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

by Alexei Panshin

  Well, if this is the case, no wonder the Eighteenth Men are so resigned to their Fate. We really shouldn’t expect them to dare the stars.

  In the end, it would seem that what the Last Men really wish to have from us is not help at all, but appreciation of the artistry with which they are going forth to meet their fate. The book concludes:

  But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.233

  Thus, amidst forced laughter, self-congratulation, and whistling in the dark, exits Humanity stage left—pursued by a bear. We hear the muffled sounds of offstage carnage. How noble. How sad.

  We might be forgiven for the thought that we have come altogether too far in time and space only to find ourselves at the end right back where we started from—face to face with the early Twentieth Century dilemma, and still unable to solve it. At the least, we must conclude that, grand myth though it may have aspired to be, Last and First Men was ultimately a prisoner of its own period.

  What this moment called for was precisely what Last and First Men could not deliver—a radical realignment of thinking. Instead of constantly dodging and hiding from the universe, it was necessary to stand fast, to turn and face the new transcendent realm revealed by science, and then to imagine a place within it for men.

  The adjustment of thinking that was called for was very closely parallel to the earlier reorientation of thought which had accompanied the transition from the Romantic Era to the Age of Technology. Just as late Nineteenth Century Western man had needed to quiet his fears of science-beyond-science and learn how to live with it and employ it, so was it essential now for the current generation to quiet its fears of the vast unknown universe that this higher science had come to reveal, and learn how to live and deal with that.

  In order to enter the Technological Age, the Romantics had to come to the perception that their most frightening problem, the rise of soulless science, was in fact the answer to their greatest need, the rediscovery of mystery. Just so, in order to enter the coming Atomic Age, was it necessary for Techno-men to realize that what appeared to be their most terrifying problem—the vast new universe revealed by science—was in fact the answer to humanity’s pressing need to escape execution by grim Fate.

  The challenge of the moment was for men to give up their age-old dependency on the Village—a dependency that ultimately must doom them—and become mental citizens of the new wider universe. Men had to become at home in space and time.

  Most people could not do this—they lacked the necessary orientation and values. But there were some who could.

  Starting in the Twenties, a new breed of man began to appear in the West, especially in America. These were tough-minded men of fact who identified themselves totally with science. No doubts, no reservations.

  As we have seen, a desperate struggle had been taking place throughout the Age of Technology. The old values of established society and traditional religion and the new values of material science had been at war with each other—most especially within the hearts and minds of individuals. But here in the person of the new man, the war was over, and it was science that was the victor.

  Received values had no hold on this new Twentieth Century man of science. He was determined to set aside all dogma and preconception, to discover the true facts, and to judge matters as he found them.

  One matter on which the new man of fact had a fresh perspective was the central fictive problem of the era and its worldly equivalent.

  Over and over through the period, in one form or another, the same basic tale had been repeated—the story of the desperate contention of society and barbarism, and the flowering and death of civilizations. Whatever limitations and deficiencies it might have, this central story did encapsulate and express a very real truth. With the final rejection of spirit, a world was coming to an end. A grand old civilization did perish in the Great War, and there was no way to bring it back.

  The new man was one who could observe this fact calmly and accept it without regret, just as he would any other fact. He was no poor little lamb who had gone astray, no member of the Lost Generation. He had no patience to spare for idle sentimentalizing.

  The new Twentieth Century man of science was eager to look forward, not back. He might even be thought of as something of a barbarian—a barbarian with a slide rule dwelling in the ruins of a former high civilization, but completely indifferent to its fall because he had urgent new business to attend to. This new man was practical and filled with determination. He had utter confidence in his mastery of scientific power, and no fear at all of encounter with the unknown scientific universe.

  Our three pivotal stories of August 1928—The Skylark of Space,” Armageddon—2419 A.D.,” and “Crashing Suns”—were epitomal early expressions of this emerging state of mind.

  The authors of these vital stories belonged to a new writing generation that had read and digested Burroughs and his fellows as youngsters back in the Teens. To turn away from the Void and surrender to Fate in the manner of Last and First Men was not for them. These brave visionaries of the late Technological Age were prepared to project their imaginations into the scientific unknown and to find answers there for every problem and every fear of their era.

  Of these three central stories, by far the most fully imagined, the most innovative, and the most influential, was The Skylark of Space, a unique tale of interstellar exploration serialized in the August, September and October 1928 issues of Amazing Stories. This horizon-widening novel was written by Edward Elmer Smith in collaboration with Lee Hawkins Garby.

  We may see in The Skylark of Space a story that serves as a link between the first brief flowering of tales of alien exploration in the American general-fiction pulps of the Teens, and the renewal of imagined venturings into the unknown that took place in the new SF magazines of the late Twenties.

  The principal author of The Skylark of Space234 was E.E. Smith, a devoted reader of the SF published in All-Story and Argosy. When he conceived his story in the summer of 1915, he was an employee of the U. S. Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., and a graduate student of chemistry.

  Lee Hawkins Garby was a neighbor, the wife of a friend and classmate. She encouraged Smith to set his story down on paper, and assisted him in writing the first third of it. Her specialty was the love element—which Smith did not feel competent to handle.

  But Mrs. Garby’s contribution to the story was distinctly limited, and except for giving this shy young scientist an initial nudge toward becoming a storyteller, she would have no further part to play in the creation of modern science fiction. She leaves our story even as she enters it.

  On the other hand, “Doc” Smith—as he would come to be affectionately called by an SF magazine readership that valued the power and prestige of his advanced scientific degree in a time when such degrees were still a comparative rarity—was a writer who would have a tremendous impact on the development of science fiction.

  Unlike so many of his Nineteenth Century predecessors—or even his coeval, that reclusive gentleman from Providence, H.P. Lovecraft—E.E. Smith was no smooth-palmed, high-born man of letters spinning out fantasies of the terrors of science. Smith was the forerunner of a wholly new kind of SF writer who would not become a commonplace for another quarter of a century—the practical man of technology who was prepared to perceive science as the means of fulfillment of all human aspiration.

  Smith was an early example of the new Twentieth Century man of science. In his own person, he combined the open-minded flexibility of the Western frontiersman, a wide range of technical skills, an acute appreciation of the altered worl
d that modem science and technology were creating, and a deep and abiding love of scientific mystery.

  For a man like Smith, technology and applied science were fundamental tools. They were the natural means for an able boy of common name and common parentage to rise in an amazing new world in which technical competence counted for more than birth or position. E.E. Smith was the living embodiment of the new man for whom and by whom the Twentieth Century was made.

  Edward Elmer Smith was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin on May 2, 1890. His father was a one-time whaler become a sailor on the Great Lakes, and then turned carpenter. Soon after Edward was born, his family moved west, and he was raised on a homestead in the wilds of northern Idaho, where his father grew potatoes for the railroad.

  If science appeared miraculous to Smith, it was in part because he grew up so far away from the centers of the Technological Age that the new inventions of the day were for him only a distant rumor to be encountered in the books he devoured in search of answers to his questions. And it meant that when he finally did experience the new age, it burst upon him as all the more marvelous.

  During the Edwardian decade, the Age of Technology reached out to seize and enlist this backwoods boy. Smith became an active participant in the technological taming of the West. He worked as a logger and sawyer, a road paver, a railroad blazer, and a hardrock miner, as well as serving a spell as the conductor of a horse-drawn streetcar in Spokane, Washington.

  Then young Smith—like H.G. Wells before him—suffered a fortuitous accident that changed his life. Fleeing from a boardinghouse fire that he himself had inadvertently caused, Smith jumped through a fourth-floor window and broke five ribs, his leg, and his wrist, and became unable to work.

  It seemed that the new possibility of the day—higher education—was the only answer for him. Smith’s family drew together. An older brother offered the winnings from a marathon poker game. His two sisters also contributed money. Together, they sent young Edward off to study at the University of Idaho, an institution of learning that was barely older than he.

  It was a timely moment to come out of the wilderness and settle to the study of science. This was the height of the pre-war period of technological optimism. And it was also the very hour when Edgar Rice Burroughs, that one-time Idahoan, was introducing his powerful and adaptable new characters, Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars, in the pages of All-Story.

  Smith took a degree with honors in chemical engineering at the University of Idaho, but then did not stop with that. He won a government job through a civil service examination, and traveled east to work as a junior chemist at the U.S. Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. And while he held this job, he continued his scientific education.

  In 1919, after brief non-combatant service in World War I, Smith would earn his doctorate in chemistry from George Washington University. He would then settle down as a food chemist, eventually specializing in the formulation of doughnut mixes.

  The Skylark of Space, Smith’s attempt at a scientific romance, remained unfinished at the time he received his Ph.D. He had set it aside in 1916, only one-third complete, when he was newly married to the sister of his college roommate, holding a full-time job, and also going to school.

  Living and working in Hillsdale, Michigan in 1919, however, Smith found himself with time on his hands. He got out his old story and began to work on it again, this time without the aid of Mrs. Garby, and finished it at last early in 1920.

  But times had changed by then. The postwar mood of despair had settled in. All-Story had been merged into Argosy. There was no longer the receptivity there had been during the Teens for stories of alien exploration.

  For years on end, E.E. Smith sent his novel vainly from magazine to magazine, publisher to publisher. And it mattered to none of them that The Skylark of Space was an SF work of radical originality.

  In his story, Smith introduced a new kind of character to science fiction—both a hero and a villain who were examples of the boldly effective new scientific man. Of even greater importance, however, was that Smith provided these characters with an appropriate context within which to show their stuff. He cut the leading strings of Mother Earth and set his brain children free within the immense new stellar universe that modern science had lately come to reveal. Smith imagined the stars as a playground, a place of human self-discovery.

  In 1915, when Smith conceived his story, this was totally unheard-of stuff. And even in the Twenties, it remained too bizarre and frightening for the ordinary man to contemplate. How utterly frustrating it must have been for Smith to live with the knowledge that his vigorous and optimistic romance, rejected again and again as too far-out for readers to accept, was actually a far more accurate reflection of current scientific thinking than the narrow, fear-ridden SF stories that the publishers of the day were willing to accept and put in print.

  Then, in the spring of 1927, Smith spied an issue of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories on the newsstand. He got out his old manuscript and sent it off one more time. And at last it found acceptance from an editor who was not afraid to take a chance on a positive scientifiction story. And still, The Skylark of Space would be held for another year and a quarter before its appointed moment of publication finally arrived.

  But so far ahead of his time was Smith as a scientific imaginist that even the passage of thirteen years did not adversely affect the impact of his story. When The Skylark of Space finally appeared in Amazing in 1928, Edward Elmer Smith was instantly recognized as the premier writer of American magazine science fiction. And he would remain that for fully a dozen years more with one expansive serial novel after another.

  The Skylark of Space begins235 abruptly with a powerful manifestation of super-science:

  Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper steam-bath upon which, a moment before, he had been electrolyzing his solution of “X,” the unknown metal. As soon as he had removed the beaker with its precious contents, the heavy bath had jumped endwise from under his hand as though it were alive. It had flown with terrific speed over the table, smashing a dozen reagent-bottles on its way, and straight on out through the open window. Hastily setting the beaker down, he seized his binoculars and focused them upon the flying bath, which now, to the unaided vision, was merely a speck in the distance. Through the glass he saw that it did not fall to the ground, but continued on in a straight line, its rapidly diminishing size alone showing the enormous velocity at which it was moving.236

  Richard Seaton, Smith’s central character, is obviously modeled upon the new human type introduced in the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs—the adaptable man strong in mind and body. Like Tarzan and John Carter, Seaton is tall, dark-haired, gray-eyed, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted and physically powerful. He has both “the wide brow of the thinker”237 and “the firm, square jaw of the born fighter.”238

  But in Richard Seaton, something new is added to the mix. Seaton is also a brilliant scientist. Indeed, he might be described as a John Carter equipped with the skills and background of E.E. Smith. Like Smith, Seaton hails from the mountains of northern Idaho. And like Smith, Seaton is a chemist employed in a government lab in Washington, D.C.

  Seaton is a casual but immensely able young fellow. He wears flowered Hawaiian shirts and rides his motorcycle through the streets of Washington. On the strength of his superior ability on the tennis court, he has an egalitarian friendship with a young millionaire, Martin Crane. And he is engaged to a beautiful Chevy Chase socialite, Dorothy Vaneman.

  When the copper steam-bath goes flying out of his laboratory window, powered by a few droplets of X, the unknown metal, Seaton realizes immediately what he has accidentally discovered—a spaceship drive. He says to himself:

  “That bath is on its way to the moon right now, and there’s no reason I can’t follow it. Martin’s such a fanatic on exploration, he’ll fall all over himself to build us any kind of a craft we’ll need—we’ll explore the whole solar system. G
reat Cat, what a chance! A fool for luck is right!”239

  When we recall that Smith’s myth-attempting contemporary, Olaf Stapledon, had to imagine seventeen future forms of man in order to accomplish the exploration of the solar system, we may begin to understand why ordinary pulp magazine editors in the Twenties could have found Richard Seaton’s offhandedly impetuous enthusiasm for space travel a trifle intimidating. Too far-out for them.

  The story moves on at a headlong pace. In almost no time, Seaton and Crane have constructed a spaceship, which Dorothy Vaneman names The Skylark. Soon the two men take the ship out for a first after-dinner spin. This proves to be an instant recapitulation of Jules Verne, as Seaton makes evident to his fiancée and her father when the ship touches down again.

  “She flies!” he cried exultantly. “She flies, dearest, like a ray of light for speed and like a bit of thistledown for lightness. We’ve been around the moon!”

  “Around the moon!” cried the two amazed visitors. “So soon?” asked Vaneman. “When did you start?”

  “Almost an hour ago,” replied Crane readily. . . .240

  But Richard Seaton has an antagonist. He is Dr. Marc C. DuQuesne, a fellow scientist at the Bureau of Chemistry who is Seaton’s physical and mental dark twin. As another co-worker says to DuQuesne early in the story: “ ‘A fellow has to see your faces to tell you two apart.’ ”241 Seaton and DuQuesne are both examples of the new scientific man, but there are significant differences between the two.

  Seaton recognizes his own fundamental connection to the human race. For him, science is an extension of his humanity. It is a complement to his superior tennis game and his skills as an amateur magician. His personal relationships—particularly with Dorothy Vaneman, his fiancée, and Martin Crane, his friend and partner—are of the greatest importance to him. Crane touches upon the essence of the matter in Doc Smith’s second novel, Skylark Three, serialized in Amazing Stories in 1930, when he remarks to Seaton: “ ‘You are still the flashing genius and I am still your balance wheel.’ ”242