The Shores of Another Sea: Are we Running out of Creativity?

 

If the universe is fractal, then its structure is fully contained in every sub-element of it. So, a single novel may be a tool to understand the whole universe. Here, I explore a 1971 novel by Chad Oliver titled, "The Shores of Another Sea," featuring a front cover that could compete for the worst book cover in history. But it may have been the first science fiction novel to describe the interaction of primates, baboons in this case, with aliens, and, perhaps, the origin of the 2001 movie series "The Planet of the Apes." It seems that, nowadays, we are getting many creative ideas from old sci-fi novels. Have we run out of creativity? I am afraid it may well be. 

Novels have become mostly an archeological item, so, reading one from 1971 has the flavor of an excavation among the ruins of an ancient civilization. It is perhaps much more than a hyperbole, considering the pitiful state of the civilization that we call "The West" nowadays. And this strange object that came out of this virtual literary trench may tell us something about our present conditions. Where has our creativity gone? Possibly, we lost it forever,

But let's examine this book and see what we can learn from it. Its most remarkable feature is that it may have been the first to deal with the interaction of aliens with a non-human, but humanoid, species on planet Earth. Baboons, in this case. Could this novel be the origin of the 2001 series "Planet of the Apes"? It may very well be. The origin of much of our contemporary filmography is in earlier novels. Just think of how "Avatar" is a remake of the old novel by Ursula Le Guin, "The Word for World is Forest" (1972). 

As a novel, "The Shores of Another Sea" is a good example of the rule that says that you should always write about things you know well. Here, Chad Oliver has done an excellent job in describing a world that, as a professional anthropologist, he knew very well. He uses his experience in Kenya to describe the "Baboonery" -- a remote outpost where the protagonist manages a small enterprise dedicated to capturing baboons and then shipping them overseas to zoos or for medical experiments. Of course, most of us have no direct experience with living in Kenya, nor with dealing with baboons in the wild. But, as readers, we can understand the consistency of the background of the story. It is a world that makes sense. 

So, Oliver uses the basic elements of a typical science fiction plot: you start with a "normal" situation, ordinary, quiet, predictable, and you add a supernatural element that gradually overturns the certitudes of the characters of the novel. You see this technique at its best in a movie such as "E.T." And it works great with "The Shores of Another Sea." The reader is immediately captured by the mix of the exotic, but predictable, world of the baboonery, and the strangeness of "something" that came from the sky that makes baboons behave in unexpected ways. 

Unfortunately, the novel doesn't keep its promises. As we keep reading, the magic slowly dissolves. The aliens never take an active role in the story, the baboons keep behaving strange, but we never learn what the aliens want to do with them. Most of what we are told about the aliens comes from arbitrary trains of thought of the protagonist, that would shame Sherlock Holmes in terms of deducing something out of nothing.

The end of the novel is especially disappointing. The author, clearly at a loss as to what to do with the plot, recurs to a truly cheap narrative device: having the young daughter of the protagonist being kidnapped by the aliens. Then, the protagonist cleverly manages to get her back, the aliens depart, and it is the end of the story. 

So, a narrative failure. Nevertheless, it was a creative attempt to innovate in science fiction. We see here a new take on the interaction of aliens and humans, using the baboons as an avatar of the Aliens, who seem to prefer to deal with them than with humans. It is a characteristic of novels that they can try new ways, even at the risk of utter failure. Today, with novels having nearly disappeared from the literary horizon, our fictional universe has moved to the serialized movies that we watch on Netflix. But creative innovation is not, and cannot be, the same thing. A movie involves a much larger effort (and money) in comparison to a novel. So, sponsors are not willing to take risks, and we are not seeing anymore the kind of personal effort that may lead to innovative ideas. Movie scripts are often just mediocre, although they may still be truly bad in narrative terms.  

So, it may well be that movie fiction is running piggyback on the great science fiction season of the 1960s and 1970s. But it is like mining fossil fuels. Great idea, but they are running out of them. Will we run out of narrative ideas?  Could be, and then? It is known that civilizations fail and disappear when they can't imagine a different world. And it seems that this is what's happening to us.