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

by Alexei Panshin

  This was a relatively minor story, but it yielded a major implication. It suggested that the nonce worlds of Dunsanian fantasy and the strange new realms lately reached by the alien explorers of scientific fiction might not be different and distinct, but the very same places.

  There were even more important symbolic mergings in Merritt’s first great popular successes, the 1918 All-Story novelet and the 1919 serial that together went to make up the novel The Moon Pool. In these stories, his characters encounter apparently supernatural beings in an underground realm beneath the Pacific Ocean, first the monstrous Dweller in the Moon Pool and then the godlike Taithu.

  One character—the young Irish airman, Larry O’Keefe—takes the Dweller for a banshee and identifies the Taithu with the Tuatha Dé Danann of Irish legend. But, alternatively, Dr. Goodwin, the botanist narrator, theorizes that the Dweller is the product of lost race superscience and that the Taithu are a natural result of the processes of evolution:

  “ ‘I think,’ I said cautiously, ‘that we face an evolution of highly intelligent beings from ancestral sources radically removed from those through which mankind ascended.’ ”184

  He then goes on to take his argument for the existence of such evolutionarily superior creatures from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds:

  “The Englishman, Wells, wrote an imaginative and very entertaining book concerning an invasion of earth by Martians, and he made his Martians enormously specialized cuttlefish. There was nothing inherently improbable in Wells’s choice. Man is the ruling animal of earth today solely by reason of a series of accidents; under another series spiders or ants, or even elephants, could have become the dominant race.”185

  So which are the Taithu really? Are they Irish gods from the Land Under the Wave, or are they some variation of Wells’s evolutionarily advanced Big Brains? We can’t be sure, and since we can’t be sure, we must take them as both, or as either.

  The Moon Pool forces us to ask ourselves whether there is any meaningful difference between the transcendent beings of traditional fantasy and the new transcendent beings imagined in scientific fiction—or whether the two in essence might not be the same.

  But Merritt went even further than this in The Moon Pool toward reconciling old-fashioned supernatural mystery with science. In his stories, Wells had relied heavily for his effects on metaphor, analogy, and appeals to the limitless extent of the new scientific unknown. Burroughs had tossed in magical rays and new words like “radium” without much concern for their actual scientific meaning. But Merritt did genuine scientific homework. In The Moon Pool, he pioneered in the practice of sprinkling his pages with frequent scientific footnotes which speculated on the true nature of the marvels to be found in the underground realm and related them to actual contemporary science.

  Most significantly, when Dr. Goodwin is forced by his experiences to admit that the-world-that-really-is is not the same as the world we perceive, he immediately refers the reader to a discourse on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity that had been delivered by the British physicist A.S. Eddington the previous year. This was a remarkable anticipation by Merritt. At the time that he wrote The Moon Pool, the work of Albert Einstein was still generally unknown and its implications unappreciated.

  In 1919—after the serial version of the novel had appeared—a British expedition headed by Eddington would travel to the Atlantic to observe stars near the sun during an eclipse, and confirm a prediction by Einstein that light would be bent by the power of the sun’s gravity. And Einstein’s name would become an instant household word as the man who had altered the nature of space.

  But this public recognition would only come at the end of the year, at almost the same moment as the book publication of The Moon Pool. Merritt’s prescient reference to the new irrational theoretical physics of Einstein was an early recognition that Twentieth Century science might prove to be the source of mysteries fully as deep and strange and unfathomable as any that had ever been born of spirit.

  During the little All-Story renaissance of the late Teens, A. Merritt went far toward drawing the various pieces of SF literature together. He made fantasy more plausible and the new scientific fiction more fantastic. Merritt’s personal imaginative synthesis was an anticipation of that general consolidation of SF which would be achieved by Hugo Gernsback in Amazing Stories in 1926, and may have had a great deal to do with making it conceptually possible.

  The farthest reaches of Merritt’s vision of mystery simultaneously scientific and spiritual are to be found in The Metal Monster. This story was serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1920 soon after the two formerly separate general fiction pulp magazines were merged.

  Like The Moon Pool, at its outset The Metal Monster has the appearance of a lost race novel. However, it, too, soon develops into a story of the discovery of alien beings—in this case creatures of crystalline metal in various geometric forms, very much like the strange Shapes in J.H. Rosny aîné’s “Les Xipéhuz” (1887).

  The prospect of living and thinking metal beings terrifies the explorers and fills them with dread. Dr. Goodwin is forced to arrive at an incredible conclusion—that consciousness, far from being a solely biological phenomenon, must be innate in the very basis of the material universe. He asks himself:

  Consciousness itself—after all what is it? A secretion of the brain? The cumulative expression, wholly chemical, of the multitudes of cells that form us? The inexplicable governor of the city of the body of which these myriads of cells are the citizens—and created by them out of themselves to rule?

  Is it what many call the soul? Or is it a finer form of matter, a self-realizing force, which uses the body as its vehicle just as other forces use for their vestments other machines? After all, I thought, what is this conscious self of ours, the ego, but a spark of realization running continuously along the path of time within the mechanism we call the brain; making contact along that path as the electric spark at the end of a wire?

  Is there a sea of this conscious force which laps the shores of the farthest-flung stars; that finds expression in everything—man and rock, metal and flower, jewel and cloud? Limited in its expression only by the limitations of that which it animates, and in essence the same in all. If so, then this problem of the Metal People ceased to be a problem; was answered!186

  This is a magnificent vision! It reconciles the new materialistic science with the old spirit-based mystery in terms of consciousness—the universal consciousness of all existence.

  The sheer breadth encompassed by Merritt is immense. He was a Romantic, a lover of mystery. He was one of the last writers of SF to treat the metaphor of the soul with seriousness. He was the culmination of Nineteenth Century SF. He was a consolidator and integrator of the new scientifiction, one of the first writers to mark his text with scientific footnotes. During the hyper-materialistic era that followed his own, Merritt’s great visions—of omnipresent mystery, of unfathomable transcendence, and of universal consciousness—would serve as a continuing challenge, stimulus and reminder of unfulfilled possibility. Merritt’s work even reaches across the years to writers of the present with their radical crossbreedings of fantasy and science fiction and their explicit concern with states of consciousness.

  But even A. Merritt’s creative insight had its limits. Like the great SF writers who came before him, Merritt, too, came to a sticking point and could go no further. Or, perhaps it might be more accurate to say, eventually the times put too great a strain on Merritt’s fragile attempt to reconcile science and spirit, and it shattered in his hands.

  It is in the midst of The Metal Monster that the bubble bursts. Merritt was able to present a vision of universal consciousness, but he was not able to sustain it. Fear and negativity overwhelm his story and change its focus from the conscious force that finds its expression in everything to the lesser question of which mode of consciousness may be fittest to survive.

  When perceived with the eyes of fear, Merritt’s Metal Peo
ple begin to seem as implacably alien and relentlessly hostile as Wells’s Martians. They are revolted by our organic nature, which appears messy and unnatural to them. No real communication with these Shapes is possible, only a desperate struggle for survival.

  In this contest between metal life and human life, the Metal People have the advantage. They have the mathematical certitude and inexorability of cosmic law. They have direct awareness and command of energies both known to us and unknown.

  As in The War of the Worlds, humanity is saved from annihilation, but not through the power of its own efforts. Instead, the metal creatures self-destruct in a kind of civil war. There is the implication that the fragmentation of the Metal People’s formerly unified consciousness comes as a result of contamination by human anger, pride and sexual antagonism.

  The novel concludes with a re-evocation of the sense of cosmic mystery that opens the book—but now tainted with menace:

  For in that vast crucible of life of which we are so small a part, what other Shapes may even now be rising to submerge us?

  In that vast reservoir of force that is the mystery-filled infinite through which we roll, what other shadows may be speeding upon us?

  Who knows?187

  These were dark times. The doubt and fear that mark the ending of The Metal Monster were a reflection of the unhappiness, despair and loss of confidence that gripped the Western world in the aftermath of the Great War.

  In the half-dozen years that followed World War I, the world was stricken with epidemics, revolutions, massacres, starvation, economic turmoil, anarchy and subversion. It was a time of unsettlement and horror for many, a great psychic crashout.

  Even in the United States, so much less severely affected by the war than Europe or Britain, and so much less shaken by the war’s aftermath, there was a conviction that things were profoundly wrong, and a desperate search for scapegoats. There were political witchhunts and racial lynchings, labor violence, literary censorship, and laws passed against the teaching of evolution in schools.

  It was as though genteel society hoped that if only the right people could be stuffed back into their proper places—Communists, Negroes, anarchists, unionists, freethinkers, free-speakers, and scientists—then perhaps the world might be set right again. At the same time, there was profound disillusionment, bitterness and cynicism, and the numb suspicion that no matter what was done, things could never be set right.

  It seemed that the lost race mythos—like the future war story before it—had proven to be true. The Edwardian years before the war were looked back upon as some Golden Age of peace and ease whose like would never be seen again. Now civilization had fallen. Nothing was left but barbarity.

  This was a wild time and a very sad time. It was not by chance that the wounded youngsters who survived the war called themselves the Lost Generation. Their youth and innocence were gone, and civilization was dead. They were poor lost souls adrift and wandering through the cold material universe.

  Poor lost souls . . . If the Great War spelled the end to mighty Nineteenth Century civilization—the old order—it also made it impossible to go on any longer believing in the rational soul. The personal spiritual connection to God which had given life its meaning and purpose for so long now seemed implausible, a mere figment of religious wishful thinking.

  If men did have a higher nature, would they have fought this awful war? If God did exist, could he have allowed men with souls to create a hell on earth like this one?

  World War I and its bitter aftermath made Western people unbelievers. Certainly a great number of people did continue to consider themselves Christians, but after the Great War, Western society was clearly post-Christian, run with less and less regard for established religious notions of propriety.

  But if the soul was no longer credible and Christianity no longer a guide, how were people to know how to proceed? Many did not.

  This was a moment both of excess and of disgust with excess. Sex and drugs, which in the Teens had seemed to be modes of liberation, now took on overtones of decadent self-indulgence. Hollywood, the new sin and glamour capital of the West, was rocked by a string of scandals involving rape, murder and drug addiction, and the careers of a number of well-known movie stars were ruined.

  In its sense of revulsion at human grossness and animality, Merritt’s The Metal Monster was very much of this moment. In this climate, it was possible for organic existence to be perceived as inherently flawed, rotten and foul. A mistake. An aberrancy.

  The reciprocal of this disgust with the flesh can also be seen in The Metal Monster—an implicit admiration of the purity and simplicity of the metal Shapes. These postwar years were the period of the emergence of Art Deco; during the Twenties, the clean lines and unadorned efficiency of the machine would become a model for architecture and design.

  In the Twenties, more than at any moment before or since, the universe of space and time appeared to people in the guise of a perfect inexorable machine. Mankind—that soulless barbarian, that revolting cosmic error—seemed no better than some noxious fungus gumming up the works.

  The postwar years were not an easy period for SF. All the conflict at large in the world and all the uncertainty in people’s minds were reflected in SF literature. It was necessary for writers to decide what they really believed. They had to make the choice between science and superstition, between the God-given soul and a sterile universe without meaning.

  Making this decision was most difficult and agonizing for those writers from the old aristocracy—Britons, Europeans, and one gentleman from Virginia—who returned to imaginative literature after the hiatus of the war to produce some of the most heartfelt and striking work of the period. The soul, that phantasm, was the source of their personal and class superiority, while the new universe of the machine barbarians seemed both trivial and repulsive.

  It was only a very few among the established—scientific utopians like H.G. Wells, and lifelong scientific materialists like his elder French contemporary, J.H. Rosny aîné—who could muster the will, the nerve and the energy to make positive statements about science and the material universe. More typically, British and European writers of privilege looked upon the face of science and responded with cries of denial, disgust, abhorrence and fear.

  Some writers attempted evasion. The nonce worlds of fantasy seemed to offer the hope of a possible place of retreat from the disastrous Twentieth Century. In these nobler and more romantic regions, perhaps, mystery might still be magical, the fact of the soul might still be beyond doubt, and men of chivalric sensibility might still pursue higher purpose.

  But where were these fantasy worlds to be found?

  In one aristocratic fantasy, Jurgen (1919), by the Virginia novelist James Branch Cabell, such a place is imagined by the expedient of wrenching apart space and time. In a blank spot on the map, an area of Europe overlooked by mapmakers and geographers, in a time that never was, the gap between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, Cabell located his sometimes magical realm of Poictesme.

  In another aristocratic fantasy of the period, The Worm Ouroboros (1922), by the British civil servant and student of Old Norse, E.R. Eddison, the nominal setting is a place distant in space, the surface of the planet Mercury. But this imagined Mercury is a fanciful and unscientific realm that is reached by means of a deliberate dream.

  What fantasies such as these were attempting to flee was expressed by Cabell in one typically wry and ambivalent episode in Jurgen that combines a twitting of the titular character’s overweening egotism and a very genuine dismay at the meaningless nature of the universe as it was then understood.

  In an attempt to purge Jurgen of his illusions, the magician Merlin has sent Jurgen to visit a transcendent being—not named, but apparently the god Pan. This superior creature entertains Jurgen by revealing a vision of All to him. But the shadow show displayed to Jurgen is a depiction of the Twentieth Century Western worldview, and Jurgen will not an
d cannot accept that:

  “Fact! sanity! and reason!” Jurgen raged: “why, but what nonsense you are talking! Were there a bit of truth in your silly puppetry this world of time and space and consciousness would be a bubble, a bubble which contained the sun and moon and the high stars, and still was but a bubble in fermenting swill! I must go cleanse my mind of all this foulness. You would have me believe that men, that all men who have ever lived or shall ever live hereafter, that even I am of no importance! Why, there would be no justice in any such arrangement, no justice anywhere!”188

  But this denial cannot be convincing to us. As much as it is a protest, it is also an admission. Whether he likes it or not, Jurgen must grant that the fantasy realm of Poictesme is a part of “this world of time and space and consciousness.” And it is time, space and consciousness that are the parameters of the modem scientific universe.

  It would seem, then, that the fantasy worlds of Poictesme and Mercury are vulnerable to scientific criticism. Would the land of Poictesme wink out of existence if we were to insist on looking closely at our maps and reading our history books with care? And what would befall the fantastic Mercury of The Worm Ouroboros, land of humanlike Demons and Witches, if an astronomer should happen to point out the true feeble gravity, blazing temperatures, and absence of atmosphere on the planet Mercury?

  Lord Dunsany’s Time and the Gods and A. Merritt’s “Through the Dragon Glass” had previously implied that the nonce worlds of fantasy were open to invasion by universal scientific law and to subjugation by the power of technology. But what are we to make of fantasy worlds where the likes of Merlin and Pan—creatures of magic—disavow magic to become advocates of Twentieth Century Realism?