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

by Alexei Panshin

  To-day there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.222

  To Bertrand Russell in his seminal essay “A Free Man’s Worship,” written at the turn of the century, matter had appeared to be blind, reckless, relentless, irresistible and omnipotent. Now, however, as the Age of Technology was nearing its end, matter had lost its ruling power. Just at the time when SF writers—including many of those writing for Hugo Gernsback—were quailing before the horrible power of the great machine universe, here was science to say, well, no, maybe the universe was not like a great machine after all. Perhaps it was more like a great thought.

  Hugo Gernsback was by no means the only person who was incapable of accepting and assimilating this new point of view. In spite of Sir James Jeans’s claim that the new conclusions were almost unanimously accepted among physicists, the great Albert Einstein himself, responsible for so many of the most fruitful paradoxes of Twentieth Century physics, shied away from the prospect of the abolition of cause-and-effect. In a letter to Max Born, another grandfather of quantum physics, written in December 1926, he stated his profound reservation:

  “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”223

  But Einstein was to be left isolated by his inability to accept the radical new physics—in just the same manner that Hugo Gernsback was to become alienated from the further development of science fiction. From the time that Einstein asserted that his God would never play dice with the world, and refused to consider altering his thinking, he lost his hitherto astonishing creative power. He made no more of the brilliant contributions to physics that had caused him to be popularly regarded as the supreme genius of the modern world.

  There was a younger generation of scientists, however, that was willing to adopt the most far-out conclusions of its predecessor as its own premises, and press on with the business of science. Speaking for those who were prepared to accept the unfolding picture of existence revealed by advanced science no matter how odd it might turn out to be, the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote in his 1927 book, Possible Worlds: “Now my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”224

  In 1931, this intimation of fundamental strangeness was to be given a theoretical underpinning by a highly important paper entitled “On Formally Undecidable Propositions” by the German—later American—mathematician Kurt Gödel. Specifically writing in answer to the Principia Mathematica (1910-13), a three-volume work by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead that had attempted to reduce all mathematics to one grand logical system, Gödel demonstrated that within any system there must be statements that the system itself cannot prove or disprove.

  The implication of Gödel’s paper was that the universe must always exceed our logical understanding. There must always be more than we can consciously know. Relative to any particular system or frame of thought, transcendence must always exist.

  Within all this new Twentieth Century scientific thought lurked highly important consequences for Western man’s image of himself and the universe. The proudly defiant Man of the Edwardians, so special and so innately superior, who had been cast into discredit by World War I, was now completely dethroned.

  Man could no longer be conceived to be the center of all existence. He was only a denizen of an insignificant planet circling around an average star on the fringes of a great galaxy containing stars to the number of a hundred billion or more. And that galaxy was only an average galaxy, one among many. What then was Man?

  Man was puny, less than a flyspeck compared to a hundred billion suns. Man was peripheral, a galactic and universal side issue. He was problematical, a mere creature of chance. He was a formally undecidable proposition.

  And simultaneously, the universe itself was altered into a realm of wonder. Mystery no longer had to be sought out there in the most distant places and farthest removed times. Mystery was now an innate part of the fabric of the universe. Glitches in reality could now open at any place, at any moment.

  One positive consequence might be found in this radical disestablishment of humanity. Mankind was no longer caught in the hot spotlight of the great cosmic drama. Now man was no longer central enough or important enough to merit round upon round of gleeful torture from a God bent upon playing cat-and-mouse. Nor was he condemned to be a weary unyielding Atlas defiantly bearing the weight of the entire universe upon his frail shoulders.

  But there was a price—at least from the point of view of the Age of Technology. And the price was that man was made more insignificant and random a being than he had ever been before.

  Throughout the Technological Age, the central problem of the era had been how mankind was to cope with the vast size and the indifferent hostility of the universe revealed by science. It seemed that human civilizations might rise and human civilizations might fall, but that all human effort was eventually doomed to come to nothing. The human race might evolve, but only to decay again and be supplanted by some stronger, smarter or more rapacious form of Earthly life. Alternatively, mankind might fall victim to some random cosmic catastrophe. Or it might be overwhelmed by a savage alien onslaught from out of the depths of space.

  And now here was Twentieth Century science ready to make a dire situation worse with the news that man’s true position in the universe was even more peripheral and precarious than it had previously been imagined to be.

  SF literature, already in the gravest difficulty in the Twenties, was challenged to take account of the threatening new cosmic situation revealed by modern science. And most SF did not respond well.

  It was European SF that did the worst. During the Twenties and Thirties, even as a demoralized Europe, never fully recovered from the horrors of World War I and its aftermath, was falling into the iron grip of fascism, so was European SF finding it increasingly difficult to muster belief in anything at all. Not man. Not science. Not the universe.

  During the Thirties, European SF turned sour, cynical, pessimistic and misanthropic. Again and again in the scattered European SF stories of the period, civilization collapses, man degenerates, the world ends—and it is all just as well that way.

  In the course of the decade, European SF dwindled and then disappeared. It was formally banned by the Nazis in Germany as dirt and trash. In France, it simply ceased to be written and published.

  Despite the willingness of British scientists like Jeans and Haldane to proclaim the new scientific view, British SF writers, too, were largely unable to accept the new science. In the early Thirties, three classic examples of SF were published in Britain—Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933). But of these three books, one was a cry of nostalgia for the soul, one was a rejection of modern technology, and one showed man defeated by the challenge of the great cosmic void.

  The Thirties were a period when any number of the most prominent British writers publicly renounced the modern universe and attempted to find salvation through a return to traditional religion. In keeping with this, as the Great Depression wore on and then flared up into World War II, more and more the most notable British SF stories tended to be expressed in terms of nostalgic fantasy. These stories longed for the simpler and more comprehensible circumstances that existed—in the words of one of them, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937)—“one morning, long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green.”225

  It was only rude crude American magazine science fiction—and by no means all of it, but only a small portion—that had the courage and insight necessary to take the bad n
ews that had been delivered by science, face it squarely, and transmute it into something positive.

  In the late Twenties in the Gernsback Amazing, and then more frequently within the more congenial context of Astounding Stories, a new kind of SF story began to appear. This fiction was written by men—and one woman—who were able to accept the immensity and instability of the physical universe, the disestablishment of man, and the radical uncertainty of existence.

  In the last years of the Age of Technology, these writers—led by E.E. Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, Stanley Weinbaum and John W. Campbell, Jr.—laid the basis for the new SF literature of the Atomic Age. In a period when even most Americans were writing of decay, defeat and devolution, these few writers demonstrated a positive eagerness to take on the challenge of the immense and random scientific universe. Employing the dismaying new insights of science as their own chief weapon, they aimed to tame the universe and turn it into a viable place for mankind.

  SF would be altered by their experiments and explorations. Indeed, at the end of the Thirties, a whole new form of SF would make its appearance, erected on the foundation of this work. And in time the new SF of the Atomic Age would seem so strange and so different from the scientifiction from which it sprang that Hugo Gernsback could mistake it for fantasy.

  The new SF would be known as modern science fiction in order to distinguish it from the old-fashioned Gernsbackian variety.

  · PART 3 ·

  MODERN SCIENCE FICTION

  There is no such thing as a destiny of the human race. There is a choice of destinies.

  —J.B.S. HALDANE

  10: Mastery of Time and Space

  THE FIRST STEPS TOWARD “modern science fiction”—the re-emphasized, reformulated SF of the Atomic Age—were taken in three boldly imaginative American magazine stories of the late Twenties. Two of these significant stories—The Skylark of Space by E.E. Smith and “Armageddon—2419 A.D.” by Philip Nowlan—appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. The third, “Crashing Suns” by Edmond Hamilton, was published in Weird Tales.

  In another of the felicitous coincidences that have marked our narrative, all three of these stories saw original publication in the very same month, August 1928. Just as though some crucial line of demarcation had been passed, suddenly it became possible for a number of different writers to think and say what no writer had found it possible to think and say before this moment.

  In these central stories—and in the sequels that followed each of them—a fundamental reorientation of vision was given its first expression. A stultifying perspective based on Earth in the here-and-now was swapped for a new viewpoint based on the future and outer space. The result was an exuberant new sense of power and freedom, the overwhelming impact of which we can only dimly appreciate today, so much have time, thought and SF changed since then. Even so, it is at least possible for us to catch fleeting echoes of that original feeling of wild exultation still ringing across the years in titles like “Crashing Suns” and The Skylark of Space.

  The worldview that these liberating stories rejected had prevailed in the Western world for nearly sixty years—ever since the time of the Franco-Prussian War and the beginnings of the Age of Technology. We have seen one major aspect or another of this worldview reflected in the lost race story, in the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, in Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague” and in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars.

  This Technological Age worldview was a biologically based vision of eternal growth and decay. Its central image was of struggle to live, of flowering, and of inevitable decline.

  According to this view—which we may take as a first crude attempt at evolutionary conceptualization—one great epoch was succeeded by another. Each distinct era was marked by its own brutal contest for survival. Each such period was bound to throw up a ruling species, or race, or civilization—which would enjoy its brief moment in the sun and then be doomed to fall like all the rest and pass from the scene.

  But there were distinct limitations to this grand conception. For one thing, the Technological worldview was not so much truly evolutionary as it was an image of a succession of discrete episodes in which the same inevitable story was played through over and over again. For another, as broad as the sweep of these eternal cycles was, this great cosmo-historical pageant was perceived and interpreted from a fundamentally limited and egocentric viewpoint. A determinedly Village point of view.

  Citizens of the Technological Era might be aware of the existence of immense expanses of space and time. They might have haunting suspicions of man’s ultimate cosmic insignificance. And still somehow they were able to continue to presume that True Reality lay on this little planet Earth during this current phase of its existence. Indeed, to presume that the locus of True Reality was themselves.

  They felt they needed to know no more than this: Western Scientific Man was in the saddle and riding high. He was boss of the whole world—exploring it, seizing it, taming it, ruling it, and turning it to his purposes. That in itself should serve as proof of his centrality and essential rightness.

  The garnering of monopolies and the establishment of empires that so typified this period were justified by another major aspect of the worldview—the half-evolutionary credo of Social Darwinism. This popular philosophy suggested that we inhabit a dog-eat-dog world in which only the strong survive. Western man looked all around this world and congratulated himself on being topmost dog. And believed that he recognized the basic evolutionary necessity to do whatever was called for in order to stay that way.

  Not altogether surprisingly, however, a great and growing nightmare troubled Western man’s dominion over the Earth. This gnawing fear was that the rule of the West would prove to be as tenuous and temporary as that of T. rex or Alexander the Great.

  Modern civilization, the white race, mankind as a species, the planet of man itself . . . it seemed that all of these were vulnerable. Just as the day of the dinosaurs had passed and the mighty ancient empires of Sumeria, Egypt and Rome had come to fall, so inevitably must Western man fall, too.

  The only questions were when and how it would happen. But that it must inevitably happen, of this there seemed to be little doubt.

  The fatal blow could come from almost any direction. Another race, perhaps—the dreaded Yellow Peril. Or armies of ants suddenly grown intelligent and invincible might sweep over us like a tide. A plague might bring civilization down. Alien invaders might land, or a cosmic fireball might strike from the heavens.

  Contrariwise, the end might be spelled by human weakness and decadence, or by human pride. We might grow soft and lose our keen fighting edge. We might lose our sense of purpose. We might even become balloon-headed Big Brains and have nothing better to do than flop about passively thinking our deep thoughts until some larger, fiercer, more vital creature appeared out of the unlit darkness of space and time to destroy us utterly.

  But whatever the particular details of our mode of passing might prove to be—whether it be later or whether it be sooner, whether at the hands of other creatures or by fiat of the universe—one thing at least was dead certain: In due time, our end must inevitably come. And then a new cycle would begin.

  A relatively calm and dispassionate phrasing of the attitude of the Technological worldview toward humanity and its competitors and possible successors is to be found in a blurb that Hugo Gernsback attached to H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds when he reprinted it in Amazing in 1927:

  Wells has often been condemned because of his pictured ruthlessness of Martians, but, after all, why should they not be ruthless? Are we not ourselves as ruthless when we dissect insects and low animals for our scientific investigations? If there were a superior intelligence, to which, by comparison ours was as inferior as that of a chicken compared to a man’s, there would be no good reason why it should not be ruthless if it wanted to conquer the planet for its own designs. We humans ourselves would not hesitate to do the same thing
if we sent an expedition, let us say, to the moon, if we found what we considered a low species there.226

  In a universe of ruthless struggle, all that appeared to count was coming out on top. And if humanity should reveal for a single moment that it was not smart enough or strong enough to maintain the upper hand, why, so much for mankind.

  At the outset of the Age of Technology, ordinary Western man held faith in two forms of transcendence—the personal soul and modern science. At this point, the two were allies. The successes of science were taken to be the proof or demonstration of man’s rational soul. But the soul was master and science was the servant.

  By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, however, science and the soul had fallen into extreme conflict. As the last tattered remnant of that belief in spirit which now seemed so completely unfounded, the soul was highly vulnerable. An immense weight of scientific doubt was increasingly being brought to bear against the very idea of the existence of a personal human tie to God.

  At the same moment that science was now prepared to dismiss the soul as a baseless superstition, unnecessary and unprovable, it was ready itself to unveil an awesome new transcendence all its own. This was the existence of a universe that was more immense than man had ever previously suspected, and that was possibly more alien than he was prepared to tolerate.

  Science challenged man to rid himself of his illusions and face the true facts of existence . . . as science saw them. The soul of man was stripped away by science and discarded, and with it all of man’s accustomed sense of worth and purpose. In its place, science offered man a new identity. Henceforth he was to be an orphan child in a universe vastly beyond his comprehension.

  According to the scientific view—as we heard it from Bertrand Russell—man and all his works are nothing more than the result of accidental heapings of atoms. Man’s devotion, his inspiration, his genius and his labors must ultimately count for nothing. All of these are doomed to total extinction in the vast death of the solar system. It is necessary for us to accept as inevitable that the sum of human achievement must eventually come to lie buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.