C.L. Moore's "Dust of Gods": Materiality, Spirituality, and "Anti-Science" Fiction

This morning I read the story, "Dust of Gods," by C.L. Moore. Because I may be studying her for my dissertation, I thought I'd share some thoughts with you regarding this story.

C.L. Moore (1911-1987)

Who is C.L. Moore? She's a wonderful pulp writer who published in (in addition to other places) Weird Tales. Her most important contribution, I'm inclined to believe, is to the "sword and sorcery" sub-genre of fantasy. Her character of Jirel of Joiry is one of the earliest female sword and sorcery characters and is a precursor, I think, to such strong feminine warriors as... hmm... Molly the Razor Girl in Neuromancer, Xena the Warrior Princess, and, say, Kara Thrace (i.e. "Starbuck") from Battlestar Galactica. If you haven't heard of her or read her work, "Dust of Gods" might be a good story to start with; however, it doesn't feature Jirel, who, I think, is her most famous creation.

What is "Dust of Gods" about? The narrative is a traditional "infiltrate a forbidden dungeon/underworld" narrative. This is an old time narrative, with many, many precedents in the Western literary tradition: Gilgamesh's search for Utnapishtim in the land beyond; Odysseus's decent into the underworld; Aeneas's descent into the underworld; Dante's descent into hell; and onward to, I'd suggest, more recent "dungeon crawls" in the Dungeons and Dragons / sword and sorcery tradition.

But it's in the specific plot elements and not in the general narrative structure that this story delights.

Basic plot summary: It's about a space mercenary, Northwest Smith, who is, many have suggested, the model for Han Solo of the Star Wars universe. Smith and his sidekick, the Venusian, Yorel, have been contracted by an eccentric fellow to go and find an interesting artifact: the "dust" of some god. This eccentric man explains that, in order for the gods of other worlds to manifest into our world, they need to take "material shape." And, while these gods are immortal, their mortal/material shapes are subject to degradation. And so, the "dust" Northwest Smith and Yarol are hired to go and find it a kind of husk left over after an extradimensional god has infiltrated our world and left.

I won't spoil things by relating the interesting journey in search of the dust. Suffice it to say, it's worth a read and filled with thrills.

I do want to comment briefly on what I see as a very interesting theme that pervades this story (and C.L. Moore's fiction, in general). And this theme is the tension between the material and the spiritual, i.e. the worldly and the otherworldly.

In this story a major premise is the distinction between two separate realms of existence: the material world of mortals and the immaterial worlds of the gods. A lot of the tension grows out of the interplay between these two worlds.

It's interesting because, to a large extent, we might look upon these Northwest Smith stories as proto-science-fictional. Why so? They take place in space. There are ray guns. There are intergalactic empires. And yet--the material/empirical vision of the world science is founded on is critiqued in these stories. It's as if, according to the logic of this story, the suggestion is made that this world, the material world of the senses, is suspect. Not only is this "soft" science fiction. It's "anti-science" fiction.


I definitely need some help to make a case for this. There's a anthropological theorist of modernity, Bruno Latour, who, in his famous study We Have Never Been Modern (1991), suggests that the key to understanding the vision of the world prevalent in the modern Western world is to acknowledge its emphasis on two realms: (1) the world of the senses, the objective world of matter, and (2) the world of culture, the mind, the spiritual. According to Latour in his book, "Modern" "Western" folk distinguish between the subjective world and the objective world, a distinction, he suggests, not made by everyone else.

What attracts me to C.L. Moore's story, here, is that it seems to play with blurring the lines between these two ontological planes. The spiritual and the material get mixed up. And so, in narrative form, we have a kind of critique of a first principle of a scientific worldview. She's not writing "soft" science ficiton. She's writing "anti-science" fiction.