Throughout the 15 installments of the John Broome-Murphy Anderson series THE ATOMIC KNIGHTS, the stories expoused an ethical stance re: science and culture most like John Campbell's ANALOG in the same era, a stance could be summed up as "pro-science no matter what." In ATOMIC KNIGHTS, humanity misuses technology so as to bring about a nuclear holocaust, returning humans to a predominantly agrarian level, though they're still menaced by tinpot dictators, mutated creatures and lingering radioactivity. Yet despite all these calamities, the primary duty of the heroes is to recover all the benefits of science and technology in order to return humankind to its high estate. These particular heroes may fight for justice while wearing the armor of archaic European knights, but they only do so because the armor has been permeated with a unique power that protects the wearers from radiation poisoning. "Set a thief to catch a thief" in the world of apocalyptic SF, if you like.
Many SF-narratives can be fairly accused of "scientism," defined as "excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques," and one of the most frequently used strategies of validating science is to downgrade the influence of religion upon human subjects. One can find a lot of anti-religious rhetoric in prose SF, but comic books of the Silver Age tended to avoid the topic. Broome's script "Threat of the Witch-Woman" shows clear influence from the many stories that deal with the witch-hunting craze of 17th-century New England, but nowhere in "Threat" does Broome speak of religion as such. Instead, the idea of "superstition" is substituted for that more controversial topic.
The witch-hunting trials are usually seen as hysteria arising from the isolation of Christian settlers in the raw domain of colonial America, where devils were seen in every incident of bad fortune, to say nothing of red-skinned natives and darksome forests. Since the KNIGHTS feature had hurled humanity back to the status of rustic life, it must have seemed logical to Broome to use witch-hysteria for a story, albeit not in New England as such. The Knights' home base, the fictional town of Durvale, is said to be located in the Midwest, six years after the nuclear apocalypse, but they nevertheless find that one of the neighboring towns has become infected with witch-hysteria-- though at base the problem stems not from religion but from a new radiation-malady: "hallucination-sickness."
The dialogue shown above-- in which the five Knights and their female comrade discuss the sickness-- is an excruciatingly earnest infodump, complete with the infamous "as you know" phrase when one Knight relates things that the other characters know but the reader does not. The character Herald, a schoolteacher, informs his friends that he beheld one of the "two-dimensional creatures" spawned by hallucination-sickness while he was checking on a student from the neighboring town of Harrow. The denizens of this town are antithetical to the pro-science beliefs of the Knights: "It seems the rest of the town doesn't believe in schools or science, or any progress! They fear progress, because they claim it led to the War!"
This critique of the misuses of science is patently ignored by the Knights, who are more concerned that someone in Harrow has been infected with the sickness. Though the malady hasn't been observed for very long, it just so happens that the Knights already have a potential cure available, so off they go to Harrow to minister to the afflicted. On their way they encounter Herald's student Fred Dromer, who reveals that one of the hallucination-creatures attacked the home of Harrow's leader Mister Fallow. It's not clear as to why Fallow and the other Harrow-ites figured out that the creature had been spawned by Fred's mother Henrietta, but in their superstitious fear they consider her to be that scourge of the seventeenth century, a witch. The Knights arrive just as the crowd prepares to execute Henrietta Dromer and stop the attempted murder. (In deference to the Comics Code, Anderson's art does not even suggest whatever method the townsfolk mean to use in killing the youthful young mother, just as Broome does not even wonder what might have befallen young Fred's father.)
However, despite having revived the archetype of the witch in superstitious fear, the Harrow-ites are correct: Henrietta is indeed responsible for calling up the vaguely devilish energy-beings. It's interesting that Broome titled the story "Threat of the Witch-Woman," since the whole point of the story is to prove that she is not a sorceress. Broome may have been in sympathy with the idea that some of the New England women who confessed to witchcraft were simply seduced by the psychological fantasias of having been seduced by Satan, but in place of psychosexual impulses, Henrietta is merely a vessel who accidentally empowers science-fictional "demons." The Knights observe that the hallucinations have a rudimentary intelligence, and that they seek to remain alive by keeping Henrietta locked in her trance.
Ultimately the Knights free Henrietta from the energy-creatures, who fade away when deprived of their summoner, and the heroes take the woman and her son back to Durvale to be cured. In a last minute turnabout, Fallow and the other townsfolk show up, duly chastened and ready to accept the ways of science over superstition.
I don't think John Broome was a feminist as such, and therefore he probably didn't have much to say about the status of women in patriarchal society, which has often been a theme on which witch-hunt stories have expatiated. Yet it's worth remembering that he did create DC Comics's second version of Star Sapphire, analyzed here as a Jekyll-Hyde figure caught between a desire to be traditionally feminine and a coequal pleasure in being "the boss." The apparent widow-woman Henrietta Dromer has far less depth than Star Sapphire, and the reader knows nothing of her position in the Harrow community, but it's at least possible that when one hallucination attacks the domicile of town leader Fallow, that event may express some feminine resentment of Harrow's patriarchal leader. It's also of passing interest that in the Dutch language-- a language that would have been spoken in some New England colonies-- "dromer" means "dreamer."
Of even greater mythopoeic interest are Broome's uses of the names "Harrow" and "Fallow." Harrowing is the process by which a farmer readies the land for planting seed, but over time the word has also taken on some emotional resonances: a fearful experience is said to be "harrowing," and the Messiah's descent into hell is typically called a "harrowing." Calling the town "Harrow" taps into some of these meanings as well as just evoking the idea of a farming-community. Of equal interest is Fallow's name, for when a farmer wants to allow overused land to "lie fallow" in order to replenish its nutrients, he does indeed harrow the land once more, but without introducing seeds. In the context of the story, the town of Harrow has allowed itself to "lie fallow" for too long by not accepting progress and scientific advancement-- and the Knights, by venturing into the staid town to purge it of an alien illness, have introduced the "seed" of rebirth.
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