Books: Worlds in Collusion

THE SPACE-GODS REVEALED

by RONALD STORY

139 pages. Harper & Row. $7.95.

THE SIRIUS MYSTERY

by ROBERT K.G. TEMPLE

290 pages. St. Martin's Press. $10.95.

Astronomy is the oldest science, yet for most terrestrials the night sky remains a confusing game of join the dots. Faced with incomprehensible distances, intimidating mathematics and names like Triangulum Australe, the temptation is to do one's stargazing on the Tonight show. But the attraction to heavenly bodies persists. In an age when science and philosophy dress in basic black, colorful beliefs about the personal influence of the stars flourish—particularly in a specialized union of pseudo scholarship and science fiction that could be called fiction science. Like astrology or its medieval cousin alchemy, fiction science tries to explain the unknown through a system of symbolic beliefs—a kind of mythology purportedly based on scientific reason. Like religion, FS's principal aim is to explain the mysterious origin of life on earth. In that sense, the Arthur C. Clarke of Childhood's End and 2001 is a fiction scientist.

Mass UFOria. Bookstore browsers can testify that the FS imagination has been working overtime. Currently the best-read fiction science (more than 30 million paperback copies sold) is Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods? and its sequels. Von Däniken, a former Swiss hotelman and convicted embezzler with no formal scientific training, professes the notion that the species Homo sapiens was created when astronauts from outer space descended to earth about 10,000 years ago and copulated with apes. It was a kind of one-night stand. According to the author, the satiated aliens soon left for new worlds, leaving the seeds of civilization—and the banana.

The Space-Gods Revealed by Ronald Story is a coherent and much-needed refutation of Von Däniken's theories. Robert K.G. Temple's The Sirius Mystery argues with some sophistication the likelihood that superior beings from Sirius visited earth between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. Both books are squarely in a modern fiction-science mode that had its recent renaissance during the early '50s when the country was overtaken by mass UFOria.

As nearly everyone recalls, while President Dwight David Eisenhower was putting on the White House lawn, reported flying-saucer sightings became almost as common as Studebakers. Dozens of books and articles were generated by the UFO phenomenon. A chosen few earthlings even claimed contact with extraterrestrials. Descriptions varied, from garden-variety little green men to simple aliens who resembled Italians dressed like Greyhound bus drivers. Reactions to UFOs usually depended on one's interests, angst and reflexes. While the jittery Air Force launched a top-secret investigation to prove whether or not the saucers were real, Psychoanalyst Carl Jung groped for a different sort of explanation. Flying saucers, he speculated, were really psychic projections of mankind's hope for the existence of a higher power in a frightening and chaotic world.