Read The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Online
Authors: Alexei Panshin,Cory Panshin
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (14 page)
In
The Coming Race,
Bulwer-Lytton is attempting to hold on to the high and noble values of utopian literature, the values that had brought modern Western civilization into being. Beliefs such as justice, morality, and the higher connection to God.
At the same time, Bulwer-Lytton is trying to take full account of the most advanced product of Western civilization, rational society’s monster child, science. Bulwer-Lytton is trying to say that the new science of Michael Faraday—the predecessor of James Maxwell who first suggested the unity of magnetic and electrical phenomena—and of Charles Darwin, the chief exponent of the theory of evolution, is
not different
from the old values.
The reconciliation of soul and science is Bulwer-Lytton’s true game.
The Coming Race
can be seen as trying to ease the transition from the Romantic Era into the Age of Technology, to bridge the apparent gap between the old order of value and the new. Bulwer-Lytton’s means of reconciliation were occultist arguments.
Occultism is the mystical doctrine which says that the visible structure of religion—any religion—is a sham, a fraud, a ruin. But that occulted—hidden—in this ruin, hidden here, hidden there, is a secret treasure, an inner core of Higher Truth.
Before the modern Western world came into being, Renaissance occultists like Paracelsus and the authors of the original Rosicrucian documents helped to stimulate the appetite for change by proclaiming the existence of a Higher Truth beyond the bounds of accepted wisdom and authority and identifying this with the study of nature and the moral reform of society and man.
With the security of a belief in occultism, the philosophers and critics of the Age of Reason could perceive their idea of a perfectible rational soul as that hidden kernel of Higher Truth that was waiting to be revealed, and feel free to attack the old order as no better than a hollow facade. Occult societies like the Masons would play an active role in the American and French Revolutions and be feared for this throughout the Western world.
Occultism had its appeal for the wildmen of the next era, too. The Romantics dyed their skins brown and sneaked into Mecca. They sought hidden mysteries in the literature of Egypt, Persia, India, and Tibet. The central argument of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
which equated the ancient secret arts of alchemy and necromancy with the wild life-awakening science of young Victor Frankenstein was an occultist argument.
However, the peak of occultist belief and practice may have come during the Age of Technology. Just as much as it was a period of scientific law and life-altering inventions, it was also an era of séances and Ouija boards, of Theosophists and Anthroposophists, of Atlantis cultists and would-be black magicians.
To people in a later day, all this flurry of activity would look like so much superstitious nonsense. By the mid-Twentieth Century,
occultist
would be a dirty word—and so would
utopian.
In reality, however, something very serious and consequential was taking place. Occultism was a means of mediating the transition from the phase of Western civilization that believed in the soul to a new phase of strict materialism. Occultism was used in at least three different ways.
It was a conservative position. It was a ground of argument on which a belief in God and the soul could be maintained despite every reductionist argument offered in the name of modern science. In effect: “No matter what you say, I still believe in an irreducible inner kernel of Higher Truth.”
It was a radical position. Just as the revolutionaries of the Age of Reason had identified occult inner truth with whatever they liked of traditional society and discarded the rest, so the young radicals of the Age of Technology could use occultist arguments to redefine alchemy and magic and call them lost science.
But occultism could also be a position beyond the merely radical or merely conservative. At its highest, occultism was the recognition that “the rational soul” and “science” might be just as much facades as “religion”—and that hidden within all three might be a common kernel of Higher Truth wearing different names in different eras.
It is in this last sense that
The Coming Race
is occultist.
Vril
is a term that refers to a force that is at one and the same time spiritual, rational, scientific, and more.
If
The Coming Race
is still kept in print these days, it is not as a work of science fiction, and not as a utopian story. It is occult publishers who continue to reissue the book. In a recent edition of
The Coming Race
from one of these, vril is identified in a foreword variously as “God’s Will,” “Will,” and “Divine Law.”
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It is possible to see these terms as bows to the spiritual, to the rational, and to the scientific interpretations of Higher Truth.
In its way,
The Coming Race
was almost as special and pivotal a book as Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto.
Both were transitional works popping up in the crack between radically different head-states, bridging the two without being ultimately committed to either. This served an immediate function for an audience that was surrendering an old mode of thought for a new one. Beyond this, while neither book could be called great literature, both had within them secret treasures with consequences for a later time.
In the case of
The Castle of Otranto,
the treasure was the principle of irreducible transcendence, simultaneously mysterious and plausible. That insight was of the greatest relevance to the science fiction literature born one hundred years later.
In the case of
The Coming Race,
the treasure was the recognition of the relativity and inadequacy of any and every term by which transcendent Truth might be represented for a time. As we will see, by the end of the Age of Technology, the concept of “science” would start wearing thin as a name for the fundamentally mysterious, and begin to be superseded by transcendence phrased in terms of “consciousness.” When we witness this happening, we would do well to remember that the mysterious
something
which Bulwer-Lytton called vril was simultaneously spiritual, rational, physical and mental.
The Coming Race
was a work with great influence in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. It was the model for a whole new form of utopian/occultist SF—the lost race story.
The locations featured in this genre were freely borrowed from the utopian story—an isolated island, or a blank spot on the map, or the planet Mars. But the strange people discovered in these places wouldn’t be utopians devoted to showing visitors their decrees, ordinances, and good and wholesome laws.
Instead, they would turn out to be people with a relationship to the familiar Village world, but radically out of place. They might, for instance, be the descendants of shipwrecked pirates. But more often they would have ancient or legendary antecedents. They would be survivors of sunken Atlantis, or some long-forgotten outpost of the Roman Empire.
People hidden away from the world-at-large who have exalted origins and are the custodians of secret knowledge—this would be the occult aspect of the lost race story.
However, the knowledge that the lost race possesses in these stories would most usually be scientific knowledge. At first, it might well look like the magic and miracles of myth and legend, especially if the lost people were of a lineage associated with such things. In time, however, these powers would be revealed to actually be ancient science of a kind still unknown to the outside world. In other cases, the special advanced knowledge might appear in a form more familiar to the Age of Technology—like the Sacred Locomotive
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which is venerated by an underground culture in one story of the 1890s.
Lost race stories . . . future war stories . . . dime novel invention stories . . . tales of advanced science-beyond-science . . . As soon as science fiction began to exist, it did so in a multitude of forms.
These initial forms were somewhat makeshift—crude and even a bit old-fashioned in appearance. In a sense, they were old bottles containing new wine. But what all of them had in common—what made them ultimately one thing—was that every one of them bowed to transcendent mystery wearing the guise of presently unknown higher powers of science.
A
LTHOUGH SCIENCE FICTION EXISTED IN
a variety of forms as early as the 1870s, it would be more than a further fifty years before SF was named and defined as a literature in the pages of
Amazing Stories.
And when it was, we may remember, editor Hugo Gernsback would identify the new “scientifiction” he proposed to publish in terms of the works of three writers—Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells.
Of these three seminal writers, it was Wells who was the most significant in the early development of SF. In practice, Gernsback would reprint only half-a-dozen stories each by Poe and Verne, but he would showcase an SF story by Wells in every single issue of
Amazing
for as long as he published the magazine. It was Wells who was the very model of a modern scientifiction writer.
The reason for this is that while all three of Gernsback’s exemplary writers produced charming romances in which scientific fact was intermingled, a crucial difference separated the work of Wells from that of Poe and Verne. Wells presented a wholly new concept of the universe in his stories, and it was the Wellsian universe within which subsequent science fiction would be written.
The universe as imagined by the Age of Reason, and the Romantic Period as well, was human-centered, comfortable and cozy. This universe was all too narrow, safe and regular for the wild Romantics, who aimed to reach beyond its limits and find mystery.
Poe and Verne, Romantics both, had tested the boundaries of this constricting imagined universe, aiming to break loose from it. Traveling to the edges of the familiar Village and beyond, they had caught sight of the transcendent beings and transcendent realms of the World Beyond the Hill.
But these glimpses of mystery had proved too much for them. Poe and Verne—each in turn was overwhelmed by what he saw. They saw strange realms and alien beings, but they identified this transcendence as Madness and Death and hastily retreated from it back into the safe confines of the Village.
Wells went far beyond Poe and Verne. He shattered the boundaries altogether that divided the Village from the World Beyond the Hill. He destroyed the comfy, cozy human-centered universe of the rational utopians forever.
In a brilliant series of scientific romances written during the 1890s—including such books as
The Time Machine
(1895) and
The War of the Worlds
(1898)—Wells set forth the parameters of a radical new conceptual universe. This universe was derived from the cool-minded reasonings of science rather than from inherited religious assurances of God’s special concern for man and man’s privileged place in the world.
The dimensions of this new scientific universe are reflected in the title of an early Wells story collection—
Tales of Space and Time
(1899). H.G. Wells might be called the first master of space and time.
The Wellsian universe was vast and merciless, chilly and uncaring. It owed not a thing to mankind. It might even prove to be hostile to all of man’s ethics, all of man’s aspirations. But, almost magically, within the yawning reaches of this new universe it was possible to discover all of the transcendence that Poe and Verne had intuited but could not accept. Wells made it possible to imaginatively sustain the beings and realms that his Romantic predecessors had denied and rejected.
Here, in the opening paragraph of
The War of the Worlds,
Wells specifically contrasts the attitudes of the narrow universe that was passing with the disquieting facts of the new universe of science:
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.
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How fresh and powerful this writing is! And how completely different it is in style and tone from anything that we have seen before. Even as we are threatened with annihilation, our jaded spirit is restored. This brisk exact narration in itself speaks of new possibilities of thought and action.
Science in Wells is no longer just a tool, a talisman, a convenient argument, a means to get from one place to another. No, science is
everything
here. It provides the frame of reference—the new universe of space and time. It is the model for Wells’s detached and analytical mode of thought. (“It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days.”) It even supplies Wells with his metaphoric microscope and his microbes.
Most remarkable of all, how simultaneously lyrical and ghastly does Wells’s new vision contrive to be! As the infusoria—a word which means either a class of protozoans or the products of decay—under the microscope are to us, so may we be to greater intelligences than ourselves, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic. (Again and again Wells would be driven to use that word “vast.”) These beings—these alien Martians—may be as mortal as we are, but they are an older and more powerful race, evolved far beyond us. They lurk across the gulf of space, studying our weaknesses and limitations. Soon they will strike.
Beware! says Wells. Tremble! The universe is not what you think it is, little man.
It is nothing less than a “great disillusionment” that Wells is after. He means to bring the walls of the tidy Village world crashing down with a personally wielded power that is no less shattering in its effect than the destructive force of his invading Martians striding over the fallen ruins of familiar London.
Wells means to reveal to a complacent mankind bent on its own little affairs the true nature of its relationship to the universe. Yet even so, while the initial impact may be one of disillusionment, we need to be aware that this disillusionment comes as the result of the unveiling of an awesome mystery—a new wider universe!
Through the remainder of the Age of Technology, and even after, H.G. Wells would cast an immense shadow. The universe that was portrayed by Wells would be the universe in which SF stories would be set. And it would be the dangers and possibilities which Wells delineated in his stories of the Nineties that would be the central issues of science fiction.
Herbert George Wells was born just prior to the dawning of the Age of Technology, on the 21
st
of September, 1866. That, we may remember, was the same year in which the late Romantic, Captain Nemo, was said to have been prowling the seas and sinking ships in his super-scientific submarine, the
Nautilus.
Wells was born in a suburb of London that was later to be engulfed by the city. His parents were former servants turned shopkeepers.
And this marks a turn in our story. The makers of proto-SF, from Walpole to Bulwer-Lytton, were all lords, lesser nobility, aristocrats and gentlefolk. Bertie Wells was anything but that. He was from the upper fringes of the lower class, one small but significant step from being a peasant or laborer, a jumped-up Cockney determined enough and lucky enough to escape from the drapery shops that swallowed his two older brothers. It would be from common clay like Bertie Wells, persons on whom the impact of the Age of Technology was most marked, that the makers of Twentieth Century science fiction would come.
It was a world in turmoil that Wells opened his eyes upon. At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, despite all the revaluations of the Age of Reason, despite the upset of the French Revolution, something like traditional society still held sway in most places. There were still kings and nobles and peasants, just as there had always been. But by the beginning of the Age of Technology, after a century of revolutions and the construction of new nation states, the familiar and comfortable old remnant feudal structure of society had been broken like Humpty Dumpty.
The very nature and character of society had been altered. Society was now remaking itself into the image of giant engines run by masters of machinery, the Bosses.
The new superior class was not an aristocracy of blood and breeding, as before, but capitalists, plutocrats, men whose only recommendation was that they controlled money. New gigantic businesses were ruled by corporate overlords, captains of industry. There were steel barons, rail barons, oil barons, coal barons, wheat barons, even sleeping car barons—autocrats to rule over every aspect of commerce and industry. It was the era of the sweatshop and of machine politics.
The underclass of society was now no longer the rural peasant, but rather urban industrial laborers—proletarians. These were people who had been forced off the land and set to work in the mills, factories and foundries. There they were used up, worn out, and then discarded. In the late Nineteenth Century, these proles rocked society by rebelling against their lot, by striking, by struggling to organize themselves into great powerful machines of their own, the labor unions.
The Western nations acted no differently. They set up the machinery of empire and made themselves the bosses of the world. During the 1880s and 1890s, in exactly the same manner that the new giant corporations banded together in trusts and cartels in an attempt to lessen competition, divide territories, monopolize markets and maximize profits, so did the countries of Europe. They dismembered the continent of Africa. They divided the whole world up into spheres of influence.
It was a ruthless time. If the machine was the model for society, the justification for the moral style of the Technological Age was adapted from Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, the deepest and most complete explanation of the meaning of existence that the new religion of science had to offer. Social Darwinism was the philosophy of the day, and the message that was drawn from Darwin by the Age of Technology was this: “Struggle to exist. If you are fit, you may survive.”
No wonder then that the most prominent citizens of the advanced Western nations should feel
obliged
to consolidate all the wealth and power they could, to seek personal advantage wherever it could be found, and to deliver a ruthless justice to the poor, the weak and the backward. They couldn’t help themselves. That was what the struggle for existence was all about. To think otherwise and to act otherwise would be foolhardy.
Like everyone else, Bertie Wells had to struggle to exist. However, he wasn’t fit by any standard. He was a small and sickly child. But, strangely enough, he managed to negotiate the minefield of late Nineteenth Century society by failing his way to success. One illness, accident and disaster after another honed and turned and shaped Wells just so, to make him that one person in the Nineties prepared to recognize the new insecure universe of space and time and man’s precarious place within it.
Wells’s parents kept a china and glass shop, but sold little ware. His father was a well-known local cricket player, and sold bats and balls in the shop. Otherwise he was a dreamer. Wells’s mother, a conventionally pious former lady’s maid, had all the family ambition. Her idea of success was a good steady position in a cloth shop, and she apprenticed all three of her sons to drapers.
When he was seven, Bertie was tossed into the air by an older boy and accidentally dropped. His leg was broken. And this was his first stroke of good fortune. During his enforced confinement, the boy became a compulsive reader.
When Wells was eleven, there was a second broken leg, this time his father’s. Joseph Wells fell off a ladder while trimming a grapevine and fractured his thigh. His cricket-playing career was brought to an end, and the dusty china shop became insufficient to support the family. Wells’s mother, Sarah, went back into domestic service, becoming the housekeeper of Up Park, the country estate of her former mistress, Miss Fetherstonhaugh (pronounced Fanshaw).
And this was another blessing in disguise. Bertie, at the times he was living with his mother, was given the run of the library at Up Park. Here he encountered Shelley and Voltaire, read the unexpurgated
Gulliver’s Travels,
and discovered the first account of a model society, Plato’s
Republic.
This paradise was never to last. Bertie was apprenticed no less than three times, twice to drapers and once to a pharmacist. Each time he contrived to fail. He was dismissed as incompetent, he argued his way free, or he simply walked away. Each time he returned to Up Park and the library.
What Wells really wanted was education, and in between his failed apprenticeships he was sent to one minimal school after another. Eventually he was offered a position as student assistant at Midhurst Grammar School, the first of a number of teaching jobs that he would hold in secondary schools and cram colleges, the new hastily established educational institutions of the late Nineteenth Century.
England had found the advanced European technology displayed at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 profoundly disturbing. An Education Act had been passed in 1871 as a reaction to the Franco-Prussian War, that even more unsettling display of European technology. In later life, Wells would speak regretfully of his lack of genuine education when he was young, but at least the Education Act of 1871 provided him with a certain space for self-education within the shelter of one half-established or fraudulent school after another.