I just finished reading C J Cherryh’s novella WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE (one of the three texts in the collection ALTERNATE REALITIES, available on the Kindle for $9.99). WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE is a brilliant work of science fiction. It takes place on a planet where powerful men (more often men than women) believe that they create their own reality and impose it on anybody “weaker” than themselves. They simply deny the existence of what is not within their will, learning to not even notice the existence of others who are excluded from their social arrangements (such others include both human beings who have been shamed and demoted or expelled from society, and to non-human intelligent beings). (This reminds me a bit of the way in which, in China Mieville’s THE CITY AND THE CITY, the people of the two cities have learned to ignore their mutual co-existence, each person unseeing the people of the other city).
The protagonist of WAVE WITHOUT A SHORE, Herrin, is a sculptor who is fatuously confident of his own superiority and genius; the only person he recognizes as perhaps an equal is his frenemy, Waden Jenks, the dictator ruling human society on the planet. Herrin makes a huge statue of and monument to Jenks; this project is a clash of the two men’s will-to-power, since Herrin is both glorifying Jenks and solidifying his tyrannical rule; and yet at the same time Herrin is asserting his own superiority over Jenks, since the implication of the piece is that Jenks needs Herrin’s artistic genius in order to claim supreme status. It is a prototypical example of how society is grounded in the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, or perhaps of Nietzsche’s vulgarization of this dialectic in his vision of hierarchies generated by conflicts of clashing wills-to-power.
Once the statue and monument are finished, Jenks understands that he has been both elevated and consigned to his place. In order to reinforce his dominance, he has his goons beat up Herrin and especially break all the bones in Herrin’s hands, so that the artist will never be able to sculpt again. There is a lot in the novella about how Herrin’s mastery is concentrated, not just in his ability to see and imagine, but above all in his manual dexterity in shaping clay and stone to his will. (This reminds me of the scene in Tarkovsky’s movie Andrei Roublev, where an aristocrat has artisans blinded so that they will never be able to construct a house more beautiful for the one that they made for him).
I won’t discuss the later twists of the narrative, except to say that Cherryh plays out the consequences of the collapse of Herrin’s worldview, and his being forced to understand that others exist — both human beings and aliens. Reality is capacious and contradictory; it contains many forces, and nobody can think to dominate and control them all. The way I have expressed it, this seems like an obvious point to make; but in asserting it, Cherryh undermines and deconstructs the pernicious myths that are central to our cultural imaginary, and that have been asserted not only by the most obvious creators and mythmakers (like Ayn Rand and Leni Riefenstahl), but much more widely in the literary and cinematic fictions that we consume and swear by.