Orion in the Dying Time

Afterward

The story of Orion began in my mind many years ago when I first contemplated the concept that the myths and legends of ancient times must have been based on actual persons and events, at least in part.

Gilgamesh, Prometheus, the Phoenix that perishes in flames yet rises anew from the ashes—how much of these tales are fanciful elaborations and how much of them are real? We will never know, of course. The dusty debris of history has covered up the original events—whether they were actual adventures of living men and women or the total invention of some clever moralist.

Be that as it may, the true significance of a myth or legend lies not in its actuality but in its ability to instruct and inspire listeners (or readers). Over the course of time since the development of speech countless human beings have lived through uncountable adventures. Only a precious few have served as the nuclei for the myths that have moved all the generations that followed.

As Joseph Campbell and others have pointed out, some myths are universal to all human tribes. They have such a powerful statement to make that every known human society has adapted a variation of the same myth. For example, every culture has a Prometheus myth that tells how a god gave fire to a freezing, starving humankind and how, with fire, humans became almost godlike in their power while their benefactor was punished by his fellow gods.

As I wrote the continuing tale of Orion I found that the story moved between mythology and history, between legend and archeology. In this present volume, the saga moves into realms of natural history, both biological and astronomical.

Underlying all of that, however, is the deeper current of the novels, a level that I had no inkling of when I first began to write of Orion’s fantastic adventures. That level is, of course, the relationship of humankind to its gods.

The original novel, Orion, was driven by my curiosity about the Neanderthals. Paleontologists have found that there were two fully intelligent species of Homo sapiens on Earth some fifty thousand years ago: the Neanderthals and ourselves. The Neanderthals disappeared, and their disappearance is the subject of that first novel about Orion.

In writing it, however, the deeper theme arose from my subconscious. Given a far-future version of humankind, distant descendants of ours with vastly superior knowledge and technology at their disposal, they could invent the means to travel back through time and create the human race.

They would seem to their creatures as gods. What is more, given that possibility, we no longer need the supernatural gods that populate our religions. We have met our Creator, as Pogo would say, and he is us!

How apt and fitting. Many philosophers and modern-day psychologists have theorized that our gods are the creation of the human mind, an attempt to impose order and justice on a seemingly indifferent universe. Turn the concept full circle and we have human descendants from the distant future creating the human race itself. The gods that people worship have always seemed to have the same foibles and vanities that you and I have. The patriarchal God of the Old Testament appears to me very much like a spoiled, petulant nine-year-old boy. Perhaps that is because the gods are just as human as we.

All it takes is time travel.

Thus we have Orion, a human being purposely built by such a Creator to serve and obey, a hunter who was created to find and kill the enemies of his Creator. In time he begins to realize that the so-called gods are as human and fallible as he is himself. In time he begins to learn how to be a god himself. Or tries to.

Orion, then, is humankind’s representative, attempting to understand what the gods demand of him. Each step forward in his understanding brings him a step closer to godhood—a progress that some of the “gods” approve of, while others do not.

So much for the underlying tensions that drive the saga of Orion. Now for the particulars of this novel.

Among the myths that every human culture seems to share there is the myth of supernatural beings who are entirely evil: devils, demons, the Satan and Beelzebub that Dante and Milton wrote of. Their descriptions have always seemed decidedly reptilian to me.

To create a satanic reptile for this novel meant that I had to deal with the possibility of a species of reptile that is fully as intelligent as H. sapiens. No, actually my Set—to give him his ancient Egyptian name—would have to be as intelligent as my fictitious Creators, the godlike human descendants from our future.

For years I have been intrigued by the possibility of reptilian intelligence. Intelligent lizards are an old standby of science fiction, including my very first published novel of thirty years ago. Yet it always seemed unlikely to me that reptiles could be intelligent, regardless of their utility as “alien” creatures for science-fiction tales.

In the past decade several paleontologists have suggested that if the dinosaurs had not been extinguished in the great wave of extinctions that swept the earth some sixty-five million years ago, they might ultimately have given rise to an intelligent species. Dale A. Russell, of the Canadian National Museum of Natural Sciences at Ottawa, is the leading champion of this idea. He proposes that a small Cretaceous bipedal carnosaur, Stenonychosaurus inequalus, might have evolved into a big-brained, erect-walking intelligent reptile, given time.

Yet it seemed to me that time and brain size were not the only requirements for the development of intelligence. Intelligence requires interaction among individuals, communication. Had Albert Einstein been left in a wilderness at birth and never met another human being, he would never have developed the ability to speak, let alone do physics.

Most modem reptile species lay their eggs and never return to them, leaving the hatchlings to fend for themselves. So did most of the dinosaurs, although at least one species of duckbilled dinosaurs apparently cared for their young. For this novel I proposed that the reptilians that evolved on the fictitious planet Shaydan orbiting the equally fictitious star Sheol evolved intelligence through motherly care and a form of telepathy.

The telepathy is something of a cheat, I admit. But think of your own childhood experiences. Did not your mother have moments of startling telepathic powers?

The astronomical setting for this novel is accurate—up to a point. It is entirely possible to “rebuild” the solar system with a small unstable dwarf star at the same distance from the sun that the planet Jupiter is now. The gravitational perturbations on the earth and the other inner planets of our solar system would be negligible. The sun’s companion star could have one or more planets orbiting around it, just as the planet Jupiter now possesses sixteen or more moons.

Ask any astronomer, though, and he or she will tell you that there is no way Jupiter could be the remnant of a star that exploded. No natural way, is what they implicitly are saying. For the novelist, however, it is possible to use deliberate changes caused by forces other than blind nature. In this novel the dwarf star Sheol evolves into our familiar planet Jupiter through the determined efforts of Orion and the Creators.

The breakup of Sheol’s one planet causes a rain of meteors on Earth that triggers the Time of Great Dying, the titanic wave of extinctions that wiped out not merely the dinosaurs but thousands of other species of land, sea, and air some sixty-five millions years ago. The end of the Cretaceous saw the slate of life on Earth wiped almost clean.

The nearly emptied world that existed after the great Cretaceous calamity contained abundant empty ecological niches that new forms of life could move into. The age of mammals began, leading ultimately to the earliest hominids.

A great cataclysm did indeed shake the earth some sixty-five million years ago. It caused the end of the Cretaceous Period, just as a similar disaster some two hundred fifty million years ago caused the end of the Permian Period and led to the rise of the dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs began in a planetwide catastrophe that scrubbed away more than half the species then occupying the earth. They died in a paroxysm of similar proportions. The available evidence strongly points to a bombardment of meteors and/or comets that was either accompanied by or actually triggered tectonic shifts of the landmasses that altered sea levels and climate all around the globe.

Stephen Jay Gould and his fellow biologists tell us that these disasters were works of blind nature, brief moments in the grand flow of the eons that forced evolution into new pathways. To the novelist, however, it is irresistibly tempting to assign these evolutionary forces to purposeful characters. It makes for a much more interesting story. It allows us to contemplate the works of nature in moral terms. It turns the blindly uncaring forces of nature into choices made by thinking, feeling characters who know the differences between good and evil.

For myself, I think there is probably much more to the Time of Great Dying than a cataclysmic rain of fire from the heavens, dramatic though that may be. As the Cretaceous was nearing its end a new form of life arose on Earth: a life-form so ubiquitous and lowly that we seldom give it much thought unless we are forced to deal with it directly. That life-form is grass.

Grasses are one of the most successful forms of life on Earth. All the cereal grains that feed humankind are types of grasses, for example. They first appeared on Earth in the late Cretaceous and shouldered earlier forms of vegetation out of existence.

Did grass kill the dinosaurs? Animals that feed on grasses today are equipped with very specialized teeth and digestive systems to crop and metabolize a food that contains a high percentage of tough silica. Could the herbivorous dinosaurs handle the grasses that replaced the earlier vegetation? If they could not and starved, the carnivorous dinosaurs that preyed on the herbivores would have died off, too.

This is mere speculation, however. And it does not explain why so many other life-forms—from plankton to plesiosaurs—died off at the same time. Yet it is instructive to consider that the so-called Time of Great Dying was also a period of birth for new life-forms, the grasses in particular.

So much for what we know of paleontology, and what we speculate. This book is a novel, a work of fiction, and of science fiction at that.

The basic scientific underpinning for this tale is as sound as careful research can make it, although I have taken liberties with agreed-upon scientific canon where I felt it necessary for the sake of the story. As I have throughout all of Orion’s adventures, I have endeavored to use the stuff of myth and legend as a means to explore the human soul; more particularly, to explore the relationship of humankind and its gods.

With an exploding star and a shattered planet we link astronomical events with death and birth on Earth. Intelligent reptiles give rise to the legends of devils that haunt the dark hours of every human culture. Dinosaurs that somehow survived into prehistoric human times lead to our legends of dragons.

And a single human being, created to obey the whims of the gods, strives not merely to survive but to understand, not blindly to obey but to learn how to be a god himself.

These are the ingredients of science fiction. The science must be accurate, yet the author must be free to invent new possibilities—as long as no one can show that they are totally impossible in the real world. The characters must be believable, no matter how fantastic their adventures. They must feel and love and bleed even as you and I do, otherwise we do not have a story to read, we have a treatise.

This is what I am trying to do with these tales of Orion. His story is not completed yet.

Ben Bova

West Hartford, Connecticut