The Road to Science Fiction

by James Gunn

  I heard Ayesha utter a sigh of relief as this light dawned upon us, which flowed we knew not whence.

  “It is well,” she said; “prepare to enter the very womb of the Earth, wherein she doth conceive the Life that ye see brought forth in man and beast—ay, in every tree and flower. Prepare, O Men, for here ye shall be born anew!”

  Swiftly she sped along, and after her we stumbled as best we might, our hearts filled like a cup with mingled dread and curiosity. What were we about to see? We passed down the tunnel; stronger and stronger grew the glow, reaching us now in great flashes like rays from a lighthouse, as one by one they are thrown wide upon the darkness of the waters. Nor was this all, for with the flashes came a soul-shaking sound like that of thunder and of crashing trees. Now we were through the passage, and—oh heavens!

  We stood in a third cavern, some fifty feet in length by perhaps as great a height, and thirty wide. It was carpeted with fine white sand, and its walls have been worn smooth by the action of fire or water. This cavern was not dark like the others—it was filled with a soft glow of rose-coloured light, more beautiful to look on than anything that can be conceived. But at first we saw no flashes, and heard no more of the thunderous sound. Presently, however, as we stood in amaze, gazing at the marvellous sight, and wondering whence the rosy radiance flowed, a dread and beautiful thing happened. Across the far end of the cavern, with a grinding and crashing noise—a noise so dreadful and awe-inspiring that we all trembled, and Job actually sank to his knees—there flamed out an awful cloud or pillar of fire, like a rainbow many-coloured, and like the lightning bright. For a space, perhaps forty seconds, it flamed and roared thus, turning slowly round and round; then by degrees the terrible noise ceased, and with the fire it passed away—I know not where—leaving behind it the same rosy glow that we had first seen.

  “Draw near, draw near!” cried Ayesha, with a voice of thrilling exultation. “Behold the Fountain and the Heart of Life as it beats in the bosom of this great world. Behold the Substance from which all things draw their energy, the bright Spirit of this Globe, without which it cannot live, but must grow cold and dead as the dead moon. Draw near, and wash you in those living flames, and take their virtue into your poor bodies in all its virgin strength—not as now it feebly glows within your bosoms, filtered thereto through the fine strainers of a thousand intermediate lives, but as it is here in the very fount and source of earthly Being.”

  We followed her through the rosy glow up to the head of the cave, till we stood before the spot where the great pulse beat and the great flame passed. And as we went we became sensible of a wild and splendid exhilaration, of the glorious sense of such a fierce intensity of Life that beside it the most buoyant moments of our strength seemed flat and tame and feeble. It was the mere effluvium of the fire, the subtle ether that it cast off as it rolled, entering into us, and making us strong as giants and swift as eagles.

  We reached the head of the cave, and gazed at each other in the glorious glow, laughing aloud in the lightness of our hearts and the divine intoxication of our brains—even Job laughed, who had not smiled for a week. I know that I felt as though the mantle of all the genius whereof the human intellect is capable had descended upon me. I could have spoken in blank verse of Shakespearian beauty; inspired visions flashed through my mind; it was as though the bonds of my flesh had been loosened, and had left the spirit free to soar to the empyrean of its unguessed powers. The sensations that poured in upon me are indescribable. I seemed to live more keenly, to reach to a higher joy, to sip the goblet of a subtler thought than ever it had been my lot to taste before. I was another and most glorified self, and all the avenues of the Possible were for a while laid open to my mortal footsteps.

  Then, suddenly, whilst I rejoiced in this splendid vigour of a new-found self, from far away there came the dreadful muttering noise, that grew and grew to a crash and a roar, which combined in itself all that is terrible and yet splendid in the possibilities of sound. Nearer it came, and nearer yet, till it was close upon us, rolling down like all the thunderwheels of heaven behind the horses of the lightning. On it travelled, and with it the glorious blinding cloud of many-coloured light, and stood before us for a space, slowly revolving, as it seemed to us; then, accompanied by its attendant pomp of sound, it passed away I know not whither.

  So astonishing was the wondrous sight that one and all of us, save She, who stood up and stretched her hands towards the fire, sank down before it, and hid our faces in the sand.

  When it was gone Ayesha spoke.

  “At length, Kallikrates,” she said, “the moment is at hand. When the great flame comes again thou must bathe in it; but throw aside the garments, for it will burn them, though thee it will not hurt. Thou must stand in the fire while thy senses will endure, and when it embraces thee suck the essence down into thy very heart, and let it leap and play around thy every limb, so that thou lose no moiety of its virtue. Hearest thou me, Kallikrates?”

  “I hear thee, Ayesha,” answered Leo, “but, of a truth—I am no coward—but I doubt me of that raging flame. How know I that it will not utterly destroy me, so that I lose myself and lose thee also? Nevertheless I will do it,” he added.

  Ayesha thought for a minute, and then said—

  “It is not wonderful that thou shouldst doubt. Tell me, Kallikrates: if thou seest me stand in the flame and come forth unharmed, wilt thou enter also?”

  “Yes,” he answered, “I will enter even if it slay me. I have said that I will enter now.”

  “And that will I also,” I cried.

  “What, my Holly!” she laughed aloud; “methought that thou wouldst naught of length of days. Why, how is this?”

  “Nay, I know not,” I answered, “but there is that in my heart which calleth to me to taste of the flame, and live.”

  “It is well,” she said. “Thou art not altogether lost in folly. See now, I will for the second time bathe me in this living bath. Fain would I add to my beauty and to my length of days, if that be possible. If it be not possible, at the least it cannot harm me.

  “Also,” she continued, after a momentary pause, “there is another and a deeper cause why I would once again dip me in the fire. When first I tasted of its virtue my heart was full of passion and of hatred of that Egyptian Amenartas, and therefore, despite my strivings to be rid of them, passion and hatred have been stamped upon my soul from that sad hour to this. But now it is otherwise. Now is my mood a happy mood, and I am filled with the purest part of thought, and thus I would ever be. Therefore, Kallikrates, will I once more wash and make me pure and clean, and yet more meet for thee. Therefore also, when in turn thou dost stand in the fire, empty all thy heart of evil, and let contentment hold the balance of thy mind. Shake loose thy spirit’s wings, muse upon thy mother’s kiss, and turn thee toward the vision of the highest good that hath ever swept on silver wings across the silence of thy dreams. For from the seed of what thou art in that dread moment shall grow the fruit of what thou shalt be for all unreckoned time.

  “Now, prepare thee, prepare! even as though thy last hour were at hand, and thou wast about to cross through Death to the Land of Shadow, and not by the Gates of Glory into the realm of Life made beautiful. Prepare, I say, Kallikrates!”

  1 It will be observed that Ayesha’s account of the death of Kallikrates differs materially from that written on the potsherd by Amenartas. The writing on the sherd says, “Then in her rage did she smite him by her magic, and he died.” We never ascertained which was the correct version, but it will be remembered that the body of Kallikrates showed a spear-wound in the breast, which seems conclusive, unless, indeed, it was inflicted after death. Another thing that we never ascertained was how the two women—She and the Egyptian Amenartas—were able to bear the corpse of the man they both loved across the dread gulf and down the shaking spur. What a spectacle the two distracted creatures must have presented in their grief and loveliness as they toiled along that awful place with the dead man be
tween them! Probably, however, its passage was easier then. — L. H. H.

  The New Frontier

  Just one year after the publication of She, with its romantic look toward the past, Edward Bellamy (1851–1898) published a book that would spur the world’s interest in utopias and reinforce its belief in progress. The book was Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888), and within two years Houghton, Mifflin reported the printing of 300,000 copies. Everyone was reading and talking about it, and serious attempts were underway to turn the book’s vision of a better world into reality, with the formation of more than 150 Nationalist clubs, the incorporation of its programs into a political party, and the creation of two journals, The Nationalist and The New Nation.

  The idealistic lectures of Looking Backward are barely clothed with story, but the book had sufficient suspense to induce hundreds of thousands of readers to read the lectures in order to discover what happened to the man who slept for more than a century and woke up in a new era of human decency and scientific wonders. And the book ends with Bellamy’s happy inspiration to reverse the traditional disappointment of having the hero wake up to find his Utopia is only a dream: Julian West wakes up to find that he has been dreaming, but the dream that has troubled his sleep is that he awakened in the awful past.

  The United States came to the utopia late. William Dean Howells (1837–1920), himself a utopian writer with A Traveller from Altruria (1894), believed that the frontier was responsible: It had absorbed the discontented. But as 1900 approached the frontier was ending and men’s thoughts began to turn toward improving his situation where he was. Howells wrote:

  If a man got out of work, he turned his hand to something else; if a man failed in business, he started in again from some other direction; as a last resort, in both cases, he went West, pre-empted a quarter section of public land and grew up with the country. Now the country is grown up; the public land is gone; business is full on all sides, and the hand that turned itself to something else has lost its cunning. The struggle for life has changed from a free fight to an encounter of disciplined forces and the free fighters that are left get ground to pieces between organized labor and organized capital.

  Political reorganization has been a part of utopian works since The Republic, and in this Bellamy offered nothing new. His utopia was a kind of humanitarian socialism, although it was not generally recognized as socialistic during his lifetime. What Looking Backward brought to the utopia was the concept of the future; instead of existing nowhere, the utopia existed in the future. That gave the vision promise for everyone and a kind of new reality. Ironically, the end of the old frontier gave humanity a new frontier—the future. And in that future was another promise, equally new, that science could help usher humanity into a new world of plenty.

  English writers had gone through a similar process a few years before. Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) published a utopian novel called The Coming Race (1871) about an underground race called the Vril-Ya because they use an all-penetrating electricity called Vril (which inspired the name of an English beef beverage, Bovril), who have evolved into intellectually and emotionally superior beings. But some of Bulwer-Lytton’s fellow writers disagreed with him about the benefits of science.

  Samuel Butler (1835–1902) located his utopia in the interior of New Zealand when he wrote Erewhon (1872); there an advanced civilization has discarded machinery because machinery, too, can evolve, develop consciousness, and eventually enslave man. W. H. Hudson (1841–1922) wrote A Crystal Age (1887), a utopia in which future Englishmen wear togas and till the soil. William Morris (1834–1896) also advocated the destruction of machinery in News from Nowhere (1890).

  After the initial successes of his pessimistic scientific romances, H. G. Wells (1866–1946) fell under the influence of the Fabian socialists (who, he wrote, did “much to deflect me from the drift toward a successful, merely literary career into which I was manifestly falling”) and turned to writing propaganda novels about utopias governed by scientists and engineers, filled with scientific marvels and mechanical plenty though often after the intervention of a terrible war, as in the classic science-fiction film he helped script, Things to Come (1936). In contrast, Wells’s early scientific romance When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) not only used Bellamy’s plot device but may have been written in reaction to Bellamy’s vision (and incorporating its plot device, a protagonist who awakes after more than a century asleep); in the novel a future of scientific progress is marred by the tyranny of a small group of rulers who force the poor into a Labour Company.

  In reaction partly to Bellamy but mostly to Wells’s later propaganda novels an entire genre of anti-utopian (or dystopian, for “bad place”) works developed, beginning with E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” continuing through Evgennii Zamiatin’s We (1924), and reaching its high point with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949).

  The utopian vision of a future in which want and privation would be eliminated by technology, and tyranny by wise laws, prevailed in the science-fiction magazines through much of the 1930s and 1940s, although frequent examples of the dystopian antithesis appeared as well. The Space Merchants (1953) by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth brought the full-fledged anti-utopia into the magazines but with a unique science-fiction emphasis on plausibility. The anti-utopian view prevails today, perhaps as a direct consequence of two world wars and the U.S. trial of arms and conscience in Asia, which did much to disillusion a generation of young people and introduce new strains of dissent into society.

  The utopian concepts of Bellamy still survive as at least a background philosophy in the work of a number of contemporary science fiction writers. They were particularly noticeable in the work of Mack Reynolds (1917–1983), himself a sometime labor organizer for the Socialist Labor Party for which his father was twice a presidential candidate; Reynolds acknowledged his debt to Bellamy with his own version of Looking Backward and an emphasis on the year 2000.

  From Looking Backward, 2000–1887

  BY EDWARD BELLAMY

  1

  I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857. “What!” you say, “eighteen fifty-seven? That is an odd slip. He means nineteen fifty-seven, of course.” I beg pardon, but there is no mistake. It was about four in the afternoon of December the 26th, one day after Christmas, in the year 1857, not 1957, that I first breathed the east wind of Boston, which, I assure the reader, was at that remote period marked by the same penetrating quality characterizing it in the present year of grace, 2000.

  These statements seem so absurd on their face, especially when I add that I am a young man apparently of about thirty years of age, that no person can be blamed for refusing to read another word of what promises to be a mere imposition upon his credulity. Nevertheless I earnestly assure the reader that no imposition is intended, and will undertake, if he shall follow me a few pages, to entirely convince him of this. If I may, then, provisionally assume, with the pledge of justifying the assumption, that I know better than the reader when I was born, I will go on with my narrative. As every schoolboy knows, in the latter part of the nineteenth century the civilization of today, or anything like it, did not exist, although the elements which were to develop it were already in ferment. Nothing had, however, occurred to modify the immemorial division of society into the four classes, or nations, as they may be more fitly called, since the differences between them were far greater than those between any nations nowadays, of the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant. I myself was rich and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all the elements of happiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in that age. Living in luxury, and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others, rendering no sort of service in return. My parents and grandparents had lived in the same way, and I expected that my descendants, if I had any, would enjoy a like easy existence.

  But how could I live withou
t service to the world? you ask. Why should the world have supported in utter idleness one who was able to render service? The answer is that my great-grandfather had accumulated a sum of money on which his descendants had ever since lived. The sum, you will naturally infer, must have been very large not to have been exhausted in supporting three generations in idleness. This, however, was not the fact. The sum had been originally by no means large. It was, in fact, much larger now that three generations had been supported upon it in idleness, than it was at first. This mystery of use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting the burden of one’s support on the shoulders of others. The man who had accomplished this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live on the income of his investments. To explain at this point how the ancient methods of industry made this possible would delay us too much. I shall only stop now to say that interest on investments was a species of tax in perpetuity upon the product of those engaged in industry which a person possessing or inheriting money was able to levy. It must not be supposed that an arrangement which seems so unnatural and preposterous according to modern notions was never criticized by your ancestors. It had been the effort of lawgivers and prophets from the earliest ages to abolish interest, or at least to limit it to the smallest possible rate. All these efforts had, however, failed, as they necessarily must so long as the ancient social organizations prevailed. At the time of which I write, the latter part of the nineteenth century, governments had generally given up trying to regulate the subject at all.

  By way of attempting to give the reader some general impression of the way people lived together in those days, and especially of the relations of the rich and poor to one another, perhaps I cannot do better than to compare society as it then was to a prodigious coach which the masses of humanity were harnessed to and dragged toilsomely along a very hilly and sandy road. The driver was hunger, and permitted no lagging, though the pace was necessarily very slow. Despite the difficulty of drawing the coach at all along so hard a road, the top was covered with passengers who never got down, even at the steepest ascents. These seats on top were very breezy and comfortable. Well up out of the dust, their occupants could enjoy the scenery at their leisure, or critically discuss the merits of the straining team. Naturally such places were in great demand and the competition for them was keen, every one seeking as the first end in life to secure a seat on the coach for himself and to leave it to his child after him. By rule of the coach a man could leave his seat to whom he wished, but on the other hand there were many accidents by which it might at any time be wholly lost. For all that they were so easy, the seats were very insecure, and at every sudden jolt of the coach persons were slipping out of them end falling to the ground, where they were instantly compelled to take hold of the rope and help to drag the coach on which they had before ridden so pleasantly. It was naturally regarded as a terrible misfortune to lose one’s seat, and the apprehension that this might happen to them or their friends was a constant cloud upon the happiness of those who rode.