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

by Alexei Panshin

  In opposition to the Hans, Rogers finds a wide variety of gangs and tribes, the remnants of the ordinary Americans of an earlier era. These are true scientific barbarians, living in the forested ruins of the civilization of our day like wild Indians, yet still tending the precious flame of science.

  Here, in these stories, we may recognize the basis for the comic strip Buck Rogers, begun in 1929 and scripted by Phil Nowlan. We may take it as meaningful that in the initial episodes of the comic strip, which were based on the original Amazing novelets, a major new character is added to the story. This is an antagonist figure, the Blackie DuQuesne-like “Killer” Kane, an inventor, self-seeker, and rejected suitor of Buck Rogers’ sweetheart, who is ready to betray his fellow Americans to the Mongol horde out of personal pique.

  Ultimately, the scattered American gangs—one of them led by Anthony Rogers—defeat the Hans by joining their disparate forces together. A new age is inaugurated—“the most glorious and noble era of scientific civilization in the history of the American race.”256

  In short, once again in the adventures of Anthony Rogers we find a ready acceptance of the World Beyond the Hill, a rejection of ruthless hyper-intellectual amorality, and the triumphant union of varying fragments working together synergetically to make a greater whole.

  There can be no doubt that set beside the imaginative scope and detail of The Skylark of Space, Philip Nowlan’s stories appear dull, clumsy and vague. But it is also clear that “Armageddon—2419 A.D.” and “The Airlords of Han” are pointing in the same new direction as the Skylark stories.

  Exactly the same thing is true of “Crashing Suns” by Edmond Hamilton, serialized in Weird Tales in August and September 1928. Compared to The Skylark of Space, this novelet and its sequels are simple-minded, dreamlike and repetitive. Even so, they also present the same new set of attitudes.

  Edmond Hamilton was born in Ohio on October 21, 1904, and raised on a farm. He was the first major SF writer to be born in the Twentieth Century—fourteen years younger than Doc Smith and sixteen years younger than Philip Nowlan. But he was as impressed as they by the coming of the technological world. He once wrote:

  “My formative first 7 years were spent on an Ohio farm so far back in that it must have had a time-lag of a decade. Horses reared up in buggy-shafts at sight of an automobile, and a steam-threshing-machine was a thing which frightened me horribly.”257

  Hamilton was a precocious youngster. At the age of 14, he was a college freshman majoring in physics, he was eagerly reading All-Story and Argosy, and he was attempting to write his first SF stories.

  His first published story was sold to Weird Tales in 1926, and Hamilton would soon become a regular contributor to the magazine. His science fiction stories were Weird Tales’ answer to the challenge lately offered by Amazing.

  Hamilton’s crucial novelet, “Crashing Suns,” is different in one important regard from the other two significant American SF stories of August 1928.

  Doc Smith’s Richard Seaton is a Twentieth Century person who makes the transition into the World Beyond the Hill, likes it, and stays to become a citizen of outer space. Philip Nowlan’s Anthony Rogers is likewise a native of our Village who makes the transition from here and now, and then finds himself eager to become a citizen of the wild and marvelous land of the future.

  But Edmond Hamilton’s viewpoint character, Jan Tor, is a Captain in the Interplanetary Patrol one hundred thousand years in the future. “Crashing Suns” begins with his spaceship racing in toward Earth from the vicinity of Uranus, and coming to land beside “the gigantic white dome of the great Hall of Planets, permanent seat of the Supreme Council and the center of government of the Eight Worlds.”258

  In this story, as in Stapledon’s Last and First Men, the outermost planet is still Neptune, and men are confined to the solar system. And once again, as in Last and First Men, the life of the sun is threatened. This time, however, it is not mysterious ethereal vibrations that are the danger, but rather a dying sun that has mysteriously changed its course and one year hence is due to smash into our star, shattering forever the peace and harmony of the utopian Eight Worlds: “ ‘For the planets of our system will perish like flowers in a furnace, in that titanic holocaust of crashing suns!’ ”259

  Boyish and naive as it undoubtedly was even in its own time, “Crashing Suns” nonetheless affords an effective yardstick by which to measure the limitations of Last and First Men. In Stapledon’s would-be myth, the one human expedition ever to brave the outer tracts beyond the solar system returned mad. And throughout the final 20,000 years of human existence, as Eighteenth Man declines and society disintegrates, no party of Last Men ever sets off into the universe to pit itself against the source of the ethereal vibrations that are destroying one star after another.

  On the other hand, Jan Tor strides into the Hall of Planets to hear the bad news of our sun’s impending destruction, and is appointed captain of an expedition to investigate. He is told, “ ‘If we can discover what phenomena are the causes of the star’s deflection, there is a chance that we might be able to repeat or reverse those phenomena, to swerve the star again from the path it now follows, and so save our solar system, our universe.’ ”260

  Only minutes later, Jan Tor is in the conning tower of an experimental space cruiser—which incidentally uses “etheric vibrations,”261 the great threat of Last and First Men, as its means of propulsion—and is taking off for the dying star. Within a matter of hours the ship is beyond the last frontier of the solar system, in regions previously unknown to man.

  Stapledon’s voyagers proceeded no farther than the point where the sun was reduced to being the most brilliant of stars, and found themselves crazed by the aloof and changeless presence of the constellations. By contrast, Hamilton’s bold venturers travel past the point where the sun becomes just one speck of light among millions. And here they find that “even more than between the planets, the stars lay before us in their true glory.”262 And they are clearly thrilled.

  Quite interestingly, when Jan Tor’s space cruiser reaches the dying red sun, the expedition discovers that it is not a cruel, uncaring cosmos that threatens humanity with destruction. Rather, it is an alien race who hope to catch a light by crashing their dying sun into ours. Our destruction will be their reinvigoration.

  These aliens are described as Big Brain:

  They were globes, globes of pink, unhealthy-looking flesh more than a yard in diameter, each upheld by six slender, insectlike legs, not more than twelve inches long, and each possessing two similar short, thin limbs which served them as arms and which projected at opposite points from their pink, globular bodies.263

  But the humans are not afraid to take on these powerful aliens. The space cruiser of Jan Tor races back to spread the news and raise a mighty fleet of spaceships from the Eight Worlds. Battle is joined in space between human and alien. The day is ultimately won when Sarto Sen, the human scientist who designed the experimental cruiser, sacrifices his own life to split the invading sun in two.

  The conclusion of “Crashing Suns” again stands in extreme contrast with Last and First Men. Olaf Stapledon’s great vision of humanity’s future metamorphoses ends with stoic acceptance of the passing of the brief music that is man. But “Crashing Suns,” the crude American novelet, ends with this bold assertion of human possibility:

  “It was from this Earth that the first man went out, Jan Tor. Out to planet after planet, until a universe was theirs. And now that Sarto Sen has saved that universe, and has given us these cruisers, how far will man go, I wonder? Out—out—universe after universe, star after star, constellations, nebulae—out—out—out. . . .”264

  He paused, a dark, erect figure beside me there, his arm flung up in superb, defiant promise toward the brilliant thronging stars.

  After his own fashion, Edmond Hamilton would do his best to fulfill this promise. He was perhaps the first writer to attempt to make a living primarily by writing for the American SF
magazines. To survive, he had to turn out a lot of wordage, and he took no particular shame in endlessly repeating himself. Beginning with “The Star Stealers” (Weird Tales, Feb. 1929), he produced one sequel to “Crashing Suns” after another. And each had exactly the same plot as the first story:

  Again and again, a cosmic threat is detected and a party is sent out to investigate. The true source of trouble proves to be an alien race wielding super-science, who are then engaged in battle and destroyed.

  Something does change from one story to the next—the scope is constantly broadened: Hundreds of thousands of years pass. The Interplanetary Patrol becomes the Interstellar Patrol. The Eight Worlds become the Federation of Stars and then the Council of Suns. By the third story, “Within the Nebula” (Weird Tales, May 1929), it is the entire Galaxy that is threatened, and the investigating party bearing the no-prejudice utopian names Ker Kal, Sar Than and Jor Dahat are a human, a tentacled Arcturan, and a Capellan plant-man.

  Ultimately, these Interstellar Patrol stories by Edmond Hamilton amount to little more than a statement of faith and a rough sketching of possibility. But, taken in company with the other seminal stories of August 1928—Doc Smith’s The Skylark of Space and Philip Nowlan’s “Armageddon—2419 A.D.”—they were an unmistakable indication that American magazine SF was ready now to alter its nature, to leave the close confines of Village Earth behind and seek new meaning and purpose for humanity in the wider world of time and space—The World Beyond the Hill.

  11: The Laws of Chance

  WHEN VIEWED FROM A DISTANCE, the new American SF magazines that sprang into life in the last decade of the Age of Technology have the appearance of an unstable mishmash of fundamentally incompatible elements. These magazines were a place of summary, experiment, struggle and confusion as writers strove to find their way out of one mind-set that was no longer viable, and into a wholly new state of mind.

  During the Thirties, all the forms of SF that had been current during the post-1870 era were given leave to exist at once in the pages of these marginal American pulp magazines. There was no kind of imaginative fiction—from stories of super-scientific experiment, to the lost race story, to stories of the exploration of alien realms, to stories of the supernatural—that could not find a home in one magazine or another.

  Underneath all of this multiplicity and respect for the past, however, old familiar categories were breaking down. Story types that had once seemed clearly separate borrowed freely from each other, or casually crossbred. At the same time, whole new story formulations—like space opera and the time paradox—were finding their way into existence.

  It is by no means always possible for us to be sure how the writers themselves felt about the materials they were presenting. The most extreme radical and conservative elements might be conjoined in the very same story:

  The latest astronomical news might turn up in a story about cruelly indifferent higher beings who fly through the interplanetary ether on leathery wings. A bold spaceman on Mars might encounter an ancient mythological horror. The Earth might be presented as the egg of some immense and unknowable space creature, and all human history and purpose might be instantly shattered when the hour of its hatching finally arrives. Or the latest speculations of physics on the fundamental uncertainty of being might be presented in a mood of total despair—lightly covered over with breeziness, jokes and slang.

  The Thirties were a period of general transition. Just as the social and economic spheres of life were caught up in change, so also were order and value within science fiction. In this agonizing extended moment of economic breakdown and cultural rearrangement, given attitudes and received truths of all kinds were subject to the most extreme question and doubt. Nothing was certain and anything might be possible.

  Through this maze of ambivalence, breakdown and confusion, the thread for us to follow is the nature and direction of the changes going on in science fiction during the years of the Great Depression. Out of the apparent old-fashionedness, muddle and doubt, we will pick the writers, the stories and the special fictional moments that best illustrate the ongoing subliminal shift from the values and orientations of the Age of Technology to the new psychic state of the Atomic Age.

  In particular, we will be looking at the work of two writers. One of these is John W. Campbell, Jr.—the writer of the period who was most consciously aware of the shift taking place, and who most directly occupied himself with the problem of reformulating science fiction.

  Campbell was far from being the most popular or prominent science fiction writer of the decade, even though he did enjoy a certain measure of recognition as an SF writer, particularly in the first few years of his career when he seemed a bright young phenom. But during the Thirties, the special programmatic nature of Campbell’s effort went generally unremarked, in part because the major portion of it was performed under cover of a pseudonym, and partly because another large segment was nonfiction.

  As a result of this work, however, at the end of the decade John W. Campbell, Jr. would be precisely the right man in exactly the right place to effectively serve as the chief architect in the establishment of modern science fiction.

  The other writer of major concern is E.E. Smith. Beyond any doubt, Doc Smith was the SF magazine writer who was most popular and prominent during the last decade of the Age of Technology. His unparalleled reach and grasp were recognized from the moment that his first story saw publication.

  It would be difficult to overstate the impact that The Skylark of Space had upon American SF readers and writers.265 It turned heads. It blew minds. It. seemed an ultimate example of what science fiction could be. Even before the serialization of Smith’s first story was complete, Amazing was inundated by letters of praise for The Skylark of Space, and it was years before the murmurs finally died down.

  But Smith didn’t rest with The Skylark of Space. He treated it as an opening card rather than a final statement, and through the decade he wrote novel after novel of ever-increasing scope. And when he tried to restrict his canvas to the solar system, as he did in the novel Spacehounds of IPC (Amazing, July-Sept. 1931), readers protested. They could get that from anyone, and they demanded more from Smith.

  Smith’s great power was his breadth of vision. Far more than any other writer of the Age of Technology, Doc Smith was able to appreciate the incredible scope of the new universe revealed by science—and then to offset this mere vastness by imagining higher reaches of human potential and command of science.

  Smith’s first rival, Edmond Hamilton, with his series of rewrites of a single story to larger and larger scale, was not a rival for long. In relatively short order, Doc Smith would adopt the most promising details of “Crashing Suns” and its sequels—the space patrol, battles in space, and domesticated aliens—and make them his own. Hamilton, by contrast, was completely unable to match either the scope or the complexity of Smith’s great vision. Very shortly, he would give up trying and content himself with work of lesser ambition.

  Then, in the early Thirties, a second rival to Smith made his appearance—the young John Campbell. But this rivalry, too, was largely an illusion of the moment. Smith was a true innovator. Campbell, twenty years his junior, was at best a Smith imitator, at least at the outset, as Campbell himself was well aware.

  In 1928, John W. Campbell, Jr., as an 18-year-old freshman at M.I.T., was one of those readers bowled over by the serialization of The Skylark of Space. And even as much as thirty-five years later, Campbell, by then long recognized as science fiction’s most distinguished editor, would still attest to E.E. Smith’s continuing centrality—and deny his own—saying: “The Skylark of Space was written in 1918! Since 1918 nobody has come up with a major breakthrough in science fiction!”

  Under the overwhelming stimulus of his first encounter with The Skylark of Space, the young Campbell was inspired to sit down and attempt a science fiction story of his own, which he submitted to Amazing. And, lo and behold, “Invaders from the Infinit
e” was actually bought!

  It was never published, however. In the period of upheaval when Amazing changed ownership for the first time, “Invaders from the Infinite” turned up missing. Campbell had made the beginner’s mistake of keeping no carbon copy, and his story was permanently lost.

  The first of Campbell’s stories actually to appear in print, “When the Atoms Failed,” was published in Amazing Stories in January 1930—the very same month that saw the publication of the first issue of Astounding, the magazine with which Campbell would eventually come to be identified.

  Very shortly, Campbell launched himself into the new science fiction of scope and power, attempting to top his master Smith with evocations of mighty science. But there was no real contest between them. Campbell was a boy still struggling to form his own concepts, while Doc Smith was a mature man enjoying his freedom to give expression at last to ideas he had been forced to keep under his hat for years. Campbell was able to match Smith only in terms of gross throw-weight of imaginary scientific zap, but not at all in terms of basic writing skill, storytelling ability, human sensitivity, or overall conception.

  The epitome of the early John W. Campbell—powerful, crude and more than a little vague and incoherent—may be this world-busting passage from a second story entitled Invaders from the Infinite, a novel published in the Spring-Summer 1932 issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly:

  What use is there to attempt description of that scene as 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons of rock and metal and matter crashed against a wall of energy, immovable and inconceivable. The planet crumpled, and split wide. A thousand pieces, and suddenly there was a further mistiness about it, and the whole enormous mass, seeming but a toy, as it was from this distance in space, and as it was in this ship, was enclosed in that same, immovable, unalterable wall of energy.266