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

by Alexei Panshin

  Without invading aliens to combat or red suns to wring one’s hands over, what was the future for? If people of the future weren’t to be utopians or decadents, what were they to do with themselves? And if the pattern of the future wasn’t necessarily bound to be up and down, up and down, round and round, but essentially going nowhere, until the machinery of the universe at last came wheezing and grinding to a halt, what was its shape to be?

  Seemingly, an alternative would have to be significantly different—but different in what ways? How was the differentness of a different future to be expressed?

  It was all an imaginative blank spot.

  In 1940, the best counterexample to the orthodox Techno Age conception of the future was the Lensman series of E.E. Smith—still recognized as the leading writer of American science fiction, just as he had been since 1928. In this series, which was the culmination of all the expansive epics of super-science of the late Twenties and Thirties, Smith envisioned not only far planets, but distant times, and a genuinely superior man to look after them and run them right. Rather than bogging down in Earth-centered cyclical history, Galactic Patrol and Gray Lensman offered an ongoing cosmic war between the forces of good and the forces of evil in which man-beyond-man was destined to play a central role.

  Inspiring as the Lensman stories might be, however, they weren’t exactly what John Campbell was looking for. They had too many remnant Techno Age elements, and they did not recognize the revised cosmos of universal operating principles.

  The power at the center of things in these stories is the Lens, the special badge of distinction of Smith’s elite Galactic Patrolmen, which is described as “a lenticular polychrome of writhing, almost fluid radiance.”455 The Lens is a telepathy device and amplifier of psychic powers. It is individually tailored to its owner and glows only as long as he wears it. After his death, it ceases to glow and soon disintegrates.

  We are told in Galactic Patrol that the Lens is “ ‘not essentially scientific in nature. It is almost entirely philosophical, and was developed for us by the Arisians.’ ”456

  These alien beings, the makers and suppliers of the Lens, are an even higher form of transcendence. The Arisians appear to men in any of a variety of forms. Their actual nature may well be Big Brain. But in any event, they are so incredibly advanced that their true reality must be kept hidden even from the members of the Galactic Patrol itself. In Gray Lensman, an Arisian says of the Patrolmen:

  “None save a few of the most powerful of their minds has the slightest inkling of the truth. To reveal any portion of it to Civilization as a whole would blight that Civilization irreparably. Though Seekers after Truth in the best sense, they are essentially juvenile and their life-spans are ephemeral indeed. The mere realization that there is in existence such a race as ours would place upon them such an inferiority complex as would make further advancement impossible.”457

  Much as he might genuinely admire Doc Smith—and ready as he still might be to publish his Lensman stories—John Campbell couldn’t be altogether comfortable with stuff like this.

  Far planets, yes. Distant times, by all means. And above all, a genuinely superior man to run them right. This is what John Campbell could accept from the Lensman stories.

  But not wars between good and evil. The Atomic Age wasn’t at all sure that it still believed in moral absolutes like good or evil. Most probably it did not. And John Campbell wasn’t about to rely on so slender a reed as human virtue to bring mankind to the top in a universe of conflicting interests. Instead, he placed his faith in human know-how.

  The Lens wouldn’t do, either. Its nature was not scientific. In fact, in its tie to the individual, in its glowings, and in the extinction of its light upon the death of its owner, it was far too soul-like.

  Most of all, however, what Campbell could do without was intolerably advanced alien beings tugging upon the strings of humanity and shifting us this way and that, even with the noblest of intentions. Campbell wished to present men standing tall and being subservient to no one, men taking control of the future by themselves and for themselves.

  The way to do this, as Campbell saw it, was through the neutral medium of universal operating principles. They were the one sure way for men to answer all problems, to bridge all gaps, to fill in all blank spots, and to proceed from here-and-now to the farthest imaginable there-and-then—all the way to the heat death of the universe and beyond.

  It would take three writers working diligently for a period of years in the pages of Astounding to establish the new future that John Campbell was aiming to bring into being: the Lensman future, or something like it—but without Lenses, or Arisians, or cosmic moral battle.

  Former Navy officer Robert Heinlein would alter the conception of time-to-come, changing it from a place where nature and fate are determined into a place of multiplex possibility.

  Canadian writer A.E. van Vogt would involve himself in a systematic inquiry into the meaning of superiority, both in aliens and in man.

  Finally, the young prodigy Isaac Asimov would gather the insights of Smith, Campbell, Williamson, de Camp, Heinlein and van Vogt, and integrate them all into a story series in which human beings rule the galaxy thousands of years hence.

  These crucial bodies of work—Heinlein’s Future History, van Vogt’s superman stories, and Asimov’s Foundation stories—would mark the parameters of John Campbell’s science fiction empire. Mainstream science fiction for a generation to come would be written within the conceptual limits set forth in these stories.

  The most immediately influential of the three writers was the oldest among them, Robert Heinlein. He came to story writing in 1939 as a man of nearly 32, with not only a wide variety of worldly experience but also perhaps the broadest reading knowledge of earlier SF of anyone who had ever attempted to write science fiction. In 1941, a mere two years after he began, he would be chosen Guest of Honor of the Third World Science Fiction Convention, held in Denver, Colorado, following Frank R. Paul and Doc Smith in this distinction.

  Robert Anson Heinlein was born in the rural county seat of Butler, Missouri on July 7, 1907, the third of what would be seven children. When Heinlein was very young, his father, a cashier and bookkeeper, moved the family north to Kansas City in search of greater opportunity.

  Young Robert was a very bright, intense and private boy, much given to having his own way in things when he could get it. Though he wasn’t without athletic ability, he had little taste for team sports. He was an avid reader, considered the class grind by his fellows. His real love was for science, and he told everyone that he aimed to be an astronomer when he grew up, though what he really wanted was to travel to the Moon.

  At the same time, the young Heinlein was troubled by overwhelming doubts that he could share with no one. His family and the immediate society around him were locked in turn-of-the-century Bible Belt Fundamentalism, narrow, bigoted and reactionary. Even as a child, Robert was acutely aware that there were contradictions between what he was reading and observing, and what he was informed was the literal word of God. He would have moments in which he doubted the sanity of ordinary adult life, doubted the reality of society, doubted the existence of everything and everyone but himself.

  These feelings would surface from time to time in stories written throughout Heinlein’s long career. In reference to the first of them—“They” (Unknown, Apr. 1941)—Heinlein would note:

  Idea is based on the feeling I had as a kid that everything as I saw it was a deliberate plot to deceive me, that people didn’t do the things I saw them do when I wasn’t watching them. . . . The world consists of two parts, the ego—unique and utterly alone—(how is it that I am inside—that is the most startling fact we deal with)—and the outside, strange, incomprehensible, and possibly hostile.458

  If the boy Robert had a love for science, it was because science seemed to offer the possibility of verifiable truth. It was a road that promised to lead beyond his own limitations arid the restriction
s of his present situation.

  In Heinlein’s third published story, “Requiem” (Astounding, Jan. 1940), D.D. Harriman—the now-aged financier who made space travel possible, but who himself has never been permitted to travel to the moon—recalls the scientific dreams of his youth. Clearly speaking for Heinlein, too, he says:

  “I wasn’t unusual; there were lots of boys like me—radio hams, they were, and telescope builders, and airplane amateurs. We had science clubs, and basement laboratories, and science-fiction leagues—the kind of boys who thought there was more romance in one issue of the Electrical Experimenter than in all the books Dumas ever wrote. We didn’t want to be one of Horatio Alger’s get-rich heroes, either; we wanted to build spaceships.”459

  At the age of 13, Heinlein managed to resolve the unutterable tension he felt between the dictates of the King James Bible, literally interpreted, and his secret desire to build spaceships and travel to other worlds. It was then that he read Darwin’s Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and recognized that he was no Christian true believer at all, but rather a scientific freethinker.

  Science and skepticism became the young Heinlein’s chosen methods for dealing with the conflict between his immediate social surroundings and his sense of truth. He resolved that he was going to doubt everything that could be doubted, test everything that could be tested, look at anything and everything, and make up his mind for himself.

  In high school, he became captain of the Negative Debate Team. He used Will Durant as a key to philosophy; Heinlein says, “He first introduced me to a wide range of philosophers; and I read ’em all; I gobbled ’em all.”460 Heinlein sought out and avidly consumed the sassiest mockers and doubters the skeptical Twenties could offer him: before anyone, his fellow Missourian Mark Twain; the author of The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce; the provocative playwright George Bernard Shaw; and the reigning iconoclast of the day, H.L. Mencken. He read forbidden literature of all kinds in search of whatever it might be that he wasn’t supposed to know.

  Most of all, however, Heinlein took his clues from SF. He relished every scrap of transcendent literature he could find. Until he began to write it himself, reading SF was his favorite spare-time activity.

  He started at it young and persisted despite parental disapproval. A whole generation of science fiction writers, from Jack Williamson to Isaac Asimov, would discover SF in the pages of Amazing Stories. Alone among them, Heinlein was reading it much earlier and soaking up a somewhat different set of influences.

  He was a reader of Hugo Gernsback’s popular science magazines, Electrical Experimenter, and then Science and Invention. He read tattered old copies of the Frank Reade, Jr. dime novels, and he read the new Tom Swift boys’ books as they were issued. He read All-Story and he read Argosy. And when Weird Tales came along in the early Twenties, he read that, too.

  In those days before the advent of Amazing, a would-be reader of SF was still obliged to define and invent the literature for himself. But young Robert’s reach was especially broad. He found his way to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but also to Lewis Carroll and L. Frank Baum. He read Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs, but also James Branch Cabell and H.P. Lovecraft.

  And much as he might love science, in SF as Robert Heinlein was constructing it for himself the science-based story would be only one possible form among many. In years to come, he would even make the explicit suggestion that “it would be more nearly correctly descriptive to call the whole field ‘speculative fiction’ and to limit the name ‘science fiction’ to a sub-class. . . .”461

  Of all the writers of speculative fiction that he read, it was H.G. Wells who influenced him the most. Wells dealt in radically changed futures and in improved alternate societies, and Robert, the boy who entertained doubts about the reasonableness and the reality of the social world around him, could like that. Moreover, Wells offered the highly attractive ideal of a dedicated scientific elite assuming control of society—from the Samurai of A Modern Utopia (1905) to the self-selected membership of The Open Conspiracy (1928)—and Robert could mentally enlist himself in their ranks.

  In high school, Heinlein was a superior student, a school politician, and Major of the junior ROTC unit. But his classmates did have some inklings of his true nature. By his name in the 1924 Central High School Yearbook, they wrote, “He thinks in terms of the fifth dimension, never stopping at the fourth.”462

  Robert spent his last year in high school writing letters and pulling political strings in a campaign to win himself an appointment to one of the military academies (he wasn’t particular which) from Missouri Senator James Reed, a creature of the notorious Boss Pendergast machine. He was initially turned down, but after an interim year spent cooling his heels at the recently established Kansas City Junior College, his persistence was finally rewarded with an appointment to Annapolis.

  At the Naval Academy, Heinlein found himself in heaven, one of a chosen elite of intelligent, dedicated and able young men, and he thrived there. The Academy took a bright bumpkin from Missouri and made a gentleman of him. He stood twentieth in the class of 1929, and he might have graduated as high as fifth if he hadn’t been caught off-limits too many times. Serving in the Navy permitted Heinlein to live for a period in an apartment in Greenwich Village, and it also gave him an opportunity to see the world. He served in a battleship, and in destroyers, and as a gunnery officer aboard the early aircraft carrier USS Lexington.

  But by no means had he lost his outsider’s eye. As early as 1930, he began to keep the first of an expanding number of files of newspaper and magazine clippings on trends in society and the eccentricities of American social behavior. And he continued to read every odd thing he could find—including, of course, the new science fiction magazines, the post-Gernsback Amazing, and Wonder Stories, and Astounding Stories of Super-Science.

  In 1934, however, his paradise came to an end. He pressed duty too hard, and came down with tuberculosis, then still a disease that had an uncertain prognosis. And almost overnight, he found himself out of the Navy, retired on full disability pension at the age of 27.

  Heinlein made a quick recovery, and decided to try graduate study at UCLA in mathematics and physics. But again he pushed himself too hard, and he suffered a severe relapse. This time he had to drop out of school and go off to Colorado to get well.

  This was a very difficult and frustrating period for Robert Heinlein. He was young and tall and handsome. He was extremely bright and able, and seemingly there wasn’t anything he couldn’t master if he put his mind to it. He could build a radio. He could set stone. He could plot a ballistic. He could command troops. He could design and erect a house, performing all the various construction work himself, if need be. He could get along with working stiffs and roughnecks, but at a formal dinner party he knew which was the proper fork to use. He could talk philosophy, economics, psychology, or semantics. He knew a thousand different things.

  But now, through a nasty caprice of fate and the failure of his body, his hard-won knowledge, his wide variety of skills and his sense of dedication were all rendered irrelevant. If he wasn’t going to be able to be a Wellsian Samurai, what was he to do with himself? What was second best?

  He tried his hand at one thing and another, including mining silver and selling real estate. But none of it was fully satisfying to him. Finally, in early 1939, he had a fling at politics. He ran in a Democratic primary in California in an effort to unseat an incumbent state representative, but he finished in second place.

  The campaign left Heinlein not only completely broke, but with a mortgage payment coming due. It was then he recalled an ad he had seen in Thrilling Wonder Stories for an amateur story contest with a prize of $50. At that particular moment, this looked like a very attractive and useful sum of money.

  The more Heinlein thought about it, the more it seemed to him that if he were seriously to attempt to write science fiction, he could do it. He had read SF practically forever. And once upon a ti
me, for his own amusement while he was recovering from TB, he had even worked up a book-length quasi-historical account of the coming to power of an American religious dictator, the eventual overthrow of his line, and the establishment of a new rational society. Heinlein saw no reason why he couldn’t produce more commercial work if he were to try.

  So he sat right down to it, and in four days he turned out a story entitled “Life-Line.” This was about Hugo Pinero, a man who has invented a machine that can accurately foretell the length of any person’s life, and the opposition he and his machine arouse among the entrenched interests of society. It opens not with the invention of the machine, but with Pinero attempting to justify his already-invented machine to a hostile and skeptical Academy of Science. And it ends with the inventor dead—rubbed out—at the very moment he himself has predicted.

  In many ways, including its determinism, this was an old-fashioned story. But in presentation, it was very new. “Life-Line” was brisk, snappy, self-confident, and immensely knowledgeable about the workings of society—more like a Paul Gallico writing in the slick magazine Collier’s than anything ordinarily to be found in the science fiction pulp magazines of the late Thirties.

  When Heinlein looked over what he had written, it struck him that it was much too good for Thrilling Wonder Stories. So acting boldly, he sent it off to Collier’s instead. But Collier’s wouldn’t take it. For one thing, they already had Paul Gallico. For another, they weren’t yet ready for science fiction in the spring of 1939.

  Considering what to do next, Heinlein remembered that John Campbell, the new editor of Astounding, had declared the existence of a permanent open contest at the magazine, all comers welcome. Since Astounding paid a penny a word, this meant that a 7000-word story like his might earn $70 there.