Camelot Among the Stars:
Arthurian Themes in Science Fiction
Copyright © 2006 John Matthews
and used with permission of the author

John Matthews, a presenter at Mythic Journeys 2004 and 2006, is the author of numerous books primarily about the Arthurian, Celtic, shamanic and spiritual traditions. His well known works include The Celtic Shaman, Healing the Wounded King, and The Winter Solstice. Watch for The Trick of the Tale: Trickster Stories from Around the World by John Matthews and his wife Caitlín, due out in 2007 from Templar Publishing.

"This strangeness, this mystery, lies not simply in
common magical elements of folklore.... (but)
in the tantalizing suggestion... that more is
meant than meets the ear."
—R. S. Loomis: Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance.¹

I

It is less often the physical presences of Arthur and his Knights who inhabit the realms of Science Fiction than their ghosts. Such works as the Dune books of Frank Herbert, The Majpoor Chronicles of Robert Silverberg, or the Avalon cycle of Roger Zelazny are noisy with their invisible presence. The concepts of Chivalry, the Eternal Quest, the endlessly varied themes of the Matter of Britain can be traced back, ultimately, to Malory, Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach ² and the rest, known and unknown, who first stirred the cauldron of story to produce the Arthurian mythos.

In the realm of Science Fiction, these themes have undergone their most radical reworking, but have emerged for the most part unscathed, though more often in strange garb. As Richard Monaco, responsible for some of the most enduring Arthurian fables of recent years, including Runes, The Final Quest and Grail Wars has written:

The strongest Arthurian tales are involved with literal and semi literal history as much as with metaphor. They are anything but 'pure adventure' stories. They are images of initiation; spiritual alchemy; journeys into the secrets of the soul and the actual world." ³

This seems to me the particular power of the best Science Fiction writing: the history of the future as it may or may not be; as some may wish and others fear it may be. The Arthurian mirror is held up to the nature of Futureworld again and again, giving us a foothold in its own reality, however strange.

Camelot, with all that the name can mean, shines amid the vast emptiness of space; her heroes and heroines transcending time and place to awaken in surprising disguises amid the clutter of robotics, ships, aliens and villains as strange as any encountered in ancient quests.

In the series of books by Arthur H. Landis, including Camelot in Orbit and Magic of Camelot set on a planet named Camelot, a complex system of chivalry, magic and super science exists. The characters bear little resemblance to the Arthurian archetypes; but again and again they seem to embody the characteristic nature of the Arthurian world:

"In Galactic Foundation listings, Fregis was called Camelot; the indisputable facts being that other than a classical medieval culture and the like spells, enchantments, and dark wizardry, as practiced by Fregis' sorcerers, really worked. Moreover the planet was an occultists', alchemists', metaphysicians' paradise. ⁴

This may seem more like the world of Sword & Sorcery than of Science Fiction proper, but here it is always the gimlet eye of science that observes, faintly surprised, the actions of older (not to say wiser) beings. In the fourth book of the series, Home — To Avalon, actually a separate story expanded from the trilogy, the planet of that name has become the final goal for the doomed species of mankind. Only by releasing secrets hidden within a sleeping valley, frozen in time, can a disaster which has already overtaken Earth be averted. In other words, as we might guess from the name of another base on the planet Eden — this is the last flight of humanity to the realm of Paradise — a long promised home and perhaps ultimate goal of all quests. Like Arthur himself in search of healing, the last representatives of old Earth go questing — and if the 'island valley, deep bosomed, fair' of Avalon has the appearance of a time locked space capsule, we should not be surprised, for this is Future Avalon, where once before the quondam King found refuge with a triplicity of Queens.

This all serves to answer the question of what figures such as Arthur are doing in Science Fiction at all. After all, one might ask, is not the real stuff of Science Fiction mechanistic, futuristic, robotic? What have the heroes of myth and legend to do with the future? The answer comes in two ways. One can say, with Ursula Le Guin, that "Science Fiction is the mythology of today"⁵, and go on to qualify the statement by declaring that only "submyths" such as Superman, Doctor Strange and the multiform worlds of comic books are the real myths of the present. Or one can see it another way: that the mythos, heroes and quests of the ancient world are fuel for the mechanistic soap operas.

If there had never been myths of Titans like Prometheus, or heroes such as Herakles, would Superman have been the same? Would the galactic quests which feature so prominently in Science Fiction writing have had the same validity without, however distantly, knowledge of Odysseus' journey home or the Grail Quest of Arthur and his Knights? The idea of Chivalry alone has given rise to a whole ethos of modern heroes — Poul Anderson's Flandry, Robert Silverberg's Valentine, even Heinlein's muscle bound moralities would be unreal without the ghost of the Arthurian hero in the background.

As Le Guin points out in the essay already quoted, it is not that we can reduce the old gods to mere symbols of nature's elements but that those elements themselves are only aspects of the gods. We are talking about transcendental truths, and Science Fiction is where we are most likely to find them today. Where else might one find a story dealing with physical resurrection, the search for a lost soul, or the unmaking of creation? Yet they are all there, and more, in the third StarTrek movie, The Search For Spock (Paramount,1984).

Indeed, anyone who watches the Classic TV series or the more recent Next Generation, with more than a casual eye cannot fail to recognize the archetypes. In the original series we have Captain James Tiberius Kirk, fearless but flawed commander; Mr Spock, shaman of otherworldliness ; Doctor Leonard McCoy, honest and headstrong, the perfect foil to Spock's alien intelligence. These and others less immediately recognizable throng the decks of the USS Enterprise, comradely, adventurous soldiers of the future.

But what other archetypes can we see, standing in the shadows of Enterprise's circular bridge? Is there not something familiar about the Captain and his alien advisor? Call the one Arthur and the other Merlin and we already have the answer. Leading his band of brave adventurers, who 'boldly go where no man has gone before' from the centre of his star ship, James T. Kirk is the leader of a new Round Table, with Spock his other worldly guide; and in McCoy there is more than a shade of Gawain.

And in all the monsters, madmen and myths encountered during the 70 odd voyages of the Enterprise we have the futuristic journeys through 'lands adventurous' where Arthur and his knights went in search of adventure. In The Next Genertion this continues of course — with Jean-Luc Picard as Arthur, assisted now by Data as his Merlin. Doctor Crusher seems to me to share the qualities of Guinevere; though never represented as a queen, she plays the role of steady companion to Picard. Riker plays out the roles of Gawain here, while Guinan and Troy are otherworldly Ladies of the Lake, and Worf fulfills the place of the warrior cast from which arose the Fellowship of the Round Table.

Clearly we have in Star Trek a pattern of Arthurian themes, a Camelot-among-the-stars whose mobile crew serve the same forces of goodness and justice as their mediaeval counterparts. Small wonder if the TV series and its movie spinoffs have found a place in the landscape of the human unconscious, as has George Lucas' Star Wars saga. Look at that unconscious and what do we see? A strange land inhabited by stranger creatures, creations of our dreaming ('monsters from the id' as they become in that classic SF movie Forbidden Planet) — the real reason for most myth creation. Small wonder indeed if they keep on recurring, and if Science Fiction, which gives reign to almost everything, should play host to the latest cycles of rebirth which bring these archetypal heroes to the fore again.

II

Where do they come from, these shadowy heroes of the past, and what role do they play in the world of the future? The idea of the Eternal Champion seems to have been around for as long as myths have been formulated. The Nine Worthies, The Seven Sleepers, The King Under the Hill are age old concepts, and all have been revived in recent years by Science Fiction writers. Indeed, Michael Moorcock, that doyen of the ultimate quest, has drawn much of his inspiration from the mythos of Arthur even though Camelot has not featured much in his pages in an obvious sense. Writing of his series of novels and stories relating to the albino champion Elric of Melnibone, Moorcock discusses the importance of the quest. When Elric's object of search, 'the Dead God's Book', supposed to contain all knowledge, finally crumbles to dust at his touch, Moorcock comments:

The Dead God's Book and the Golden Barge (from the book of the same name) are one and the same. They have no real existence save in the wishful imagination of mankind. There is, the story says, no Holy Grail which will transform a man overnight from bewildered ignorance to complete knowledge — the answer clearly is within him, if he cares to train himself to find it. ⁶

All this harmonizes with the idea of the Arthurian quest, and in his War Hound and the World's Pain Moorcock takes this a step further. His hero, Graf Ulrich von Beck, is a brutal soldier of fortune hardly in the Arthurian mould, yet he is singled out by no less than Lucifer to go in quest of a cure for the world's pain which is, not surprisingly, the Grail. Lucifer's desire is to be reconciled with heaven, perhaps take up his former position there, but not all of Hell's denizens share this wish, and before Beck's quest is over he must face the legions of the damned. Beck does indeed find the Grail and gives it to Lucifer, but it is insufficient to heal the breach between Heaven and Hell. Lucifer is still not welcome in Heaven. Instead he is given the task of redeeming earth and of learning the true nature of the Grail. When both the Devil and mankind can do this, all shall be redeemed. But there is a warning. Lucifer declares:

"You are your own masters. Your lives are your own. Do you not see that this means an end to the miraculous? You are at the beginning of a new age for Man, an age of investigation and analysis."⁷

Where this "age of investigation and analysis" leads we well know; the hope is that a rediscovery of the miraculous will follow. If the trend in Science Fiction writing and current scientific thought is any indication, this may well be so; and Arthur is leading the attack.

The original Arthurian cycle ends in defeat and a strange victory. The Science Fiction treatment is a kind of resurrection — a return of Arthur. In Martyn Skinner's neglected epic Merlin; or The Return of Arthur, the king does indeed return to set things right in a world of Satanic evil. Malice is reborn in the shape of Morgan la Fay. An age old theme is the one which brings Arthur out of otherworldly retirement when the world needs him, and this is explored in several Science Fiction novels: The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers, The Dragon Rises by Adrienne Martine Barnes, and A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson being three that are notable. All are alike in attributing to Arthur the abilities and the desire to reaffirm what is threatened by destruction or undermined by evil.

In Tim Powers' book, the Western World of the 17th century is threatened by the power of Sulieman's Turkish empire — it will fall unless the Fisher King, the Soul of the Land, is revived and brought to the field of battle. This can only be brought about by thwarting a plot to prevent the ancient monarch from drinking a special brew of beer, known as Hartzwesten Dark (a name not without significance). The only person who can save this from happening is Arthur, and he is long dead. But is he? In Powers' Science Fiction version of history, Merlin (who is still active at this late time) discovers that Arthur's soul has been reborn in the body of an Irish mercenary soldier named Brian Duffy. With the help of Excalibur he succeeds in reawakening Arthur's memories in time to avert disaster, the only problem being that when Arthur remembers everything, including his death at Camlann, he will once again withdraw.

In The Dragon Rises, it is the seven sleepers (of whom one is Arthur) who are revived. These are the heroes whose eternal task it is to guard the direction and fate of mankind. In this instance, the time is the far future and the players strangely named — yet beneath the unfamiliar guises of Gilhame ur Fargon, Alvellaena and Pers Buschard lie the familar figures of Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot. Amid galactic adventure and universal mayhem these three play out the age old pattern of love and friendship, lust and deceit. Yet this time there is a difference: always in the past the Dragon has returned to the Glass Castle and the sleep of ages, awaiting his next call. This time he is able to transcend the eternal circle, move on to a new cycle of being; and Adrienne Martine-Barnes is the only writer who thus dares to break the mould of the original myth in giving her heroes a happy ending. But then what would it be like if...? is a favourite device of most Science Fiction writers.

In A Midsummer Tempest, the Arthurian theme is subliminal but none the less important. Here is envisaged a parallel time line in which the Industrial Revolution has happened in the time of King Charles I and Cromwell, with the Royalist cavaliers standing against and the Roundheads for the progress of the mechanical over the natural. Prince Rupert of the Rhine, accompanied by faithful friends, invokes the aid of Oberon and Titania in a quest for the Staff and Book of Prospero. (In this world the works of William Shakespeare, 'the Great Historian', are fact.) But when, after many adventures, the Staff and Book are found, the final confrontation takes place on Glastonbury Tor, home of Arthurian and Grail legends. Here Rupert invokes and succeeds in raising the Spirit of the Land, something older and more basic than the mere heroes of the past. Here also, Arthur and the knights of Avalon ride forth against the armies of Cromwell, the representatives of brick and mortar, wheels and cogs of mechanistic rule. Echoes are here of Tolkien and the march of the Ents against Isengard, and here also Science Fiction seems to laugh at itself, taking the side of magic over science. The message is powerfully expressed:

"I am the land ... I have the right to raise the land I am.
In me alone the mightiness indwells, till I bestow it on my
messengers that they may bear my wrath across the world.
Mine is the outrage, mine was the love. Thou shalt not bind
me fast in brick and steel, nor make my people the idolators
of little frantic leaders and their texts. If mystery and merriment
alike be human rights, I claim them for my folk."

Here is a timeless mystery which will not be shut out, which seemingly only certain contemporary writers are aware of, and some few poets. It is a mystery of time past and time future, of which Arthur and his knights, Avalon and above all the Grail are true symbols on which to draw.

III

Those works where the Grail appears produce a synthesis of the ageless myth represented by the Arthurian ethos and what might legitimately be called the new mythology of Science Fiction. Sometimes, as in Roger Zelazny's The Last Defender of Camelot, the mystery will almost be explained away only to be replaced by another and greater one, which —thank heaven— no one has yet succeeded in explaining. Or, as in work like Walter M. Miller's classic, A Canticle for Leibowitz, or the more recent Star Spring by David Bischoff, it looms central to the matter of the story.

In Miller's book, monks, hermits and pseudo saints occupy a post holocaust wasteland where the Grail makes a fleeting but important appearance. Towards the end of the story, one of the characters, significantly called Mrs Grales, is making her confession to a latter day priest of this future earth. But Mrs Grales has two heads, one purely vestigial, a supernumerary growth which is dumb, lifeless, without expression. Whatever secret it may contain, cannot be conveyed by normal means. In the midst of her act of contrition, the church is struck by a missile, and the priest, Zerchi, pinned under debris. As he lies there waiting to die, Mrs Grales reappears unhurt but changed. Her vestigial head is now 'awake' though still capable of repeating only whatever words are addressed to it. Zerchi notices also that the woman seems younger, and that her old 'head' is gradually withering away. Something new has awakened in her. What happens next is extraordinary. Fearing that she may have suffered fatal exposure to radiation, Zerchi attempts to bless her. He is repulsed and suffers a temporary blackout from the pain of his wounds. When he awakens, he sees Mrs Grales kneeling before him:

Finally he could make out that she was holding the golden cup in her left hand and in her right, delicately between thumb and forefinger, a single Host. She was offering it to him . . . she made no conventional gestures, but the reverence with which she . . . handled it convinced him of one thing: she sensed the presence under the veil. ⁸

Thus, in the moment between death and life, with a new holocaust about to commence, a miracle occurs: the dead half of mankind awakens or is healed and dispenses a blessing upon the hurts of creation. The part which had been dead to the mysteries sees beyond the veils of matter into the heart of things. The symbolism of Eucharist and Grail is overt. Mrs Grales even has five wounds, one of which is described as caused by 'a spear of glass' like the wounds of Christ, and the Grail lance. With almost his last breath, the priest murmurs the words of the Magnificat, wanting

...to teach her the words as his last act, for he was certain that she shared something with the Maiden who first had spoken them... he did not ask why God would choose to raise up a creature of primal innocence from the shoulder of Mrs Grales, or why God should give to it the preternatural gifts of Eden those gifts which man had been trying to seize by brute force again from heaven since first he lost them...(But) he had seen innocence in those eyes and a promise of resurrection. ⁹

It is precisely that 'promise of resurrection' which is inherent in all Grail stories; nor should it be necessary to wait for a distant future to discover it, The paradox may well be that in writing or reading of that future we somehow penetrate it, bringing back from the country outside time the knowledge we require.

Certainly, the knowledge is, as always, currently available. though it takes a certain ability to discover it as is made clear in Bischoff's Star Spring. Described as a 'space opera' this odd book chronicles the struggle against the machinations of a two hundred year old millionaire named Edward Evers Hurt. Hurt's determination to achieve physical immortality leads him to set up a scheme to gather all the finest artistic and scientific brains of the future age aboard a vast star ship, and link them into a computer created matrix which draws upon the imaginal quality of the human mind. With this Hurt intends to create an entry port into what Bischoff calls 'underspace,' a kind of super collective unconscious which might more familiarly be called 'innerspace' in fact the dimension of spiritual reality. He thus attempts to 'storm heaven' or the reality of which heaven is but a vague shadow, and by this attempt aligns himself with another figure from the Arthurian corpus — Klingsor, the evil magician who opposes the Grail knight in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, and who is best understood in Wagner's opera of the same name, or Richard Monaco's Grail Trilogy.

Into this ambitious and intriguing scenario Bischoff injects a somewhat bizarre Grail quest, where a symbolic Galahad, little more than a computer hologram with no sense of anything other than its own reality, is accompanied by the minds of two spaceborne secret agents transposed into the bodies of a lion and a donkey with a unicorn's horn. This unlikely trio travel across a two dimensional landscape invested with tactile reality by the computer matrix in search of the Grail. The task is not self-chosen, but assigned to them, with maps provided. This seems curiously unlike the usual nature of the quest, but as one of the characters suggests the quest is:

...the process, I presume, that perhaps creates the votive qualities of the... Grail." ¹⁰

For Hurt, this is an active principle of the energy he desires to use to create a doorway into the infinite; the erstwhile Grail seekers see it as a possible way of hitting back. If they can really discover the Grail they may be able to use it against him.

Soon after, they meet Merlin, and with his rather jaundiced help ('piss on this stupid Grail,' he remarks at one point) they penetrate deeper into the core of the living brain which the star ship has virtually become. Finally, the seekers find themselves in 'The Fisher's Bar and Grail', where a strange version of the Grail Mass ensues and the 'realities' of the story are one by one shown to be masks. Nothing is what it seems, and even Hurt is only a dupe of a more sinister and alien evil. The end of the story is obscure, but the Grail is central to the whole matter of the plot. A possible god figure emerges as it were from the heart of the unconscious mind of humanity — not precisely to aid the seekers but in a mysterious way to watch over events. Herein lies an echo of the figure of Prester John, one of the titular guardians of the Grail, who seems to combine the images of Christ, Galahad and the Fisher King. But this is not taken up in the story.

Bischoff's book is a prime instance of the intricate mixture of technology and magic which lies at the heart of so much "Arthurian" Science Fiction. In Andre Norton's Merlin's Mirror the mixture is total. Here an alien installation, left on Earth centuries before, wakens to life and summons a ship sent forth from its own doomed planet with the accumulated wisdom of its makers lodged in its memory banks. This becomes the progenitor, by a species of artificial insemination, of Merlin, and thus of the whole Arthurian ethos. The story ends — this time with a temporary defeat of technology by human emotion (Lancelot and Guinevere). Merlin retires to the depths of a mountain where, in cryogenic suspension, he begins an age-long dream until able to try again...

This theme is much used by Science Fiction writers who seek a paradigm of hope for the future out of the past and turn to the mythos of Arthur and the Golden Age of Knights and Ladies, magic and wonder, when the doors between the worlds were open without need of space flight and computer circuitry.

It reaches perhaps its purest form in the maxi series comic Camelot 3000, where Arthur is revived from age long sleep beneath Glastonbury Tor to help the earth against alien invaders. Merlin, Lancelot and Guinevere, Gawain and Tristan follow, appearing in reincarnation rather than revived form. But with the reawakening of Arthur other ancient powers stir again to combat him. Morgan la Fay, after unsuccessfully trying to combat the powers of Merlin, leaves Earth and drifts through astral realms across the galaxies until she discovers the home planet of the aliens and makes them into her new army with which to conquer Earth. Thus beneath the patina of Science Fiction an age old battle continues unabated. Even the evil president of Earth's security forces turns out to be a reincarnation of Mordred who, in a twist of the original story, becomes the Grail thief and constructs out of it a suit of armour which makes him invincible.

Of course, good triumphs in the end, the aliens are routed and the old order, though broken, triumphs. Once again we see, in the Arthurian past, a world which can be transported into the present — though sometimes at great cost.

Roger Zelazny, in his brilliant short story "The Last Defender of Camelot", makes the same point, but qualifies it interestingly. Here, it is Lancelot, preserved through time, who features as a representative of Cosmic Chivalry. Meeting Morgan la Fay in an Astrological Emporium, he discovers that the reason for his preservation is the power of Merlin, whose last action before failing into enchanted sleep was to ensure that when he awoke, millennia later, the strongest knight in the world would be on hand to serve him. Morgan also implies that it could only mean the greatest harm for mankind if Merlin were once again at liberty to use his virtually unlimited power.

His desire to right wrongs would certainly upset the precarious balance of world power and bring about disaster. Merlin is mad anyway, she says, though Lancelot predictably finds this hard to believe. Indeed, it was Merlin who "arranged" the vision of the Grail to give fresh impetus to the failing energies of the Arthurian court. Lancelot, who believes that his preservation is a direct result of his ancient "sin" with Guinevere, is shaken by this; he believes he must still achieve the Grail before he can be redeemed. Nonetheless he sets out for England and arrives to find Merlin awake and the madness predicted by Morgan to be true. So it is Lancelot who becomes the "last defender", fighting a desperate battle against Merlin's magically operated 'Hollow Knight' (a kind of robot) amid a ghostly Stonehenge, half in and half out of the world. Watching Merlin and Morgan, locked in sorcerous combat, vanish forever between the worlds, and finally, wounded beyond healing. beginning to age, he sees a vision of the Grail and follows it to his proper end — the end, Zelazny seems to imply, of the Arthurian quest for all time, and the death of Magic.

Except of course that there is no real end to the perpetual quest, at least not while a single blade of grass remains unredeemed, and Lucifer (vide Moorcock) fails to teach mankind the meaning of salvation.

Perhaps here we have the kernel of the use made by Science Fiction writers of the Arthurian corpus. It is possible to look back to the age of Arthur with fond nostalgia for what is gone, or to project it forward into the infinity of Futureworld as a pattern upon which to build a stable society or a workable world. We can further see in this the imperishability of myth, which continues to exert a potent spell upon all who have a hunger for it.

The Arthurian stories endure all that we do to them and our desire to inflict new forms upon them, but they lose none of their original power to move and inspire us. This, finally, is one of the best things Science Fiction has to offer, this ability to make us better people than we were previously whatever one may mean by that. It is possibly the greatest gift of all great writing. The Arthurian theme is only one of many that can, and does, have this effect. If we let them, of course. As Zelazny says at the end of "The Last Defender of Camelot":

QUO FAS ET GLORIA DUCUNT (Where duty and glory lead.) ¹¹

NOTES

1. R. S. Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance (NY, Columbia University Press, 1927).
2. Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d'Arthur Ed. John Matthews (London, Cassell, 2000); Chretien de Troyes, Perceval, The Story of the Grail (Totowa, NJ, Rowman &Littlefield, 1982); Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzifal (Penguin, 1980).
3. Richard Monaco, Runes (NY, Ace, 1984).
4. Arthur Landis, Camelot In Orbit (NY, Daw, 1978), p. 7.
5. Ursula Le Guin, The Language of Night: Essays on SF (NY, Putnam. 1979); See especially "Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction".
6. Michael Moorcock, Elric At The End of Time (London, New English Library, 1984).
7. Michael Moorcock, The War Hound and the World's Pain (London, New English Library, 1982).
8. Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1960), pp. 275.
9. Ibid., pp. 276 7.
10. David Bischoff, Star Spring (NY, Berkley, 1982), p. 146.
11. Roger Zelazney The Last Defender of Camelot (I Books; Reprint edition, 2002).

    ---

    Return to Passages Menu

    Subscribe to the Passages e-zine