The Listeners

Right off the bat I must state that this novel has blown me away and caught me up entirely. My notes may therefore be quite biased.

It come as no surprise to me that when New Scientist Magazine called for scientists and writers to nominate their lost SF classics, the senior astronomer at SETI, Seth Shostak, did just that. This is an excellent book, perfectly balanced with legitimate science and believable and fallible characters, eloquent and lyrical at times, the only criticism being that some of the sections dealing with the characters’ emotional lives may well appear dreary and turgid to some.

The Listeners is a very important literary SF work, an experimental novel, along similar vein as Alfred Bester’s seminal The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, focussing on the lives of the men and women involved in tackling the possibility and challenges of interstellar and interpersonal communication. It was written serially as short stories for Galaxy Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, from 1968 to 1972. The novel has been considered (unfairly) a “fixup” by John Clute that “makes productive use of episodic structure in depicting the installation of an electronic listening post to scan for radio messages from the stars, and the 100-year wait that ensues.” The reader experiences the “complex institutional frustrations and rewards of this long search,” cemented together by what Gunn calls “computer runs,” sections between chapters that provide historical and philosophical overview of SETI and the future hypothesised by the novel. These sections can be easily skipped without loss of continuity, but they do add an imaginative and important layer of feeling and significance within which to understand the story. Skipping those make for a poorer reading experience and much of the story, to my mind anyway, becomes lost without it. De Witt Douglas Kilgore makes an interesting observation about these computer runs – they represent three lines of argument: history and futurist speculation (something we also see in Asimov’s Foundation series), inspirational epigraphs from literature, and statements from SETI pioneers. These arguments create “a dialectic that defines the science as a movement that can change the course of individual and collective lives” (page 541).

Science, and plausible science at that, takes centre stage. Much more than in Carl Sagan’s Contact (which is, dare I say, a blatant plagiarised “extension” to The Listeners), the science is compelling, garnering cultural credibility for the search for extra-terrestrial communication, making the story appear much more than mere science fiction. It's easy to think you are engaging with a factual, historical reference. Gunn’s quotes from actual and fictional scientists give authenticity to how listening for interstellar communication and setting up the technology to do so, came to be. He admirably includes quotes from such notable poets and artists as Alice Meynell, Edward Lear, Walt Whitman and Manley Hopkins in order to convey some of the fanciful and religious viewpoints and philosophies that have always been part of Western literature, and also takes care to include quotes from H.G. Wells, Murray Leinster, H.B. Fyfe, A.E. van Vogt, Eric Frank Russell and Theodore Sturgeon, almost as a counter balance, to formulate a kind of modern conception of alien sentiency on how to present a story of human and alien contact. In my view this format of science fiction writing is the quintessential model for integrating fiction and science writing. Gunn crafted a well-balanced narrative of believable science, coupled with realistic emotional resonance in the fictional chapters. If there are ever going to be first contact, Gunn is showing us the likely, unfolding drama. It’s not utopia, but a better world, according to Kilgore, that “reinforce … a pattern of expectation that would lead some to embrace rather than fear communication with another intelligent species” (page 553). This beauty and hopefulness of The Listeners still resonates fiercely with me.

The story unfolds from the viewpoint of different characters, but essentially there is one main character. Robert McDonald is the well-read engineer and director of the Project who must deal with the initial failures of the Project for not picking up any extra-terrestrial signals for more than 50 years. His domestic live falls apart as his wife successfully commits suicides, and he becomes estranged from his son. A reporter from a major magazine arrives to unravel the failures, and a tele-evangelist as well as the President of the United States initially opposes what the team eventually uncover when a message finally is heard, depicted as computers dots. Initially these dots are merely random and means very little, but as the story develops, they come to mean multiple things simultaneously and logically. Gunn is a linguist and his explotation of syntax, semantics and semiotics in his writing is simply amazing. Apart from being just a story about alien contact, Gunn shows how communication in general can convey, process and assign meaning, even if not agreeable - or, in particular how communication often becomes disagreeable, depending on the specific filter of interpretation. Eventually focussed communication resolves ambiguity. In this sense, McDonald is quite the complex character. Whilst clearly struggling to communicate meaningfully with his wife and son, he can easily answer the concerns about the impact of the discovery of an extra-terrestrial civilization, stating that the very act of communication is the guarantee that social progress would rather be fostered and not hindered.  Once people learn the facts, the benefits of communication outweigh the risks. Sadly, we see that in his personal life a similar insight is perculiarly lacking. Interpersonal communication to McDonald appears very much … alien. This latter theme becomes re-ocurring amongst the various protagonists - for example the president would reflect on his son: “The boy was alien, but somehow he had to communicate” (The Listeners, page 110). It gently echos some disconcerting truths about our relationships with the “aliens” we live with here on Earth.

Despite his failings in his personal life, McDonald does express a (naieve?) hope: if human beings can talk to one another, we could also engage with beings from another world, that is, if human civilization can mature beyond the point of, for example, ethnicity. President White, an African American, laughs at the reply that McDonald wants to send to the Capellans, a simple pictogram of dots and spaces, a message that contains some biological and astronomical information. It is a significant statement:

I’m sorry … I wasn’t laughing at the answer. I don’t begin to understand half of what’s here. But that’s obviously a father and a mother and a son – a child – and the Capellans would have no way of knowing whether they are white or black. (The Listeners, page 135)

Significant, because at this level of communication, human differences are transcended by the reproductive biology that sustains it. It is biological statement that humanity is a single species. From this point forward The Listeners becomes a more hopeful narrative. Other than so many utopian efforts in the genre, there is no deus ex machina conclusion that resolves all the difficulties that humanity face. There is neither a final answer nor a utopian type, perfect social order – merely a way forward. Gunn explains in childlike fashion:

The problems that had seemed so difficult, virtually unsolvable, one hundred and fifty, even ninety years before had seemed to solve themselves once the world relaxed. (The Listeners, page 178)

Given the right pressure, the human species can change for the better. Gunn presented a new dispensation, one in which the impact of a more advanced alien culture produces radical change on Earth. If only we could listen. McDonald’s grandson:

We have received a large legacy more valuable than the physical possession of another world, with all its natural treasures, and the world’s scientists and scholars and everyone else who wishes to explore it may spend their lifetimes studying it, interpreting it, and adding bits and pieces of it to our civilization, enriching us by a whole new world and everything it has. (The Listeners, page 191-192)

Highly recommended, and a must read for all SF aficionados. There are many more thematic ciphers to uncover from the artistic The Listeners, worth reading over and over in order to do so. It is exemplary science fiction, an expression of the faith that we supporters of the genre keep alive in mankind’s search for new technologies, understanding of the universe and ultimately the first contact that, like McDonald’s, will be more than likely a multi-generational effort.

Sources: James Gunn, The Listeners. BenBella Books. (2004); De Witt Douglas Kilgore, “C/SETI as Fiction: On James Gunn’s The Listeners.” Societal Impact of Spaceflight. NASA. (2007); John Clute, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. (Online version).