Gods, Monsters & Murderbots
By Donald Maass | January 5, 2022 |
Fiction is about us. It captures our condition. It confronts us with our fears. It celebrates our human joys and triumphs. It’s a mirror, a telescope, a microscope, a record and a reminder. In it, we discover what drives us apart and what binds us together.
Why, then, do readers seek out fiction which is about anyone but us? Why are we fascinated by ghosts, vampires, superheroes and creatures of all kinds? Why do we delight in tales of anthropomorphized animals, from Aesop to Watership Down? I mean, rabbits?
There is the microcosm effect. Animal Farm is a communist collective, where all animals are equal but some are more equal than others. (Especially pigs.) Orwell’s novel has the instructional effect of parable or fable. There is also heightening, which all stories utilize to some degree. We don’t need fiction to merely capture day-to-day life. We have day-to-day life already. We need fiction to elevate and exalt the terrifying adventure of living. We seek out fiction to put us through unusual events and extreme emotional experiences.
How do gods, monsters and sentient machines heighten our human experience? They are not human. Why bother with them? It’s partly because we know that they exist, especially within us. We fear them but even more we fear ourselves. We can be overbearing, cruel and cold. We can lack reason and be driven by ego, avarice and lust. We can be mindless, unchecked and destructive. We can be inhuman. History proves it. Science affirms it. The news demonstrates it to us every day.
No wonder that we find gods, monsters and sentient machines in our literature. They dwell inside us. Their stories are about us, too. We relate…or do we? The first requirement of fiction like this is to make non-human characters relatable. We have to connect. For fiction writers, the basic principle is twofold: 1) humans in such stories become more monstrous; 2) monsters in such stories become more human.
Let’s take look at some examples of this principle in action.
The Humanity of Monsters
It’s tempting to trace the humanization of monsters back to 1976 and Anne’s Rice’s seminal novel Interview with the Vampire. Certainly, that story marked a turning point in our understanding
of vampires. (Did I just write that seriously?) However, in truth monsters have been human for a very long time. We find that even in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818). After animating a monster made of body parts, and several deaths caused by the monster, its creator Victor Frankenstein seeks solace in the Alps.
There on an icy glacier the monster finds him. Frankenstein is horrified at his creation but the monster begs to be heard:
I entreat you to hear me, before you give vent to your hatred on my devoted head…Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine; my joints more supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee…Remember, that I am thy creature: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me fiend…Listen to me, Frankenstein…
The poor monster wants to be understood. (Well, he also wants a girlfriend.) He feels that he is uniquely singled out for misery. His condition is unearned, and not his fault. At the same time, he feels strong. He feels superior in certain ways to his creator. He believes that he is owed something from Frankenstein.
Wait, is this the first horror novel or is this contemporary YA? Is there any teen boy who can’t relate to Frankenstein’s monster, except maybe that the monster is remarkably articulate? The monster commits murders but is desperate for company which he doesn’t get. In the end, weeps over Frankenstein’s dead body. The creature is a monster, true, but he also is fundamentally and understandably human.
Aren’t we all?
A couple of weeks ago, dual Hugo Awards for Best Novel and Best Series were won by SFF author Martha Wells, for her Murderbot Diaries series of novellas and the first related novel Network Effect (2020). [Disclosure: Martha Wells is a client of my literary agency.] The series concerns a security android who has hacked her own programming and is thus free to ponder her own existence and its meaning.
So, what does a sentient machine do with her time? In the opening paragraph of the debut novella All Systems Red (2017), we find out:
I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.
Hold on, “Murderbot” (as she refers to herself) is a couch potato? Yep. All she really wants to do is watch soap operas. Okay, how can you not love a violent, mechanical assassin who has a bad TV habit and a self-deprecating sense of humor?
The story doesn’t stop there, of course. Murderbot’s job is to protect people, not that easy on an alien planet. Furthermore, she has a history to conceal: a malfunction during which she murdered fifty-seven people. Over time, though, Murderbot discovers new emotions and forms uncomfortable relationships with humans and other artificial intelligences, some of whom she sets free. She also discovers a history of concealed corporate crimes. Murderbot’s universe is grim but she is a heartless killing machine to cheer for.
Bringing Gods Down to Earth
Essentially, the trick of relatable monsters is to make them in some way good, or at least human and understandable. The same goes for characters who are gods. The Greek pantheon of gods, for example, if you ask me is a bunch of goofballs. Sure, they can throw lightening bolts but they cheat, play tricks and have rivalries that make our own look—hmm, familiar. I marvel that anyone worshipped them. (Okay, I’ll admit that Artemis is hot, if sadly unreachable as parallels my own experience with girls in high school.)
Neil Gaimam’s American Gods (2001) is likewise populated with all-too-fallible Old Gods of the past who are not quite up to defeating the New Gods of current American life and technology. A similar approach to gods is taken by Canadian SFF author K.V. Johansen in her gods-walk-the-earth fantasy Blackdog (2011), a nominee for the Sunburst Award, which concerns the fallen goddess Attalissa who has taken the form of a human girl, and who is introduced by several other characters, including one known as Old Lady:
In the past, Attalissa had been a true power. A glory to bring folk to their knees, a great mother to them all. When had she fallen away from that? Old Lady didn’t know. Before her time, generations gone. Gods and goddesses rose, and ruled, and fell away to act as nothing more than petty wisewomen and wisemen, as though they lost their will after a few generations of life. That was what all her reading and her study, the travels she had indulged in younger years, had taught her. Gods and goddesses simply…lost interest, like children bored of playing house, of echoing their parents’ strength.
Even the Old Great Gods had abdicated all concern for the world and retreated from it.
Indeed, it’s hard to find in fiction gods who aren’t humanized, since after all who wants to read novels that will give us an inferiority complex?
The higher the mighty the more humorous they can be, as well, as we see in everything from many “Satan’s secretary” story variations to the comedy of Terry Pratchett’s novels, such as the eleventh in his Discworld series, the hilarious and gem-studded Reaper Man (1991): “It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things.” Indeed, especially if you are a god, demon, or are in some other way imbued with inhuman power.
The Monstrousness of Humans
Somewhat more difficult is the challenge of making human characters monstrous. It’s a task we associate primarily with cooking up antagonists and villains, but what happens when a fiend becomes the protagonist? (“Hero” doesn’t quite fit.)
Humbert-Humbert (Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, 1955) has that profile, as does Frederick Clegg, the lonely clerk in John Fowles’s The Collector (1963). The first half of Fowles’s novel is narrated by Clegg, who begins by explaining his obsession with the female student at the Slade School of Art with whom he will abduct and hold prisoner in his basement:
I can’t say what it was, the very first time I saw her, I knew she was the only one. Of course I am not mad, I knew it was just a dream and it always would have been if it hadn’t been for the money. [He wins a large sum in a football pool.] I used to have daydreams about her, I used to think of stories where I met her, did things she admired, married her and all that. Nothing nasty, that was never until what I’ll explain later.
Of course I am not mad…seriously? Yes, or at least not at first. Clegg is simply a socially awkward guy who is attracted to a girl who’s out of his league. As an abductor and—spoiler alert—killer, he’s really pretty ordinary.
In that way he’s similar to Joe Goldberg, the deliciously snide bookstore clerk in Caroline Kepnes’s novel You (2014), who stalks a pretty graduate writing student and eventually even becomes her boyfriend. (That is, before–spoiler alert—killing her.) We like Joe not because he’s creepy but because he’s caustically observant, the smartest and most ruthlessly honest person in the story. So nastily witty is he that we would sort of like to be like him…or, wait…hold on…aren’t we, at times, already just that? Nabokov and Kepnes’s novels ultimately are cautionary tales but they grip because they caution us about ourselves.
The opposite of the regular-guy-killer approach is the alienated man strategy, which can be harder for readers to warm to but equally effective. One of the greatest works in Japanese literature, and Japan’s second- best-selling novel of all time, is Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human (1948). The novel is in the form of the notebooks of a man named Ōba Yōzō, who masks his extreme alienation with a hollow and false jocularity. The first notebook recounts his childhood:
I can’t even guess myself what it must be like to live the life of a human being…
Good. Right away we have the idea. The opening then recounts his childhood unfamiliarity with trains and his disinterest in eating.
…In other words, you might say that I sill have no understanding of what makes human beings tick. My apprehension on discovering that my concept of happiness seemed to be completely at variance with that of everyone else was so great as to make me toss sleeplessly and groan night after night in my bed. It drove me to the brink of lunacy. I wonder if I have actually been happy. People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have aways felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me luck were incomparably more fortunate than I.
I have sometimes though that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer of him.
I simply don’t understand.
Are you getting the feeling that Dazai’s novel is a downer? Sorry to report, there is no positive turn in Ōba Yōzō’s story. He is not changed or redeemed. The author himself took his own life after shortly its publication. Still, the novel is a Japanese classic. If you’re wondering how that can be, I think that one key is contained in that line, I simply don’t understand. The protagonist of this novel—who would surely not survive a flogging by Ray Rhamey here on WU—exhibits the secret strength of all dark protagonists: self-awareness.
As I said at the outset, fiction captures our condition. It confronts us with our fears. One of those fears is that we don’t measure up. We’re fooling others and ourselves. We are imposters. Strangers wearing masks. Wanderers in a meaningless wasteland, trying fruitlessly to make sense of a senseless universe. We are Estragon and Vladimir (“Waiting for Godot”, 1953). We are Meursault (The Stranger,1942). We are Lear, driven mad, and Bottom, turned into an ass.
What makes our hopeless human condition bearable, even noble, is when we nevertheless struggle and seek to know ourselves. When we are aware of who we are—or even of who we are not—then we even so are somebodies. Placed in a heightened situation, the human who is not human is a monster, yes, but nevertheless can be a hero.
Gods, monsters and murderbots…they’re not human but they’re a heck of a lot like us. That being the case, why not write about them? It’s really writing about you and me.
Who are your favorite non-human characters…and what makes them all too human after all?
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
[coffee]
Oh,Murderbot, how I love you (and Martha Wells for creating them). Sorry, I think of Murderbot as a them, though my sister refers to Murderbot as her. Regardless, Murderbot is one of my most favorite all time mcs. How could I not love someone who wants to watch their holo dramas rather than face the boring, difficult, and sometimes infuriating task of living? And as a writer, how can I not admire (worship) someone who has given us this snarky human-intolerant character who nevertheless rises above their own desires and utter annoyance with the stupidity of humans and still helps and saves them at every turn.
This goes down as one of the great love letters of all time: “Oh, Murderbot, how I love you!” But seriously, you are exactly right about something about Murderbot. She (sorry) purports not to care and prefers to lose herself in entertainment, but she does actually care and saves and entertains us. That contradiction makes her (sorry) fascinating and hard to resist.
The philosopher Yuval Noah Harari has remarked that what many science fiction stories get wrong about AI — robot armies becoming self-aware and rising up in rebellion against their human creators, etc. — is that the writers do not understand the difference between intelligence and consciousness. You can program a machine to be vastly more intelligent than a human being, but not self-aware. We simply don’t understand consciousness well enough to pull that off. (“Yet,” I hear you reply.)
Just an aside. Carry on.
I have a friend who is on the forefront of AI research, who says that AI is so far from volition never mind consciousness that it’s currently imaginable. An AI cannot now even decide on its own to pick up a pencil. I spoke with him about what is involved in writing a novel. We’re in no danger whatsoever.
I really shouldn’t be awake and playing with the Internet at 5:41 a.m., but I am and I love these characters, so here’s my list.
Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion
Ozma with her interchangable heads
Reepicheep in Narnia
Winnie the Pooh and all his friends
Tolkien’s hobbits and elves and dwarfs and wizards. Shelob. Gollum. Sauron, the Great Eye (yikes!)
Terry Pratchett’s wizards at Unseen University
IT in A Wrinkle in Time
Jasper Fford’s wizards and Quarkbeasts
Becky Chambers’ AI Lovey
Andy Weir’s alien Rocky in Project Hail Mary (amaze!)
Helene Wecker’s golum Chava and jinni Ahmad
the Hendrix hotel in Altered Carbon
the orogenes in The Fifth Season
Naomi Novik’s Temeraire
Shit Turd in Sarah Jane Buxton’s The Hollow Kingdom
What a list! There are a few I haven’t yet read, so hooray! A million thanks for that.
24 hours later, I have to add more of my favorites:
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Bob and Mister in The Dresden Files
Terry Pratchett’s Diamond King of Trolls, DEATH and The Luggage!
The Witcher and his monsters
And just one from the big screen, The Minions!
Supernatural stories and “quiet horror” are my favorite. I can’t resist a ghost story. Wasn’t it Lovecraft who said the oldest and strongest fear is the fear of the unknown? Your post, Don, reminds me of Rod Serling’s The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street (Twilight Zone), which I saw many years ago. I think Serling was an author and screenwriter who had a brilliant understanding about humans and monsters and how fear, anger, and bias weave into our psyche. After reading your thoughts today, I may watch Monsters Are Due On Maple Street again.
I will be rewatching that TZ episode along with you. Haven’t seen it in years but it made a huge impression. And Lovecraft…well, that’s a whole blog post of it’s own. Watch this space…
I have a long list of characters, but what I came in here to say is that this was one of the most finely crafted bits of writing that I’ve read in a VERY long time. I even bought a coffee! I started my day off the right way, thanks to you.
Thanks so much! I’ll be having that coffee very soon.
I have to go back to my childhood with The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. Who doesn’t love the unforgettable lion Asian. And, of course, marvel comics, which is now a multi billion dollar movie franchise.
I was thinking of story in the human experience the other day. Written story goes back about 9,000 years and cave drawings about 30,000. Stories disarm prejudice to a topic for the most part. Perhaps enough to leave the door open a crack for people to consider a different point of view. Story is a safe space for people to explore some of life’s deepest questions or most tumultuous issues.
Many difficult cultural changes take generations to accomplish – unless a superhero of fantastic beast intervenes. Story reminds us of our mistakes, warns us of the future and best of all, gives us a glimpse of what we can be.
“Story is a safe space for people to explore some of life’s deepest questions or most tumultuous issues.” Yes, and notice that some of the first and oldest stories are about gods, monsters and human heroes. They help us to understand us, yes, but I’d also argue that they *are* us.
Hey Don – Really fascinating topic. Wells is so wildly creative, a longtime favorite and somehow I’ve yet to read the Murderbot Diaries. In spite of the fact that it’s highly acclaimed in the fantasy community (to a rare degree, for SF). As I think of my favorite non-humans, I immediately encounter the oh-so-human aspect you’re revealing to us. I love Gandalf, for his crankiness, his willingness to put faith in the smallest/humblest of beings, his refusal to utilize the ring when it’s freely offered. I love Hobb’s dragons, not for their power but for their self-awareness, their recognition of their own selfishness and vanity. And don’t get me started on animal companions. Damn, to me some of the most moving scenes in my genre are born of their selfless devotion, their bravery.
I guess my love of the humanity of non-humans helps explain why I would work in a genre that almost demands the use of non-humans while stubbornly refusing to utilize them (with the exception of horses). Thanks for the illumination. Happy new year. Hope winter is being as kind as possible to you guys. Maybe head up to Whistler? Cheers.
No need to head to Whistler, the several slopes of our driveway provide plenty of slippery fun. It’s been an unusual white winter here in B.C., and I’ve discovered that my little Prius is actually a Skidoo. In a few minutes I’ll be heading outside to shovel more of the stuff. And dragons…we could talk for hours just about them. McCaffrey, Novik…don’t get me started. HNY to you.
Don – a wonderful, thought-provoking post.
Ah, the relatable monster. It’s such an open-ended opportunity, letting you create anything from Angel in Whedon’s Buffyverse to Harris’s terrifying yet magnetic Hannibal Lecter (who only eats the rude, which I kinda love about him). Good stuff.
I’m starting to get superhero’d out, but I can understand the current appetite for the genre: living in a world in which we control so little, it’s nice to watch some people who still have some power.
As a latecomer to Greek mythology, I’ve only recently realized what dicks so many of their gods were. But hey, far more relatable than a burning bush – at least to me.
And Murderbot? New to me, but YES, PLEASE. Heading over to the evil online monopoly to stock up on those stories!
I’m banging around an idea with a protagonist who is NOT a typically good person, and this is giving me some great food for thought, between the less-than-noble gods and the monsters you want to hug. Oh, and the murderbots.
Thanks for all the input, and the new ways for looking at them!
I hear you about being superhero-ed out. The big screen CGI extravaganzas have me missing the comic books of yore. Those gripped my imagination. Curious about your new story idea! Do tell!
“We need fiction to elevate and exalt the terrifying adventure of living.” A great take-away, thanks!
Kathryn, have you read the book “Wonderworks” by Angus Fletcher? He’s part of OSU’s Project Narrative. He has degrees both in neuroscience and literature. His book is a fascinating take on the different “inventions” (as he calls them) that literature has made. I recommend it. In the preface about Enheduanna, priestess of Mesopotamia, you’ll see the origin of that line in my post today.
No I haven’t, but neuroscience and literature is always a beguiling pairing. Thanks for the rec!
What about travel? I prefer fiction, especially fantasy and science fiction, because it take me away from here. Sure the problems and conflicts are associated with people problems and conflict, people write fiction. Monsters and all. But, how else can we visit Mars or Epsilon five, or speak to a dragon or battle in magic armor. Fiction is more than human foibles, it is escape from the terrifying life of job and commute and well, the news.
Sam, I see nothing wrong with reading, or writing, for escape. However, I would argue that in entertainment we don’t so much escape ourselves as become, imaginatively, our true and better selves.
The first R-rated movie I saw was Blade Runner, when I was too young to understand what was going on (not sure why my parents approved me going in the first place. I think I was 11?!) Even still, I totally got that the non-human wasn’t the ONLY monster (at the very least) and the end scene where Roy dies stuck with me all these years. It was traumatically tragic to my young brain. Thinking on it, he may have been the subconscious basis of a character in my first novel whose story also breaks my heart. The humanity in the non-human is often attached to some of the saddest books/movies, imho…
Stories with fantastic creatures can be profound, no question. And, yes, there are so many movies and TV shows based on Phillip K. Dick stories that stick with me, too, for just that reason.
Don, I was just writing about Edgar Allen Poe, and his tales have some human monsters, like the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart, who kills the old man with the filmy eye, harmless as he was, because the killer was unnerved by the eye and some other aspects of the old guy. Or the character in “The Black Cat,” initially a cat lover, who cuts out one of the eyes of his cat.
And in “The Imp of the Perverse” the lead guy is a murderer who finally wants to confess, but it doesn’t really read as a cleansing. But perhaps Poe was a cheerful lunch date.
Poe would have been more of a drinking buddy, from what I’ve read. Thanks for steering me back to Poe, though. Some pretty dark people in his stories. Puts Vincent Price in my head, too, which is disturbing.
I love those unreal characters, talking rabbits, ghosts, monsters made in labs, time travelers, and so forth. I could talk about why for hours, but also some people will never love these characters because they refuse to read them. I know people who won’t read about anything that isn’t “real.” “I only want to read about things that can really happen,” they say. They might read about humans being monstrous but they won’t read about monsters being human. “It’s made-up.” “It’s a waste of time.” And they seem to say this with the suggestion that I’m not really a grown-up for loving and writing these sorts of stories.
Fiction in general is not “real”. It may reflect life as we know it, but if it’s any kind of story worth reading it heightens our experience in some way, ask me.
Thanks for this wonderful meditation, Don. Yes, nonhuman characters allow us to figure out what does make us truly human. My favorite nonhuman is EB White’s Charlotte the spider. Lewis’s Alsan, Mo Willem’s Pigeon, James Cameron’s Terminator. I loved the conceit of Inside Out and loved Joy.
Oh yes, the Pigeon! A favorite of picture book reads to my son, back when he was that age. You left out the Bible, though, Vijaya. God is a mighty presence, as are angels and Satan. The snake in the garden. The lions. Still, I can’t say that I see the same degree of humanity reflected in them as I am suggesting today. Probably not the point, right?
Lol. God, angels and demons. They’re too powerful. I purposely left them out because they’re not like Greek or Indian gods and goddesses. Happy Ephiphany–will your children receive gifts tomorrow?
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
This came to mind as I read your wonderful piece. But so did the character Anton Chigurgh from NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. Rather than a monster who is humanized, he is a human being seemingly devoid of humanity. So many people he is about to kill say, “You don’t have to do this,” to which he responds in sincere puzzlement, “Why does everyone keep saying that?” Elsewhere he remarks to someone he intends to kill, “This is the best deal you’re going to get. I won’t tell you that you can save yourself, because you can’t.” It is his inhumanity that makes him terrifying–and compelling.
Richard III and Iago have at best slight motivations for the evil they inflict. We don’t know why they go to such extremes to destroy others. Shakespeare apparently wrote extensive notes on such matters but never included that information in his plays–he felt not knowing helped enhance audience engagement. But he does a neat trick with both of them–to humanize them. He has then speak directly to us, the audience.
Oh, and this also came to mind: “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.” –Jessica Rabbit (yes, RABBIT)