The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (23 page)

8: The Death of the Soul

E
DGAR RICE BURROUGHS’ TWO GREAT STORIES
of 1912—
Under the Moons of Mars
and
Tarzan of the Apes
—and the whole body of work that he produced before World War I, may be taken as a culmination of Edwardian SF and a foretaste of vigorous American science fiction to come. By sloughing off certain Edwardian values—by discarding the soul and primary dependence on civilization—Burroughs was able to imagine a new exemplar of human possibility, the adaptable existential man of action, who was the fulfillment of the irrational Edwardian confidence in Man.

But that Edwardian confidence in Man was to suffer a great shock with the coming of World War I, a horrible conflict in which all civilized restraint was cast aside and barbarity reigned. World War I—known in its own time as the Great War and the War to End All Wars—was a bloody animal struggle among the European nations to discover which was fittest and which had the right to survive.

This Great War, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, was that scientific war-of-the-future that had been under rehearsal in SF stories ever since George Chesney’s “The Battle of Dorking” in 1871. The war was an awful international exhibition of marvelous weaponry and technological innovation, with rank upon rank of men sacrificed to prove the power of poison gas, machine guns and barbed wire. Great armored tanks, submarine boats and flying machines clashed together like a return of the Age of Reptiles in mechanical form.

In the face of the evidence offered by World War I, it was very difficult to continue to believe in the simple rational advance of mankind. If this war was civilized behavior, who needed civilization? With the brutal slaughter of ten million young men, how was it possible to maintain claims of the superiority of human morality?

During the war years, there was a great dieback of SF. Most affected was utopianoid SF—the oldest, most serious, most literary, and best respected element of this still-emerging literature. The largest part. There was a sudden disappearance of future war stories, techno-utopian schemes for the betterment of humanity, stories of natural catastrophe, and accounts of the fall of civilization.

What remained of SF was its most mysterious, transcendent, romantic and imaginative materials—along with its uneasy faith in super-science and the unknown scientific universe. What survived, in sum, was the most questionable, frightening and disreputable portion of SF.

SF did not have an excess of credit that it could afford to lose. Even in the days when it was widely published, it had always been a minority taste, always a bit suspect.

For an example of the questionable esteem in which SF was held during the Age of Technology, even in its best days, it is only necessary to look at the career of H.G. Wells. When Wells turned from writing his innovative scientific horror stories of the Nineties to writing more conventional Dickensian social comedies in the Edwardian decade, there was almost a sense of relief. The judgment of contemporary society was that this change demonstrated “a great advance in artistic power”
¹⁷⁶
on Wells’s part, and both his book sales and his literary repute leaped.

World War I drove a wedge between SF and all hope of respectability. With the failure of utopianism, SF lost its one strong tie to high culture. At the same time, SF’s central mystery—soulless science—became abhorrent and horrifying to genteel society.

SF, already wounded, was rejected and shunned by high culture. It was no longer acceptable in polite company. From the Teens on, SF had to make its way chiefly in the pulp magazines as a low form of popular literature that was considered both more than a bit dangerous and more than a bit crazy.

Both the shock to utopianism and the social fall of SF may have contributed to SF’s great failure in Europe during World War I. Prior to the war, the development of SF had always been an enterprise swapped back and forth by British writers, Americans, and Europeans, in particular the French. There was a flowering of imaginative and explorative French SF as late as the end of the Edwardian decade. During the Great War, however, European SF ceased to be published, as though no one could bear to think about such things. When European SF resumed after the war, it never fully regained its former vitality.

Neither American self-esteem nor American confidence in science were shaken as they were in Europe by the events of World War I. America only entered the war at the last minute, in 1917. No grinding battles were fought on American soil, and the United States did not suffer the same harrowing casualties as the other participants. It was even possible for Americans to believe that they were responsible for winning the war.

All during the war years and immediately after, when utopian SF failed and European SF disappeared, a gaudy and romantic line of story much influenced by Burroughs did continue to be published in the American general fiction pulp magazines, particularly
All-Story
under the editorship of Robert H. Davis, and secondarily its sister magazine,
Argosy.
With the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the new pulp writers who followed him, the leadership in the development of SF passed into American hands. It was only Americans, among all the people of the West, who retained enough confidence in man and in science to continue with the unsettling and dangerous business of imagining the new SF mythos.

With utopian plausibility denied to it, this American pulp SF of the Teens became highly imaginative. It was both escapist and exploratory. Sometimes these two aspects were difficult to distinguish.

During the Teens, there was a last great appearance of lost race stories. These were radically different from the original lost race narratives of the late Nineteenth Century. No longer was it merely remnants of known civilizations like Rome or Phoenicia that were discovered, or simple enclaves of technological utopians. In these Twentieth Century pulp magazine lost race stories, there was a new time scale reaching back into the forgotten past, back to Atlantis and before that to completely unknown civilizations fully as old as the ancient Barsoomian high civilization on Mars. And the populations of these places were now given as masters of ancient mystic wisdom, usually identified with science-beyond-science.

In Perley Poore Sheehan’s
The Abyss of Wonders
(
Argosy,
January 1915), for example, his American venturer travels to a marvelous lost city surviving in the midst of the Gobi Desert, and there falls in love with a mysterious maiden. But the gift of insight that he brings back from his encounter with mystic wisdom is not ancient in form, but rather modern and technological:

“Hello,” said the foreman. “Did you get as far as Omaha?”

“I guess so,” Shan answered. Then he continued. “While I was knocking about I thought of that improvement you said was needed in the reversing-plate on the big lathe.”

He borrowed a stub of a pencil from the foreman and drew a plan on the white-washed wall.

“You’ve got it,” said the foreman. “Gee, that ought to make your fortune!”
¹⁷⁷

Other American pulp SF stories of the Teens did not look for their inspiration to ancient occult wisdom, but instead headed off into the new worlds of space and time or into other dimensions to find their adventures. These stories of alien exploration invariably followed the same plan as their models—Wells’s
The Time Machine
and Burroughs’
A Princess of Mars
and its sequels. Over and over, a contemporary Western person would pass into a strange other realm, be beguiled and threatened, retreat to the Village to tell his tale to some friend or relative, and then disappear into the World Beyond the Hill again.

Perhaps the most popular of these stories was “The Girl in the Golden Atom” (
All-Story,
March 15, 1919), by Ray Cummings, a writer and editor in the employ of Thomas Edison. This story was the fulfillment of Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” (1858), the tale of a scientific madman’s thwarted passion for Animula, the beautiful girl he sees within the confines of a drop of water. Like O’Brien’s character, the protagonist of Cummings’ story has a super-scientific microscope, peers into the infinitesimal world, and falls in love with a wondrously beautiful maiden he spies there—in this case, within an atom of his mother’s golden wedding ring.

Fitz-James O’Brien’s story, written before SF explorers had blazed the first trails into the World Beyond the Hill, had ended tragically. To O’Brien, the radically tiny world of Animula had seemed hopelessly inaccessible. And even so recent a writer as H.G. Wells, pioneer explorer of alien realms, had envisioned the microcosm as wonderful, but no place for a being such as himself.

Ray Cummings, however, was able to imagine bridging the gap between our world and the world of the very small. His character—named “the Chemist” after the example of Wells’s “the Time Traveller”—synthesizes a new drug to reduce himself in size, and penetrates the atomic dimension in pursuit of love.

It was not particularly important that the adventures discovered in the world of the Golden Atom were ordinary and banal. What was thrilling to the audience of
All-Story
was that imaginary science had burst through another barrier and brought yet another dimension within its reach.

Of all the new writers who appeared in the American pulps during the World War I years and immediately after, the most significant and influential was A. Merritt, a newspaperman who took up story-telling in 1917 at the age of 33.
¹⁷⁸

Abraham Grace Merritt was born in Beverly, New Jersey, north of Philadelphia on the Delaware River, on January 20, 1884. His father was a lapsed Quaker, an architect and builder. On his mother’s side, Merritt was a great-great-grandnephew of James Fenimore Cooper.

Merritt’s first aim was to be a lawyer, but when his father died when he was eighteen, lack of money forced Merritt to drop out of college and become a reporter. Writing fiction was never other than a hobby for Merritt, a sideline from his highly paid job as an editor for the Hearst newspapers’ Sunday magazine,
The American Weekly,
of which he would eventually become editor-in-chief.

A. Merritt was not as innovative an SF writer as H.G. Wells, nor as inventive as Edgar Rice Burroughs, nor even as eager an explorer of new dimensions as any number of his pulp contemporaries. Neither was he particularly prolific. During an active writing career of seventeen years, Merritt wrote just eight novels and a handful of shorter stories, by no means all of which were scientific fiction.

Nonetheless, Merritt played a pivotal role in the development of SF. He unified and consolidated SF through his ability to see that one imaginative formulation might be essentially equivalent to another that was radically dissimilar in appearance.

Before Merritt wrote, modern imaginative fiction existed, but only as a variety of seemingly separate story types, not as a single coherent literature. Merritt observed none of the conventional boundaries. He switched effortlessly from the alien exploration story to lost race fiction, from otherworld fantasy to the occult horror story, mixing the symbols of one with the symbols of the next as though there was no essential difference between them.

His special power was his sense of universal mystery. Like some Romantic of a hundred years previous, a Blake or a Poe, Merritt perceived the ordinary appearance of things as a mere facade. It is of the essence of Merritt that Dr. Goodwin, the rational scientist who narrates his first novel,
The Moon Pool
(1919), is ultimately forced by his strange experiences to conclude, “our world
whatever
it is, is certainly
not
the world as we see it!”
¹⁷⁹

This was a view to which the mood of the time was unusually receptive. World War I finally ground its way to an exhausted conclusion in November 1918. As everyone took note, with a sigh of wonder and relief, the armistice was signed in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. And, indeed, it did feel as though the end had come just in time, at the very last possible moment before the midnight hour in which the West would totally destroy itself.

In the entire course of this harrowing four-year war, no decisive battles were ever fought.

As much as by anything, the Great War was brought to a halt by the worldwide flu epidemic of 1918—which killed a further twenty million people beyond the casualties of the war.

In the moment of stunned silence that attended the end of the war, it seemed to many in the West that the world was a place of complete insanity. There was a positive eagerness to believe that somewhere else there might be a truer reality than this one. There was a willingness to consider any possible alternative. Writers of imaginative fiction cultivated hallucinatory and dreamlike prose styles. Interest in drug-taking, occultism and mysticism rose to a peak.

Among the SF writers of the day, it was Merritt who was most open to alternatives. Other writers might catch a fleeting glimpse of transcendent mystery through the prism of one particular belief or another—science, society, survival, the soul. But Merritt saw mystery as the fundamental fact, and only then tried on various means of expressing this vision.

Merritt’s most powerful evocation of pure mystery appears in the opening paragraphs of his second and most speculative novel,
The Metal Monster
(1920). Like
The Moon Pool,
this novel, too, is narrated by botanist Walter T. Goodwin. But in this story, he is a much-changed man. He is no longer the scientific rationalist he used to be, but is now a scientific mystic, and he begins his new tale with a direct testimonial to the ubiquity of mystery:

In this great crucible of life we call the world—in the vaster one we call the universe—the mysteries lie close packed, uncountable as grains of sand on ocean’s shores. They thread, gigantic, the star-flung spaces; they creep, atomic, beneath the microscope’s peering eye. They walk beside us, unseen and unheard, calling out to us, asking why we are deaf to their crying, blind to their wonder.