Vengeance of Orion

Author’s Afterward

THE distant past has always been just as exciting to me as the distant future, and seems an equally fascinating domain for science fiction.

The novel you have just read is science fiction, not an historical novel. Obviously this is so, for the novel deals with the gods and goddesses of the ancients, and attempts to portray them as advanced human beings from a far distant future who have the ability to travel through time at their whim.

Yet the historical parts of this novel are as accurate as careful research can make them — with some deliberate deviations from “known” history.

It is agreed among most students of ancient history that the siege of Troy celebrated in Homer’s Iliad and the fall of Jericho described in the Old Testament’s Book of Joshua both happened sometime around the middle of the twelfth century B.C. To the novelist, this presents the opportunity of placing the same character(s) at both events; both could have happened within the lifespan of a human being. Perhaps they happened within a few years, or even a few months, of each other.

Once I realized that this was so, the temptation to examine the fabled Trojan Horse and the true cause of the “tumbling down” of Jericho’s walls simply overpowered me.

Thus the historical backbone of this novel — the Achaian siege of Troy, the Israelite invasion of Canaan, the collapse of the powerful Hittite empire, and the troubles of Egypt during the attacks of the Sea Peoples — are faithful to modern historical scholarship.

In classic Greek legend there is no certainty about Helen’s fate after the Achaians sacked Troy. Some tales claim that she went to Egypt and spent the remainder of her days there. If she were the kind of woman I think she was, she would surely have preferred civilized, peaceful Egypt to the semi-barbaric rigors of Achaian Sparta.

I have taken a few liberties with the canons of history. Several scholars have pointed out that the Trojan Horse might have been a siege tower covered with horse hides. It could not have been built by the Achaians, however, who have left absolutely no evidence of such sophisticated military technology. But siege towers had been used in the Middle East for centuries before Troy. Certainly the Hittites knew of them, and thus I bring a Hittite contingent to the service of Odysseus and the House of Ithaca.

The cause of the collapse of Jericho’s walls is more speculative, but I believe it is consistent with the archaeological evidence and the record from the Book of Joshua.

In this novel, I have it that while the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt, pharaoh commanded every female infant to be killed. This contradicts the Biblical telling of the murder of every male baby. Biblical scholars and historians agree that the Egyptians apparently carried out the slaughter as a means of controlling the Hebrews’ population growth; the Jewish slaves were out-populating the native Egyptians. To my mind, the Egyptians were intelligent enough to realize that killing male children would not alter the Jewish birthrate; killing female children would. Thus the slaughter of the baby girls. I assume that later generations of Jewish scribes were so thoroughly male-oriented that they changed the story to agree with their concepts of male importance and dominance.

These speculations are perfectly in accord with the traditional science-fiction axiom that the author is free to invent anything, so long as no one can prove him wrong. The Egyptians slaughtered baby girls, and Troy and Jericho were both toppled by Hittite engineers.

The most fantastic elements in the novel are, of course, Orion himself and the pantheon of advanced human time-travelers who present themselves as gods and goddesses to the ancients.

Does this mean that the novel is fantasy, rather than science fiction? To be science fiction, a story must deal fairly with the known laws of science, and reasonable extrapolations thereof.

Time travel is clearly impossible, almost. Physicists have speculated that black holes representing collapsed stars or even collapsed galaxies must have gravitational fields about them that are so intense they warp space-time. Space and time are bent so drastically that modern physics cannot predict what happens under such circumstances. Such black holes may represent, then, natural time machines. What nature can do, the human mind can eventually duplicate or even improve upon. Time machines are clearly impossible today, but they may not always be so, especially if you allow plenty of millennia for them to be developed.

Thus the novel is, to my way of thinking, science fiction. Again, the axiom is that an author can use anything that cannot be proven to be wrong. Time travel is reasonable material for a science fiction novelist to use in his speculations. Even more fascinating are the consequences of time travel.

If one grants the possibility of time travel, then the need for a supernatural being, a god, as the cause of the universe — and of humankind — goes out the window. Consider a very advanced human civilization, thousands of years in our future. Their knowledge is so great that they discover the means to travel through time; past and future are like different currents in a vast ocean, to them. They could go back to an earlier eon on Earth and create the human race, their own ancestors. In fact, they would have to.

To those earlier people the creators would seem like gods. It is clear that the ancient gods were not the beneficent moralists that we believe our modern gods to be. In fact, to any rational mind, the concept of a god who is perfectly just and perfectly merciful is not only illogical, it is decidedly out of tune with the observable facts of the world around us.

Now then — if the “gods” are as human as you and I but possess enormously greater powers than we do, and if power truly does corrupt the human spirit, imagine how wildly malevolent an all-powerful god must be!

The result of such ratiocinations is the novel you have just finished reading, and its predecessor, Orion. There will be more.

Ben Bova

West Hartford, Connecticut