Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth by John C. Wright Page B

Europeans. They thought about other considerations first.
    Let me be clear: these ideas were decades older than the Great War. That war was only the final point of no return, the point at which the ever steeper drop of the slope into darkness became a brink.
    The attacks against the concept of the divine were as old as Lucretius, as old as Eden. But in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century these crackpot notions gained respectability, slowly won over the intellectuals, who lured the rest of society toward their simplistically elegant and simply wrong notions.
    So, the artistic world is nothing but the concrete images that make real and solid the emotional and spiritual atmosphere of the age. The artistic world lost faith in romance and grandeur and adventure during and after the Great War because it lost faith in God.
    The barren and roaring chaos of the universe presented to the imagination of him who regards God as myth is void and sad, filled with mindless violence and meaningless pain, and the Great War was as sad and meaningless, as truly horrible as any event in history.
    This world view is not even tragic. Tragedy is cathartic. The empty events, the impact of dinosaur-killing asteroids, the broken legs of monuments of Ozymandias found in antique lands, the sheer emptiness of the blind star-gulfs overhead where our ancestors thought the angels danced—all life in such a world is merely meaningless, a grain of dust lost in a desiccated desert.
    So a movement started to expunge the gold and purple, the glory and the nobility, the gaiety and wonder, and most of all the miracles from art and literature.
    No more paintings of the Creation on the Sistine Chapel; instead we have paintings of cans, of Campbell’s soup cans. No more dragons nor knights, no more Pre-Raphaelites. Instead, we have Picasso, and scrawls a baboon could make by ingesting paint, and splashing out colors by flinging his poop.
    Ghosts and supernatural evils were, naturally, harder to expunge, since they are more in line with the emotional makeup of the empty and godless universe. Supernatural horrors are in keeping with the horrors of discovering life to be meaningless and love to be a sour joke: writers like Edgar Allan Poe, despite his connection to popular genres of detective and horror tales, retained his respectable place among in the eyes of the self-appointed guardians of literature.
    The mainstream maintained itself artificially. Whenever a book that started as a mainstream novel, such as, let us say,
Gone With The Wind
or
Casino Royale
, which had the fire of romance or intrigue, adventures in times long gone or in exotic locales across the sea, if its more fantastic and romantic elements caught the public imagination and other writers began writing in the same background, the novels were thereafter considered “genre” novels, love-stories or spy thrillers, and no longer of interest to the literati.
    Science fiction preserved the exiled creatures of the fantastic through these dry years. Science fiction rather cleverly exploits a loophole in the whole worldview that rejects the supernatural. The loophole is that wonder still persists in the unknown, which includes other planets and future advancements. And where there is wonder, and where there is the unknown, the gods and giants and abominable dwarves can make their appearance again, disguised perhaps as Morlocks or Martians or Monolith-builders, higher powers and lower monsters. And even, thanks to Anne McCaffrey and E.E. Doc Smith, dragons can return once more, disguised as extraterrestrials from Pern or from the haunted planet Velantia.
    Fantasy made a slower comeback, and at first even science fiction readers were wary of it. There were a number of fantasy worlds with all the tropes and props of medievalism and the supernatural, but set in space with the magic called psionics to give it the glamor of scientific respectability.
    After Tolkien, fantasy slowly but steadily re-conquered the