Let’s imagine two science fiction writers. The first is a person who wants to avoid a lifetime of working the nine-to-five grind and decides they want to become a science fiction writer. This person studies all the classics and bestselling SF novels and writes what they hope readers will passionately love and make them a million dollars. The second is a person who thinks deeply about life and has what they believe is a brilliant philosophical insight. Their inspiration is to use science fiction to convey their insights into humanity to the rest of us.
Whose book do you want to read?
I read Farewell, Earth’s Bliss by D. G. Compton because my favorite YouTube reviewer, Bookpilled, praised it highly in two videos. He warned the novel was one of the bleakest books he’s ever read. The story is grim indeed. Not as existentially dark as The Road by Cormac McCarthy, or as depressingly dystopian as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or even as bleak as those literary novels that make you want to kill yourself, such as The Painted Bird by Jerzey Kosinski, or The Tin Drum by Günter Grass.
Back in the mid-sixties, science fiction was changing, and it was interesting that in 1966, two science fiction novels came out about shipping convicts into space. The most famous of the two was The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. A forgotten title was Farewell, Earth’s Bliss by D. G. Compton. I find it odd, that right in the middle of the 1960s great space race, when all the excitement and glamor was about how to get to the Moon, and during the thrilling Project Gemini missions two science fiction authors would imagine the Moon and Mars as a Botany Bay prison colony. Instead of sending people with the Right Stuff into space, Heinlein and Compton imagine sending people with the Wrong Stuff. Why? In 1967, Robert Silverberg would publish “Hawksbill Station” about using time travel to exile criminals to the Cambrian period. (I should compare all three someday.)
I believe in the 1950s, Heinlein wanted to be more than the biggest fish in a small pond. He was already the most successful science fiction writer in the world. I can’t prove this, but my guess is he saw the potential of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in 1957 and wanted to swim in the bigger pond Rand created, so he came out with Stranger in a Strange Land in 1961. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was Heinlein’s third book he used as a soapbox to express his philosophical and political ideas. My other guess is D. G. Compton was inspired by New Worlds magazine, and the initial stages of the New Wave and decided to take a piss on science fiction, the space race, and humanity. Heinlein’s view of a penal colony on the Moon wasn’t exactly positive, although he thought it was. He saw his story as recreating the American Revolution. Maybe I need to reread and reanalyze that story. I don’t think Compton had a chance to read Heinlein’s book, so it wasn’t a reaction to it, but it is worthwhile to consider them together as two views SF takes on 1966.
Farewell, Earth’s Bliss is about twenty-four new one-way exiles to Mars. Compton uses several point-of-view characters to project a multifaceted take on humanity. All the people on Mars are convicts, and they shape their own society. Their life is brutal. They’ve found they can eat lichen and one small Martian animal they call a rabbit. Everything else must be recycled from the spaceships bringing the prisoners to Mars twice each Martian year. It’s an extremely hard and bleak existence. This isn’t Star Trek, another science fiction story that came out in 1966.
Compton’s insights deal with racism, feminism, gender, homosexuality, government, brutality, inequality, religion, and other subjects that feel completely contemporary to today. Most of the insights Compton explores didn’t need to be set on Mars. Because they are, it makes us question the desire to explore other worlds.
Ultimately, Farewell, Earth’s Bliss ends in a kind of dark Darwinian optimism. Was Compton trying to be funny? Ironic? Satirical? Existential? Compton uses his novel to show how everyone and all societies are flawed, that life is grim, but there’s a kind of nobleness in surviving, even if you’re killing others to do so.
Like Joachim Boaz at his blog Science Fiction and Other Ruminations, I’ve been into reading science fiction that is critical of the final frontier dream. As a kid, Mars was my Land of Oz, my Big Rock Candy Mountain, my Shangri La. Compton laughs at people like me in Farewell, Earth’s Bliss. Boaz also reviews Farewell, Earth’s Bliss, and rates it 4.5 out of 5. Now that I’m older, I realize the fallacy of my fantasies. Mars would be a horrific place to live.
Over the decades I’ve tried reading D. G. Compton’s work, but I usually give up because his stories were too grim, too adult. But it seems like in the past year that everyone is rediscovering Farewell, Earth’s Bliss and Compton.
What’s the point of exploring the depressing side of reality? Compton makes Mars very unappealing. Years ago, there was this story about people volunteering for a one-way trip to Mars. A lot of people said they would sign up. Mars has always been the Middle Earth for science fiction. No matter how grimly realistic it is portrayed, readers still find it a magical destination to daydream about. I think Compton is asking why people would fantasize about Mars like that.
The leader of the criminals is a ruthless man who is smart enough to manipulate people yet is unaware of his own delusions. He reminds me of Donald Trump. And the laws the criminals choose to live by remind me of what MAGA people want. They embrace religion, even insane religious ideas, reject education because they want to protect their kids from intellectuals, and they want punish rule breakers and people who are different harshly to maintain the orderliness of their community.
I used to think that spreading humanity across the galaxy was the purpose of our species. I haven’t felt that way for years. Reading Farewell, Earth’s Bliss makes me think we shouldn’t infect the rest of the universe with our madness. Compton sees us like cockroaches that are impossible to kill.
Is that the kind of science fiction you’d want to read?
Why?
Amazon currently has Farewell, Earth’s Bliss as a $1.99 Kindle ebook.
James Wallace Harris, 8/12/24
