The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (109 page)
Read The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Online
Authors: Alexei Panshin,Cory Panshin
Now what is this that we are being told? It is the
Second Foundation
which is the one that really counts?
Does this mean that up until now we have only been being led astray in believing it is the First Foundation that is of central importance in the re-establishment of Galactic Empire? Apparently, it does.
When the failing psychologist has managed to learn more, knitting together the all-too-sparse facts and his own knowledge and insights, he explains further:
“Foundation Number One was a world of physical scientists. It represented a concentration of the dying science of the Galaxy under the conditions necessary to make it live again. No psychologists were included. It was a peculiar distortion, and must have had a purpose. The usual explanation was that Seldon’s psycho-history worked best where the individual working units—human beings—had no knowledge of what was coming, and could therefore react naturally to all situations.
“Foundation Number Two was a world of mental scientists. It was the mirror image of our world. Psychology, not physics, was king.”
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It would seem that a revised order of power in the universe is being presented here:
At the bottom is the mere material force of the old Galactic Empire.
Above that comes the more subtle physical science commanded by the First Foundation.
That, however, can be trumped by the Mule’s ability to mentally control the emotions of other people.
But he is a sport, a freak with one talent. The one thing that can possibly defeat the Mule is the advanced mental science wielded by the Second Foundation. Whoever they are. Wherever they are. Whatever they may be doing.
But where are these marvelous masters of mental power to be found?
On his deathbed, Ebling Mis calls Bayta, Toran and Magnifico to him. He tells them that he knows where the Second Foundation is.
Having destroyed all his notes, he is now ready to confide the secret to them.
He whispers: “ ‘I am convinced the Second Foundation can win, if it is not caught prematurely by the Mule. It has kept itself secret; the secrecy must be upheld; it has a purpose. You must go there; your information is vital . . . may make all the difference.’ ”
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But then, just as the psychologist is opening his mouth to tell them the location of the Second Foundation, Bayta draws a blaster and shoots him dead.
She explains to Toran that the grotesque clown Magnifico is in actuality the mutant conqueror, the Mule. Ebling Mis was about to tell the secret to exactly the one person who must not be allowed to hear it. Magnifico then admits that indeed he is the Mule. While traveling the galaxy with them, he has readied one world after another for conquest with his concerts on a “ ‘Visi-Sonor’ ”
907
—the hallucinatory sound-and-image instrument that he plays. He has held Ebling Mis under his direct control, driving him to the utter limits of his strength and health in order to gain this information so vital to his designs.
The great mistake of the mutant lay in his all-too-human frailty. Because Bayta has liked him for himself, he has left her mind uncontrolled, and that has been his undoing. But though he may have lost this time, he declares that he will yet again try to locate the Second Foundation.
But to this, Bayta replies:
“We have defeated you
entirely!
All your victories outside the Foundation count for nothing, since the Galaxy is a barbarian vacuum now. The Foundation itself is only a minor victory, since it wasn’t meant to stop your variety of crisis. It’s the Second Foundation you must beat—
the Second Foundation
—and it’s the Second Foundation that will defeat you. Your only chance was to locate it and strike it before it was prepared. You won’t do that now. Every minute from now on, they will be readier for you. At this moment, at this
moment,
the machinery may have started. You’ll know—when it strikes you, and your short term of power will be over, and you’ll be just another strutting conqueror flashing quickly and meanly across the bloody face of history.”
908
In a final triumphant shot, Bayta assures the Mule that he will prove to be the last as well as the first of his line. And, because this is nothing less than the literal truth, the comment strikes home. As he departs, the mutant general permits himself to reveal to Bayta and Toran that one reason for the selection of his name is that he is sterile. There will be no offspring of his own kind to follow him.
The Mule may be a mutant superman, but it seems that the character and action of one very ordinary human being have been sufficient to counter all of his efforts. For all the momentary power he may wield, in the long run history will account him little more than a hiccup.
If we check to see what actual changes have been made by the conquests of the Mule, we would have to say that his brief, brilliant appearance on the galactic stage has served one purpose and one purpose only. Through his activities, he has explicitly demonstrated the limitations of the science-beyond-science of the First Foundation, and caused it to be replaced in our admirations by the transcendent mental powers commanded by the Second Foundation. He has overturned the old king, physics, and brought forth the new king, psychology.
The First Foundation is now a closed chapter—either an only partially successful experiment of some kind, or a galactic sideshow, or (just possibly) a tool in the unwitting employ of more knowing hands. From now on, the presumption in this series would be that wherever it is that the masters of mental power of the Second Foundation are located must be the place where the real galactic action is happening.
Here in “The Mule,” the answer to the perennial problem of Lagash implicit in “Nightfall”—alteration in thought—would at last be made both explicit and universal. Henceforth, the solution to any and all challenges to the glorious future of man would have to be found in higher states of consciousness, and not in higher science.
Isaac Asimov’s “The Mule” was the climactic contribution to the great imaginative work project that John Campbell had been directing since becoming editor of
Astounding.
Here was the final guarantee—or as near to that as Campbell would ever have—that determinism, even the marvelous determinism of Hari Seldon, had no ultimate grip on humanity. The future was ours to make.
The two halves of the Golden Age, with their apparently very different natures, were reconciled in “The Mule.” The Foundation series had been the culmination and synthesis of all the new thought systems and laws presented in the pre-war
Astounding
and
Unknown.
But now Psychohistory—and, by extension, all the other great codifications—were subsumed within the new mysteries of the war years: non-rational consciousness and human self-transcendence.
Taken as a step-by-step whole, the Foundation series said more loudly and completely what Asimov had just said in “Escape”:
If mankind wishes to overcome the limits of Village Earth and attain the stars, it will be necessary for us to change the way we think.
As the series began, our attention was directed to the rational materialists of the original Foundation project, bent on carrying out their dream of the ultimate static codification of human knowledge, the
Encyclopedia Galactica.
Now, in “The Mule,” after many changes of perspective, we are asked to see transcendence in the mindbending abilities of a mutant and the unknown powers of the superpsychologists of the Second Foundation.
Taken altogether, this progression of viewpoints offers us an altered understanding of human consciousness. Following Asimov through his series of stories, we have to acknowledge that thought is not a static or unitary process. Human mentation is actually multi-faceted and dynamic.
If the material science of the First Foundation is not sufficient to deal with the problems of Asimov’s galactic future, then by implication, the scientific understanding of our modern Western world cannot be a universally valid and adequate approach to existence, either. At best, it is just one possible state of mind among many, and by no means the most advanced.
Once this is accepted, our perspective on the whole modern Western adventure must change. No more can it be the utmost that mankind may dream and do. Now it becomes reduced to a necessary phase that we had to pass through in order to stop looking over our shoulders at transcendence in the guise of spirit and start looking ahead to transcendence perceived as higher states of thinking and being.
A phase that began around 1685 and was over after the end of 1945.
But how much the myth of transcendent science managed to accomplish while it lasted! It took us from shivering under the bedclothes at the first disconcerting intimations of non-spiritual transcendent power and it showed us the infinite possibilities of the future and the wider universe. And it told us that these might be ours if only we could learn to think in new ways.
That is the ultimate promise of the stories of the Golden Age. They tell us that if we are only able to change the way we think, and to keep changing it when that is appropriate, we may have a future of difference upon difference, we may build a world of meaning for ourselves as broad as the galaxy, and we may become a higher order of man.
Since the time in which they were written, these stories have accumulated a vast audience. A generation has grown up trying to absorb the mythic lessons of the basic works of modern science fiction.
The world-that-is continues to be dominated by the values and accomplishments of the old rational scientific order. But, in terms of our new best knowledge, these seem increasingly hollow and inadequate.
And, in the meantime, throughout Western society, there are people who by their conduct and goals are attempting to bring into being a new world of ecological wholeness and higher consciousness. If we judge their efforts by the story that has been told in this book, we have to believe that they will have their opportunity to see their dreams made real . . . and also to discover their limitations.
“T
HE MULE” MARKS THE END OF SCIENCE FICTION,
and the end of our story of the myth of science fiction.
But, of course, it was nothing like the end of SF, the re-oriented mythic stream. That has continued to this day, constantly changing and developing.
The imaginative ground assumed in this latter-day SF—which has continued to be known as science fiction out of habit, even though it is no longer about transcendent science—has been the territory staked out in the Golden Age
Astounding
and
Unknown:
the de Campian multiverse, the Heinleinian future, the Asimovian galaxy, and the van Vogtian sense of the potential of humanity.
But in this new SF of the Atomic Age, the Village and the World Beyond the Hill would no longer be separate. They would be intermingled, so that utter strangeness might appear suddenly in our midst, and we also might find elements of familiarity at the most remote removes of existence.
And the subject matter of this new myth would be transcendent consciousness.
As usual, however, that wasn’t clear to anyone in 1945.
All that was clear was that the world was changing with great rapidity.
Isaac Asimov finished “The Mule” shortly after the surrender of Germany in the middle of May 1945. A little more than two months later, while van Vogt’s
The World of Null-A
was in serialization, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. And that was the end of World War II.
George O. Smith reached John Campbell first with the news that an Atom Bomb had been used to destroy the city of Hiroshima. And the editor’s immediate reply was: “ ‘Oh, my God! It’s started.’ ”
909
The new world made by science fiction—the world of nuclear bombs and atomic power, jet planes and rocket ships, television and computers—was upon us. Of all the items on Campbell’s science-fictional agenda, control of the atom, with its nerves, deadlines, blowups and unsatisfactory solutions, was the one that his writers had dealt with least well. Now it was an actuality, and he wasn’t ready yet. He wasn’t
finished.
With the dropping of the Bomb, the transcendent had been made real, and in the process the factors that had made the great mythic moment of the Golden Age possible had been decisively and permanently altered. As rapidly as Campbell’s writers had come together in 1939, they now scattered in every direction, seeking to pick up the thread of long-interrupted lives and trying to work out for themselves where and how they fit into the new post-war world.
Each of them did what seemed appropriate:
Jack Williamson, that slow-maturing adaptable man, returned from army service in the South Pacific. He would marry a divorced woman he had known since primary school, and eventually go back to college after more than twenty years away, work his way through to a Ph.D. in English, and begin a new career as a university professor. All the while, he would continue to write SF stories.
After the war, L. Sprague de Camp remained in Philadelphia. More than any other writer, he missed
Unknown.
The best he was able to do for
Astounding
was a relatively weak story series in which a future Brazil has established a highly tentative form of interstellar space travel and placed outposts on planets of nearby suns. His main energies were reserved for a mammoth book he was writing debunking spirit-based belief systems.
Robert Heinlein returned to California. Not only did he not go back to writing for Campbell, he also neither completed the great central gap in the Future History nor faced up to the problem of coping with the superiority of higher aliens. Instead, he wrote essays warning of nuclear peril, which he was unable to get published. He wrote simple science fiction stories for the
Saturday Evening Post
which both paid him well and allowed him to carry the SF point of view to a wider public. And for youngsters, he wrote a series of juvenile science fiction novels which summarized and encapsulated the triumphs of Techno Age science fiction for a new audience.
A.E. van Vogt moved from Canada to Los Angeles—a new city in a new country—at the end of 1944. Here he wrote
The World of Null-A.
But after that was done, he fell into an inability to write that lasted for almost a year. It may have been that he took a wrong mental turning. The stories he wrote when he broke through his block lacked the fire and power of his wartime work. And they looked for the future of man in the genetic superman rather than in the superman-by-education.
Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore went back home to California, too. A. Merritt had died in 1943, and they now began to write Merritt-influenced otherworld fantasies for
Startling Stories,
the companion magazine of
Thrilling Wonder.
And, for
Astounding,
as Lewis Padgett, they wrote short novels of human madness and nuclear holocaust.
With the conflict over, Isaac Asimov was no longer an essential war worker. He was drafted into the Army. When he got out again, he returned to Columbia University, where he finished his Ph.D. in chemistry. The stories he wrote for
Astounding
in his leisure time were accounts of ever-more-humanlike robots, until at last one secretly serves in the job of World Co-ordinator, and of a series of searches for the psychic masters of the Second Foundation.
As for John Campbell, he took to his basement, his lifelong refuge in times of trouble. His most recent hobby was experiments in hi-fi sound reproduction, which at this early stage of the game chiefly consisted of the attainment of maximum possible volume. Campbell turned the music way up loud and wondered just what was to be done about the atomic demon which science fiction had dreamed into being.
How was humanity to be saved from this out-of-control monster it had made?
If mankind destroyed itself tomorrow in a ball of incandescent flame, how were we ever to get to the stars and fulfill our higher destiny?
It seemed to Campbell that some answer had to be found to the great gap between the awesome new power at our command and the limitations of present human thought and behavior. And so he wondered about ways of engineering the human psyche so as to avert the disaster that he saw as imminent.
When the choice had to be made, it was universal operating principles that Campbell chose instead of the attainment of higher states of consciousness. And that was the point at which John Campbell found his imaginative limit.
In the meantime, the transcendent spirit underlying SF moved on. . . .
But that is another story to tell.