The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (74 page)
Read The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Online
Authors: Alexei Panshin,Cory Panshin
Schneider goes on to suggest to Waldo that it is because of the doubt and fatigue of their pilots that the air cars have been failing. It is belief in modern science that has kept them up in the sky, and when that lapses, down they fall. To fix the deKalbs—and to heal Waldo’s ineffective muscles—it is necessary to draw on the power of the Other World.
This is not only a lot for Waldo to absorb, but it is contrary to everything he ever thought he knew, and it takes him a while to come to terms with what he has been told. But he is a pre-eminently practical man, and by the time he can produce the Schneider effect in the deKalb receptors himself, Waldo has altered much of his previous thinking.
For one thing, he has begun to give magic credence as a mode of thought with its own measure of validity—which in some cases has been confirmed by modern science, but in other cases may have been too hastily dismissed by science and its reductionist either-or logic.
Waldo goes on from this to convince himself that the Other World of which Schneider speaks really does exist, and that this is the source of power that the altered deKalbs are drawing upon. He tries to picture the alternate realm in his mind, knowing as he does so that the image is probably inadequate, but still finding it convenient: “ ‘I think of it as about the size and shape of an ostrich egg, but nevertheless a whole universe, existing side by side with our own, from here to the farthest star.’ ”
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From conceding that there might be something to magic after all, and further postulating that there really might be an alternate realm of being with the power to affect this world, Waldo somewhat reluctantly abandons the safety and security of natural law to experiment with a mentalistic point of view:
Waldo was not emotionally wedded to Absolute Order as Rambeau had been; he was in no danger of becoming mentally unbalanced through a failure of his basic conceptions; nevertheless, consarn it, it was convenient for things to work the way one expected them to. On order and natural law was based predictability; without predictability it was impossible to live. Clocks should run evenly; water should boil when heat is applied to it; food should nourish, not poison; deKalb receptors should
work,
work the way they were designed to; Chaos was insupportable—it could not be lived with.
Suppose Chaos
were
king and the order we thought we detected in the world about us a mere phantasm of the imagination; where would that lead us? In that case, Waldo decided, it was entirely possible that a ten pound weight
did
fall ten times as fast as a one-pound weight until the day the audacious Galileo decided in his mind that it was not so. Perhaps the whole meticulous science of ballistics derived from the convictions of a few firm-minded individuals who had sold the notion to the world. Perhaps the very stars were held firm in their courses by the unvarying faith of the astronomers. Orderly Cosmos, created out of Chaos—by Mind!
The world was flat before geographers decided to think of it otherwise. The world was flat, and the Sun, tub size, rose in the east and set in the west. The stars were little lights, studding a pellucid dome which barely cleared the tallest mountain. Storms were the wrath of gods and had nothing to do with the calculus of air masses. A mind-created animism dominated the world then.
More recently it had been different. A prevalent convention of materialistic and invariable causation had ruled the world; on it was based the whole involved technology of a machine-served civilization. The machines
worked,
worked the way they were designed to work, because everybody believed in them.
Until a few pilots, somewhat debilitated by overmuch exposure to radiation, had lost their confidence and infected their machines with uncertainty—and thereby let magic loose in the world.
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This is a most remarkable sequence of speculation. There is nothing that matches it elsewhere in the Golden Age
Astounding
or
Unknown.
In the first place, it is a direct philosophical statement of the great insight that is expressed again and again by Heinlein’s early futuristic stories: Over the course of time, thought patterns accepted at any one moment as normal, self-evident and completely sufficient can change and do change.
“Waldo” may further be seen as a prescient attempt to recognize and come to terms with the very same succession of mental orientations in Western society that has been of concern to us throughout this account of the story of science fiction—the transition from spiritual belief to materialism, and the further shift from materialism to emergent post-materialism.
Finally, in Waldo’s own modes of thinking we can glimpse the spectrum of thought typical of Campbell’s Golden Age, from his initial pragmatic belief in his ability to force answers out of an uncooperative universe, to his brief moment here on the heady heights of mentalism and probabilism.
But, as story titles like “Fear” and
Darker Than You Think
should indicate to us, at this early hour the new transcendence could still seem so intense, untamed and perverse as to be well-nigh intolerable. Consciousness and uncertainty were almost as frightening to the new Atomic Age as wild science had been to the Romantics or as the enigmatical immensities of time and space had appeared to the Age of Technology.
So it is for only a very brief moment that Waldo can tolerate this much transcendent possibility. As we have just overheard him thinking, he isn’t at all sure that it is possible to live without predictability. And the new uncertain, indeterminate reality in which “ ‘a thing can both
be, not be,
and
be anything
’ ”
589
looks like Chaos to him.
In Jack Williamson’s
Darker Than You Think,
Will Barbee is able to accept a new personal state where he can
be, not be,
or
be anything
—even though he might have to be goaded and enticed into it by April Bell. But Waldo isn’t able to cope with this degree of freedom. He has to hastily back away and re-establish control.
Waldo’s clampdown comes immediately. He thinks:
The world varied according to the way one looked at it. In that case, thought Waldo, he knew how he wanted to look at it. He cast his vote for order and predictability!
He would
set
the style. He would impress his
own
concept of the Other World on the cosmos! . . . He would think of it as orderly and basically similar to this space.
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In sum, offered infinite possibility, the possibility that Waldo opts for is to have things continue much as they have been. He never really was Big Brain at all. In fact, he isn’t even as adventurous as mad Dr. Rambeau. When you come down to it, he’s just another guy with a hunger to be liked.
So it is that for his own need, Waldo will draw on enough of the Power of the Other World to heal his bodily weakness and turn himself into a dancer, brain surgeon and popular personality. And, for society’s sake, he will keep the window to the Other World open a crack, just enough to make it the new source of technological power replacing the old debilitating radiation.
Society is maintained, and Waldo receives the adulation he has been craving. And that is enough to satisfy Waldo. But any more of the freedom allowed by the Other World would be Chaos, and that would be insupportable. He won’t allow it.
But Waldo is only fooling himself. He hasn’t really imposed his point of view on the cosmos at all. Only on his society, and only for a time.
Before the end of the story, Gramps Schneider does what he can to remind Waldo of this. The old hex doctor is no more enamored of clocks that run evenly and the technological civilization they regulate than he ever was, and he sends Waldo a note politely refusing his offer to take part in the Other World power project. Gramps goes on to say:
“ ‘As for the news of your new strength I am happy, but not surprised. The power of the Other World is his who would claim it.’ ”
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That is, the power of the Other World belongs to anyone with the breadth of vision to venture beyond the limits of current social belief, and the courage to
be, not be,
or
be anything
—even if it is, like Waldo, only for the briefest moment.
The new post-materialistic transcendent power of consciousness and reality was there to be claimed by any of the SF writers of Campbell’s Golden Age. But there was only one among them who was consistently able to avail himself of it and to exercise it without fear or retreat. This was A.E. van Vogt.
I
N THE MOST CENTRAL STORIES
of the early Campbellian Golden Age, two fundamental tenets were affirmed and reaffirmed. One of these was that change and difference are always possible. The other was that men armed with a knowledge of universal operating principles can always find a way to cope with any difficulty that change and difference may present.
These tenets were asserted in one important story after another by L. Sprague de Camp, Campbell’s first ally, and Isaac Asimov, his most able student. And yet, brilliant as these stories were, nonetheless there was something about them that was distinctly limited—something of the special case, something untested.
The various novels that de Camp published in
Unknown
were only humorous fantasies, games of
what if.
They didn’t make any claim to be serious. If
Lest Darkness Fall
invoked the historical past, before the end of the story this was indicated to no longer be our own past, but rather some brand-new branch sprouting from the tree of time. And, at best, the Harold Shea stories, with their extension of scientific control to storybook worlds, might be taken as a kind of theoretical exercise in the application of universal operating principles, but no more than that.
Asimov’s stories were more serious-minded science fiction, published in
Astounding.
But “Nightfall” was the most special of special cases, a laboratory experiment in cyclical history set off in some remote place in space and time with no direct connection to men of Earth and their history. And even though his series of robot stories was the most explicit presentation of universal operating principles to be found anywhere in Campbell’s magazines, it was also true that the sphere of control that they established was only over a handful of man-created machines during the next fifty years or so.
Of all Campbell’s writers, it was Robert Heinlein who applied the new beliefs where they were of greatest relevance—to the course of humanity’s own future development, from the present moment to the human attainment of the stars. But even as he was doing this, Heinlein ran into a problem that he couldn’t get past.
The difficulty didn’t lie with the initial Golden Age tenet, the principle of change and difference. To Heinlein, it seemed clear that change not only might happen, but that it does happen, and that it will continue to happen. In his various futuristic stories written between 1939 and 1942, he imagined time-to-come as a kaleidoscopic whirl of permutation and combination, of change upon change upon change.
Heinlein’s sticking point came with the second tenet—the presumption that men with a knowledge of the way the universe really works could contrive to cope with any difficulty they might encounter. Heinlein had been a relatively late convert to the doctrine of universal operating principles, and even though at his most confident he might envision a dedicated elite of competent men, the overseers of society, who could solve any problem that might present itself and manage to ease ordinary folk past the rough spots, when he put his beliefs to the test, he wasn’t able to maintain confidence. The truth was that shepherding mankind from the present to the stars looked like no easy task to him.
He had little trust in the willingness and ability of normal less-than-competent humanity to do the right thing. He could wonder whether the capable, responsible few could manage to raise stupid, greedy, unheeding humanity up to the stars without snapping under the strain. But what really haunted Heinlein was the possibility that when mankind did reach the stars, it would find beings more able and advanced already established there.
In a universe responsive to competence, these aliens might effortlessly outstrip the most brilliant human genius, even Andy Libby of
Methuselah’s Children.
They could be more adept manipulators of universal operating principles—like the rapport groups of the Little People who by the power of thought alone can convince plants to bear fruit that tastes like mashed potatoes and gravy. Or, like the gods of the Jockaira, they just might be so highly evolved that try as men could it would never be possible for them to catch up.
It is this spectre that causes Heinlein’s long-lived people in
Methuselah’s Children
to turn back from the stars and retreat to Earth. Heinlein’s Best of Breed are motivated and sustained by the confident knowledge of their own superiority. Without this assurance, they despair of life, wilt, go mad, and die.
Until World War II finally intervened, and he went off to serve his country at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Heinlein went round and round with this problem in one story after another. But he never came close to resolving it.
Heinlein’s limitation was his lingering attachment to Techno Age notions of survival of the fittest and evolutionary superiority. These caused him to look upon transcendent aliens if not as hostile, certainly as dismaying. To someone who craved to have the edge, to know all the answers, and to be in charge as badly as he, the imagined indifference of higher beings could seem shattering—as he indicated in
Methuselah’s Children,
“By His Bootstraps” and “Goldfish Bowl.”
There was another writer for
Astounding,
however who would tackle the thorny questions of fitness, evolution and the future development of man and deal with them more creatively than Heinlein had been able to do. This was A.E. van Vogt, the most radical and visionary of all Campbell’s authors.
Alfred Elton van Vogt was born on his grandparents’ farm in Manitoba, Canada on April 26, 1912. At this time, van Vogt’s father and three of his uncles were partners in a general store in the village of Neville, Saskatchewan and his father was studying by correspondence to earn a law degree.
Like Isaac Asimov, who developed a case of double pneumonia at the end of his second year from which it was feared he wouldn’t recover, van Vogt had an early brush with death. When he was two, he fell from a second-floor window onto a wooden sidewalk, knocked himself unconscious, and remained in a coma for three days.
Van Vogt was like Asimov in another regard—the original language of this writer-to-be was not English. Until his mother put her foot down on the matter when Alfred was four, it was a dialect of Dutch that was spoken in the van Vogt household.
Young Alfred had something of a divided nature. He was an insatiable reader who for many years devoured two books a day and knew early that he wanted to be a writer when he grew up. But there were also moments when he was “an extrovert of extraordinary energy”
592
—as he put it in a 1981 memoir entitled “My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story.”
Van Vogt was a horseback rider as a youth. In summers during his teens, he worked as a separator man on a threshing outfit and drove a truck for a combine. He was a good rifle shot, and even came close to going off on a trapping expedition to northern Canada.
In later years, van Vogt would look back upon his younger self and try to determine just when it was that the more outgoing part of himself had gotten suppressed. Did it stem from that traumatic fight with another boy that occurred when he was eight? Was it the teacher who had caused him to doubt himself for reading fairytales at twelve? Or was the crucial event when he was 17 1/2 and killed a snake, and then suffered a revulsion against doing harm to any wild creature?
Though van Vogt might make guess after guess, he would never be able to pinpoint the exact moment when it happened. And, in fact, even well into his twenties, when he was an advertising space salesman and writer of interviews for a string of trade papers, van Vogt could still call on some lingering residue of brashness in his character to gain the attention of businessmen and store owners—as long as no one challenged him.
The truth of the matter seems to be that van Vogt’s withdrawal into himself took place over a considerable period of time. The beginning of it may lie in the fact that young Alfred was a highly idealistic small town boy with a number of wide-eyed notions about right and truth and justice in his head. When the world failed to conform to his expectations, he found that a substantial shock.
Beyond this, it was also true that Alfred was a boy who had something a little strange and left-footed about him. He didn’t think or talk exactly like everyone else, and reaction to this may have had its effect on his developing personality.
As the Twenties boomed, van Vogt’s lawyer father moved his family once and then again, first to the larger town of Morden, Manitoba, and then to the city of Winnipeg, where he became the western Canadian agent of the Holland-American Shipping Lines.
These moves were very difficult for van Vogt. He would recall: “Childhood was a terrible period for me. I was like a ship without anchor being swept along through darkness in a storm. Again and again I sought shelter, only to be forced out of it by something new.”
593
Morden was twice as large as Neville. It was a conservative community with a predominantly English population, and here van Vogt was made aware that Canada was British but that he was not.
Winnipeg was even more trying. It was a city of 250,000—two hundred times the size of Morden—and Alfred felt lost there. He quickly fell behind in school “in the five subjects that you just can’t catch up on easily: algebra, geometry, Latin grammar, Latin literature, and one other that I can’t recall.”
594
In consequence, he was asked to repeat the tenth grade.
The broader horizons offered by science fiction—still not yet called this—were one answer he found to his difficulties. He came across SF first in Morden at the age of eleven in a British boys’ magazine called
Chum,
the yearly collected volume of which he contrived to borrow for a dime from another boy who soon became his best friend.
Then, in Winnipeg, in his dark days of failure in school, he discovered the November 1926 issue of
Amazing Stories
on a newsstand and recognized it as what he was seeking. During the next three years—until Hugo Gernsback lost control of the magazine and it came under the more conservative editorial direction of ancient T. O’Conor Sloane—van Vogt would read
Amazing
assiduously, seeking signs of another and higher order of being than that which was to be found in Winnipeg, Manitoba in the late 1920s. As van Vogt would eventually come to express it:
Reading science fiction lifted me out of the do-be-and-have world and gave me glimpses backward and forward into the time and space distances of the universe. I may live only three seconds (so to speak), but I have had the pleasure and excitement of contemplating the beginning and end of existence. Short of being immortal physically, I have vicariously experienced just about everything that man can conceive will happen by reading science fiction.
595
If
Amazing
had defects and limitations, this wasn’t apparent to young Alfred. What he saw in the pioneer magazine of science fiction was the wonders of man’s progress-to-come, and his imagination was fired by one grand new concept after another: “ESP; trans-light speeds; exploration of space; the infinitely small turning out to be another universe; new super-energy sources; instant education; the long journey; shape changing; vision at a distance; time travel; gravity minimization; taking over another body; etc.”
596
A considerable impression would be made on van Vogt by E.E. Smith’s
The Skylark of Space,
of course. But the writer in
Amazing
who had the most to say to him was A. Merritt.
When Gernsback left the magazine, the youngster couldn’t help but notice the change.
Amazing
lost the magic it had held for him and became dull. Consequently, in 1930, in one of the utterly abrupt transitions that were to become typical of his conduct of life, van Vogt put science fiction aside.
He wouldn’t look at SF again for more than eight years, until, just as abruptly, he was ready to begin to write it. In the meantime, however, he had a great deal of self-preparation to do.
Lack of spare cash was one reason for his ceasing to buy science fiction magazines. The stock market crash of 1929 took place at the beginning of van Vogt’s last year in high school. Before that school year was over, van Vogt’s father had lost his shipping-lines job and it was apparent there wouldn’t be sufficient money available for Alfred to go to college. Although in later life, van Vogt would sit in on college courses in many subjects from economics to acting, this was to be the end of his formal education.
For the next six months, he hid out in his bedroom and wondered what to do with himself. Mostly he continued to read. He read hot pulp fiction—historical romances, mysteries and Westerns. He read serious turn-of-the-century British fiction and Nineteenth Century French novels. He read history and psychology. And he also read books of science.
The science that interested van Vogt the most was not familiar Newtonian science. It seems possible that the unrecallable essential subject he flunked in tenth grade, along with Latin and math, just might have been chemistry or physics. Unlike a John Campbell or a Robert Heinlein, van Vogt hadn’t spent his youth building radios or carrying out a search for a better way to blow up the basement. There was never much likelihood that he would grow up to become an aeronautical engineer like de Camp or a biochemist like Asimov.
The science that van Vogt did care about was the new wider science of atoms and galaxies. But even here, what interested him was not the details, but rather concepts and overviews—the philosophy and meaning of science. And so it was only natural that he would find his way to the writings of Arthur Eddington, James Jeans and J.B.S. Haldane.
However, the book that had the greatest influence on the formation of his thinking may have been Alfred North Whitehead’s
Science and the Modern World
(1925). At one time or another, this pioneering work of post-materialistic philosophy passed through the hands of most of the youngsters who would grow up to become the science fiction writers of Campbell’s Golden Age. But it was van Vogt alone amongst them who would be able to take insights derived from this difficult little book and make them the basis for his SF writing.