A Fictional Role Model?

Imagine you have lived your life with one mission: to promote mankind’s future in space.  Earth cannot be the sole repository of life in the universe, you have preached to any and all.  We must do more than listen for alien signals and send unmanned probes into space.  We must leave our planet and search among the great ocean of stars.  The persuasiveness of your arguments, as well as your skill as an astronomer, has justified your inclusion in mankind’s space program.  You have even participated in a mission to Mars.  But after decades exploring space, no proof of intelligent alien life has ever been found.

Then one day an alien space ship arrives in our solar system, and you are sent from the moonbase to be mankind’s representative.  To your surprise, the aliens don’t wish to learn about humanity.  They are not here to orchestrate interstellar trade, or to welcome us into a galaxy-wide federation.  Their sole reason for settling into orbit is to learn from you about our sun, and the knowledge they seek has nothing to do with its spectral classification or luminosity.  No, their question is simple: Tell us about your relationship with your star, and how it has personally affected your life.

This is the situation Bradley Reynolds encounters in section two of Dr. Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund’s novel If the Stars are Gods.  These aliens see their own star in personal terms, as a sentient being who possess great wisdom and assists them in making important decisions such as choosing a mate.  If they arouse its anger, it will punish them.  Nevertheless, it cares for them, and forewarns them of impending tragedies.  When Bradley tries to explain how humans see the Sun, the aliens are dumbfounded.  Why would humanity have ventured into space if they do not perceive their star as a conscious being?  His superiors want Bradley to lie, to string the aliens along with a fabrication of his personal relationship with the Sun so that they can learn more about the aliens and their space ship.  But Bradley cannot bring himself to lie to these aliens, and so he wields his own deal with them.  If they allow human scientists to study their ship and answer the scientists’ questions, as well as teach him how to talk to the stars, Bradley will help the aliens, as best he can, to understand Sol.

On his next visit to the space ship, the alien who will instruct him begins to sing, and his song awakens something in Bradley Reynolds.  He cannot define it in logical terms, but the song invigorates him, fills him with new life.  He finds his voice merging with the alien’s, and somehow knows that his song is going out into space.  Through their shared song, he senses an entity great and wise and powerful and ancient.  He cannot doubt the validity of this experience: it is simply something that he knows is real.

Science Fiction writers have long shared their dreams with us of humanity putting aside its various differences (whether they be racial, cultural, or otherwise) to solve the world’s biggest problems and to launch us toward the stars.  Yet today we are still as divided as ever, and the problems that beset our world seem no less than those faced by previous generations.  Many now doubt that our race will truly reach the stars.  In their character of Bradley Reynolds, Dr. Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund portray a scientist who experiences a genuine spiritual transformation.  In the novel, he will go on to successfully merge those two oft-warring factions of Faith and Science in his outlook on life.  We could do worse than learn from such a fictional role model.