The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

  In the case of The Castle of Otranto, the treasure was the principle of irreducible transcendence, simultaneously mysterious and plausible. That insight was of the greatest relevance to the science fiction literature born one hundred years later.

  In the case of The Coming Race, the treasure was the recognition of the relativity and inadequacy of any and every term by which transcendent Truth might be represented for a time. As we will see, by the end of the Age of Technology, the concept of “science” would start wearing thin as a name for the fundamentally mysterious, and begin to be superseded by transcendence phrased in terms of “consciousness.” When we witness this happening, we would do well to remember that the mysterious something which Bulwer-Lytton called vril was simultaneously spiritual, rational, physical and mental.

  The Coming Race was a work with great influence in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. It was the model for a whole new form of utopian/occultist SF—the lost race story.

  The locations featured in this genre were freely borrowed from the utopian story—an isolated island, or a blank spot on the map, or the planet Mars. But the strange people discovered in these places wouldn’t be utopians devoted to showing visitors their decrees, ordinances, and good and wholesome laws.

  Instead, they would turn out to be people with a relationship to the familiar Village world, but radically out of place. They might, for instance, be the descendants of shipwrecked pirates. But more often they would have ancient or legendary antecedents. They would be survivors of sunken Atlantis, or some long-forgotten outpost of the Roman Empire.

  People hidden away from the world-at-large who have exalted origins and are the custodians of secret knowledge—this would be the occult aspect of the lost race story.

  However, the knowledge that the lost race possesses in these stories would most usually be scientific knowledge. At first, it might well look like the magic and miracles of myth and legend, especially if the lost people were of a lineage associated with such things. In time, however, these powers would be revealed to actually be ancient science of a kind still unknown to the outside world. In other cases, the special advanced knowledge might appear in a form more familiar to the Age of Technology—like the Sacred Locomotive101 which is venerated by an underground culture in one story of the 1890s.

  Lost race stories . . . future war stories . . . dime novel invention stories . . . tales of advanced science-beyond-science . . . As soon as science fiction began to exist, it did so in a multitude of forms.

  These initial forms were somewhat makeshift—crude and even a bit old-fashioned in appearance. In a sense, they were old bottles containing new wine. But what all of them had in common—what made them ultimately one thing—was that every one of them bowed to transcendent mystery wearing the guise of presently unknown higher powers of science.

  6: A Universe Grown Alien

  ALTHOUGH SCIENCE FICTION EXISTED IN a variety of forms as early as the 1870s, it would be more than a further fifty years before SF was named and defined as a literature in the pages of Amazing Stories. And when it was, we may remember, editor Hugo Gernsback would identify the new “scientifiction” he proposed to publish in terms of the works of three writers—Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells.

  Of these three seminal writers, it was Wells who was the most significant in the early development of SF. In practice, Gernsback would reprint only half-a-dozen stories each by Poe and Verne, but he would showcase an SF story by Wells in every single issue of Amazing for as long as he published the magazine. It was Wells who was the very model of a modern scientifiction writer.

  The reason for this is that while all three of Gernsback’s exemplary writers produced charming romances in which scientific fact was intermingled, a crucial difference separated the work of Wells from that of Poe and Verne. Wells presented a wholly new concept of the universe in his stories, and it was the Wellsian universe within which subsequent science fiction would be written.

  The universe as imagined by the Age of Reason, and the Romantic Period as well, was human-centered, comfortable and cozy. This universe was all too narrow, safe and regular for the wild Romantics, who aimed to reach beyond its limits and find mystery.

  Poe and Verne, Romantics both, had tested the boundaries of this constricting imagined universe, aiming to break loose from it. Traveling to the edges of the familiar Village and beyond, they had caught sight of the transcendent beings and transcendent realms of the World Beyond the Hill.

  But these glimpses of mystery had proved too much for them. Poe and Verne—each in turn was overwhelmed by what he saw. They saw strange realms and alien beings, but they identified this transcendence as Madness and Death and hastily retreated from it back into the safe confines of the Village.

  Wells went far beyond Poe and Verne. He shattered the boundaries altogether that divided the Village from the World Beyond the Hill. He destroyed the comfy, cozy human-centered universe of the rational utopians forever.

  In a brilliant series of scientific romances written during the 1890s—including such books as The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898)—Wells set forth the parameters of a radical new conceptual universe. This universe was derived from the cool-minded reasonings of science rather than from inherited religious assurances of God’s special concern for man and man’s privileged place in the world.

  The dimensions of this new scientific universe are reflected in the title of an early Wells story collection—Tales of Space and Time (1899). H.G. Wells might be called the first master of space and time.

  The Wellsian universe was vast and merciless, chilly and uncaring. It owed not a thing to mankind. It might even prove to be hostile to all of man’s ethics, all of man’s aspirations. But, almost magically, within the yawning reaches of this new universe it was possible to discover all of the transcendence that Poe and Verne had intuited but could not accept. Wells made it possible to imaginatively sustain the beings and realms that his Romantic predecessors had denied and rejected.

  Here, in the opening paragraph of The War of the Worlds, Wells specifically contrasts the attitudes of the narrow universe that was passing with the disquieting facts of the new universe of science:

  No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.102

  How fresh and powerful this writing is! And how completely different it is in style and tone from anything that we have seen before. Even as we are threatened with annihilation, our jaded spirit is restored. This brisk exact narration in itself speaks of new possibilities of thought and action.

  Science in Wells is no longer just a tool, a talisman, a convenient argument, a means to get from one place to another. No, science is everything here. It provides the frame of reference—the new universe of space and time. It is the model for Wells’s detached and analytical mode of thought. (“It i
s curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days.”) It even supplies Wells with his metaphoric microscope and his microbes.

  Most remarkable of all, how simultaneously lyrical and ghastly does Wells’s new vision contrive to be! As the infusoria—a word which means either a class of protozoans or the products of decay—under the microscope are to us, so may we be to greater intelligences than ourselves, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic. (Again and again Wells would be driven to use that word “vast.”) These beings—these alien Martians—may be as mortal as we are, but they are an older and more powerful race, evolved far beyond us. They lurk across the gulf of space, studying our weaknesses and limitations. Soon they will strike.

  Beware! says Wells. Tremble! The universe is not what you think it is, little man.

  It is nothing less than a “great disillusionment” that Wells is after. He means to bring the walls of the tidy Village world crashing down with a personally wielded power that is no less shattering in its effect than the destructive force of his invading Martians striding over the fallen ruins of familiar London.

  Wells means to reveal to a complacent mankind bent on its own little affairs the true nature of its relationship to the universe. Yet even so, while the initial impact may be one of disillusionment, we need to be aware that this disillusionment comes as the result of the unveiling of an awesome mystery—a new wider universe!

  Through the remainder of the Age of Technology, and even after, H.G. Wells would cast an immense shadow. The universe that was portrayed by Wells would be the universe in which SF stories would be set. And it would be the dangers and possibilities which Wells delineated in his stories of the Nineties that would be the central issues of science fiction.

  Herbert George Wells was born just prior to the dawning of the Age of Technology, on the 21st of September, 1866. That, we may remember, was the same year in which the late Romantic, Captain Nemo, was said to have been prowling the seas and sinking ships in his super-scientific submarine, the Nautilus. Wells was born in a suburb of London that was later to be engulfed by the city. His parents were former servants turned shopkeepers.

  And this marks a turn in our story. The makers of proto-SF, from Walpole to Bulwer-Lytton, were all lords, lesser nobility, aristocrats and gentlefolk. Bertie Wells was anything but that. He was from the upper fringes of the lower class, one small but significant step from being a peasant or laborer, a jumped-up Cockney determined enough and lucky enough to escape from the drapery shops that swallowed his two older brothers. It would be from common clay like Bertie Wells, persons on whom the impact of the Age of Technology was most marked, that the makers of Twentieth Century science fiction would come.

  It was a world in turmoil that Wells opened his eyes upon. At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, despite all the revaluations of the Age of Reason, despite the upset of the French Revolution, something like traditional society still held sway in most places. There were still kings and nobles and peasants, just as there had always been. But by the beginning of the Age of Technology, after a century of revolutions and the construction of new nation states, the familiar and comfortable old remnant feudal structure of society had been broken like Humpty Dumpty.

  The very nature and character of society had been altered. Society was now remaking itself into the image of giant engines run by masters of machinery, the Bosses.

  The new superior class was not an aristocracy of blood and breeding, as before, but capitalists, plutocrats, men whose only recommendation was that they controlled money. New gigantic businesses were ruled by corporate overlords, captains of industry. There were steel barons, rail barons, oil barons, coal barons, wheat barons, even sleeping car barons—autocrats to rule over every aspect of commerce and industry. It was the era of the sweatshop and of machine politics.

  The underclass of society was now no longer the rural peasant, but rather urban industrial laborers—proletarians. These were people who had been forced off the land and set to work in the mills, factories and foundries. There they were used up, worn out, and then discarded. In the late Nineteenth Century, these proles rocked society by rebelling against their lot, by striking, by struggling to organize themselves into great powerful machines of their own, the labor unions.

  The Western nations acted no differently. They set up the machinery of empire and made themselves the bosses of the world. During the 1880s and 1890s, in exactly the same manner that the new giant corporations banded together in trusts and cartels in an attempt to lessen competition, divide territories, monopolize markets and maximize profits, so did the countries of Europe. They dismembered the continent of Africa. They divided the whole world up into spheres of influence.

  It was a ruthless time. If the machine was the model for society, the justification for the moral style of the Technological Age was adapted from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, the deepest and most complete explanation of the meaning of existence that the new religion of science had to offer. Social Darwinism was the philosophy of the day, and the message that was drawn from Darwin by the Age of Technology was this: “Struggle to exist. If you are fit, you may survive.”

  No wonder then that the most prominent citizens of the advanced Western nations should feel obliged to consolidate all the wealth and power they could, to seek personal advantage wherever it could be found, and to deliver a ruthless justice to the poor, the weak and the backward. They couldn’t help themselves. That was what the struggle for existence was all about. To think otherwise and to act otherwise would be foolhardy.

  Like everyone else, Bertie Wells had to struggle to exist. However, he wasn’t fit by any standard. He was a small and sickly child. But, strangely enough, he managed to negotiate the minefield of late Nineteenth Century society by failing his way to success. One illness, accident and disaster after another honed and turned and shaped Wells just so, to make him that one person in the Nineties prepared to recognize the new insecure universe of space and time and man’s precarious place within it.

  Wells’s parents kept a china and glass shop, but sold little ware. His father was a well-known local cricket player, and sold bats and balls in the shop. Otherwise he was a dreamer. Wells’s mother, a conventionally pious former lady’s maid, had all the family ambition. Her idea of success was a good steady position in a cloth shop, and she apprenticed all three of her sons to drapers.

  When he was seven, Bertie was tossed into the air by an older boy and accidentally dropped. His leg was broken. And this was his first stroke of good fortune. During his enforced confinement, the boy became a compulsive reader.

  When Wells was eleven, there was a second broken leg, this time his father’s. Joseph Wells fell off a ladder while trimming a grapevine and fractured his thigh. His cricket-playing career was brought to an end, and the dusty china shop became insufficient to support the family. Wells’s mother, Sarah, went back into domestic service, becoming the housekeeper of Up Park, the country estate of her former mistress, Miss Fetherstonhaugh (pronounced Fanshaw).

  And this was another blessing in disguise. Bertie, at the times he was living with his mother, was given the run of the library at Up Park. Here he encountered Shelley and Voltaire, read the unexpurgated Gulliver’s Travels, and discovered the first account of a model society, Plato’s Republic.

  This paradise was never to last. Bertie was apprenticed no less than three times, twice to drapers and once to a pharmacist. Each time he contrived to fail. He was dismissed as incompetent, he argued his way free, or he simply walked away. Each time he returned to Up Park and the library.

  What Wells really wanted was education, and in between his failed apprenticeships he was sent to one minimal school after another. Eventually he was offered a position as student assistant at Midhurst Grammar School, the first of a number of teaching jobs that he would hold in secondary schools and cram colleges, the new hastily established educational institutions of the late Nineteenth Century.

  England h
ad found the advanced European technology displayed at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 profoundly disturbing. An Education Act had been passed in 1871 as a reaction to the Franco-Prussian War, that even more unsettling display of European technology. In later life, Wells would speak regretfully of his lack of genuine education when he was young, but at least the Education Act of 1871 provided him with a certain space for self-education within the shelter of one half-established or fraudulent school after another.

  The nearest that Wells came to any proper education at all was the three years from 1884 to 1887 that he spent at the Normal School of Science, a college for teachers of science in South Kensington, London. Wells arrived at the Normal School by passing a number of exams for his own reasons and winning an unanticipated scholarship.

  And for a time he was in his element. Bertie was the prime mover in the establishment of a school magazine, the Science Schools Journal. He edited the magazine and contributed a wide variety of material to it. And he took an active part in the Debating Society, experimenting with the utterance of unthinkable ideas.

  The best part of his formal education at the Normal School was the first year spent studying biology and zoology under Thomas Huxley, whom Wells admired vastly. Huxley, known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” had become famous as a champion of the theory of evolution. In an 1860 debate that had insured the acceptability of evolution—if not won its immediate acceptance—Huxley had made a monkey out of his opponent, Bishop “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce. Huxley was the era’s chief spokesman for the scientific point of view.

  Huxley’s influence on Wells was brief but it was crucial. Early in the year, Huxley became ill and soon had to withdraw. It was to be his last year of teaching.

  In Wells’s second year, his attention began to turn to his extracurricular activities and his grades slipped badly. In the third year of his three-year course he did so disastrously that his scholarship was withdrawn and he had to drop out of college. Not finishing at the Normal School meant that Wells had unfitted himself for a successful career as a teacher or scientist. To all appearances, he had placed himself on an evolutionary sidetrack.