The End of Science Fiction

Lisel Mueller’s “The End of Science Fiction” uses unrhymed free verse in four stanzas to elaborate on the first line of the poem: “This is not fantasy, this is our life” (Line 1). The speaker employs the first person plural point of view, implicating both the speaker and the reader with the use of “our” (Line 1) and “We” (Line 2). The speaker creates distance between reality and artifice, however, by framing the human subjects of the poem as “characters” (Line 2). In this stanza, people do not land on the moon; they “invaded” (Line 3) it. Computers, created by humans, function beyond human control, making humans “the gods” (Line 5) that can create and destroy.

In the second stanza, the speaker asserts that physical reality and time are beginning to lose meaning. Time is “stopped at noon” (Line 7), and the next lines suggest that humans have traded their corporeal selves for a more machine-like form: a “lightweight, aluminum” (Line 9) body, “stamped” (Line 10) with a number. What lives in that body—information, images—lives eternally, much like the data many readers input into cell phones and computers via the internet. Humans don’t speak, but “dial our words like Musak” (Line 11); language is not only over-familiar and anodyne, but unintelligible, as though heard “through water” (Line 12).

The speaker of the poem shifts the tone in the third stanza, which begins with the proclamation that “The genre is dead” (Line 13), referring, again, to the literary genre of science fiction. In the world of the poem, machines are in charge as science and technology now outpace the human ability to control them. Everything sci-fi previously imagined has come to pass; therefore, sci-fi no longer exists. The imperative of “Invent something new” (Line 13) indicates that the speaker believes in the necessity of story, in some form. The speaker suggests that a new story be stripped to the bare essentials: “Invent a man and a women / naked in a garden” (Lines 14-15), employing an allusion to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve from the book of Genesis, one of the oldest stories humans know. The speaker, by not naming the story, refreshes it and turns it into something to be discovered anew.

The speaker moves from allusions to the Old Testament to the Bible story of the birth of Jesus, and on to the epic Latin poem, The Aeneid, before referencing the Ancient Greek story of Theseus and Ariadne. The speaker begins with the nakedness of the first man, Adam, and first woman, Eve, before their fall from grace, before the pair are cast out of the garden and step into a long future of struggle. Two instances of heroism follow: the first involves “a child that will save the world” (Line 16) and the second, “a man who carries his father / out of a burning city” (Lines 17-18). The former refers to the life of Jesus, and the latter is the tale of Aeneas, who delivers his father from the city of Troy, which is on fire.

The stories in the third stanza grow more detailed, however, with an allusion to the Greek myth of Theseus, who escapes the labyrinth and the deadly Minotaur when Ariadne provides a spool of red thread for him to follow out of the maze. The stanza ends with his “betrayal” (Line 23), implying that the original story was not a simple one as Greek myths convey heroism and bravery in equal measure to human and godly folly. After the escape, the story gets messy: Theseus abandons Ariadne on an island, and, according to the speaker of this poem, feels no guilt over doing so.

In the fourth stanza, the suggested plots thicken. The speaker doesn’t simply want a new story, they want the characters themselves re-invented. The speaker calls for epic struggle with their allusion to the story of David and Goliath, the “shepherd who kills a giant” (Line 27), and the Greek myth of Daphne, who transforms into a laurel tree to escape the amorous attentions of Apollo. Retellings of the Biblical story of Jacob, who “steals his brother’s birthright / and becomes the head of a nation” (Lines 31-32), as well as the story of Lot’s wife, who cannot abandon her home without one last backward look, allow the reader to re-consider the complex nature of humanity as central to the human story.

“Invent real tears, hard love,” (Line 33), the speaker says, imploring the reader to return to a way of being that prioritizes human development and interaction over technological advancement. True advancement, the poem insists, requires struggle unrelieved by external technologies, as evidenced by the image of a “a child’s / first steps across a room” (Lines 35-36). To learn to do something as fundamental as walking is to instill a deep personal knowledge of one’s own capabilities, to internalize what it is to strive and fail, and try again—in other words, to enact the human condition.