The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (6 page)

But who was mentally prepared to make this perception?

During the succeeding Western phase—the Romantic Period of the late Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries—the spirit of SF was able to descend only now and then, when conditions were just right, to light a fire in the brain of some dreaming or drugged-out writer. The stories that resulted were rare and occasional and uncertain. From time to time, one writer or another would pick up the argument for transcendent science-beyond-science for one story or two—at the utmost half-a-dozen in a lifetime’s work—and produce a tale about some weird scientist toying with the forbidden and paying the necessary penalty.

It is this period that is the source of the cliché of the mad scientist studying knowledge that man was not meant to know. In these stories, transcendent science-beyond-science always looks very much like old-fashioned spirit-based transcendence and is used to evoke horror.

Notice how isolated all this is. We have an occasional argument for the power of super-science, mainly employed after 1835, and used for its horror and novelty and not for any more serious purpose. It is the rare writer who writes this stuff, and he writes it only now and again. And in these stories that followed the line of
Frankenstein,
the scientists, like Victor Frankenstein, are lonely figures—like alchemists or wizards in their private towers—operating “science” known only to themselves.

At the conclusion of
Frankenstein,
the creature, having killed Victor and delivered his last lament, departs for the North Pole—“the most northern extremity of the globe”
²⁸
—there to immolate himself on a solitary funeral pyre. In the stories that followed
Frankenstein,
there was a continuing presumption that transcendent science was somehow unnatural and that after it had turned on its discoverer it would dispose of itself conveniently or gutter out.

No one who wrote of transcendent science had the knowledge or the nerve to push the imagined accomplishments of science beyond the present actual state of science in a mood of calm inquiry, just to see what might be discovered. These Romantic lovers and fearers of transcendence always struck a spark of creative power, and then ran and hid under the bedclothes.

There was no foundation yet for more than this. The new times of the Nineteenth Century were just beginning to reveal a few isolated instances of the power of actual science. It would only be after years of living with the gaslight, the steamboat and the locomotive and their effects that it would become plausible to think of science linking up with science, science altering science, change compounding change.

The mentation of the early Nineteenth Century was not yet prepared to accept more. It needed to assimilate the horror and hubris of daring to usurp the powers of Nature, of daring change at all.

Frankenstein
was the most extreme speculation of the period, the only one that must actually be hidden from. The SF stories that followed it only pretended to the horrible and terrifying. In effect, they lit wastebasket fires just to see the flame, and then instead of running and hiding, they threw water on them. In this way, the curiosity of the Romantics mastered their hysteria.

An indication of the narrowness of the SF which followed
Frankenstein
may be seen in its degree of restriction to familiar settings. Romantic SF was confined to the Village. But the proper home of transcendence lies beyond the boundaries of the Village, in what we may call the World Beyond the Hill.

In the Village, our knowledge of what is limits our acceptance of the marvellous. But in distant places, where even ordinary things are different than they are around here, it is easy to believe that more radical difference will be found as well. In the World Beyond the Hill, transcendent power can display itself everywhere, there are superior beings to be encountered, and we may undergo experiences that Village knowledge cannot encompass.

The World Beyond the Hill has been the natural territory of both ancient myth and modern science fiction. But the writers of Romantic SF were not prepared to venture so far. The very thought was unsettling.

They might half-glimpse the possibility of transcendent aliens. They might toy with the thought of passing beyond the bounds of the Village and entering the World Beyond the Hill. They might hint at these possibilities. They might even intimate them in stories that were cast as jokes or pipe dreams. But they could not and did not present dramatic encounters with fully transcendent aliens or realms. Stories that set out to do these things ended abruptly, half-finished, or blew themselves out in storms of conventional hysteria.

One writer of mid-century who made gestures in the direction of transcendent aliens was Fitz-James O’Brien, a literary Bohemian who came to New York City from Ireland in the 1850s. O’Brien was a writer of plays and stories who acted out the by-then well-worn Romantic charades of rebellion and excess and died in the American Civil War, age 34.

O’Brien was neither a writer of Mary Shelley’s startling originality nor a literary master of the stature of those other sometime creators of Romantic SF, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. However, in two short stories written at the end of the Fifties, O’Brien presented a beauty and a monster discovered in the crannies of the Village, exotic beings who might, just might, be transcendent. In these two stories, O’Brien came as close as it was possible to come to writing of transcendent aliens in the mid-Nineteenth Century.

In “The Diamond Lens” (1858), the narrator, employing a superscientific microscope, the heart of which is a lens he has obtained through murder, peers into a drop of water and there spies a girl whom he names Animula. This typical madman of science tells us: “It was a female human shape. When I say ‘human,’ I mean it possessed the outlines of humanity—but there the analogy ends. Its adorable beauty lifted it illimitable heights beyond the loveliest daughter of Adam.”
²⁹

Wow! A girl who might be more than human within a drop of water! But is this a truly superior creature, a transcendent being, or are we merely listening to the normal hyperbole of the lovestruck?

There is no way to be sure. The drop of water evaporates and Animula dies. The presumptuous wretch of a narrator faints in a conventional fit of hysteria and comes up muttering, “They say now that I am mad; but they are mistaken.”
³⁰

Sixty years later, in a story such as Ray Cummings’ “The Girl in the Golden Atom” (1919), it would be possible to dream of more than merely seeing an Animula, isolated and alone, inside an atom. In Cummings’ story—taken as highly original in its own day—it would be possible to imagine penetrating an atom and finding a world, a girl, and adventure there. Not yet, however.

In O’Brien’s “What Was It? A Mystery” (1859), we are presented with a second creature who might be a transcendent alien. This being, mysterious and invisible, drops down onto the narrator from the vicinity of the ceiling one night when our man has been lying awake after hitting the opium pipe too hard. After a furious struggle, the creature is subdued. But even after capture it remains resolutely silent and invisible until at last it starves to death.

Is this a transcendent alien? Or is it perhaps only a lonely superscientist who has discovered the secret of invisibility, and who will not speak lest his Romantic excuses for himself give the game away? We don’t know. It is all a mystery, and remains one.

Of all the writers of Romantic SF, it was Edgar Allan Poe who made the bravest and best attempts to break loose from the confines of the Village. Poe, born in 1809, was a classic Romantic misfit, a threadbare Byron hooked on opium and death. He was the offspring of frail turn-of-the-century Romantic spirits. His father had thrown away a law career to go on the stage. He married Poe’s mother, a young actress, and then abandoned her. Before he was three, Poe was an orphan, both of his parents dead. He was taken in and raised as a Virginia gentleman, a style of life he had no way of maintaining as an adult.

Poe worked as an editor and as a writer of poems, tales, reviews and random essays. But because of his temperament and style, he was unable to sustain relationships or hold jobs. He alternated alcohol with his opium, though he lacked all tolerance for liquor. Before his collapse in a Baltimore saloon and death at 40, Poe had taken to muttering to himself in the streets and breaking down in public.

Poe’s stories are all attempts to dislocate perception, using a wide variety of methods. They are japes and satires, and tales of the bizarre, mysterious and horrible. If there is a strange fact or a grotesque imagining, Poe will employ it in his attempts to convince us that the familiar world is not as it seems.

Of the writers who came after Mary Shelley, it was Poe who wrote most often and most brilliantly of transcendent science-beyond-science. On at least two occasions, Poe made gestures in the direction of the World Beyond the Hill, but then could not follow through. He was not able to pass beyond the limits of the age to actually show us a world of transcendence.

In “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (1835), a strange dwarf appears in the skies over Holland in a balloon. He drops a manuscript containing a narrative by one Hans Pfaall, a disappeared bellows-maker, telling of his trip to the Moon in a balloon of his own manufacture. The story proper is Pfaall’s narrative.

Poe is very exact in his details of the mechanics of the journey, in as sustained a passage of elaborated science-beyond-science as the Romantic Period has to offer. The trip itself becomes possible by the assumption of a continuous atmosphere from the Earth to the Moon and the discovery of a mysterious gas whose “density is about 37.4 times
less than that of hydrogen
.”
³¹

In a note appended to the story, Poe reviews previous utopian stories of ventures to the Moon and claims that his is superior on account of its greater plausibility—using that very word, even italicizing it. He concludes this note by saying: “In ‘Hans Pfaall’ the design is original, inasmuch as regards an attempt at
verisimilitude,
in the application of scientific principles (so far as the whimsical nature of the subject would permit), to the actual passage between the earth and the moon.”
³²

As much as any other thing, it is Poe’s tone of exactness and certainty of detail that would affect later SF and give Hugo Gernsback reason to list Poe among the progenitors of scientifiction. In the next generation after Poe, a young Jules Verne would read “Hans Pfaall” and be deeply impressed by it. In Verne’s own
From the Earth to the Moon
(1865), a character describes Poe as “ ‘a strange, moody genius’ ”
³³
and recalls the gas thirty-seven times lighter than hydrogen, and all the members of the Baltimore Gun Club whom Verne has gathered together stand and cry, “ ‘Hurray for Edgar Poe.’ ”
³⁴

In the narrative of Hans Pfaall, the balloon venturer arrives at a moon-city, and there follows a two-page catalog of hinted lunar wonders. There is, for instance, “the incomprehensible connection between each particular individual in the moon with some particular individual on earth.”
³⁵
Even more promisingly, there are “those dark and hideous mysteries which lie in the outer regions of the moon—regions which, owing to the almost miraculous accordance of the satellite’s rotation on its own axis with its sidereal rotation about the earth, have never yet been turned, and by God’s mercy, never shall be turned, to the scrutiny of the telescopes of man.”
³⁶

Dark and hideous mysteries? Well, that is the times and that is Poe—the atheist who invokes God’s mercy, the believer in mystery and the fearer of mystery.

Here we are, plausibly transported from our familiar Village Earth into the World Beyond the Hill, arrived in a place where things promise to be endlessly mysterious. But what kind of a world of wonder—or death—is this? Is it a transcendent realm?

It could be. It should be. But it isn’t.

“Hans Pfaall” does not maintain itself as a story. All the plausible reasoning and hinted mystery have not been for the purpose of establishing a realm of transcendence. Instead, we have been set up to have the rug pulled out from under our feet:

The mystery, we are told, is not real. The narrative has all been a hoax. Hans Pfaall has been playing a trick on the burgomasters and astronomers of Rotterdam.

Dutchmen were the Nineteenth Century’s comic dumbheads. Only characters with names like von Underduk and Rubadub could have been taken in for a moment by a dwarf in a balloon “manufactured entirely of dirty newspapers”
³⁷
who is passing as an inhabitant of the Moon. Only they could have been stupid enough to have taken seriously a narrative of a fantastic journey that begins on the first of April. Only they would swallow an invented gas that is described as “tasteless but not odorless”
³⁸
but also as “instantaneously fatal to animal life.”
³⁹
It is all a hoax on gullible Dutchmen—and a joke by Poe on us.

How strange and typical of Poe that immediately after a conclusion that turns all that has gone before into a jape at our expense, he should proclaim the superior plausibility of his method. If the Moon is not the world of wonder and mystery that Poe first suggests, but only a joke, then the superior plausibility of his method can have no point.

Was his plausibility serious, or was it a joke? Poe will have it both ways, and must have it both ways. As far as his immediate audience is concerned, it’s a joke. Neither he nor they dare to brave the World Beyond the Hill long enough to encounter its transcendence. But, inasmuch as Poe is talking to later writers of SF like Jules Verne, he is completely serious. His appendix is an arrow pointing to the most innovative aspect of “Hans Pfaall”—plausible argument that can carry us to a transcendent realm—even though he himself isn’t up to facing that mystery. But then, it has not been unusual in the development of SF for serious methods and arguments to be embodied in very unserious vehicles.