Menacing Minerals With Psychic Powers
Minerals. These days, it seems like everyone’s looking for them. But…what if...the inhabitants of the rock kingdom were not as inert as previously believed, and they started to acquire intelligence and psychic powers to menace mankind? In so doing, we would question our simplistic definitions of what constitutes life. These evil and possibly telepathic rocks would be the ultimate adversary for life as we know it, as they represent the replacement of life with unlife, a metaphor for our industrial society that replaces living forests and swamps with dead parking lots.
This science fiction element has its origin in the peculiar fixation of a bizarre but nonetheless influential man, J.H. Rosny, a pen name for two Belgian science fiction writer brothers who worked together. I sometimes address them in the singular and the plural as at times they worked together and other times as just one brother. The Rosnys believed that eventually, the final battle for existence, billions of years in the future, would be man against the future inheritors of the earth, incomprehensible inorganic rocks and minerals.
Rosny was very much a foundational cultural figure in science fiction in France and Belgium, though unlike Jules Verne, his contemporary, he is not too well known in the English speaking world. Like Olaf Stapledon or Asimov, he had a long view of human history, and he set his stories in one of two places: either the beginning of human history, like his stone age adventure story Quest for Fire (La Guerre du Feu in France) a novel about a time when men (or something like a man) killed for possession of fire, which he did not know how to make…or at the end of human history and life on earth, billions of years in the future when the sun burns out, in his Death of the Earth.
In between them, Rosny wrote Le Xipehuz in 1910, a novel set at the very beginning of civilization in Ancient Mesopotamia, where mankind is invaded by a race of genocidal sentient crystals known as the Xipehuz. Our hero is a thinker ahead of his time, an Assyrian Einstein, who represents an extraordinary rationalism and an early version of the scientific method in an otherwise primitive age. The first truly alien aliens in science fiction (predating the surreal landscapes of Stanley G. Weinbaum), the Xipehuz are crystalline minerals from space that are able to float, shoot something like a laser (and even use their laser to read markings left by others, like an optical scanner on a CD-ROM), the Xipehuz cannot be communicated with or reasoned with, and are scary in that they are a form of mineral life that is totally incomprehensible. The story never explains where the Xipehuz came from, their motives, or even tells us what they wanted. They slaughter humans but only out of cold indifference instead of sadism or passion.
Le Xipehuz (French for "The Xipehuz") is an alien invasion story set at the beginning of civilization, somewhere between the Neolithic and Mesopotamia. But Rosny’s second book to deal with malevolent minerals, the Death of the Earth, is set at the end of history, where the last few survivors of earth find they are running out of water, running out of food, as the very animal and plant kingdoms of life face their inevitable end, threatened by psychic minerals called the ferromagnetics. Like the Xipehuz, they are absolutely confounding and incomprehensible, cannot be communicated with. It’s not entirely clear if the ferromagnetics are even life as we understand the term, as they seem to confound simple definitions of what “life” is.
The worst part about the ferromagnetics is this: there’s a crushing inevitability to them. It seems these weird rocks, not life as we know it (plants, animals) are the true inheritors of the earth, who will continue when the last man’s eyes shut and the animal kingdom ends with him, replaced by inorganic matter. In that sense, they are a metaphor for the rock and earth of the tomb, the final conqueror.
The Rosny Brothers were the beginning but not the end of the story of evil minerals.
In 1957, a movie called “The Monolith Monsters” featured gigantic rocks that burst from the earth, threatening to spread over the entire earth and replace life itself.
In 1963, the Outer Limits episode "Corpus Earthling" was about geologists who discover a pair of pulsing, bizarre talking rocks that turn out to be attempting to conquer earth. The Outer Limits was the Twilight Zone's more science-heavy and plausible cousin, more like the magazine scifi of the era. The fact the rock invaders are unrecognized as any form of life is to their advantage, and they only are stopped when, after an accident, a human acquires the ability to spy on their telepathic communications. Note that yet again we find the minerals are telepathic by nature. The episode was based on a French novel, which is unsurprising because of the domination of the Rosnys over French language scifi.
The otherworldly control voice (done by "Nomad" actor Vic Perrin) ended the episode with this closing thought:
Two black crystalline rocks: unclassifiable. Objects on the border between the living and the nonliving. A reminder of the thin line that separates the animate from the inanimate. Something to ponder on. Something to stay the hand when it reaches out innocently for the whitened pebble, the veined stone, the dead unmoving rocks of our planet.
In 1966, J.G. Ballard wrote a fascinating story called the Crystal World, a novel about a strange crystallization process affecting the wild places. It is an alien invasion, but one of a very strange variety: the ecological invasion, where a biosphere is replaced by something cold, dead and unliving, with crystals enveloping living things like flies in amber, preserving them eternally. Ballard, even more than Rosny, start to see why people write about evil minerals and crystals: it represents the terror that life itself is overtaken by nonliving matter, the way parking lots replace wetlands. It's a predecessor to the ecological-based alien invasion story where ecosystems are replaced by something sinister and unrecognizable, and was a direct predecessor to David Gerrold's War Against the Cthorr novels, where a more aggressive alien ecosystem takes over earth's.
Not to be outdone, Frank Herbert, who put-putted around in the pulps for a good decade before he did that book, did the Green Brain, a malevolent uni-mind found in green minerals that have a kind of collective sentience, created by the resistance of the earth itself to human industry's total domination over life. It sounds like it's out of style with Frank Herbert's usual work, but it really isn't if you look under the hood. As an ecologist who's works (yes, including that one) were about ecological issues at a time that was beginning to be at the forefront of public consciousness, Herbert was fascinated by how nature was not controllable.
It's very interesting that all of the stories should come out around the same time, the late 50s-60s. In that time, the runoff from society was making entire areas unlivable. It must have felt like the unliving kingdom, toxic to living things, was replacing life itself, and so battles were phrased in terms of life vs. unlife itself, with man on the side of the plants and animals. In the event that ecological catastrophes increase due to man's greed and misrule, we may see our own earth become cold, crystalline and dead as the other barren all-rock worlds of our solar system - and then the evil rocks really will have won over life.
