Opening Passages V:

This opening os for a fact article, essentially done, but being rewritten,

 Adventures in Mythistory

by Michael  F. Flynn

“We need to share truths with one another, and not just truths about atoms, stars, and molecules, but about human relations and the people around us.”

-- William M. MacNeill, “Mythistory”

While rightly decrying junk science in his Alternative View, John Cramer repeated junk history when he mentioned “the Flat Earth consensus that existed before the voyages of Columbus and Magellan” (Cramer, 2015:61). No such consensus existed (Consolmagno, 2016:267-8). The standard medieval astronomy text was Sacrobosco’s “On the sphere of the world.” Thomas Aquinas took the world’s sphericity for granted (Sum. theo. 1.1.1 adv. 2); and it was central to the medieval science fiction classic, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. In the latter, “Sir John” sets forth to discover new life and new civilizations, encountering alien beings like blemyae,[i] and in hard SF Analog fashion, uses an astrolabe to show how the changing inclination of the pole star at different locales demonstrates the Earth’s sphericity:

“So I say truly that a man could go all round the world, above and below, and return to his own country, provided he had his health, good company, and a ship.” (Mandeville 1983:128).

Yet the flat earth myth, concocted by Washington Irving for his fictionalized biography of Columbus, persists in popular culture. Like all myth, it serves to “reinforce the values and attitudes of the community, offer satisfying explanations of the major features of the world as experienced by the community, and legitimate the current social structure” (Lindberg 2007: 7-10). That is, the purpose of myth is satisfaction, not journalism. We are smart, the story assures us, and our ancestors were stoopid.

Mythmaking may be deliberate. Mussolini concocted a mythistory of a resurrected Roman Empire. Defeated Confederates conjured the Lost Cause; defeated Germans, the Stab in the Back. Triumphant Tudors demonized Richard III. And after Kennedy’s death, his administration became the mythic “Camelot.”

But myth can also be unintentional, caused by losing context over time, sanding off details, reifying abstractions, or fusing characters. The “Children’s Crusade” is an example. (Dickson. 2008) This erosion can require as much as three centuries before real events become grand narratives (Vansina 1985: 23-24). Thus, in common culture, certain events of the 1600s had become by the 1900s Foundation Myths for the Modern Ages: The complexities of Massachusetts Bay coalesced into The First Thanksgiving; those of Jamestown, into Pocahontas. Galileo became The Martyr for Science. Newton had an Annus Mirabilis.

Myth presents Types: valiant hero, brave traitor, cowardly traitor, old fogey scientist, iconoclastic young scientist, and so forth. Each comes on stage to strike characteristic poses and perform iconic deeds. Early SF was replete with such fables.

But to write realistic SF, we need characters with motives and purposes. Motives drive a character forward and may be unclear, even to the character. The author may unveil these motives by selectively revealing a backstory (e.g., Dickens, A Christmas Carol). Purposes, on the other hand, pull the character forward and are generally explicit in the plot.[i]

To do this, we need to know how people really behave, not how we want them to behave to advance the plot. History, biography, and direct observation help. But historical facts, the subject of this article, are prone to mythologizing.

 

6. Consolmagno, Guy. 2016. “Medieval Cosmology and World Building,” in Medieval Science Fiction, ed. Carl Kears & James Paz (King’s College London).

7. Cramer, John. 2015. “The Retarding of Science,” (Analog, Oct. 2015)\

8        8. Dickson, Gary. 2008. The Children's Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythistory (Palgrave Macmillan; 2008 edition (November 8, 2007)

16. Lindberg, David C. 2007. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious. and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, 2nd ed. (Univ. of Chicago Press) 

17. Mandeville, John. 2014. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C.W.R.D. Moseley (Harmondsworth: Penguin) On line: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/782/782-h/782-htm.

23.  23. Vansina, Jan. 1985. Oral Tradition as History. (University of Wisconsin Press)

 

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[i] blemyae: Headless men whose faces are on their torsos.

[i] motive/purpose. You may recognize Aristotles two causes of becoming: efficient cause and final cause.

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(c)2022 Michael F. Flynn