. But she dances on, now naked, and even tears the skin from her body, and finally falls down—a naked skeleton. This is buried, but at night a lily grows out of the grave, and from its cup there rises the white lady, who floats slowly up to the sky.²²

This daydream is interesting not only because of the number and variety of transformations it contains, but also because of the mythlike transfiguration at the end of it. The death and burial of the beautiful young girl and her subsequent rebirth in the form of a flower are, of course, paralleled by similar events in numerous well-known myths. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid, in fact, organized much of the mythology of Greece, Rome, and Babylonia around the theme of transformation; and, among the many different kinds of transformation he described, those involving the death of an individual and the subsequent rebirth of that individual in the form of a flower were amply represented. Because of their popularity with Renaissance poets such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell, the Ovidian stories involving such myths (those about Narcissus, Hyacinthus, and Adonis, for example) are the best-known today. Overall, the transformations depicted in Metamorphoses are more numerous and more varied than some of us will remember them to be: Chaos is transformed into an ordered universe, the coral “plant” into a rock, Syrinx into a reed, Daphne into a tree, the Thracian women into oaks, Ascalaphus into an owl, the nephew of Daedalus into a partridge, Daedalion into a hawk, Cadmus into a snake, Lyncus into a lynx, Lycaon into a wolf, Callisto into a bear, Galanthis into a weasel, Atlas into a mountain, Cyane into a pool, Arethusa into a spring, a dog into a marble statue, a city into a heron; nymphs are transformed into islands, ships into nymphs, and on, and on.

Over a hundred years ago Nietzsche suggested a relationship between our dream thinking and what he called the “whole thought” of primitive man. On the basis of dream analysis, Freud came to a related conclusion; he held that myths are the “distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the [age-long] dreams” of primitive man. And, finally, Jung himself wrote, “The conclusion that the myth-makers thought in much the same way as we still think in dreams is almost self-evident.”²³ With these ideas about the nature and functions of night-dreams, daydreams, and myths in mind, we are now ready to turn to Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.

Near the middle of “Usher II,” one of the stories in The Martian Chronicles, Mr. Stendahl, lover of fantasy and re-creator of the House of Usher, says of his architectural accomplishments, “I nurtured a medieval atmosphere in a modern, incredulous world.”²⁴ Apt though they are for describing the house and grounds Stendahl created on Mars, Stendahl's words would have made an even more appropriate epigraph for The Martian Chronicles itself. Although superficially a book about a technologically superior world of the future, The Martian Chronicles is in reality a collection of atavistic daydreams, daydreams which derive much of their power from mythlike transformations.

One of the most mythlike stories in the book is “The Martian,” a haunting tale of a Martian “boy” capable of changing his shape to accommodate the desires of the settlers from Earth. In what seemed like, in the words of the narrator, a “repeated dream,”²⁵ he moved among the settlers, assuming the shapes of their dead relatives and acquaintances. Always fearful of being “trapped” by the settlers, he eventually met his end beside a Martian canal, as members of a hysterical crowd struggled to hold him: “Before their eyes he changed. … He was melting wax shaping to their minds. They shouted, they pressed forward, pleading. He screamed, threw out his hands, his face dissolving to each demand. … They snatched his wrists, whirled him about, until with one last shriek of horror he fell.”²⁶ This story, of course, reminds us of the myth of Proteus. A shape changer who also had to be constantly on guard against being caught and forced to satisfy the desires of his captors, Proteus, a god of the sea, sometimes assumed “the shape of a young man, at another transformed into a lion; sometimes he used to appear … as a raging wild boar, or again as a snake … or else horns transformed him into a bull.”²⁷

In “The Third Expedition,” a spaceship from Earth lands near what appears to be a small Martian town. The commander of the ship is Captain John Black. A man eighty years old, Black, “through the grace of God and a science that … knows how to make some old men young again,” is as agile and alert as the chronologically younger men accompanying him. Nearing the town, he and two of his men hear someone “softly, drowsily,” playing “Beautiful Dreamer” on a piano. Minutes later, exploring the “dreaming” afternoon streets of the town, the Earthmen find that it appears to be in every way identical to the small, Midwestern towns of their youth; and shortly, in an “amazing dream of reality,” Black is happily reunited with his long-dead “brother,” “father,” and “mother.”²⁸

But during the night, lying beside his “brother” in a bedroom like the one they shared as children, Black begins to awaken from his “dreaming hypnosis”: “Suppose these houses are really some other shape, a Martian shape, but, by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house. … Sometime during the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed will change form, melt, shift, and become another thing, a Martian. It would be very simple for him just to turn over in bed and put a knife into my heart.” By morning, the Martians have, in fact, killed all sixteen men from the rocket ship. At their funeral, the “mayor” of the town, “his face sometimes looking like the mayor, sometimes looking like something else,” makes a sad speech, while the faces of Black's crying “relatives” melt from familiar shapes “into something else.”²⁹

The transformations witnessed by Captain Williams and his crew in a different story, “The Earth Men,” are even more bizarre than those encountered by Captain Black in “The Third Expedition.” Taken for a hallucinating psychotic because he claims to have come from Earth, Williams, along with his crew, is locked in a Martian insane asylum, where he must spend the night surrounded by constantly metamorphosing “paranoids”:

A man squatted alone in darkness. Out of his mouth issued a blue flame which turned into the round shape of a small naked woman. …

The captain nodded at another corner. A woman stood there, changing. First she was embedded in a crystal pillar, then she melted into a golden statue, finally a staff of polished cedar, and back to a woman.

All through the midnight hall people were juggling thin violet flames, shifting, changing, for nighttime was the time of change and affliction. …

Little demons of red sand ran between the teeth of sleeping men. Women became oily snakes. There was a smell of reptiles and animals.³⁰

Convinced that Williams is a highly imaginative Martian who has transformed himself into a startlingly effective image of an Earthman, a Martian psychologist excitedly envisions a scientific paper on Williams's feat: “I'll write this into my greatest monograph! I'll speak of it at the Martian Academy next month! Look at you! Why, you've even changed your eye color from yellow to blue, your skin to pink from brown. And those clothes, and your hands having five fingers instead of six! Biological metamorphosis through psychological imbalance!”³¹ Finally, having judged Williams's case incurable, the Martian psychologist resorts to euthanasia, only to find that, even after the death of Williams, his supposed hallucination, his Earthman's body, continues to exist.

An exhaustive account of the many kinds of transformation taking place in the other stories in The Martian Chronicles would require more space than I have been allotted for the rest of this essay, but perhaps I can at least suggest their variety and number before turning to similar materials in Lem's Solaris. In the stories and the bridges between the stories, a frosty Ohio winter is transformed into a brief summer by the heat from the exhausts of a rocket ship; Spender, a sensitive archaeologist, is (in spirit, at least) transformed into a Martian; Benjamin Driscoll, a latter-day Johnny Appleseed, turns a Martian desert into a green paradise; Pikes, a man of ten thousand faces, is able to transform himself into “a fury, a smoke, a blue fog, a white rain, a bat, a gargoyle”; Stendahl's guests, after being forced to don masks, are “transformed from one age into another”; a Martian woman, slain by the vulgar and crass Sam Parkhill, turns into “ice, snowflake, smoke,” and is blown “away in the wind”; and, at the end of the book, the Hathaway family, having destroyed the rocket ship which brought them to Mars, become “Martians.”³² This list might be considerably extended, but it should suffice.

Finally, before leaving The Martian Chronicles, I must say something about the book's special use of metaphor and simile. All metaphors and similes are, of course, by their very nature transformational. If I, for example, say that “my love is a soft, soft cloud,” I am, at some level of understanding, for a brief moment at least, transforming her. What is unusually interesting about the metaphors and similes of The Martian Chronicles, however, is the high frequency of what I shall call “biomorphic” figures of speech—metaphors and similes with inanimate tenors and animate vehicles. And among the many biomorphic figures of the book, those of greatest interest to me are the figures in which the tenors are machines. Here are a few examples: “the … house … turned and followed the sun, flowerlike”; “From [the evil weapon] hordes of golden bees could be flung out with a high shriek”; “Up and down green wine canals, boats as delicate as bronze flowers drifted”; “the rocket had bloomed out great flowers of heat and color”; “[the rocket] had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan”; “The rockets came like locusts”; “It was a machine like a jade-green insect, a praying mantis, delicately rushing through the cold air”; and “the great ships turned as lightly as moon thistles.”

In interviews during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Bradbury repeatedly stated that he had never flown in an airplane, that (whenever possible) he avoided riding in automobiles, and that he disliked telephones and television sets.³⁴ Consistent with Bradbury's openly negative attitude toward machines, Mr. Hathaway at the end of The Martian Chronicles says of life during the last half of the twentieth century, “Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness. …”³⁵ Only last year in an interview, Bradbury insisted, “We must learn to humanize the machine.”³⁶ In light of his general mechanophobia, it is not, I think, therefore surprising to find in The Martian Chronicles and in Bradbury's other works numerous, probably unconsciously generated, biomorphic figures of speech.

According to Jung, fantasy thinking, although mainly a spontaneous product of the unconscious, contains elements of consciousness. The degree of influence an individual will allow his unconscious is dependent on the degree of rationalism prevailing in his immediate environment. Today, the countries officially most committed to a rationalist position are the socialist states of Europe and Asia, and the most read and most admired socialist writer of fantasy and science fiction is Stanislaw Lem of Poland. In recent public statements about his stories, Lem has revealed that, although he is officially a staunch rationalist, his attempts to rationalize the creative process have hitherto met with failure:

I have tried all thinkable, rational, optimization procedures (tactics of writing). All in vain. I do not know where my ideas come from. … They come in dreams, but this is very rare; sometimes while reading scientific papers, especially mathematical ones. But then, there is no evidence of a rational linkage between a new idea and the said paper. … And truly I never know what I am writing—if it will be a short story, a novel, a serious thing or something grotesque—what problems may emerge, and so on. This is one hell and damnation, especially since I AM a rationalist, but it is so.³⁷

Of even greater relevance to the concerns of this essay, though, are Lem's statements about the composition of his best novel, Solaris:

I had no knowledge, not an atom of it, when I wrote the first chapter, what Kelvin would encounter on Solaris Station. I went forward in the same way that Kelvin went, and spoke for the first time with Snow, not knowing what was going on. Then, as I approached the end, again I did not know how to end the story, and it took a whole year—one day there came this illumination, and so it was. I do not like this kind of creative work, because I am myself a rationalist, and I would prefer to write in a planned, “rationalistic” way. … There were no plans, no elaborated preconceptions, no tactics, no nothing. …³⁸

Surprisingly enough, then, Lem's metaphysical masterpiece appears to have been just as much the product of fantasy thinking as Bradbury's less intellectually challenging Martian Chronicles. All the extrinsic evidence supports that conclusion.

In addition, considerable intrinsic evidence can be marshaled in support of the same proposition. To begin—throughout Solaris, as throughout The Martian Chronicles, a dreamlike atmosphere prevails. Kelvin has, in fact, hardly set foot upon Solaris Station when he exclaims, “I must be dreaming. All this could only be a dream!”³⁹ Shortly thereafter, he encounters Gibarian's nightmarish mistress in a corridor of the space station and his long-dead wife, Rheya, in his own room. At first, he is convinced that he is only dreaming of Rheya, but little by little he begins to entertain the possibility that she is real:

My first thought was reassuring: I was dreaming and I was aware that I was dreaming. … I closed my eyes and tried to shake off the dream. … I thought of throwing something at her, but, even in a dream, I could not bring myself to harm a dead person. … the room, Rheya, everything seemed extraordinarily real. A three-dimensional dream. … I saw several objects on the floor. … When I wake up, I told myself, I shall check whether these things are still there or whether, like Rheya, I only saw them in a dream. … We kissed. … Was it possible to feel so much in a dream, I wondered. … Was it then that I began to have doubts? I went on telling myself that it was a dream, but my heart tightened.⁴⁰

To further complicate matters for Kelvin, Rheya herself begins to dream doubtful dreams: “I have dreams. … I don't know whether they really are dreams. Perhaps I'm ill.”⁴¹ And then, ironically, Kelvin, who had earlier tried to convince himself that he was dreaming, now dreams of Gibarian trying to convince him that he is awake: “Oh, you think you're dreaming about me? As you did with Rheya? … No, I am the real Gibarian. …”⁴²

While Kelvin sleeps, the sentient ocean which inhabits Solaris probes his unconscious, and its invasive presence is reflected in the erotic, terrifying imagery of his nightmares. Two of these nightmares are vividly transformational. The first comes approximately halfway through the novel: “The night transfixed me; the night took possession of me, enveloped and penetrated me. … Turned to stone, I had ceased breathing. … I seemed to be growing smaller. … I tried to crawl out of bed, but there was no bed; beneath the cover of darkness there was a void. I pressed my hands to my face. I no longer had any fingers or any hands. I wanted to scream. …”⁴³ Even more horrifying is the dream near the end of the book:

Out of the enveloping pink mist, an invisible object emerges, and touches me. … I feel this contact like a hand, and the hand recreates me. … Under the caress of the hesitant fingers, my lips and cheeks emerge from the void, and as the caress goes further I have a face, breath stirs in my chest—I exist. And recreated, I in my turn create: a face appears before me. … This creature—a woman?—stays near me and we are motionless. The beat of our hearts combines, and all at once, out of the surrounding void. … steals a presence of indefinable, unimaginable cruelty. The caress that created us … becomes the crawling of innumerable fingers. Our white, naked bodies dissolve into a swarm of black creeping things, and I am—we are—a mass of glutinous coiling worms … and I howl soundlessly, begging for death and for an end.⁴⁴

In these nightmares, Kelvin undergoes transformations symbolic of the painful transformation he must in reality suffer on Solaris. That transformation begins when he first steps from his space capsule, which resembles a “burst cocoon,” onto the space station.⁴⁵ After a series of tense encounters with Snow, Sartorius, and the “visitors” sent to the station by the ocean, Kelvin expresses his doubts and fears to Rheya in language not unlike that which he employs in describing his frightening transformational dreams: “After what has happened already, we can expect anything. Suppose tomorrow it turns me into a green jellyfish! It's out of our hands.”⁴⁶ Much later, at the end of the novel, a more subdued Kelvin stands on the shore of the ocean and repeatedly reaches out to the waves which, without actually touching them, envelop his hand and his feet. Eventually, the ocean tires of this “game,” but Kelvin, having undergone a kind of baptism, has been radically changed. His attitude has now become one of complete and total acceptance: “Although I had read numerous accounts of it, none of them had prepared me for the experience as I had lived it, and I felt somehow changed. … I … identified myself with the dumb, fluid colossus; it was as if I had forgiven it everything, without the slightest effort of word or thought.”⁴⁷

While Kelvin dreams his transformational nightmares and slowly metamorphoses into the sadly wise man who at the end of the novel waits patiently for another chance, for another “time of cruel miracles,” the ocean itself is “engaged in a never-ending process of transformation, an ‘ontological autometamorphosis.’” This “Polytherian form” of the category “Metamorph,” this “mass of metamorphic plasma,” is capable of infinitely varied “matter transformations.”⁴⁸ Most of the time it busies itself with the shaping and unshaping of unique forms, for which a Solarist had in the past created the broad taxonomic categories of “extensor,” “mimoid,” “symmetriad,” and “asymmetriad”; but, in the course of the novel, the protean ocean also at one time or another assumes the shape of a garden, a huge building, an enormous child, distorted tools, and, most important of all, the “visitors.”

Of the last group, the “visitors,” only two are ever very fully revealed to the reader—Gibarian's giant, steatopygic Negress and Rheya. Near the beginning of the novel, Kelvin characterizes the former as a “monstrous Aphrodite,” and near the end of the book, Snow partially repays the compliment (or insult?) when in the presence of Kelvin he sardonically addresses Rheya as “fair Aphrodite, child of Ocean.”⁴⁹ Both applications of the name are apt. Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of sexual love and beauty, was literally born from the sea, and the myths about her all exemplify the power of love.

Also apt are the names of the spaceships which figure in the novel. The Laakon and the Ulysses, for example, remind us of ancient myths about the sea. In one, Laocoön, a priest of Poseidon, the god of the sea, angers Apollo, who sends two huge sea serpents to kill Laocoön and his sons. In another, Ulysses, sailing a troubled sea, frequently runs afoul of Poseidon, Lord of Proteus, the old shape changer. In light of these and other mythic resonances within the novel, Kelvin's speculative question near the end seems particularly acute: “Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition?”⁵⁰

Although in many ways very different, The Martian Chronicles and Solaris are, then, alike in at least one demonstrable way. Both incorporate significant amounts of dreamlike and mythlike transformational materials. An obvious question now comes to mind: are such transformational elements ubiquitous in works of fantasy and science fiction? Certainly, additional examples are easily adduced—the transformation of the animals into beast men and back into animals in The Island of Dr. Moreau, the transformation of the robots into human beings in R. U. R., the transformation of individual Gethenians alternately into “males” and “females” in The Left Hand of Darkness, the transformation of Mrs. Grales into Rachel in A Canticle for Leibowitz, the transformation of the Mark IV computer into Mike in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the transformation of the world's children into the Overmind in Childhood's End, the transformation of David Bowman into the Star Child in 2001, the transformation of matter into various forms in Cosmicomics, and on, and on. A definitive answer to this intriguing question would obviously, however, require the transformation of this essay into a monograph, and, for the time being at least, I shall let it rest in embryo.

Notes

1. Poul Anderson, quoted in Jeffrey M. Elliot, “Poul Anderson: Seer of Far-Distant Futures,” in Science Fiction Voices #2, ed. Jeffrey M. Elliot (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Pr., 1979), pp. 44–45.

2. Poul Anderson, “Poul Anderson Talar Om Science Fiction,” Algol 15, no. 3 (1978): 14.

3. Lester del Rey, quoted in Darrell Schweitzer, “An Interview with Lester del Rey,” Science Fiction Review 5, no. 3 (1976): 8.

4. L. Sprague de Camp, quoted in Darrell Schweitzer, “L. Sprague de Camp,” in Science Fiction Voices #1, ed. Darrell Schweitzer (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Pr., 1979), p. 60.

5. Gregory Benford, quoted in Nancy Mangini and Jim Purviance, “Interview with Nebula Nominee Gregory Benford,” SF & F 36: A Science Fiction Fanzine, no. 6 (1978): 8, 7.

6. “In dreams and fantasies the sea or a large expanse of water signifies the unconscious” (C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia, 2d ed. [1956; reprint ed., Princeton: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1974], p. 219).

7. Joe Haldeman, “Great Science Fiction About Artichokes & Other Story Ideas,” Algol 15, no. 3 (1978): 21.

8. Ibid.

9. A. E. Van Vogt, quoted in Jeffrey Elliot, “Interview: Van Vogt,” Galileo, no. 8 (1978): 11.

10. Ibid., p. 10.

11. Ibid., pp. 8–9.

12. Stephen R. Donaldson, quoted in Neal Wilgus, “An Interview with Stephen R. Donaldson,” Science Fiction Review 8, no. 2 (1979): 29.

13. Ibid.

14. Richard Lupoff, quoted in Jim Purviance and Nancy Mangini, “Interview with Nebula Nominee Richard Lupoff,” SF & F 36: A Science Fiction Fanzine, no. 6 (1978): 14, 15.

15. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, pp. 11, 21.

16. Ibid., p. 17.

17. C. G. Jung, “The Psychology of the Child Archetype,” in C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology (New York: Pantheon, 1949), pp. 102, 103.

18. Ray Bradbury, “How Not to Burn a Book; or, 1984 Will Not Arrive,” Soundings 7, no. 1 (1975): 19, 22, 13.

19. Ray Bradbury, quoted in Jeffrey M. Elliot, “Ray Bradbury: Poet of Fantastic Fiction,” in Science Fiction Voices #2, ed. Jeffrey M. Elliot (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Pr., 1979), pp. 21, 24.

20. Jung, “The Psychological Aspects of the Kore,” in Jung and Kerényi, p. 241.

21. Ibid., p. 235.

22. Ibid., p. 238.

23. Nietzsche and Freud quoted by Jung. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, p. 24.

24. Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (New York: Bantam, 1975), p. 108.

25. Ibid., p. 126.

26. Ibid., p. 130.

27. Ovid, Metamorphoses (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967), p. 198.

28. Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles, pp. 35, 39, 43.

29. Ibid., pp. 46, 47, 47–48.

30. Ibid., pp. 26, 27.

31. Ibid., p. 29.

32. Ibid., pp. 110, 112, 138.

33. Ibid., pp. 2, 11, 14, 32, 78, 80, 140.

34. See, for example, Richard Donovan, “Morals from Mars,” The Reporter, 26 June, 1951, pp. 38–40; Matt Weinstock, Los Angeles Mirror-News, 11 July, 1955, p. 10; Lawrence Lipton, “The Illustrated Man: Ray Bradbury,” Intro Bulletin 1, nos. 6,7 (1956): 9; Maggie Savoy, “Ray Bradbury Keeping Eye on Cloud IX,” Los Angeles Times, 15 Mar., 1970, sec. E, p. 1.

35. Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles, pp. 179–80.

36. Bradbury, quoted in Elliot, p. 26.

37. Stanislaw Lem, quoted in Daniel Say, “An Interview with Stanislaw Lem,” The Alien Critic 3, no. 3 (1974): 8.

38. Stanislaw Lem, “Stanislaw Lem, Krakow Poland,” S F Commentary 24 (1973): 28.

39. Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox (New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1971), 16.

40. Ibid., pp. 60, 61, 62.

41. Ibid., p. 117.

42. Ibid., p. 141.

43. Ibid., p. 99.

44. Ibid., pp. 187–88.

45. Ibid., p. 11.

46. Ibid., p. 153.

47. Ibid., p. 210.

48. Ibid., pp. 17, 24, 26, 30, 82, 211.

49. Ibid., pp. 37, 192.

50. Ibid., p. 211.