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

by Alexei Panshin

  “Truth will triumph,” Gallegher said piously. “It always does. However, I figure truth is a variable, so we’re right back where we started. All right, sweetheart. I’ll answer your question. Stay on my side if you want to be safe.”

  “Which side are you on?”

  “God knows,” Gallegher said. “Consciously, I’m on Brock’s side. But my subconscious may have different ideas. We’ll see.”828

  It would appear that Gallegher has made a leap of faith. His conscious mind may not always recognize truth, but he believes that his subconscious will. He trusts it more.

  Which side is Gallegher on? He’s on the side of his subconscious. In a world of variable truth, his subconscious will know the right thing to do and bring him through safely.

  The result of this trust of the unknown is that the universe is transformed. Through the offices of his subconscious, Gallegher is faced with what during the Techno Age would have been fearsome monsters. But in the altered atmosphere of his state of calm acceptance of whatever strangeness he encounters, these one-time bogies reveal themselves as comically humanlike in their foibles and limitations.

  In “The World Is Mine,” the threat which is no longer a threat is invaders from outer space. Three of them arrive through a Gallegher-made time machine from Mars five hundred years in the future, asserting their intention to take over the world.

  Except that these Lybllas, as they call themselves, look rather like white bunny rabbits with round ears and golden eyes and are about as dangerous. It turns out that they have been reading Techno Age scientifiction and taking it to heart. They want to destroy cities and hold pretty girls to ransom, and all the other fun stuff invading aliens get to do.

  Gallegher deals with them by clumsily faking a news broadcast in which it is declared that a bloodless revolution has taken place all around the world:

  “The Lybllas are unanimously acclaimed as our sole rulers—”

  “Whee!” cried a small voice.

  “—and the new form of government is already being set up. There will be a different fiscal system, and coins bearing the heads of the Lybllas are being minted. It is expected that the three rulers will shortly return to Mars to explain the situation to their friends there.”829

  Gallegher then shakes their paws, gives them one more cookie apiece, and sends them back to future Mars to tell everyone about their adventures.

  In “The Proud Robot”—the best-remembered of the Gallegher stories—the threat that isn’t a threat is the robot Joe. He is another of those robots in the same family as Jack Williamson’s Malgarth and Isaac Asimov’s QT-1 who have an exalted opinion of themselves, but think far less well of mere human beings.

  Joe won’t do anything that he is told to do. He insults every person who crosses his path. Like the Glass Cat in L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, he admires his own inner workings and invites everybody else to as well. He wants nothing more than to spend long hours before the mirror watching the wheels within his transparent hull go around and around.

  There can be no doubt that this robot does have highly unusual powers and abilities. Joe can watch Gallegher throwing an apple core on the floor and snicker to himself for ten minutes over the probability that Gallegher will slip on it when he goes for the mail—which indeed he does. Joe has X-ray vision. He can hypnotize people. And, at one point, when he wants to locate Gallegher, he does so by “vastening” him:

  “What’s vastened?” Gallegher wanted to know.

  “It’s a sense I’ve got. You’ve nothing remotely like it, so I can’t describe it to you. It’s rather like a combination of sagrazi and prescience.”

  “Sagrazi?”

  “Oh, you don’t have sagrazi, either, do you. Well, don’t waste my time. I want to go back to the mirror.”830

  Superior being though Joe may be in certain respects, however, he is never treated for a single moment as a danger to humanity. In large part, this is because Joe has no active purposes of his own beyond self-admiration. He’s just too comically vain to be a threat to anyone.

  The worst that Joe does is to hypnotize some visitors he finds particularly irritating and wants to get rid of. He makes them think that it is Gallegher they are dealing with and forges Gallegher’s signature to a long-term contract at pitiful wages.

  This is certainly trying from Gallegher’s point of view. All the more so since this is the act that places him in the middle of that ugly entertainment industry struggle. Even so, however, Gallegher doesn’t get more than exasperated with the robot, in much the same way that a parent might be put out with a child who has been acting irresponsibly.

  Gallegher’s solution to the Joe problem is to get drunk—but not too drunk—and then talk Joe into hypnotizing himself, the better to appreciate his beauty from a new perspective. Then, when Joe is in the grip of his subconscious, Gallegher asks the robot why he created him, and the robot is forced to answer:

  “ ‘You were drinking beer,’ Joe said faintly. ‘You had trouble with the can opener. You said you were going to build a bigger and better can opener. That’s me.’ ”831

  Now that Gallagher knows what Joe is good for, he orders the robot to open a can of beer for him, and Joe does it deftly. My what a good can opener he is! And with his basic function established, it seems that henceforth the robot will be compelled to obey all of his maker’s commands.

  But that isn’t all that Joe does. He also emits a subsonic noise which Brock is to broadcast underneath all his pay TV programs. When amplified within one of his competitor’s illegal theaters, this noise will be sufficient to put the audience into a panic and send it rushing out the door.

  And yet, even this isn’t all that Joe is good for. It seems that the subconscious Gallegher has a yen for a singing partner. And the story ends with a drunken Gallegher sinking “Frankie and Johnnie” in a duet with his can opener.

  This isn’t untypical of Gallegher’s solutions. In “Gallegher Plus” (the plus is his subconscious), he is being assailed by three different people who have hired him to solve their problems while he was drunk past the point of remembering. And the answer to all three of the problems turns out to be one machine. It is a dirt excavator, a hole maker. And the dirt that it eats, it converts into super-strong, super-fine wire which can be used variously as a manual spaceship control or as the basis for a three-dimensional TV screen.

  It sings, too. The story ends with Gallegher—drunk, of course—harmonizing with this new machine on “St. James Infirmary.”

  This year—1943—in which Kuttner and Moore were for a brief period the leading writers in Astounding, was the trippiest and most uncertain of the war. It might be compared to that deep dark moment in the midst of World War I when writers began to cut loose from old notions of a fixed reality and set forth to explore other realms of being.

  By the middle of 1943, the initial thrusts of the Axis powers into Russia, North Africa and the Western Pacific had all become stalled, but the Allies had yet to take the offensive in the war and begin to force Germany, Italy and Japan out of the territories they had seized. During this temporary moment of stasis, with the immediate pressure to survive relieved but no end to the war yet in sight, there was space to catch a breath, but also an opportunity for strange thoughts to enter the mind.

  The old familiar living patterns of the Western countries had been thoroughly disrupted by the demands of the war, and “normality”—whatever that might be—seemed a distant dream. It was at this hour that art forms of all kinds started to perceive the mind as a new unknown and began to probe its uncertainties.

  People were ready to reach out and try new and weird states of mind. And non-rational states of mind were also ready to force themselves upon people’s attention.

  As an example of this latter, we might consider the discovery in April 1943 of the mind-altering properties of LSD, the first man-made hallucinogenic drug.

  In the years before the war, a young Swiss biochemist named Albert Hofmann had bee
n doing research in the alkaloids of the poisonous fungus ergot. It was his hope to find a circulatory and respiratory stimulant which could be marketed by his employers, the pharmaceutical firm Sandoz, Ltd.—and, indeed, he would eventually prove successful in this.

  In 1938, Hofmann had synthesized d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate, the twenty-fifth in a series of lysergic acid derivatives. But when animal experiments indicated that this wasn’t the drug he was seeking, he had set it aside.

  Now, however, in the spring of 1943, he decided to prepare another batch of LSD-25. There was no pressing reason for him to do so. In fact, reflecting on the subject at a later time, Hofmann would say, “This was quite unusual; experimental substances, as a rule, were definitely stricken from the research program if once found to be lacking in pharmacological interest.”832

  What is more, in handling the substance, Hofmann suffered an uncharacteristic laboratory accident. While crystallizing LSD-25, he apparently got a trace of the substance on his fingers and it was absorbed through a cut in the skin. Very shortly, the chemist had to leave work and go home to cope with the effects of the world’s first acid trip.

  To Hofmann, perhaps the most marvelous part of the whole affair was the minuteness of the dose that he took compared with the power this new drug had to affect his mind.

  It would almost seem that LSD had nagged, schemed, shouted and pushed to force an awareness of its effects upon a heedless human intermediary—and that 1943 was somehow the appropriate moment for such a thing to happen.

  Another example of a light suddenly dawning during 1943 where the powers of the non-rational mind are concerned may be drawn from the experience of A.E. van Vogt. Here was a writer who was strongly oriented toward the holistic function of the right brain—but who worked with excruciating slowness and who felt himself to be out of touch with his powers of intuition. Van Vogt wanted nothing more than to discover a system that would allow him regular contact with what he (like Padgett) thought of as the subconscious mind.

  From the very beginning of his writing career, van Vogt had had repeated anxious moments when he would wake during the night not knowing where his current story was going next. He would lie awake and mull over the problems of the story until he fell back to sleep. But then, in the morning, a solution to the problem he had been so anxious about would suddenly come to him. He says, “All my best plot twists came in this way.”833

  However, it was only in July 1943, a dozen years after he first began writing stories, that the penny finally dropped and van Vogt at last became consciously aware that this same sequence of events had happened to him again and again. He immediately determined to induce it deliberately rather than accidentally, to force himself to lie awake thinking about his latest story and see whether an appropriate creative flash came to him the next day:

  That night I got out our alarm clock, and moved into the spare bedroom. I set the alarm to ring in one and one-half hours. When it awakened me, I reset the alarm for another one and one-half hours, thought about the problems in the story I was working on—and fell asleep. I did that altogether four times during the night. And in the morning, there was the unusual solution, the strange plot twist. Exactly as when I had awakened from anxiety. So I had my system for getting to my subconscious mind. During the next seven years I awakened myself about three hundred nights a year four times a night.834

  Just as with Albert Hofmann and LSD, the basis for this breakthrough in consciousness had been there for years and years, right under van Vogt’s nose, before he finally took notice of it. But it was in 1943, that strange, unsettled time of mind, that the eyes of both men finally became opened to what they hadn’t been able to see before.

  Astounding would go through a series of physical changes during this same volatile year. The stimulus for its radical reconstruction would be government-imposed restrictions in the amount of paper available to magazine publishers.

  In the year before the United States entered the war, there had been a great over-expansion in the number of science fiction magazines being published, followed by a severe die-back that left about a dozen titles at the end of 1941. Now, however, with the imposition of paper rationing, there would be a further die-off of SF pulp magazines. Only half-a-dozen titles would still survive by 1944, and to maximize sales, all would be quarterlies.

  All of them, that is, but Astounding. It was a very different strategy that John Campbell would elect to follow.

  The first decision that he made, in May 1943, was to change Astounding and Unknown Worlds from bedsheet size to pulp size—a slightly compressed pulp size, 7 by 9 1/2 inches, with too much type jammed onto each page, so that the magazine had an overcrowded look. Six issues of Astounding and three issues of Unknown Worlds would be published in this format.

  Then, after the October 1943 issue of Unknown Worlds, the editor would make the decision to kill off his magazine of modern fantasy. It would be one of the SF magazines that was unable to survive the wartime paper crunch.

  At the same time—after the October 1943 issue of Astounding—Campbell would change the dimensions of his science fiction magazine again, to so-called digest size, that is, the size of Reader’s Digest, 5 1/2 by 8 inches. The result would be one dark, squat, ugly little magazine.

  But it would still be a monthly. By appropriating the former paper budget of Unknown and by making this second reduction in the dimensions of Astounding, Campbell was able to hold his magazine to a monthly schedule at a time when other SF magazine publishers were deciding to keep more than one title alive but to publish each of these less frequently than before. What is more, because of its new smaller size, it was now Astounding which got placed at the front of the magazine rack, and the pulp magazines which were stuck away behind.

  At last, Campbell’s magazine was effectively set apart from all the others!

  In this new smaller size, the editor was even able to add an expanded science article section that was printed on paper of Sunday supplement quality, paper that would reproduce photographs. This increased concern for the presentation of actual leading-edge science may have been an attempt on Campbell’s part to compensate for the smaller proportion of science-based stories now appearing in Astounding.

  More and more, the leading edge stories in Astounding were based in transcendent consciousness rather than in transcendent science. A turning point may be seen in the October 1943 issue of Astounding, its last as a pulp-sized magazine. In this issue, whether by chance or by design, every one of the stories would be consciousness-based.

  In the digest-sized Astounding, a number of writers would pick up themes that Lewis Padgett had presented in “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” and the Gallegher stories and enlarge upon them: the acceptance of the primacy of non-rational thought; toleration of aliens and robots and other creatures who would previously have been taken to be evolutionary competitors of mankind; and recognition of education in new forms of thought as the key to higher human development.

  But Lewis Padgett would have no part to play in these explorations. At about the same time that Astounding was switching over to digest size, Henry Kuttner was drafted into the Army, despite a heart murmur, and made into a medical corpsman.

  This was the man, we will remember, whose most fundamental belief was that all authority is dangerous, and that, bend though he might, he must never give in to it. It would take the Army a little more than a year to come to the conclusion that Kuttner was someone with a total inability to accept military discipline, and to give him a medical discharge on psychoneurotic grounds.

  In the meantime, Lewis Padgett would be silent as a writer, and when he was able to return to work for Campbell at the beginning of 1945, it was to find that others had pressed on beyond his limits in dealing with the new reality. Kuttner and Moore would write well for Campbell, but never again as innovatively as in 1942 and 1943.

  As an example of just how queer and non-scientific SF could be in Astounding in the last years of the war, we m
ight look at the short story printed immediately before Lewis Padgett’s “The Proud Robot” in the October 1943 issue—Fredric Brown’s “Paradox Lost.”

  Fredric Brown was born in Cincinnati on October 29, 1906. He was a student at two different colleges without being able to finish. He sold his first mystery story in 1936, but until he began publishing mystery novels after the war and was at last able to write full-time, he would earn his primary living as a proofreader for the Milwaukee Journal while turning out pulp magazine stories on the side.

  Like Kuttner, Fredric Brown was another small, soft-spoken, hard-drinking man with a love for Lewis Carroll and doubts about the sufficiency of our ordinary notions of reality. Among his mystery novels would be one entitled Night of the Jabberwock (1950) that would lead off with the very same verse which figures so centrally in “Mimsy Were the Borogoves.”

  Brown found the plotting and writing of mystery stories extremely hard work, and turned to SF writing as a form of relief. He knew nothing and cared nothing about science. His SF stories would be primarily philosophical in nature, but with the philosophy made sweet and simple by means of cockeyed humor and a spare, highly readable pulp writing style.

  His first SF story was “Not Yet the End” (Captain Future, Win 1941), but more than half of the stories that he published before the end of the war would appear in Unknown or Astounding. Altogether, about a quarter of his work, including five novels, would be science fiction.