GODS AND MONSTERS: DRAKE’S NEW MYTHOLOGY
They still call to us, the old stories. Cocooned in our air-conditioned, insulated buildings dozens of feet from the earth, the sky obscured, we still hear the ancient tales and in them we can still remember who we were. The human hero, caught between the monsters and the gods, uses courage, strength and boldness to restore the fundamental order. This satisfies our deepest sense of justice, of virtue.
That in our time, courage, strength and boldness seem to have priced themselves out of the virtue market makes this kind of exercise even more valuable. From Joyce to the Coen Brothers the story of Odysseus comes at us from all angles, and the story of the Argonauts appeals ever more to the special-effects-besotted movies.
In the hands of a master like David Drake the old tales echo with unexpected meanings and analogies, a sly reference to a rosy fingered dawn, the monster with fewer than two eyes. His own monsters are sensational, as always. Nobody does monsters better than David Drake; they are forever bursting terrifically up from the sea or out of the earth itself, all spines and tentacles and horrible teeth.
Much of the delight of these two works is the way Drake manipulates the original to fit his space-opera setting, like the evolution of the Golden Fleece into some kind of instantaneous transporter, in The Voyage, or any of the weird worlds in Cross the Stars that mark Don Slade’s desperate struggle to get home. These are gifts of a resourceful mind conversant in both worlds, and illuminate both: the magical elements of the Greek myth become a technological marvel in the space-opera and you see how both fit into their cultures’ value systems.
The deeper message is in the differences between the Greeks and us, because Don Slade may seem to be operating in some parallel universe, but these books, like all fiction, are ultimately about us, about our moral universe.
The Greek gods control what happens in both the originating myths. These gods are real, are outside human existence, are other. The moral dilemmas they represent are beyond the ability of mortals to address; the order which determines right or wrong belongs to the gods, not to men.
So the Greeks needed to purge the common mind of terror and pity, but not guilt.
The modern world has turned that all inside, and made the irreconcilable demands of life into a constant test, and one we often fail. Exchanging magic for technology makes the human hero suddenly liable for a lot more. Now we’re alone, and the monsters are still there, in the dark, rising furious from the depths. Drake roars back through his indomitable heroes, he blasts out his rockets of words, but the monsters never die. As he says of Don Slade, “they are part of what had forged him,” and all of us, those monsters from within. But we are our own gods now, and we can’t escape.
Cecelia Holland