The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (11 page)
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Authors: Alexei Panshin,Cory Panshin
After 1870, perhaps in reaction to France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and to growing doubts about science in the hands of fallible men, Verne made an imaginative retreat. At the very age at which Poe had died, Verne dropped the element of Poeian mystery from his extraordinary voyages. The science-beyond-science that Verne wrote of became more constrained in effect. Verne continued to write SF stories to the end of his career, but most of the later extraordinary voyages were ordinary mimetic adventure stories, journeys to known worlds.
We might compare Verne’s fruitful period from 1862 to 1870 with Walpole’s production of
The Castle of Otranto.
Verne, like Walpole, was a man standing between two generations with vastly different states of mind, not fully at home with either but able to serve as a mediator between them. Walpole was neither an ancient nor a modem, but in his one fantastic novel, an idiosyncratic synthesis that no one else could manage to repeat, he attempted to make these two head-states compatible.
The practical result was to reintroduce mystery into the materialistic modern Western world. The Romantics who succeeded Walpole, rather than exactly repeating Walpole’s synthesis, found themselves wrestling with the problem of mystery that he had given to them, dealing with it in various ways, as we’ve seen.
Similarly, Verne was a man who was neither a wild Romantic nor a sober Victorian. He was something of both, but never fully at ease as either. The psychosomatic illnesses that had plagued the young Verne continued to afflict him in his years of success. Even as a Victorian patriarch, honored and respected, Verne was driven for years to travel almost incessantly, like one of his own characters, without fixed destination, aim or rest.
Verne’s formula, like Walpole’s, was a unique synthesis of old and new that managed to work only within a limited span of time. Throughout the 1860s, as long as his nerve lasted, Verne kept attempting stubbornly to make this personal concoction of imaginary travel, science-beyond-science and Edgar Allan Poe do what he wanted it to do.
Again and again he tried his formula, altering the balance of elements from story to story. And he never quite managed to do what he had originally set out to do: write Poe
right.
No more than Mary Shelley had successfully written a ghost story, or Walpole had written Shakespeare, try as they might. Rather, almost as a by-product, Verne had produced two new developments in SF for his successors to wrestle with.
The writers who joined Verne the Victorian after 1870 and worked beside him during the next twenty-five years radically extended the scope and power of domesticated science-beyond-science. They far outstripped Verne in inventing a wide range of plausible new super-scientific devices and phenomena and in imagining the effects that transcendent science might have on the contemporary world and the near future.
These same writers followed the paths that Verne had blazed into the World Beyond the Hill. But what they found under the ground or beneath the sea or on other planets was not the untamed mystery-upon-mystery encountered by Axel and Hans and Professor Lidenbrock in
Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
Instead, again and again they were to discover advanced human societies, masters of domesticated super-science.
If Verne, even in his years of imaginative retreat after 1870, remained the premier SF writer of the generation, the model, the standard, it was because his fellow Victorians were less daring in their imagination than the half-Romantic Verne of the 1860s had been. They had a resource unacceptable to Verne—a new attitude toward science—and this permitted their advances in domesticated science-beyond-science. Nonetheless, even with this resource they could not press beyond Verne. They were working within his imaginative territory.
Not until H.G. Wells produced
The Time Machine
in 1895 would another writer find the nerve to take up the challenge of Verne at his most imaginative and pass again into a fully transcendent realm. Verne’s daring accomplishment in
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
of “thrusting into the unknown” would remain a solitary imaginative event for fully thirty years.
To properly appreciate Verne, we might say that, like Walpole, he had a visionary glimpse of the unknown. In Walpole’s case, the glimpse was of mystery. In Verne’s, it was of a transcendent realm. Pushing themselves to their limits, finding special points of balance, both Walpole and Verne were able to express these visions once.
Only once. The visions could not be recaptured. Just as Clara Reeve could not duplicate the mystery of
The Castle of Otranto,
the Jules Verne of
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
could not write of a transcendent realm as the Jules Verne of
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
had done.
In order to fulfill the mystery of
The Castle of Otranto,
a new generation of Mary Shelleys and Edgar Allan Poes with new arguments was necessary. And they did offhandedly what Walpole had done only in one special fevered moment.
In the same way, in order to fulfill the promise of the transcendent realm encountered in
Journey to the Centre of the Earth,
it was necessary for a new generation with new arguments to arise. H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and A. Merritt would go lightly and easily into those transcendent places that Poe intuited and did not dare to brave and that Verne only once surprised himself into finding in a fit of somnambulism.
· PART 2 ·
SCIENCE FICTION EMERGES
The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn
. . . .
A day will come when beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins shall stand upon this earth as one stands on a footstool and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars.
—
H.G. WELLS
5: The Higher Powers of Science
F
OR THE FIRST TWO HUNDRED YEARS
of the modern era—from the accession to the leadership of Western society by the philosophy of rational materialism in the late Seventeenth Century to the appearance of techno-warfare in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71—there was no such thing as science fiction literature. Through all this time, writers had no conscious awareness of working in a connected and cumulative SF tradition. Such a thing as science fiction was unthinkable, unimaginable. It didn’t exist.
How very different the situation is today! In the late Twentieth Century, nobody at all would think to doubt that there is such a thing as science fiction. Paperback racks are filled with books labeled “SF.” There is a great visible science fiction industry: writers, editors, critics, magazines, books, films, fans, clubs, conventions, awards, and much much more.
The difference between the situation prior to 1870, when SF could not be said to exist, and the situation we are heir to today, is the general acceptance by the Western world of the plausibility of scientific mystery. This acceptance, this new faith, began to take hold right around 1870.
As we have suggested, in order for myth to be an effective indicator of yet-unrealized possibility, there must be some basis for a belief in transcendence. We must think that there could be mysterious higher states of being and awareness, and we must be able to believe that we might plausibly attain those higher states.
In ancient myth,
spirit
provided such a groundwork for belief in plausible mystery. After 1870,
science
became sufficiently developed as a concept and a practice to serve as a new foundation for belief.
But this was not so prior to 1870, which is why we can say that during the first two hundred years of modern Western society, SF literature did not exist. It is only retrospective wisdom that allows us to peer into the past and single out a literary possibility here, a dynamic metaphor there, a subtle argument or an imaginary exploration, and identify these highly separated moments of special creativity as a connected series of advances necessary for the coming into being of SF literature.
It is our awareness of the nature of later science fiction—and our appreciation of the invisible working of the transcendent spirit of SF—that allows us to perceive what these varying bits and pieces had in common: All were attempts at the presentation of plausible scientific mystery.
But SF literature still did not exist as late as the advent of Verne in the 1860s. He was not working in an active tradition, a contemporary literary form. Rather, he was recognized as a marvel, a writer with his own unique product. It was as though Verne were a last solitary Romantic wizard with a formula all his own—like Captain Nemo, that master of his own special brand of electricity.
After 1870, however, in the very moment of Jules Verne’s imaginative retreat, modern Western civilization entered a new phase, the Age of Technology. And immediately, science fiction was born.
The new era was the result of a change in the attitude of society toward science. The consequence of the change was that after 1870 it was possible to set out consciously to write science fiction. No longer was SF a feat that a rare Romantic wildman, lit by inspiration while in some unique state of acute mental receptivity, might aim at once in a lifetime. Science fiction became a form that almost anyone could write, and after 1870 there would always be a number of writers at work producing SF.
The shift in attitude that made the Age of Technology and SF literature possible might be called the final fruit of the Romantic Period. The change was, in effect, the solution to the major problems that the whole Romantic Period had been attempting to solve.
One of these problems was the lack of plausible mystery in the world. Without transcendence, the Romantics felt like orphan children. They mooned after the old spiritual mystery that the Age of Reason had rejected. And they hunted vainly for new mystery everywhere in the hopes of finding it somewhere—and didn’t necessarily recognize it when they had it.
Another problem was the science and applied science that the Romantic Period had inherited from the Age of Reason. This rational activity was beginning to alter life, and the Romantics didn’t know how they felt about that. The Romantic Period looked upon monster science with the same ambivalence and apprehension that Victor Frankenstein felt for his creature.
It was the change in the practice of science during the Nineteenth Century that we have described that finally made it possible for the Romantics to see that one of their problems was the answer to the other. Through the course of two phases in Western society—the Age of Reason and the Romantic Period—the “practice of science” had meant the careful observation of the material world, the gathering and classification of fact. But in the later years of the Romantic Period, this familiar definition was strained beyond its limits.
First to appear were radical new mathematical systems like non-Euclidean geometry and symbolic logic. These systems were self-consistent but, by ordinary standards, irrational. They seemed to apply to something more or something other than the ordinary earthly realm.
These new forms of systematic thinking were followed in the 1860s by strange new scientific theories, all of which pointed beyond the known into the unknown.
There was Darwin’s theory of evolution. This suggested—from current scientific evidence—that both man and nature had once been something different than they now were. And further, that they might alter again in the future.
There was Pasteur’s germ theory of disease. This pointed beyond the new infinitesimal lifeforms that science had discovered to claim that similar living motes that were unknown might have crucial influence on our health and well-being.
There were Maxwell’s equations. These took the apparently separate electrical and magnetic phenomena of longtime scientific study and established them at last as part of a single continuous spectrum which even included visible light. And further predicted the existence of forms of energy then unknown.
There was Mendeleev’s periodic table of the elements. Once again a generalization unified an ill-understood chaos of information, and then went beyond the known to suggest the unknown, in this case the existence of hitherto undiscovered forms of matter.
Wow! New powerful forms of life. New energy, new matter, new levels of being. Most important of all, a mutable mankind risen from lower forms and with a destiny that was unknown, instead of the old familiar conception of a fixed mankind specially created and loved by God.
Shifts in attitude had to take place. From being in the background of awareness, one element of society among many, scientific study and its technological application were now recognized as the most superior and advanced aspect of Western society. The leading edge, like it or not.
And science itself was no longer understood to be the practice of looking at familiar material things and taking their measurements. Rather, it was redefined. “Science” was now taken to be the sum total of that which is known and that which might be known. Anything that man might someday measure or bring under the rule of a scientific generalization, any knowledge that man might master, any possibility he might attain—
that
was the sphere claimed as its own by “science.”
This new science was no longer just the occasional discoverer of minor unknowns. The new science was mysterious by definition. It was the wisdom of a universe that was
more
unknown than known.
Oh my! A universe that was more unknown than known. That was a radical new concept indeed.
It was this new valuation of science and understanding of its nature that brought the Age of Technology into being and made a literature of scientific transcendence possible. Science fiction in full flower was the post-1870 myth of the limitless unknown powers of science.
As we shall see, this new literature changed and developed all through the Age of Technology, which lasted from 1870 until the onset of World War II—and then transcended itself in the succeeding Atomic Age.
At the beginning of the Age of Technology, SF didn’t even have a name. And even very late in the day, in Hugo Gernsback’s time, it would pass under a multitude of different names. But from 1870 or thereabouts, it is at last possible to say that a literature that we can recognize as science fiction was visible and acknowledged.
After the beginning of the Age of Technology, when an SF novel was published, it would not be looked upon as a unique prodigy. Instead, reviewers might compare it to some earlier story. Writers would consciously answer each other and extend each other’s notions. A literary tradition existed.
Jules Verne, caught between generations, only partly made the transition to the new Age of Technology. He accepted the idea that science and technology were the leading edge of Western civilization—though in time a certain doubt about that began to creep into his stories. But his real sticking point was the new image of science as the wellspring of unknown things.
That was more than Verne could handle. In
Journey to the Centre of the Earth,
he had glimpsed the wonder inherent in evolutionary theory and presented it in the form of Axel’s overwhelming vision and the subsequent encounter with the giant herder of mammoths. But then he had panicked and run away, calling these intuitions of mystery “insane” and “unacceptable.”
In preference to the new ideas of science as a discoverer of the unknown, Verne continued to cling to the old idea of science as an extender of the known. And, along with him, there were other SF writers in the new Technological Age who continued to hold to this old-fashioned image of science.
The product of these writers was simple invention stories, which might be called the fictional equivalent of the work of Thomas Alva Edison. Edison, the greatest inventor of the Age of Technology, was the creator of the light bulb, the phonograph and motion pictures. He was not an explorer of the unknown reaches of higher science, but rather a new type of man—the master of applied science. Edison was an entrepreneur of inventions, as much businessman as scientist.
Most common among the Edisonian invention stories that held to the idea of science as an extension of known things were SF dime novels. These stories were melodramas of technology written for young boys, the new children of the Technological Age.
SF stories were only one type of dime novel, an American publishing format that was both the product and the reflection of the age. Dime novels were cheap paperbacks with lurid covers. These crude action-adventure stories were run off by the million on the new modern presses of the late Nineteenth Century to catch the nickels and dimes of the young reading audience which sprang up with the spread of literacy and basic education.
The first dime novel SF story was written by Edward S. Ellis, a man who was the supreme master of early dime novel hack writing.
The Steam Man of the Prairies
(1868), Ellis’s only invention story, became the prototype of the form. In this story, a ten-foot-tall steam-powered automaton is invented by a fifteen-year-old boy and used to look for gold and to chase buffalo out West.
The degree of mystery in this imaginary technological achievement was extremely limited. Ellis’s steam man is most mysterious in the opening paragraphs of the story. It is first spied at a distance of two miles and described as “looking like some Titan as it took its giant strides over the prairie.”
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A comic Irishman even mistakes it for “ ‘the ould divil.’ ”
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And, we are told: “No wonder that something like superstitious awe filled the breasts of the two men who had ceased hunting for gold, for a few minutes, to view the singular apparition; for such a thing had scarcely been dreamed of at that day, by the most imaginative philosophers. . . .”
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But thereafter throughout the story, the steam man is described in thoroughly plausible terms as a mobile steam boiler with a quasi-human form. Even howling savages can see through it: “. . . their previous acquaintance with the apparatus had robbed it of all its supernatural attributes. . . .”
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Now, the steam man
might
have been a creature with at least the danger, uncertainty and power of Victor Frankenstein’s monster. Only it isn’t. It has no intelligence or volition of its own. It moves only where it is pointed. Eventually it is pointed at attacking Indians, the boiler is deliberately overloaded, and the steam machine explodes.
The only real mystery is the means of the machine’s movement. This is how Ellis describes the crucial step before the automaton is animated and runs into its first wall:
It required two weeks before Johnny Brainerd succeeded. But it all came clear and unmistakable at last, and in this simple manner:—
(Ah! but we cannot be so unjust to the plodding genius as to divulge his secret. Our readers must be content to await the time when the young man sees fit to reveal it himself.)
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This is the old I-can-tell-you-but-I-won’t trick that we have met before. We can hear echoes of Mary Shelley’s presentation in
Frankenstein.
But Victor Frankenstein wouldn’t tell us the details of his knowledge of the secrets of life in order to protect us readers from suffering a fate like his. In the case of
The Steam Man of the Prairies,
it is the poor bright young inventor Johnny Brainerd, dwarfish and hunchbacked, who is to be protected until he has the chance to patent and publish his work, and make a buck out of it.
This is typical. In the words that Jules Verne used in 1904 to describe the mysterious motive power of his submarine the
Nautilus
—imagined at almost the same moment as Ellis’s story—the mystery of the steam man could fairly be said to amount to no more than “a mere technical hiatus, as it were, quite capable of being filled in by a highly-trained and thoroughly practical mind.”
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