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

1: The Mystery of Science Fiction

S
CIENCE FICTION IS A LITERATURE
of the mythic imagination. In science fiction stories, spaceships and time machines carry us outside ourselves, outside our world, outside everything we know, to distant realms that none of us has ever seen—to the future and outer space. In science fiction, we encounter unknown powers, alien beings, and worlds of wonder where things become possible that are presently impossible to us.

These marvels are the very essence of science fiction. They are the source of science fiction’s fascination and appeal. Without them, science fiction would be just like everything else—normal, known, ordinary, and commonplace. As it is, science fiction is irrational, extraordinary, elusive, wonderful, never completely to be known.

This quality of the unknown, the marvelous, and the wonderful we may call transcendence. No matter how rational and fact-based science fiction has attempted to be, the marvelous has been a constant element as well. The acknowledgment of transcendence was present from the moment that science fiction existed as a distinct literary form.

It was the conscious hope of Hugo Gernsback, the immigrant technocrat who named the genre, that science fiction should be fiction about science. It was Gernsback’s aim to publish a literature that would foresee the possibilities of science-to-come, stories of imaginary technology, stories that would be extravagant fiction today, but cold fact tomorrow.

To this end, in 1924, Gernsback sent out a circular to 25,000 people announcing a new magazine. It was to be called
Scientifiction.
This was a portmanteau word of Gernsback’s own devising, meaning “scientific fiction.” But the response to Gernsback’s circular was so poor that he abandoned his idea for two years.

Then, in March 1926, Gernsback took a gamble. Without any prior announcement, he issued the first number of a new magazine which he described as “a magazine of scientifiction.” But this magazine was called
Amazing Stories.

In an editorial in an early issue, Gernsback attempted to justify what he had done. He wrote:

We really need not make any excuse for
Amazing Stories,
because the title represents exactly what the stories really are. There is a standing rule in our editorial offices that unless the story is
amazing,
it should not be published in the magazine. To be sure, the amazing quality is only
one
requisite, because the story must contain science in
every
case.
¹

Gernsback was able to fulfill his true desire to the extent that it was he who selected the name by which this new literature would present itself to the world-at-large: First “scientifiction,” and then later the name that would stick—“science fiction.”

But when Gernsback chose a title to attract an audience to the magazine he published, he had to put transcendence—“the amazing quality”—ahead of science.

And so it would be, again and again. The transcendence at the heart of science fiction can be seen revealed in the meanings of a whole constellation of words used as the titles of one science fiction magazine or another. These words have been the promise of the genre for those who have loved it:
amazing, astonishing, astounding, fantastic, marvel, miracle, startling, thrilling wonder, unknown, worlds beyond.
²

These evocative words are related to each other. Many of them share common roots. To look up the meaning of one in the dictionary is inevitably to be referred to another:

To
astound
is to bewilder with sudden surprise, to amaze.

To
amaze
is to fill with great surprise or sudden wonder, to astonish.

To
astonish
is to fill with sudden wonder or surprise.

To
wonder
is to be seized or filled with amazement, to marvel.

To
marvel
is to become full of wonder, be astonished or surprised.

Around and around these words chase each other, all the while pointing to something unexpected, mysterious and impressive. The deeper we look into these words—and into the older words in other languages from which they sprang—the more we can see that taken together, they indicate a unique extra-dimensional presence.

What characteristics are to be discerned of this elephant in the dark?

It is baffling to the rational mind, as bewildering as a blow on the head. It is sudden or shocking. Its appearance is strange or weird. It is piercing, like being struck by a bolt of lightning. It causes shivers of excitement. It arouses feelings of admiration and awe. It apparently contradicts known scientific laws. It has a connection with the faculty of the imagination. It “seizes,” it “fills,” it “shows,” it “makes visible.” It is of a higher reality. It is the measure of things.

That is what these potent words have meant during their long history. They are the indications of transcendence: of unknown things, higher possibilities, and human becoming.

We are all familiar with the transcendent symbols of ancient myth. Even though they are no longer
believed in
by modern Western culture, these symbols have been preserved into the present in religious texts and fairytales and echoed in contemporary fantasy stories.

As examples, there are the marvelous old magical powers: wishing rings, enchanted swords, draughts of immortality, caps of invisibility, seven-league boots, ever-filled purses, wells of wisdom, runes, spells, curses and prophecies. There are the ancient mythic beings: gods and ghosts, witches and wizards, brownies and elves, ogres and angels, cyclopses and centaurs, giants and jinns. And in ancient myth, there are places of wonder, countries where anything might happen to us, mysterious realms with names like Eden and Arcadia, the Forest Primeval, Valhalla, the Isles of the Blessed, and East of the Sun and West of the Moon.

Science fiction has been different from this. Like ancient myth, science fiction has presented transcendent powers, beings and realms, but they have had very different names and been conceived of in different ways than the wonders and marvels of previous myth:

The transcendent powers of science fiction have been “scientific” rather than “magical” in nature.

The transcendent beings of science fiction have not been demons and spirits, but rather mechanical robots, mutated humans, and alien creatures from other planets.

The transcendent realms of science fiction have not been located in the heavens or the underworld of ancient religious conception. Instead, these marvelous countries have been placed in the outer space of astronomical study, or in the parallel worlds theoretically posited by our mathematics, or in the future.

From its beginnings, science fiction has been the mythic vehicle of one particular culture, the rational, materialistic, weigh-and-measure, science-and-technology minded culture that has arisen in Europe and America since the Renaissance—so-called modern Western civilization. As a myth, science fiction speaks in their own language to those persons who “think Western,” those people who are the product of the logic of Descartes, the physics of Newton, the encyclopedism of Diderot, the skepticism of Voltaire, the practical experimentation of Franklin, the biology of Darwin, the inventions of Edison, and the revised relativistic physics of Einstein.

This is our culture’s best knowledge. And active myth always presents the transcendent in terms which reflect current best knowledge and then reach beyond its bounds.

It is no accident that Hugo Gernsback declared that fiction in
Amazing Stories
had to be scientific—true to best knowledge—as well as transcendent. This is the recipe for myth in every culture and at every time.

We seek that which is beyond the bounds of our best knowledge. And when we find it, we bring it home and add it to our store. This is how human beings learn, and how cultures change and develop.

Fantasy stories are not fully mythic because they cling to ancient images of transcendent possibility which no longer appear plausible. Although these may inspire us with reminders of the mysteriousness of transcendence, they are inconsistent with our best knowledge and so cannot guide us to action.

Mundane fiction is also incompletely mythic because the only things it sees as possible are those which exist or which have existed. As strongly as it may reinforce our sense of plausible possibility, at best it can only present larger-than-life characters and situations that remind us of the existence of transcendence without actually daring to be transcendent.

Science fiction has been effective myth for our time because it respects both the actual and the transcendent. It takes account of what we know and what we don’t and then looks beyond the here-and-now to thrill and inspire us with dreams of what might be.

This is the story of the dreams that have been presented by the modern myth of science fiction—and of the consequences when they began to come true.