Passing for Human

“She was learning to be human. That meant being split into a million confused, unhappy fragments.”

If Ursula Le Guin popped two handfuls of psilocybin mushrooms with Terence McKenna and they both went on a motorcycle trip with Jim Morrison and Hunter S. Thompson, the four of them together might conjure a novel like Passing for Human. The story is part Zelazny mythos, part Barrington Bayley space opera, and it has the succinct perspicacious psychological insight that writers like Barry Malzberg wielded with gusto. That razor-sharp edge of the intelligent and witty cynic.

This forgotten work is a lost gem of science fiction. Jody Scott only wrote three novels and a handful of short stories. It’s unfortunate that the paperback market of the time didn’t bother collecting her oeuvre — most of it now buried in long-forgotten digests and magazines.

Passing for Human follows the adventures of a race of alien gods who send their best anthropologists to Earth to determine whether humanity can be saved from destruction given its pessimistic condition. Although these aliens carry a smug superiority complex, they’re not immune to the very tendencies they condemn in us. This is no oversight — it’s Scott’s point. The entire ladder of consciousness may be subject to a strange form of inimical pollution. It raises the metaphysical question: what even is universal morality? What qualities constitute the perfect being?

My only point of contention with Scott is one of perception. She is a scathing cynic — and I understand why. But humanity is not just a seething ocean of malevolence, swallowing goodness en masse through black whirlpools. Still, I sympathize — especially considering the era this book was written. We are a curious, creative species that, even for generations at a time, may forget the very essence that drives us: the underlying, if unstable, propensity for goodness. Now, where that goodness comes from, or how we preserve it — that remains the mystery. An eternal one. Many of her points are difficult to contend with:

“The System is always a mirror of the mass mind.”

“Reality is just frozen imagination.”

“She had a firm grasp of the three Basics: defending self loudly; keeping the finger of blame pointed at others; and selling out to the highest bidder while in the very act of boasting of own loyalty.”

“It’s very complicated but humans out of jealousy always kill off the true creators and artists. Then they either start a religion on the bones, or they express grave concern and shift the blame.”

Scott diagnoses humanity with a perennial condition of the collective impulse to look in the wrong place for solutions. Symptoms of cultural malaise are merely managed, medicated, and driven underground until their inevitable relapse. She outlines our inability to comprehend collective need, let alone individual need. She raises an important issue on why creative insight or behavior is ridiculed out of people during childhood. And questions why we cement ourselves in adulthood with negative mantras that perpetuate and justify the conditions of the world: “That’s just the way things are.”

Jody has composed an exceptional tale showcasing the utter bizarreness of human behavior. She offers a bird’s-eye perspective of the unfolding psychodrama we perform. The ever-rampaging coalescence of elation and sorrow, the manifold roles and masks adorned by sleeping bodies, the idols of gluttony and progress, our culturally projected emblems of desire that manifest our own willful bondage, the beauty of our romantic spontaneity and quixotic daydreams. She reminds you to just pause for a moment, and consider that we are a strange isolated accident of conscious emergence on a seemingly random but perfectly positioned blue rock in an ever-expanding universe attached to a dying star.