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

by Alexei Panshin

  In “Fear,” an over-rational, spirit-denying college professor named James Lowry, misunderstanding the circumstances in which he has discovered his wife and his best friend together (they are planning a surprise party for him), has murdered them both with an ax. Lowry then spends the next several days flipping in and out of what appear to be fantasy episodes, but are eventually revealed to be psychotic states, before he is finally able to acknowledge to himself and to us what he has done.

  The even more provocative “Typewriter in the Sky” offers Mike de Wolf, a contemporary piano player, who suddenly finds himself living out the role of a character—specifically, the antagonist, Spanish Admiral Miguel de Lobo—in a buccaneer novel, Blood and Loot, which is in the process of being banged out by his best friend, a cynical, slapdash writer named Horace Hackett.

  As de Wolf thinks, when he discovers the truth of his situation:

  That would mean that he was Horace Hackett’s villain in truth and in the flesh. And it would mean that he was in a never-never land where anything might and probably would happen. Where time would be distorted and places scrambled and distances jumbled and people singletrack of character—574

  Hackett sits around in his customary dirty bathrobe and pounds the typewriter keys. And again and again de Wolf within the inner narrative is compelled to do and say what he would rather not.

  No real solution is ever worked out for this uncomfortable situation—only an eventual storm-tossed transference of de Wolf back to his familiar world, which leaves him wondering if that “reality,” too, could be the product of a God who on his own plane is no more than another cheap word merchant like Horace Hackett. The short novel ends with this intimation by de Wolf of what, under the circumstances, just might be L. Ron Hubbard himself, hovering behind the scenes of his story:

  “Up there—

  “God?

  “In a dirty bathrobe?”575

  “Typewriter in the Sky” can be understood as an old-fashioned alien exploration story, but with a new basis of transfer from one world to another—the thoughts of an outside intelligence. Except for the radical discontinuities that result from the struggle for control between Hackett and de Wolf, the realm of being that is reached—which previously would have been the World Beyond the Hill—wouldn’t be notably marvelous. No more so than the world presented in any conventional pulp pirate story. But the ordinary Village “reality” to which Mike de Wolf returns—like the world of James Lowry in “Fear”—has been altered into a place of utter uncertainty.

  One story originating in Unknown would stand apart from the rest for its presentation of the new transcendence of probability and the new transcendence of mental power, and for its successful equation of the two, without any invocation of universal operating principles. This was Jack Williamson’s novel Darker Than You Think, first published in the same December 1940 issue as the second installment of “Typewriter in the Sky,” and then expanded for book publication in 1948.

  Like other late pioneer children we have met, Jack Williamson, one-time dweller in the Stone Age and traveler by covered wagon, had grown up with awe and love for the amazing new science of the Twentieth Century. As a youth, he picked up whatever scientific information he could from magazine articles and encyclopedias. Though he had no money to speak of and very few resources available to him, young Williamson still did his best to follow the path of science. He constructed batteries and motors which never quite managed to work. He attempted to build an adding machine out of pine sticks. And he even put together a steam engine of sorts with a lye can for a boiler, which promptly blew up.

  At last, after his graduation from an unaccredited rural New Mexico high school, Williamson got his opportunity to go off to college and study real science. What a keen disappointment it was, then, for him to find himself being instructed in Nineteenth Century physics by a professor who knew nothing whatever about the new science of radioactivity and subatomic particles that Williamson found so fascinating. By the time he finished two years at West Texas State College, it had become evident to Williamson that he would much rather be an SF writer than an actual practicing scientist, and he dropped out of school to seek wider experience.

  But the consequence of traveling this road was that Williamson had much less in the way of formal instruction in orthodox science and engineering than did the likes of Campbell, de Camp, Heinlein or Asimov, and so, perhaps, had less of a predisposition to have faith in universal operating principles. He wasn’t as committed to Newtonian science as they.

  Even so, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding, Williamson was able to find ways to produce science fiction that he would buy, while others who had written successfully for Hugo Gernsback or even F. Orlin Tremaine couldn’t get anywhere with Campbell.

  Williamson had two things in particular going for him. One was that great degree of personal adaptability which had made him the only writer able to sell SF stories to every market and every editor from Argosy to Weird Tales. The other was his active continuing interest in the new post-materialistic forms of transcendence.

  We’ve already seen Williamson offering an early fictional representation of the assertion that this is a world of probability rather than certainty in his novel The Legion of Time, with its different contending futures struggling to come into existence. But he was also very quick to pick up on the new Twentieth Century psychology of the unconscious.

  Even though he might appear amiable and undemanding to others, Williamson himself was far from being content with his own soft-voiced, stoop-shouldered diffidence and his backwardness in social relationships. In 1936-37, a time when such things were far from commonplace, especially for farm boys from New Mexico, he undertook a year of psychoanalysis with Dr. Charles Tidd at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Dr. Tidd later moved to Southern California, and in 1940-41, Williamson followed him to Los Angeles and underwent a second year of analysis and therapy.

  Darker Than You Think, which Williamson wrote shortly after his arrival in Los Angeles, would become his personal favorite among all his stories. It was a by-product of the self-work he was doing, an expression of both the reluctance and the exuberance involved in his “growing willingness to accept bits of myself that I had always feared or hated.”576

  The protagonist of Darker Than You Think is Will Barbee, an orphan raised in institutions who has grown up to be a hard-drinking and none-too-happy young newspaper reporter. Barbee has never managed to get over his unaccountable rejection by his one-time college mentor and surrogate father, a professor of anthropology named Dr. Lamarck Mondrick.

  At the opening of the story, Barbee is at the airport to attend a press conference called by Dr. Mondrick and his assistants—in former times Barbee’s closest friends—who have just flown back from an archaeological expedition to Inner Mongolia. Dr. Mondrick, not looking at all well, speaks to the newsmen of a hidden enemy of mankind and the coming of “ ‘a Black Messiah—the Child of the Night—whose appearance among true men will be the signal for a savage and hideous and incredible rebellion.’ ”577 But then, before he can say anything more substantial, he drops dead from an apparent heart attack.

  Will Barbee is left deeply troubled. It seems that Mondrick was allergic to cats, and prior to the news conference Barbee had seen a black kitten in the hands of April Bell, a young and beautiful red-haired reporter whom he finds both alluring and unsettling. He can’t help wondering if she deliberately triggered a fatal asthmatic seizure in Mondrick.

  He is even more bothered when he discovers the abandoned body of the little black kitten. It is dead twice over—strangled with the red ribbon that had been tied in a bow around its neck, and stabbed to the heart with the pin of April Bell’s jade brooch.

  When Barbee confronts April with this seeming bit of witchery, she confesses to him that indeed she is a witch. And Dr. Mondrick was her dedicated enemy.

  Long ago there existed many of her kind, who were eventually tracked down and extermi
nated by normal mankind—but not before they had interbred with humanity. Now, in a materialistic era in which black magic and shape-shifting are no longer given credence by most people, the witches are selecting for their own genes and backbreeding themselves into existence once more. Not only was Mondrick aware of this, but he had come back from Mongolia having discovered what he sought, the ancient secret of how to detect and combat witches. It was utterly necessary that he be killed.

  Barbee is more than a bit of a modern skeptic himself, and furthermore is bedazzled by April, and he finds it hard to accept this story at face value. In the original short novel, he attempts to explain it to himself in terms of Freud’s study of the unconscious mind and Rhine’s investigations of extrasensory perception.

  In the book version, however, there is more. To make sense of what he has been told, Barbee attempts to translate it into terms of quantum reality. He thinks:

  Probability—he recalled a classroom digression of Mondrick’s on that word, back in Anthropology 413. Probability, the bright-eyed old scholar said, was the key concept of modern physics. The laws of nature, he insisted, were not absolute, but merely established statistical averages. The paper weight on his desk . . . was supported, Mondrick said, only by the chance collisions of vibrating atoms. At any instant, there was a slight but definite probability that it might fall through the seemingly solid desk.578

  We may recognize this, in itself, as a very near repetition of what Williamson had already suggested in The Legion of Time, serialized in Astounding in 1938. However, in the book version of Darker Than You Think, Barbee takes this line of thought and couples it with the mentalistic speculations of his original short novel:

  The direct mental control of probability would surely open terrifying avenues of power—and the Rhine experiments had seemingly established that control. Had April Bell, he wondered uneasily, just been born with a unique and dangerous mental power to govern the operation of probability?579

  In this rationalization of witchcraft, then, we have a direct linkage of quantum mechanics and Joseph Rhine’s experiments in ESP. The suggestion is that the same mind power that can predict symbol cards and tip dice will be able to directly affect atomic reality, seen as the source of multiple possibility.

  Barbee immediately discounts his speculations. But as soon as he goes to bed, he finds himself caught up in a queer vivid dream in which he changes into the form of a wolf and joins April, also in the shape of a wolf, and runs the night with her.

  In the course of this experience, April explains the ability to change shape, and her account matches Barbee’s own probabilistic and mentalistic line of speculation. She says:

  “I don’t know physics enough to explain all the technical ramifications, but my friend made the main point seem simple enough. The link between mind and matter, he says, is probability. . . .

  “Living things are more than matter alone. . . . The mind is an independent something—an energy-complex, he called it—created by the vibrating atoms and electrons of the body, and yet controlling their vibrations through the linkage of atomic probability—my friend used more technical language, but that’s the idea of it.

  “The web of living energy is fed by the body; it’s part of the body—usually. My friend is a pretty conservative scientist, and he wouldn’t say whether he thinks it’s really a soul, able to survive long after the body is dead. He says you can’t prove anything about that. . . .

  “But that vital pattern in us, is stronger than in true men—his experiments did prove that. More fluid and less dependent on the material body. In the free state, he says, we simply separate that living web from the body and use the probability link to attach it to other atoms, wherever we please. . . .”580

  In these speculations and explanations, three post-materialistic ideas are proposed that later SF would find useful and return to again and again. One is that mind and matter are not separate, but linked. Another is that mind is an energy-complex or pattern. And the third is that natural laws are not absolute, but rather constitute a range of possible outcomes whose average has been mistaken for hard-and-fast “law.”

  In Darker Than You Think, the strange dreams continue. Barbee assumes one new shape after another and, with April to goad him on, commits crime after crime against his former friends. As a sabretoothed tiger, he kills one buddy by slashing his throat and forcing his car off the road. As a giant snake, he crushes another and throws his body out of a ninth-floor window.

  And when Barbee is awake again, he discovers that indeed his friends are dead from causes as superficially plausible as Dr. Mondrick’s heart attack. One was driving a car with bad brakes much too fast down a notoriously dangerous hill. The car crashed and the windshield broke and cut his throat. The other was a sleepwalker who accidentally tumbled out a high window to his death.

  The conscious rational Barbee is in a state of turmoil. He drinks too much and ties himself into knots of jealousy over April. He would like to be a support to his friends and to oppose evil. He also wants to doubt all that is happening, even to the point of undertaking psychoanalysis. And in the meantime, the shape-shifting nighttime Barbee keeps running wild with April.

  It is only gradually that Barbee comes to recognize and admit his own true nature: He is not the person he always took himself to be. He, too, is a witch. More than that, he is the awaited one, the Child of the Night, his powers all the greater for being slow to waken. It is his task to seize probability and lead the witch-people to final victory over a disbelieving mankind.

  At last, however, Barbee does assent to his destiny. After another auto accident on that dangerous hill, he takes leave of his familiar material body for good and begins to exist as a mental pattern capable of weaving any form he wishes out of convenient atoms. The story ends with him once more assuming the shape of a wolf and following April’s exciting scent off into the shadows.

  A fascinating mixture of psychology, morality and emotion is presented in this novel. The unconscious is perceived as a source of free will—but also of possibly evil behavior. The ambivalence and highly charged feelings associated with separation from the nuclear family and initiation into sex are powerfully set forth. Ultimately, however, the central issue of Darker Than You Think becomes the willingness to accept a protean personal nature—represented by Will Barbee’s ability to cloak himself in any form he desires.

  We may understand this more flexible individuality as the consequence toward which all of the rejection of received religion, of traditional cultural roles, and of historical determinism that we have been witnessing in the course of our story had been tending, made visible and explicit at last. That is, the long-term result of the modern Western adventure into materialism and out the other side was the development of a new kind of man, not predefined by society and its expectations, but flexible enough to respond appropriately to whatever circumstances he might encounter.

  Jack Williamson himself was an early example of this new type of man. This is the explanation for his slow maturation and his highly individual life path. It accounts for his singular ability to write successfully for every SF market when no one else could do this. And it also explains his somewhat uncomfortable fit within a society that taken as a whole had not yet gone as far as he had in shaking off the constraints of tradition.

  But no matter how badly adjusted to conventional mid-Twentieth Century American life Williamson may sometimes have felt, the psychic twinges he suffered were growing pains rather than signs of illness. The fact of the matter was that Williamson was an existential child whose experience of life stretched from covered wagons on the American frontier to the streets of modern-day New York and Los Angeles, and from a Stone Age existence to the exploration of the stars—and there simply was no familiar social pigeonhole offered by Western society that was capacious enough to contain him. Except, of course, to eke out a living as a science fiction writer.

  Darker Than You Think was the expression of Williamson’s ow
n recognition and acceptance of his unfixed nature. And even so—as with every new imaginative step into the unknown taken by SF during the course of its development—there was in this story a central element of uncertainty, disquiet and fear.

  Indeed, whenever the new forms of transcendence were not presumed to be under the control of universal operating principles, they could arouse feelings of wariness, apprehension and self-protectiveness in the science fiction writers of the Golden Age. This is perhaps most precisely illustrated by “Waldo” (Astounding, Aug. 1942), Robert Heinlein’s final bow as Campbell’s resident iconoclast, Anson MacDonald. This short novel was Heinlein’s next-to-last pre-war story, written between Beyond This Horizon and “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” during the months after Pearl Harbor when Heinlein was making arrangements for the wartime job he would hold as a civilian engineer at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

  Here, as in “Magic, Inc.”—with which “Waldo” would eventually be paired in a hardcover volume—Heinlein once again deliberately mixed futuristic science fiction and outright fantasy, but this time with the weight of appearance more toward the science-fictional side. And even so, “Waldo” was overtly metaphysical enough to be upsetting to certain of the more determinedly materialistic readers of Astounding who would write letters wondering about the legitimacy of such a story in their science-based magazine.

  In the next-century world presented in “Waldo,” people fly air cars and live in underground dwellings. Their power is supplied not through wires but by broadcast radiation. Now, however, the power receptors—“the deKalbs”581—are beginning to fail and the air cars are starting to drop out of the sky.