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 (57 page)
As one example, there is the fact that what are the deepest possible mysteries to Lagash are not necessarily mysteries to us, who are fortunate enough to be permitted a wider angle of view. We are no strangers to darkness ourselves, and we have managed to survive the experience with our wits intact. We are familiar with moons and with eclipses. We have often seen the stars, and we are acquainted with the wider universe revealed by Twentieth Century science, with its suns by the billion and galaxies beyond counting. So however much we may empathize with the poor Lagashans, simply finding ourselves in the dark surrounded by a globular cluster of stars isn’t going to shake our nerve and rattle our brains.
Moreover, throughout the story we are constantly flashed special signals over the heads of the Lagashans that give us assistance in understanding and assessing the situation in which we find ourselves. These aren’t direct references to Earth so much as meaningful allusions to Earthly events that not only provide us with an extra measure of understanding, but also lend plausibility to the story we are being told.
We are, for instance, obviously meant to see that international exposition with its Tunnel of Mystery by the light of the recent New York World’s Fair. When we are told of a series of nine civilizations that were all destroyed by fire, we are expected to recall the excavation of the nine cities of Troy, some of which were destroyed by fire. When reference is made to a theory that only twelve men are supposed to be able to understand, we are meant to hear an echo of the public marveling over Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. And if we are expected to believe the indirect detection of that invisible moon of Lagash, that is partly because we are already known to be aware of the gravitational anomalies that led to the search for the unknown planet Pluto.
The single most important piece of special information that is given to us, however, is that the scientists of Lagash are essentially correct—the great eclipse they have predicted really is going to occur. The eclipse is what we have been brought here to see, and we
know
that it is coming. John Campbell made certain of that five times over:
The title of the story was an indication of what to expect. So were the epigraph from Emerson and the powerful Hubert Rogers cover painting. And Campbell’s story blurb, which ran beneath Asimov’s title and right beside the quote from Emerson, said:
“How would people who saw the stars but once in two thousand years react—”
431
But all of this was no more than a reminder, because in the preview of “Nightfall” that Campbell had run in the preceding month’s “In Times to Come” column, he had spelled out the story situation exactly:
Next month, Isaac Asimov has a novelette, “Nightfall,” inspired by a quotation from Emerson—which might, offhand, seem a curious source of inspiration for a modern science-fiction writer. Said Emerson: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!”
“Nightfall” discusses just that point. How
would
men believe—and what—if the stars appeared but once in a millennium or two? Suppose there were a planet of a multiple-sun system where there was no night, since there was always, everywhere, at least one sun-star in the sky. Except that, once in some twenty-five hundred years, the configuration became such that—night fell.
Now—what would happen? Asimov has an idea, and a story—and I think they’re both darned good!
432
We cannot have any doubt that John Campbell wished the readers
of Astounding
to be fully aware of the basic facts about the situation in “Nightfall” before they began to read the story. While it might be nice if they were able to summon an old-time scientifictional frisson over the sad fate of Lagash, they were not in any way to be surprised by it. They were to know better from the outset.
The duality displayed in “Nightfall” can be understood as a demonstration of a fundamental assumption of Campbellian science fiction—that it is possible to live, experience and suffer within the universe, and also at the same time to stand apart from existence, observe its workings, and influence its operation.
This leads us to one last regard in which Asimov’s story is modern science fiction. “Nightfall” isn’t content to wring its hands helplessly while an unheeding cosmos grinds the bones of all-too-mortal man, as a story that was merely scientifictional might. It actually proposes a solution to the eternal problem of Lagash—couched in the terms suggested by L. Sprague de Camp in his essay on the direction of history, “The Science of Whithering,” published in
Astounding
in 1940.
That is, this eclipse that we have been brought here to witness may not be just one more Lagashan light show of stars and burning cities, all so much alike that we might as readily have attended the one that came before it, or the one that comes after. This fall of civilization on Lagash may not be just one more fall of civilization on Lagash. What we have been seeing may actually be the last time around the age-old cycle.
This time, at least, having some few months to prepare for the coming disaster, the scientists of Saro University have built a bulwark against the power of the Darkness and the Stars. They have invented what they describe as an “artificial-light mechanism”
433
; we would call them torches. They have constructed a place of refuge—“the Hideout”
434
—for three hundred women and children and able educated men. And they have placed all their precious scientific records there for safekeeping.
Sheerin assures Theremon: “ ‘The next cycle will
start off
with the truth, and when the
next
eclipse comes, mankind will at last be ready for it.’ ”
435
It is possible that Sheerin is wrong. The present eclipse, when it occurs, is so much more intense an experience than the scientists have anticipated that it may be that the Hideout has not managed to survive it, either.
But then Sheerin could be right after all. And though we can’t know for certain, we have to suspect that he is. There is only one regard in which this eclipse is different from other eclipses in earlier cycles. And that is the existence of that safe Hideout with its essential scientific records.
This time round, men have actually used the power of science to determine the operating principles at work in their situation, and have attempted to master them. So if the Hideout does survive, then in the morning light after the night has gone for another eon, Lagash may finally wake and begin to unchain itself from the eternal wheel of cyclical history. And that is the only viable answer there can be to the otherwise unending futility of Lagash.
Modern science fiction would like readers here on Earth to take a lesson from this, in particular those laggard folk still bogged down in the assumptions of the Age of Technology. Speaking to people like these, “Nightfall” says:
There is a way out of the nightmare of cyclical history, a way past the otherwise total certainty of your own downfall. Become a master of universal operating principles and learn to deal with whatever circumstances you find yourselves in.
Just as Isaac Asimov intended when he first sat down to write it, “Nightfall” is a true thought-variant. It is a scientifiction story, but set in a modern science fiction location. At the same time it is a model modern science fiction story that addresses and resolves the most nagging questions of scientifiction.
Taken only as a scientifiction story, “Nightfall” is about the long night coming again. But read as modern science fiction, “Nightfall” is about the crucial transition from a state in which men have been ruled by the Stars to a new era in which free will is at last a possibility.
“Nightfall” is a bridge that links the Technological Age and the new Age of the Atom. It can be likened to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1871 novel
The Coming Race,
which eased the previous moment of transition from the Romantic Era to the Age of Technology through its conception of the transcendent force
vril,
which was simultaneously spiritual, rational, occult and scientific.
In something of the same way, in “Nightfall” different realms of transcendence are perceived as essentially the same. That is, the invisible moon and hidden stars of Lagash are interpreted in spiritual terms by the Cult, as the vast unknown universe by the scientists of Saro University, and as blank spots in perception by us outside observers.
But at the same time that these different frames of reference are equated, the new formulation is asserted to be superior to the old ones in aptness and power. The suggestion is made that merely by a change in perspective, a whole range of Techno Age problems—from cyclical history to cosmic horror—might finally become recognizable as a single problem which could be resolved by universal operating principles in the hands of science-minded men.
The story “Nightfall” couldn’t have been written either much earlier or much later than it was. It was both the product and the representation of a moment in which perceptions were shifting.
We might think of this story as the unique result of exactly the right two collaborators—editor John W. Campbell, Jr., who had been working so long and so diligently to solve the problem of human Fate, and his star pupil, modern science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. By producing this story at precisely the one moment when it could be produced, they pointed the way out of the Techno Age, in which the destiny of man had been determined, into the new Atomic Age in which anything was possible.
P
ARADOXICAL THOUGH AT FIRST IT MIGHT APPEAR,
the most immediate result of the arrival of John Campbell’s modern science fiction at the end of the Thirties was a radical shrinking of the scope of science fiction, a withdrawal from the great vastnesses of time and space that had loomed so large to the Techno Age imagination.
In the 1939
Astounding,
there was a retreat from the farther reaches of the future—with their grim promise of decay, devolution and the ultimate quiescence of all existence. No more were there to be stories of red suns at the end of time, and no more encounters with Big Brains domestic or foreign. Overwhelmingly powerful alien invaders of all kinds were asked to pack and shown the door.
Short stories became largely confined to the near future and to near space, and to those things that might be known, calculated and controlled. The most typical kind of story in
Astounding
in 1939 was some sort of technological space opera set amongst the worlds of our Solar System as described by John Campbell in his long-running series of articles and then depicted on
Astounding’s
new realistic astronomical covers. These might be tales about rushing urgently needed serum to Jupiter, or about the canny astrogational techniques that permit a slower ship to win a space race from Mars to Jupiter and back, or about the discovery of a young mathematical whiz in the midst of a construction gang laboring to alter an asteroid into a space station.
A measure of sweep did still remain in the novels that were published in
Astounding
in 1939. The three major serials were all superscientific space epics in the style of the early Thirties. Clifford Simak’s
Cosmic Engineers
(Feb.-Apr.) was a deliberate attempt to write a good old-time story about bold venturers wielding mighty science after the example of the young John W. Campbell. Jack Williamson’s
One Against the Legion
(Apr.-June) was a comparatively tame second sequel to
The Legion of Space.
And E.E. Smith’s
Gray Lensman
(Oct. 1939-Jan. 1940)—easily the most far-reaching story of the year—was the first sequel to
Galactic Patrol,
the novel that had been in serialization at the moment that Campbell assumed the editorship of
Astounding
in 1937.
By 1940, however, even the novels that Campbell chose to print in
Astounding
reflected the new restrictiveness. The three major serials this year were all set on Earth in the near-to-middle future, with neither star travel nor aliens. Robert Heinlein’s short novel “ ‘If This Goes On—’ ” (Feb.-Mar.) was about the overthrow of a future American religious dictator. L. Ron Hubbard’s
Final Blackout
(Apr.-June)—written in the hour that Hitler invaded Poland, launching World War II—was about war in Europe protracted for generation after generation. And A.E. van Vogt’s
Slan
(Sept.-Dec.) was about the attempts of emergent Homo superior to deal with the jealousy, fear and rage of ordinary humanity.
One way to understand the radical indrawing of science fiction that took place during the first two years of the Atomic Age would be to recall the situation that existed back in 1870, just before the publication of “The Battle of Dorking” and the opening of the Technological Age. At that moment, the future did not yet belong to science-beyond-science. Rather, it was still imagined to be the land of utopian social perfection.
In a very similar way, at the onset of the Atomic Age in 1939, the far future was the exclusive property of Techno Age SF. It was envisioned as the country of Big Brains and red suns.
We might feel some inclination to say, then, that this was a moment for SF to draw in its horns. Modern science fiction as of yet had no alternative images of the most distant reaches of the multiverse. It had no business of its own to perform at the far ends of space and time. And consequently, it felt the need to restrict itself to comparatively well-defined territory until it had worked out new answers to the questions of what was to be done out there amidst the enigmatical immensities, and how, and why.
However, there is an alternative way of regarding this early modern science fiction of 1939 and 1940 that may catch a little more of the truth of the matter. To see things from the proper angle, we must recall the overwhelming degree to which the expansive superscientific SF of the early Thirties had emphasized mystery, while devoting comparatively little thought to the matter of plausibility.
In that hour of political and economic desperation, with the whole world apparently falling into collapse, a handful of exploratory writers had flatly denied the inevitability of the decline and fall of Western man. Instead, these bold visionaries had foreseen man bursting free of the bonds of Earth and leaping lightly to the stars. They’d imagined that men might run into alien races out there, wrestle with them for dominance, and win. So powerful would men become that they might destroy whole planets with nothing more than a seeming child’s toy or the pure overwhelming power of their thought. Out of the nothingness of space, they might produce anything their hearts desired. And there would even come a day when ancient alien races saluted humanity for its maturity and breadth of vision, and men served as the guardians of the galaxy.
The young John Campbell had perhaps gone the farthest. In his SF daydreams, he had imagined man as unique and alone in his power—a creator and destroyer, well-nigh a god.
This was certainly inspiring stuff—for some people, at least—in a time that could use all the inspiration it could get. But in no way could it be called inherently likely. It was all cobbled together out of unfounded hope and barefaced assertion.
And as wonderful and mysterious as the leaps beyond current possibility might be that were tossed off with such apparent casualness in the SF of the early Thirties, they could also be more than enough to test the credibility of even so uncritical a scientific believer as Hugo Gernsback. It might seem to us that there was nothing that this man could not swallow if only the word “science” were attached to it—but the kid John Campbell proved that even Hugo Gernsback had his limits.
In the December 1932 issue of
Wonder Stories,
Gernsback wrote a special editorial entitled “Reasonableness in Science Fiction” and attached it to a new Campbell story called “Space Rays.” Said Gernsback:
In the present offering, Mr. John W. Campbell, Jr. . . . has proceeded in an earnest way to burlesque some of our rash authors to whom plausibility and possible science mean nothing. He pulls, magician-like, all sorts of impossible rays from his silk hat, much as a magician extracts rabbits. There is no situation that cannot easily be overcome by some sort of preposterous scientific—(as he terms it)—gimmick. . . . If he has left out any colored rays, or any magical rays that could not immediately perform miraculous wonders, we are not aware of this shortcoming in his story.
436
How odd of Gernsback to deliver this public rap across the knuckles! Even though his criticism may have had a certain justice to it, it would seem that the doubts and reservations he felt were not sufficient to prevent him from accepting Campbell’s story and publishing it—and, presumably, even paying for it by and by.
This reprimand from Hugo Gernsback, the guardian of all that was serious about science fiction, apparently smarted considerably. “Space Rays” would be the last story that Campbell would publish in
Wonder
for four full years. He wouldn’t appear there again until Gernsback had given up and sold the magazine and it had been remade into
Thrilling Wonder Stories.
And yet, this reproof would seem to have been a turning point for John Campbell. It appears to mark the precise moment that he began to put aside his juvenile fantasies of the unstoppable power of science-wielding man and to turn his considerable critical intelligence to the task of setting forth the unresolved problems and challenging the unconsidered premises of Techno Age science fiction.
It was on the heels of Gernsback’s rebuke, in December 1932, that Campbell wrote “Twilight.” And by Campbell’s own reckoning, it was “Twilight” that “led to the development of the Don A. Stuart stories, and thus to the modern
Astounding.
”
437
In fact, however, the whole variety of work that Campbell found to do during the Thirties following his initial super-scientific phase—his stories as Don A. Stuart, the Penton and Blake series, and his eighteen articles on the Solar System, beginning with one significantly entitled “Accuracy” (
Astounding,
June 1936)—can be seen as varying attempts to bring necessary plausibility to the dreams of human power and domination with which he had begun.
Campbell was not totally alone in this. We may remember, for instance, that one reason why Stanley Weinbaum’s first story, “A Martian Odyssey,” had such powerful impact was its relatively greater concern for plausibility. Even John Campbell himself was ready to take instruction from Weinbaum in conceiving and writing his Penton and Blake stories.
As the Thirties passed and Depression fears gradually began to wane, there was a decrease in demand for stories of escape to the far ends of space and time, or for stories of human scientific invincibility, and an increase in concern for what it might actually prove possible for human beings to be and do. More and more of the readers of science fiction—like the young Isaac Asimov—were receiving education in current science and beginning to care that the stories which inspired them should have some reasonable consonance with known fact. They wanted science fiction to be more than just made-up stuff.
By the later Thirties, so evident had the increased appetite for accurate science become that with the beginning of 1937, F. Orlin Tremaine would alter the letters column in
Astounding
from “Brass Tacks” to “Science Discussions.” In a sense, it was only the confirmation of this trend when eight months later John Campbell, the chief contemporary spokesman for scientific accuracy in science fiction, was chosen to become the new editor of
Astounding.
As we’ve seen, the moment he became editor, Campbell began a series of radical changes in
Astounding
that were designed to alter it into a fit vehicle for an altogether new kind of SF—a modern science fiction that was not only good, but was also logical and possible. And, as we have also seen, by then
Astounding
had a readership that was more than ready to go along with Campbell in the new direction, to support his policy of mutation and to ask for more.
To understand the radically constrained science fiction of the 1939 and 1940
Astounding,
then, we must be aware that at the hour it was published, it was not perceived as an imaginative retreat. Rather, it was hailed as a giant step forward, a radical advance in realism, rigor and relevance.
Observers like us, shielded by the passage of time from the pure overwhelming force of John Campbell’s self-confidence and the corresponding enthusiasm of his readers, might still only see that there was a moment when Campbell’s vaunted new modern science fiction actually amounted to no more than a small handful of relatively trivial stories about the human race becoming hairy, or a man falling in love with a female robot, or the problems of repairing a cracked drive shaft on a Martian spaceliner. And it could be with a sense of near-embarrassment that we mentally compare these simple little stories to the ever-so-much-vaster dignity, scope and seriousness of a Techno Age work like Olaf Stapledon’s
Star Maker,
published as recently as 1937.
But then we have to pause and remember that every period has its own problems, its own priorities, and its own sense of exactly where it is that plausible transcendence is to be sought and found. Just as the Age of Reason had been concerned with the rational perfection of society, while the Romantic Era was bound on a Grail-quest in hopes of healing its wounded soul, so had it been the special business of the Age of Technology to come to terms with the vastness of the wider universe.
The Atomic Age simply wouldn’t be mesmerized by
vastness
in the same way. There would still be a few writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke who would continue to find a measure of inspiration in the thought of vast sweeps of time and space—in something of the same way that there had still been those during the Techno Age who continued to care about the fate of the soul. But modern science fiction as a whole would not concentrate its hopes and fears on the remotest imaginable distances. It would seek its mysteries in other places.
A third way—and perhaps the best way—to look upon the apparent constriction and limitation of SF in
Astounding
in the first years of the Golden Age would be to think of science fiction under Campbell’s direction as changing the focus of its vision from the far away and vague to the near and sharply defined. If that was a very small territory at the outset—the Solar System during the next hundred years or so—in short order, Campbell’s careful, thoughtful, plausible, human-centered modern science fiction would begin expanding its area of authority and control, moving out into the territory of Techno Age SF and taking it over.
There would be distinct limits to how far it would ultimately go. For the most part, no farther ahead in time than about fifty thousand years, and no farther out in space than the borders of our own galaxy. But within this broad-enough area of knowability, John Campbell would stake out his science fiction empire.
The first territory that was placed under Campbellian rule, however, would not be our time or space, but rather parallel universes—that multitude of alternate realms of being asserted to exist by Dunsany and Lovecraft, among others, but perhaps most tellingly evoked by H.G. Wells in
Men Like Gods.
Assertion of authority over these not-quite-real places would take place in the not-completely-serious pages of
Unknown
in 1940—a time when
Astounding
was still concentrating its full attention on the immediate task of straightening and tidying up around the Solar System.