The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (30 page)

As much as any man of the Age of Technology, Hugo Gernsback was a lover of science. He believed that he knew science thoroughly and intimately. Science was the entirety of his life. But then, while Gernsback was preoccupied with the serious business of proclaiming science and promoting science and creating the science of tomorrow—and without his ever quite taking in that it was happening—science itself altered radically.

Advanced Twentieth Century science became something altogether different from the science that Hugo Gernsback’s generation had known and loved, and Gernsback—together with a good many others—got left behind. Gernsback never really caught on to the new thing. Even after the Atomic Age had arrived, he remained what he was, a mental citizen of the Age of Technology.

One centrally important change was in scale. Between 1895 and the 1920s, the conceptions of science were radically extended in every dimension, so that a universe that was already disconcertingly vast and alien suddenly became incomprehensibly larger and more complex, as well as far older, than had previously been supposed.

With the discovery of radioactivity and the subatomic realm, the small became much smaller. With identification of the existence of other galaxies lying far beyond the boundaries of our own—and the subsequent conclusion that all these great stellar aggregations were rapidly moving away from each other as the cosmos expanded—the large became immensely larger. Geological and astrophysical evidence both suggested that the scale of time past had to be altered from mere millions of years to billions of years.

But even more disconcerting was a series of announcements from those physicists who had begun to probe into the microcosm and the macrocosm in search of the basic foundations of matter and energy. It was certainty and stability that they were seeking—the ultimate constituents of things. But what they managed to find instead was instability, uncertainty, ambiguity and paradox.

These scientists reported that it now appeared to be the case that where very large, very small, very fast and very prolonged processes were concerned, common sense and the familiar rules of classical physics did not necessarily apply. Time might vary. Space might be twisted or altogether abolished. Matter could be energy in another guise. And light was somehow both a particle and a wave—simultaneously matter and energy.

Most provocative of all was the suggestion from the new science of quantum mechanics—which leaped into being at precisely the same time that Hugo Gernsback was establishing
Amazing Stories
—that on the subatomic level events did not happen by cause-and-effect, but by probabilities. All of a sudden, seemingly solid matter was replaced by pure chance.

In short, at the very moment when material science had become the acknowledged leading edge of Western civilization, and society at large had followed science into finally rejecting the last remnant of insubstantial spirit, the most fundamental concepts of Western belief—time, space, matter, causality, even objective knowledge itself—were all being called into question. And by whom? By the masters of material science.

How utterly strange! Western scientists—the most devotedly materialistic of men—had spent two full centuries and more examining their precious matter with an ever finer scrutiny. And now, suddenly, in the early Twentieth Century, matter itself had lost its solidity and become insubstantial in their hands. Like the spirit-seeking Romantics of the previous era, sober scientists had come around to the belief that the true reality of the world was nothing at all like its appearance.

And so it was that you might now find a distinguished scientist like the British astrophysicist Sir James Jeans stepping forward to declare in his 1930 book,
The Mysterious Universe:

To-day there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches almost to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
²²²

To Bertrand Russell in his seminal essay “A Free Man’s Worship,” written at the turn of the century, matter had appeared to be blind, reckless, relentless, irresistible and omnipotent. Now, however, as the Age of Technology was nearing its end, matter had lost its ruling power. Just at the time when SF writers—including many of those writing for Hugo Gernsback—were quailing before the horrible power of the great machine universe, here was science to say, well, no, maybe the universe was not like a great machine after all. Perhaps it was more like a great thought.

Hugo Gernsback was by no means the only person who was incapable of accepting and assimilating this new point of view. In spite of Sir James Jeans’s claim that the new conclusions were almost unanimously accepted among physicists, the great Albert Einstein himself, responsible for so many of the most fruitful paradoxes of Twentieth Century physics, shied away from the prospect of the abolition of cause-and-effect. In a letter to Max Born, another grandfather of quantum physics, written in December 1926, he stated his profound reservation:

“Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.”
²²³

But Einstein was to be left isolated by his inability to accept the radical new physics—in just the same manner that Hugo Gernsback was to become alienated from the further development of science fiction. From the time that Einstein asserted that his God would never play dice with the world, and refused to consider altering his thinking, he lost his hitherto astonishing creative power. He made no more of the brilliant contributions to physics that had caused him to be popularly regarded as the supreme genius of the modern world.

There was a younger generation of scientists, however, that was willing to adopt the most far-out conclusions of its predecessor as its own premises, and press on with the business of science. Speaking for those who were prepared to accept the unfolding picture of existence revealed by advanced science no matter how odd it might turn out to be, the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote in his 1927 book,
Possible Worlds:
“Now my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we
can
suppose.”
²²⁴

In 1931, this intimation of fundamental strangeness was to be given a theoretical underpinning by a highly important paper entitled “On Formally Undecidable Propositions” by the German—later American—mathematician Kurt Gödel. Specifically writing in answer to the
Principia Mathematica
(1910-13), a three-volume work by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead that had attempted to reduce all mathematics to one grand logical system, Gödel demonstrated that within any system there must be statements that the system itself cannot prove or disprove.

The implication of Gödel’s paper was that the universe must always exceed our logical understanding. There must always be more than we can consciously know. Relative to any particular system or frame of thought, transcendence must always exist.

Within all this new Twentieth Century scientific thought lurked highly important consequences for Western man’s image of himself and the universe. The proudly defiant Man of the Edwardians, so special and so innately superior, who had been cast into discredit by World War I, was now completely dethroned.

Man could no longer be conceived to be the center of all existence. He was only a denizen of an insignificant planet circling around an average star on the fringes of a great galaxy containing stars to the number of a hundred billion or more. And that galaxy was only an average galaxy, one among many. What then was Man?

Man was puny, less than a flyspeck compared to a hundred billion suns. Man was peripheral, a galactic and universal side issue. He was problematical, a mere creature of chance. He was a formally undecidable proposition.

And simultaneously, the universe itself was altered into a realm of wonder. Mystery no longer had to be sought out there in the most distant places and farthest removed times. Mystery was now an innate part of the fabric of the universe. Glitches in reality could now open at any place, at any moment.

One positive consequence might be found in this radical disestablishment of humanity. Mankind was no longer caught in the hot spotlight of the great cosmic drama. Now man was no longer central enough or important enough to merit round upon round of gleeful torture from a God bent upon playing cat-and-mouse. Nor was he condemned to be a weary unyielding Atlas defiantly bearing the weight of the entire universe upon his frail shoulders.

But there was a price—at least from the point of view of the Age of Technology. And the price was that man was made more insignificant and random a being than he had ever been before.

Throughout the Technological Age, the central problem of the era had been how mankind was to cope with the vast size and the indifferent hostility of the universe revealed by science. It seemed that human civilizations might rise and human civilizations might fall, but that all human effort was eventually doomed to come to nothing. The human race might evolve, but only to decay again and be supplanted by some stronger, smarter or more rapacious form of Earthly life. Alternatively, mankind might fall victim to some random cosmic catastrophe. Or it might be overwhelmed by a savage alien onslaught from out of the depths of space.

And now here was Twentieth Century science ready to make a dire situation worse with the news that man’s true position in the universe was even more peripheral and precarious than it had previously been imagined to be.

SF literature, already in the gravest difficulty in the Twenties, was challenged to take account of the threatening new cosmic situation revealed by modern science. And most SF did not respond well.

It was European SF that did the worst. During the Twenties and Thirties, even as a demoralized Europe, never fully recovered from the horrors of World War I and its aftermath, was falling into the iron grip of fascism, so was European SF finding it increasingly difficult to muster belief in anything at all. Not man. Not science. Not the universe.

During the Thirties, European SF turned sour, cynical, pessimistic and misanthropic. Again and again in the scattered European SF stories of the period, civilization collapses, man degenerates, the world ends—and it is all just as well that way.

In the course of the decade, European SF dwindled and then disappeared. It was formally banned by the Nazis in Germany as dirt and trash. In France, it simply ceased to be written and published.

Despite the willingness of British scientists like Jeans and Haldane to proclaim the new scientific view, British SF writers, too, were largely unable to accept the new science. In the early Thirties, three classic examples of SF were published in Britain—Olaf Stapledon’s
Last and First Men
(1930), Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
(1932), and James Hilton’s
Lost Horizon
(1933). But of these three books, one was a cry of nostalgia for the soul, one was a rejection of modern technology, and one showed man defeated by the challenge of the great cosmic void.

The Thirties were a period when any number of the most prominent British writers publicly renounced the modern universe and attempted to find salvation through a return to traditional religion. In keeping with this, as the Great Depression wore on and then flared up into World War II, more and more the most notable British SF stories tended to be expressed in terms of nostalgic fantasy. These stories longed for the simpler and more comprehensible circumstances that existed—in the words of one of them, J.R.R. Tolkien’s
The Hobbit
(1937)—“one morning, long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green.”
²²⁵

It was only rude crude American magazine science fiction—and by no means all of it, but only a small portion—that had the courage and insight necessary to take the bad news that had been delivered by science, face it squarely, and transmute it into something positive.

In the late Twenties in the Gernsback
Amazing,
and then more frequently within the more congenial context of
Astounding Stories,
a new kind of SF story began to appear. This fiction was written by men—and one woman—who were able to accept the immensity and instability of the physical universe, the disestablishment of man, and the radical uncertainty of existence.

In the last years of the Age of Technology, these writers—led by E.E. Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, Stanley Weinbaum and John W. Campbell, Jr.—laid the basis for the new SF literature of the Atomic Age. In a period when even most Americans were writing of decay, defeat and devolution, these few writers demonstrated a positive eagerness to take on the challenge of the immense and random scientific universe. Employing the dismaying new insights of science as their own chief weapon, they aimed to tame the universe and turn it into a viable place for mankind.

SF would be altered by their experiments and explorations. Indeed, at the end of the Thirties, a whole new form of SF would make its appearance, erected on the foundation of this work. And in time the new SF of the Atomic Age would seem so strange and so different from the scientifiction from which it sprang that Hugo Gernsback could mistake it for fantasy.

The new SF would be known as
modern science fiction
in order to distinguish it from the old-fashioned Gernsbackian variety.