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

by Alexei Panshin

  And that old-style scientifictional paragraph with its “soul-searing splendor,” its “awful indifference,” and its “cold, horribly bleak world” did have an important emotional point to put across that otherwise would not have been fully made. Ultimately, in “Nightfall,” it is not just the darkness that overwhelms the people of Lagash, unbalances their reason, and causes them to trash their civilization. What gets to them and brings them down is the sudden recognition of their own cosmic insignificance.

  Ordinarily the people of Lagash live in a vest-pocket universe composed of six suns, and regard that as a sufficiency, an all-in-all. By straining their imaginations to the utmost, they can envision and mentally accommodate the existence of a hidden universe that is as much as four times larger than this. Instead, however, in the space of a single instant they find themselves drowning in a great sea of stars—not the mere thirty-six hundred suns visible to us, but thirty thousand Stars blazing down on them at once.

  The sudden revelation of a universe this many times more vast and complex than even imagination has allowed for could be sufficient to chill the heart and unhinge the mind of one of our own Techno Age citizens—H.P. Lovecraft, say. In the dark, it is quite enough to overtopple the poor children of Lagash.

  There is a certain grand inevitability about the end of the story and the conclusion of the latest cycle of civilization on Lagash. At the sight of the Stars, all of the men present in the astronomical observatory—skeptical reporter, sober scientist and Cultist true believer alike—promptly fall to pieces without regard to what each of them may think he believes. They whimper, they scream, they cry, they giggle hysterically as they are overtaken by their ineluctable Fate:

  Someone clawed at the torch, and it fell and snuffed out. In the instant, the awful splendor of the indifferent Stars leaped nearer to them.

  On the horizon outside the window, in the direction of Saro City, a crimson glow began growing, strengthening in brightness, that was not the glow of a sun.

  The long night had come again.430

  And so “Nightfall” ends.

  This is a scientifiction story, for sure. Just like Asimov’s “Cosmic Corkscrew” or Don A. Stuart’s “Night” or H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine or a hundred other stories of the Technological Age, “Nightfall” displays a catastrophic cosmic situation before which mankind is helpless. And that is that, or so it seems. The long night has come again. Chalk up another fallen civilization and start the next cycle.

  But, of course, that isn’t simply that. “Nightfall” may be an epitomal presentation of cyclical history and cosmic horror, but it isn’t just another scientifiction story. Even as we gaze at it, its nature alters and it stands revealed as modern science fiction.

  The first things that identify “Nightfall” as modern science fiction are its distant location and its highly special circumstances.

  As we have seen, a typical Techno Age scientifiction story that invoked either cyclical history or the impact of the wider universe upon the vulnerable psyche of man would be likely to find its setting at the focal point of human concern, on Village Earth. Or, at most, it might trail along after an adventurer from Earth out exploring the Solar System in search of the ruins of past civilizations.

  But, for all the evocations it makes of Earth, Asimov’s story is neither tied to Earth nor to a protagonist from Earth. As a modern science fiction story, “Nightfall” can take place anywhere at all. It can search through all of time, space and alternate dimensions to find exactly what it is looking for—the ultimate scientifiction-like situation, the place where cyclical history and the suddenly revealed wider universe are not only literal fact, but even turn out to be the very same thing.

  However, this special effect does take a lot of arranging. Asimov has to present a situation of incredible complexity—six cooperating suns, the crucial one of which is a red dwarf so that the last light before the eclipse may appear properly terminal and melancholy; a planet that is physically and also culturally a twin of present-day Earth; a moon of exactly the right composition to be unobservable; and a race of men that is given to pyromania and amnesia under conditions of stress—with all of these peculiar elements interacting just so. Then, behind the glitches and blank spots of their natures and interweaving, the spook of cyclical history in the form of a cluster of thirty thousand suns can lurk until just the right moment to pop out and go, “Boo!”

  But what an effort it all takes! Simply by the distance that must be traveled and the amount of puffing and straining that is necessary to arrange and maintain the special scientifictional situation of “Nightfall,” this story contrives to make cyclical history and cosmic freakout seem a highly unlikely fate for us on Earth.

  The duality of “Nightfall” also marks it as modern science fiction. Once again, as in Asimov’s earlier story “Reason,” we both experience the events of a story and stand outside them looking on.

  We are, quite naturally, ignorant of the situation in which we find ourselves. We identify with Aton and Sheerin and Theremon in their quest for knowledge, and along with them we put together details, fragments, and scraps of information as they become available to us and do our best to make sense of them. When these citizens of Lagash break down and Saro City goes up in flames, we care about all that has been lost.

  At the same time, however, we also manage to stand at a comfortable distance from the disaster. We know all kinds of things that the characters in this story do not, and our privileged knowledge separates us from the doom suffered by Lagash and allows us to look upon it with a certain objectivity.

  As one example, there is the fact that what are the deepest possible mysteries to Lagash are not necessarily mysteries to us, who are fortunate enough to be permitted a wider angle of view. We are no strangers to darkness ourselves, and we have managed to survive the experience with our wits intact. We are familiar with moons and with eclipses. We have often seen the stars, and we are acquainted with the wider universe revealed by Twentieth Century science, with its suns by the billion and galaxies beyond counting. So however much we may empathize with the poor Lagashans, simply finding ourselves in the dark surrounded by a globular cluster of stars isn’t going to shake our nerve and rattle our brains.

  Moreover, throughout the story we are constantly flashed special signals over the heads of the Lagashans that give us assistance in understanding and assessing the situation in which we find ourselves. These aren’t direct references to Earth so much as meaningful allusions to Earthly events that not only provide us with an extra measure of understanding, but also lend plausibility to the story we are being told.

  We are, for instance, obviously meant to see that international exposition with its Tunnel of Mystery by the light of the recent New York World’s Fair. When we are told of a series of nine civilizations that were all destroyed by fire, we are expected to recall the excavation of the nine cities of Troy, some of which were destroyed by fire. When reference is made to a theory that only twelve men are supposed to be able to understand, we are meant to hear an echo of the public marveling over Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. And if we are expected to believe the indirect detection of that invisible moon of Lagash, that is partly because we are already known to be aware of the gravitational anomalies that led to the search for the unknown planet Pluto.

  The single most important piece of special information that is given to us, however, is that the scientists of Lagash are essentially correct—the great eclipse they have predicted really is going to occur. The eclipse is what we have been brought here to see, and we know that it is coming. John Campbell made certain of that five times over:

  The title of the story was an indication of what to expect. So were the epigraph from Emerson and the powerful Hubert Rogers cover painting. And Campbell’s story blurb, which ran beneath Asimov’s title and right beside the quote from Emerson, said: “How would people who saw the stars but once in two thousand years react—”431

  But
all of this was no more than a reminder, because in the preview of “Nightfall” that Campbell had run in the preceding month’s “In Times to Come” column, he had spelled out the story situation exactly:

  Next month, Isaac Asimov has a novelette, “Nightfall,” inspired by a quotation from Emerson—which might, offhand, seem a curious source of inspiration for a modern science-fiction writer. Said Emerson: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!”

  “Nightfall” discusses just that point. How would men believe—and what—if the stars appeared but once in a millennium or two? Suppose there were a planet of a multiple-sun system where there was no night, since there was always, everywhere, at least one sun-star in the sky. Except that, once in some twenty-five hundred years, the configuration became such that—night fell.

  Now—what would happen? Asimov has an idea, and a story—and I think they’re both darned good!432

  We cannot have any doubt that John Campbell wished the readers of Astounding to be fully aware of the basic facts about the situation in “Nightfall” before they began to read the story. While it might be nice if they were able to summon an old-time scientifictional frisson over the sad fate of Lagash, they were not in any way to be surprised by it. They were to know better from the outset.

  The duality displayed in “Nightfall” can be understood as a demonstration of a fundamental assumption of Campbellian science fiction—that it is possible to live, experience and suffer within the universe, and also at the same time to stand apart from existence, observe its workings, and influence its operation.

  This leads us to one last regard in which Asimov’s story is modern science fiction. “Nightfall” isn’t content to wring its hands helplessly while an unheeding cosmos grinds the bones of all-too-mortal man, as a story that was merely scientifictional might. It actually proposes a solution to the eternal problem of Lagash—couched in the terms suggested by L. Sprague de Camp in his essay on the direction of history, “The Science of Whithering,” published in Astounding in 1940.

  That is, this eclipse that we have been brought here to witness may not be just one more Lagashan light show of stars and burning cities, all so much alike that we might as readily have attended the one that came before it, or the one that comes after. This fall of civilization on Lagash may not be just one more fall of civilization on Lagash. What we have been seeing may actually be the last time around the age-old cycle.

  This time, at least, having some few months to prepare for the coming disaster, the scientists of Saro University have built a bulwark against the power of the Darkness and the Stars. They have invented what they describe as an “artificial-light mechanism”433; we would call them torches. They have constructed a place of refuge—“the Hideout”434—for three hundred women and children and able educated men. And they have placed all their precious scientific records there for safekeeping.

  Sheerin assures Theremon: “ ‘The next cycle will start off with the truth, and when the next eclipse comes, mankind will at last be ready for it.’ ”435

  It is possible that Sheerin is wrong. The present eclipse, when it occurs, is so much more intense an experience than the scientists have anticipated that it may be that the Hideout has not managed to survive it, either.

  But then Sheerin could be right after all. And though we can’t know for certain, we have to suspect that he is. There is only one regard in which this eclipse is different from other eclipses in earlier cycles. And that is the existence of that safe Hideout with its essential scientific records.

  This time round, men have actually used the power of science to determine the operating principles at work in their situation, and have attempted to master them. So if the Hideout does survive, then in the morning light after the night has gone for another eon, Lagash may finally wake and begin to unchain itself from the eternal wheel of cyclical history. And that is the only viable answer there can be to the otherwise unending futility of Lagash.

  Modern science fiction would like readers here on Earth to take a lesson from this, in particular those laggard folk still bogged down in the assumptions of the Age of Technology. Speaking to people like these, “Nightfall” says: There is a way out of the nightmare of cyclical history, a way past the otherwise total certainty of your own downfall. Become a master of universal operating principles and learn to deal with whatever circumstances you find yourselves in.

  Just as Isaac Asimov intended when he first sat down to write it, “Nightfall” is a true thought-variant. It is a scientifiction story, but set in a modern science fiction location. At the same time it is a model modern science fiction story that addresses and resolves the most nagging questions of scientifiction.

  Taken only as a scientifiction story, “Nightfall” is about the long night coming again. But read as modern science fiction, “Nightfall” is about the crucial transition from a state in which men have been ruled by the Stars to a new era in which free will is at last a possibility.

  “Nightfall” is a bridge that links the Technological Age and the new Age of the Atom. It can be likened to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel The Coming Race, which eased the previous moment of transition from the Romantic Era to the Age of Technology through its conception of the transcendent force vril, which was simultaneously spiritual, rational, occult and scientific.

  In something of the same way, in “Nightfall” different realms of transcendence are perceived as essentially the same. That is, the invisible moon and hidden stars of Lagash are interpreted in spiritual terms by the Cult, as the vast unknown universe by the scientists of Saro University, and as blank spots in perception by us outside observers.

  But at the same time that these different frames of reference are equated, the new formulation is asserted to be superior to the old ones in aptness and power. The suggestion is made that merely by a change in perspective, a whole range of Techno Age problems—from cyclical history to cosmic horror—might finally become recognizable as a single problem which could be resolved by universal operating principles in the hands of science-minded men.

  The story “Nightfall” couldn’t have been written either much earlier or much later than it was. It was both the product and the representation of a moment in which perceptions were shifting.

  We might think of this story as the unique result of exactly the right two collaborators—editor John W. Campbell, Jr., who had been working so long and so diligently to solve the problem of human Fate, and his star pupil, modern science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. By producing this story at precisely the one moment when it could be produced, they pointed the way out of the Techno Age, in which the destiny of man had been determined, into the new Atomic Age in which anything was possible.

  14: A World of Change

  PARADOXICAL THOUGH AT FIRST IT MIGHT APPEAR, the most immediate result of the arrival of John Campbell’s modern science fiction at the end of the Thirties was a radical shrinking of the scope of science fiction, a withdrawal from the great vastnesses of time and space that had loomed so large to the Techno Age imagination.

  In the 1939 Astounding, there was a retreat from the farther reaches of the future—with their grim promise of decay, devolution and the ultimate quiescence of all existence. No more were there to be stories of red suns at the end of time, and no more encounters with Big Brains domestic or foreign. Overwhelmingly powerful alien invaders of all kinds were asked to pack and shown the door.

  Short stories became largely confined to the near future and to near space, and to those things that might be known, calculated and controlled. The most typical kind of story in Astounding in 1939 was some sort of technological space opera set amongst the worlds of our Solar System as described by John Campbell in his long-running series of articles and then depicted on Astounding’s new realistic astronomical covers. These might be tales about rushing urgently needed serum to Jupiter, or about the ca
nny astrogational techniques that permit a slower ship to win a space race from Mars to Jupiter and back, or about the discovery of a young mathematical whiz in the midst of a construction gang laboring to alter an asteroid into a space station.

  A measure of sweep did still remain in the novels that were published in Astounding in 1939. The three major serials were all superscientific space epics in the style of the early Thirties. Clifford Simak’s Cosmic Engineers (Feb.-Apr.) was a deliberate attempt to write a good old-time story about bold venturers wielding mighty science after the example of the young John W. Campbell. Jack Williamson’s One Against the Legion (Apr.-June) was a comparatively tame second sequel to The Legion of Space. And E.E. Smith’s Gray Lensman (Oct. 1939-Jan. 1940)—easily the most far-reaching story of the year—was the first sequel to Galactic Patrol, the novel that had been in serialization at the moment that Campbell assumed the editorship of Astounding in 1937.

  By 1940, however, even the novels that Campbell chose to print in Astounding reflected the new restrictiveness. The three major serials this year were all set on Earth in the near-to-middle future, with neither star travel nor aliens. Robert Heinlein’s short novel “ ‘If This Goes On—’ ” (Feb.-Mar.) was about the overthrow of a future American religious dictator. L. Ron Hubbard’s Final Blackout (Apr.-June)—written in the hour that Hitler invaded Poland, launching World War II—was about war in Europe protracted for generation after generation. And A.E. van Vogt’s Slan (Sept.-Dec.) was about the attempts of emergent Homo superior to deal with the jealousy, fear and rage of ordinary humanity.