“…some people take drugs to chemically induce a happiness they cannot otherwise achieve; others drink to excess for the same reason. Still others throw themselves into religious frenzies in a bout of self-intoxication. All are seeking happiness. But happiness, even Heaven, is the absence of further progress. When one is happy, one wants no more than that, and will spend his life in a search to keep the brain’s pleasure center permanently on. It is the essence of humanity. We learn, we progress, by our unending quest for eternal happiness—yet should we achieve it, it all stops.”
from Soul Rider book 3: Masters of Flux and Anchor
Jack Chalker published the Soul Rider series in the mid-Eighties, a bit after the first five novels in the Well World Series but before he returned to that earlier series in the Nineties. The first three novels in Soul Rider are really one extended story in three volumes. It starts by describing the adventures of a young girl, Cassie, who grows up in a rural farming community in a place called Anchor Logh. Her planet, World, consists of twenty-eight “Anchors” all surrounded by this mysterious energy called Flux. Anchors are really like very large islands. They have conventional Earth-like properties and seem quite ordinary: filled with farms or factories; people live, work, have children and die all under the watchful gaze of the matriarchal Church in conjunction with the patriarchal local government.
these three look pretty happy to me
Flux is something quite different and generally frightening to most of these “Anchor-folk.” It’s a kind of energy field surrounding the Anchors that some people can manipulate with their minds. The strongest, called “wizards,” can create anything they wish out of Flux, including changing human bodies and even minds to completely control all those around them less adept at handling Flux.
The Soul Rider is something unknown even to itself but at the start of the first novel it is inexplicably drawn to Cassie and enters her mind as a kind of symbiot. Through various complex political machinations, Cassie along with a number of other young people are sold into slavery to Flux. The story is very intricate, with lots of schemes and counter-schemes, and like all good sci-fi, finishes with a nail-biting confrontation with the “end of the world” where all the mysteries are more or less explained. There’s even a “scientific explanation” given for magic. Meanwhile it’s quite a ride.
Cassie gets tortured, brainwashed, becomes a saint, a powerful wizard, a mother, a wife and a mindless sex slave at various times throughout the book. Her children and loved ones fare little better. Much of the author’s philosophizing is about the relationship between men and women and the human tendency to exploit one another. These people are not nice and they use their powers, magical and technological, ruthlessly. Church leaders, wizards, warlords, husbands and wives, lovers, parents and children, scientists and dreamers all backstab, manipulate or otherwise mess with each other for personal ambition or revenge. By the end, everything all sort of “works out,” but at a dreadful cost.
It’s in this context that the wizard Mervyn, one of “the Nine” whose mission is to protect World from the opening of the “Hellgates,” makes those pessimistic comments about happiness quoted above. Is it really true that happiness is merely a chemical reaction that the brain is striving to maintain at all costs? Are we all seeking that kind of happiness, and would everything really stop if we achieved it?
I’m constantly hearing people tell me that they’d be happy if they could just find that perfect girl/boyfriend, get a better job, have more money or less debt, have better health, weigh less (or, rarely, more), were younger or older, were the other sex, looked more attractive, lived somewhere else, you name it. Yet so often after achieving one of these dreams; an example for me was moving to California, which I’d been sure would make me ecstatically happy; the effect gradually wears off. I still love it here but I’m not intoxicated with delight every day. That’s always the problem with these wishes, isn’t it?
I’m not sure that I can agree with old Mervyn that drugs or drink are a way to achieve this exalted level of happiness. There is no doubt that these things affect the mood and sometimes that’s in the happiness direction. So often, though, drugs and alcohol in serious users tend to cause more problems than anything else. These sad folk end up taking more and more not to feel good but to avoid thinking and feeling bad about all their problems, including the problem of their drug dependency itself. Drugs are a dead end if you ask me.
So where does that leave us? Is happiness a mirage? Chalker’s characters in the Soul Rider series realize many of their dreams at various times but are mostly left angry and miserable as time goes by. At their best, they are at peace with compromises that they’ve made with the powerful forces around them. That’s it, though. Not “happy,” just “O.K.”
Perhaps it’s the model of “happiness” that’s the real issue. Peak happiness happens, thank goodness! It simply never lasts. Feeling good all the time sounds great on paper, but maybe it’s kinda unrealistic. Why not adjust our expectations to fit better with reality? That’s what Cassie et al. finally did on World. How marvelous to have these joyful bursts from time to time. Working toward a sense of general wellbeing, not the vanishing ecstatic extreme, is my goal. I get the idea that Chalker thought so too. If that’s true, than at least we can safely put Mervyn’s fear of the end of progress to rest. It will never stop because permanent ecstatic happiness is always out of reach. That’s not as gloomy as it sounds. Personally I enjoy things more when they’re mixed with things that are less exciting. It’s the variety that makes stuff interesting.
Reading this three volume novel made me very happy, at least for a while. The story’s disturbing but also thrilling and thought provoking. That good feeling is already fading and I only finished the third novel last night. I suppose that I’ll have to start on something else soon to get that literary “rush” once again. But I’m still feeling fine right now.