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

by Alexei Panshin

  What we can say of these particular fantasy realms is that they were compromised as soon as they were conceived. If they are magical places, it is only that they appear magical to us for as long as we are willing to make believe. The very instant science begins to inquire into them seriously, they must become anomalous and implausible.

  Like Lord Dunsany, their primary model, Cabell and Eddison were aware that the old values expressed in fantasy had become unfounded, and that new values reigned. And persisted in writing fantasy anyway. But a fantasy tinged by irony and self-doubt.

  It is not surprising that both Jurgen and The Worm Ouroboros should undercut their own ideals of magic, chivalry and romance even as they presented them. As much as these books were protests against the Twentieth Century, they were also typical expressions of the Twentieth Century, touched by the postwar blight at the very instant they cried out against it. Both of these books had moments when old-fashioned idealistic morality was replaced by the new cynical hard-boiled pragmatism. And there were other moments in each book when the contemporary mood broke in and cool rational calculation suddenly gave way to shudders of physical and sexual revulsion.

  Ultimately, these postwar aristocratic fantasies were not at all successful in evading the modern scientific universe that they so despised. It is by no accident that both Jurgen and The Worm Ouroboros (a title that refers to the world-girdling serpent that bites its own tail) were circular in construction, ending just where they began, with nothing changed or accomplished by the passage of four hundred pages. These fantasies aimed to run away from the scientific universe, only to be thrown back into it by a kind of self-applied, self-defeating judo move.

  With entirely appropriate irony, Cabell’s Jurgen became a success through a great public scandal. This witty and elliptical expression of uneasiness at the nature of the modern world was condemned by the American Society for the Suppression of Vice as a work of obscenity and was banned from sale for twenty months during 1920 and 1921—which had the contrary result of making this elitist work a popular bestseller. And the biggest joke, of course, was on all of those readers who bought this fantasy expecting to find it pornographic.

  There were other aristocratic SF books during this postwar period that did not attempt to take flight from the foul and unjust Twentieth Century scientific universe, that unavoidable fact, but instead—queasily, unhappily, even masochistically—submitted to its power. Two books by British writers may serve as examples of this disgusted acknowledgment of gross matter.

  David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) was a simultaneously brilliant and murky occult SF novel. It told the tale of a trip to the planet Tormance, a place where fears and desires are given form and body. The gnostic conclusion of this story was that all material existence is the creation of a demonic demiurge whose snares of pleasure entice Spirit and then entrap it into shameful, unbearable degradation by Matter.

  The Amphibians (1924), by S. Fowler Wright, was a time travel story that made reference to H.G. Wells. In this novel, the superior beings of half-a-million years from now are a commentary on the limitations of our physical nature. They are asexual creatures, and are also exempt from our need for food and sleep. They are even able to shed their vestigial bodies and then reincarnate at will. These mental beings view their human visitor from our imperfect era with a horror that he compares to that aroused in him by the sight of a maggot-ridden sheep.

  H.G. Wells himself was one of the very few writers of standing who were able to look upon science and its works without despair. For more than twenty years, Wells had been the Western world’s primary advocate of scientific progress. Even in the aftermath of World War I, science still seemed to him to offer men their only hope of survival. Wells blamed human selfishness and limitation for the great disaster, not monster science.

  In Men Like Gods (1923), his last radically innovative SF story, Wells presented one more version of scientific utopia, this time set on another Earth in a parallel universe. This other Earth is both a near analog of the contemporary early Twentieth Century world and also radically advanced beyond it. Wells’s party of characters does not arrive in this place through its own choice. Instead, it is swept up in the net of a dimensional experiment conducted by two Utopians.

  This has its own special importance. It is the first suggestion that our own little Village world might not be of primary importance, but might be subject to higher science being operated from the World Beyond the Hill.

  Indeed, what was most original about this book—as well as most mysterious—was not its utopian proposals, largely familiar by now, but rather its radical new argument for the existence of a multiplicity of worlds. In the course of justifying his alternate world, his improved near-variant of our own Earth, Wells, with his immense gift for effective analogy, presented an imaginational theory that not only accounted for the existence of this one random world, but embraced all of the various alternative worlds and alien realms that fantasy stories and scientific fiction had of late been investigating:

  Serpentine proceeded to explain that just as it would be possible for any number of practically two-dimensional universes to lie side by side, like sheets of paper, in a three dimensional space, so in the many dimensional space about which the ill-equipped human mind is still slowly and painfully acquiring knowledge, it is possible for an innumerable quantity of practically three-dimensional universes to lie, as it were, side by side and to undergo a roughly parallel movement through time. The speculative work of Lonestone and Cephalus had long since given the soundest basis for the belief that there actually were a very great number of such space-and-time universes, parallel to one another and resembling each other, nearly but not actually, much as the leaves of a book might resemble one another. . . . And those lying closest together would most nearly resemble each other.189

  Later SF writers would come to find this general theory of parallel universes of immense usefulness, particularly in the broader form in which it was restated by Wells near the end of Men Like Gods:

  And yet, as he had been told, it was but one of countless universes that move together in time, that lie against one another, endlessly like the leaves of a book. And all of them are as nothing in the endless multitudes of systems and dimensions that surround them. “Could I but rotate my arm out of the limits set to it,” one of the Utopians had said to him; “I could thrust it into a thousand universes.”190

  This version of the argument accommodates not only worlds that closely resemble our own, but places utterly fantastic and different as well. This was, in fact, no less than the first attempt by any writer of SF to encompass the true size, scope and multiform nature of the World Beyond the Hill.

  What a truly strange moment this was!

  In this hour, stories of magical fantasy no longer had the courage of their convictions. They had lost their faith in spiritual transcendence, which was now reduced to little more than a leftover literary convention. Almost inevitably, then, these stories fell into endorsement of all the most parochial and limiting beliefs current in the Twentieth Century Village—beliefs such as the universe being nothing but an inexorable machine and human existence being no more than a meaningless and circular futility.

  But at exactly this same moment that spirit was finally dying, a story of soulless science was able to intimate the existence of an uncountable number of higher states, and to suggest that those who could enter into them and master them would be men like gods. And that is the sort of message that is traditionally delivered by living myth.

  What we have here is a monumental shift in value caught in its very moment of occurrence. After the year 1920, the soul was no longer an effective metaphor of transcendence. The last of the true magic in spirit had flown. More and more it would come to seem that if there was anything at all to what had formerly passed under the name of spirit that was not to be dismissed as superstition, humbug, lunacy or poetic piffle, then that real something had to be some sort of science.
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  From this moment on, it would be science alone that could be taken as touched by the inner fire of transcendence—as being magical. Science offered the only viable route to higher realities. If mystery was to be found, it could only be found through science.

  After the year 1920, there would no longer be any real question of reconciling spirit and science on even terms, as in Merritt’s The Moon Pool. At best, there was only the possibility of salvaging some portion of spirit by subordinating it to science or redefining it as science.

  It would, for instance, be possible to preserve the existence of fantasy worlds like Cabell’s Poictesme and Eddison’s Mercury—but only if they frankly admitted themselves to be ultimately scientific rather than spiritual in nature. In the new Wellsian World Beyond the Hill—that multiplex place composed of endless systems and dimensions—it should be possible to locate any number of plausible venues for fantastic realms of all sorts without any need for reference to unlikely locations like the continent of Europe or the planet Mercury. And eventually, to save their worlds, both Cabell and Eddison would make the necessary capitulation to science and redefine their later fantasies as alternate history or parallel dimensions.

  Science in its broadest interpretation was now the basis of a new Twentieth Century occultism that was generally unrecognized as being occultism, most particularly by the very persons who subscribed to it. Nonetheless, theirs was an occult creed. Just like all previous occultists, they were convinced that hidden in the ruins of former human belief was a secret kernel of Higher Truth. The only mark of difference about these latter-day unconscious mystics was that they believed that the one true name of the hidden treasure was science. And thought of themselves as rational and logical beings, as materialists and practical men.

  It was, of course, only a select minority who were able to perceive all human meaning as encapsulated in science, and accept science as the one path to Truth. Far from recognizing science as the road to godhood, most people after World War I were only able to perceive science in its crudest and most obvious aspect.

  Science was barbed wire, machine guns and poison gas. Science was the destroyer of the old order. Science was the knife that had severed the human connection to God. Soul-killer science.

  Only the special minority who identified completely with science were prepared to recognize the beauty, mystery, and range of possibility inherent in H.G. Wells’s argument for the existence of parallel worlds when Men Like Gods was published in 1923. Most readers perceived far less. What was apparent to them was only one more dubious iteration of the benefits of the scientifically perfected society.

  Wells, the Twentieth Century’s chief advocate of scientific progress, was a natural target for aristocrats, nostalgists and all the others who doubted the benefits of science. And Men Like Gods would be taken as a particular object of dissent and rebuttal. Often the alienated folk who replied to the utopian Wells, advocate of Demon Science, did so in terms that were derived from the younger H.G. Wells, the sometime dystopian writer of the Nineties. So great was Wells’s breadth and so central was his position that even his opponents were Wellsians.

  One such rebel child was the Russian engineer, writer and revolutionary, Yevgeny Zamiatin, who had lived in England during World War I and was the author of a book on the works of Wells. Zamiatin reacted both to Wells and to the betrayal of the promise of the Russian Revolution, which occurred in 1917, just in time to turn Russia into the first of the Twentieth Century machine dictatorships. In his dystopian novel We, written in Russia in 1920 but first published in New York in English translation in 1924, Zamiatin presented a portrait of the United State, a scientifically perfected society of metal and glass—like the Crystal Palace Exhibition extended a thousand years into the future and made into the entirety of society.

  But no, not quite the entirety. The United State is surrounded by a great Green Wall, and outside the boundaries wild hairy people roam.

  D-503, the narrator of We, is an elite mathematician, the builder of a spaceship for the state. But he gets into trouble when he falls under the influence of a strange woman with contacts outside the Green Wall, and atavistically develops a soul. That is only the beginning of an epidemic of soul development.

  There is no help for this condition but surgery, and at the end of the novel a soul-ectomy is performed upon him. The “center for fancy”191 is removed, and D-503 is restored to a proper condition of reason and obedience in which the torture of his lover means nothing to him:

  I am smiling; I cannot help smiling; a splinter has been taken out of my head, and I feel so light, so empty! To be more exact, not empty, but there is nothing foreign, nothing that prevents me from smiling. (Smiling is the normal state for a normal human being.)192

  Another Eastern European writer who juxtaposed advanced science and the death of the soul was the Czech playwright and satirist Karel Capek. In the play R.U.R. (1921), a physiologist named Rossum, whose “ ‘sole purpose was nothing more or less than to prove that God was no longer necessary,’ ”193 and his son, an engineer, have produced organic beings, artificial humanlike creatures called “Robots,” to perform industrial tasks—like so many Frankenstein monsters harnessed to useful purpose.

  Later SF would adopt Capek’s word robot, but apply it only to mechanical devices in quasi-human form. Living creatures like Rossum’s Robots would more commonly be known as androids.

  The current General Manager of the Rossum Universal Robot factory offers an account of their design and nature to Helena Glory, daughter of the country’s president:

  “A gasoline motor must not have tassels or ornaments, Miss Glory. And to manufacture artificial workers is the same thing as the manufacture of a gasoline motor. The process must be the simplest, and the product the best from a practical point of view. What sort of worker do you think is the best from a practical point of view?”194

  Miss Glory answers him in old-fashioned terms: “ ‘Oh! Perhaps the one who is most honest and hard-working.’ ”195

  But the manager says:

  “No. The one that is the cheapest. The one whose requirements are the smallest. Young Rossum invented a worker with the minimum amount of requirements. He had to simplify him. He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work. Everything that makes man more expensive. In fact he rejected man and made the Robot. My dear Miss Glory, the Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are; they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul.”196

  It is a major fear of the period that is represented in both We and R.U.R.—that rather than increasing the capacity of man and making men like gods, the effect of science might instead be to simplify and reduce mankind’s humanity. It seemed that scientific civilization could produce beings of highly developed intelligence, but without any souls—creatures in human form who were no longer people.

  In R.U.R., just as in We, those who lack souls overwhelm those who have them. The Robots rise in revolt and exterminate their makers. All humanity is destroyed. The one hope that is offered by the conclusion of the play is that the Robots may now be in the process of developing souls of their own.

  It was not only British and European elitist SF that was touched by negativity and confusion. American SF, too, felt the loss of the soul and the crushing weight of the material universe. During the great emotional crashout of the early Twenties, even American pulp SF, so expansive during the Teens, suffered from existential nausea.

  There was a psychic retrenchment. Instead of exploring lost cities in pursuit of ancient knowledge or probing into alien realms in search of love and adventure, American SF stories of the early Twenties were much more likely to concern themselves with the horrors of the machine universe, competition from insect societies, and the threat of cosmic hostility. They were defensive rather than exploratory.

  One writer particularly affected was A. Merritt. As we have already seen, the failure of spirit and the retreat fro
m transcendence twisted and deformed the ending of The Metal Monster, his most imaginative work. During the Twenties, Merritt was no longer able to maintain his former unified vision of mystery. He fell into fragments. Sometimes, as in “The Face in the Abyss” (1923), Merritt was science-minded but cynical. Sometimes, as in The Ship of Ishtar (1924), he was vague and otherworldly. And at still other times, as in Seven Footprints to Satan (1927), he might write of phenomena that at first appearance seemed to be mysterious, but ultimately proved to be non-transcendent.

  In the Twenties, even Edgar Rice Burroughs retreated. His best imaginative stories of the period—Tarzan and the Ant Men (1924) and The Moon Maid, a book composed of three novelets published between 1923 and 1925—were more society-minded and satirical than inventive and exploratory. After 1925, Burroughs would fall into copying and repeating himself and cease to be an innovative force in SF.

  One important factor in the retreat of American pulp SF was the failure of All-Story, the home base of Burroughs and Merritt, and the chief center of imaginative exploration throughout the Teens.

  After World War I, the newsstands began to be flooded with a new style of pulp magazine. The original prewar pulps—modeling themselves on the first pulp, Argosy—had published a wide variety of fiction. They had aimed to have stories to appeal to every member of the family in each issue.

  But the new pulp magazines were specialized. Each concentrated on printing one and only one kind of fiction. There were detective magazines, love magazines, sports story magazines, Western magazines, air adventure magazines. A separate magazine for every taste.