The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (95 page)
Read The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Online
Authors: Alexei Panshin,Cory Panshin
But other people are more conscious than he of the personal shortcomings that render him unfit for the job. For instance, Hardin’s personal observer, the high priest of the Galactic Spirit on Anacreon, says of Wienis: “ ‘He’s the most egregious fool on the planet. Fancies himself as a shrewd devil, too, which makes his folly the more transparent.’ ”
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That’s not just one man’s opinion, either. From the beginning, Isaac Asimov tips a wink to the reader over the heads of his characters that there is something definitely lacking about the Prince Regent and his methods. It’s not by accident that this would-be ruler of the universe and his mighty flagship should be blessed with a name insinuating laughable impotence. Who could be expected to take with total seriousness a threat from anybody or anything named “Wienis”?
Not altogether surprisingly, then, under test it proves to be simplicity itself for the Mayor to outthink, outplan and outmaneuver this belligerent but ineffectual deadhead. In the spirit of Hardin’s favorite slogan, we may say that his competence easily wins out over Wienis’s mere violence. Mind over matter.
But that is the way things were set up to be when the Foundation was established with a vast store of human knowledge on a beleaguered peripheral planet completely lacking in natural resources. Clearly, Hari Seldon wanted the people of the Foundation to think their way to the goal, and not to win by overwhelming material force.
By setting forth this order of value and explicitly demonstrating its power in “Bridle and Saddle,” Isaac Asimov was making the auctorial promise that henceforth on the long road to New Galactic Empire, knowledge, skill and insight might always be counted upon to prevail over brute force and ignorance. Human states of mind would determine the outcome of the Plan, not armies and spaceships and atom blasts.
But Asimov didn’t stop there. He went on in this story to assess the relative effectiveness of one frame of mind and another. Taken as a whole, “Bridle and Saddle” portrayed a kind of ladder of consciousness—a series of modes of thought which must be worked through in the proper order if men are ever to defy the power of cyclical history and avert thirty to fifty thousand years of galactic darkness and barbarism.
The most elementary of these is religion. This mental framework is limited and emotional, but one that is effective in organizing the otherwise chaotic thought of local communities such as Anacreon.
Next, there is the scientific approach. Because it is willing to look at the facts and to revise itself, it is a less excitable and more pragmatic ordering of thought than religion. Yet it is still capable of becoming mesmerized by the special conditions that happen to hold true in some particular time and place, such as Village Earth in the early Twentieth Century, or Lagash in the long seasons between eclipses, or Terminus in the uncertain days after the withdrawal of the Old Empire.
Finally, beyond this scientific nearsightedness, there lies a more comprehensive and effective state of mind which might be called holistic perception.
This mode isn’t anything so advanced as the ability of the men of “Forgetfulness” to annihilate the ordinary bounds of space and time with the power of mind. Rather, it is the more modest ability to perceive complete patterns, with their necessary interconnections, and thereby to be aware of the true nature and demands of a given situation.
Asimov was thinking in this way when he found it impossible to outline his stories logically and linearly in advance of writing them, but instead had to follow an inner sense of their design and put them down whole.
And his character, Salvor Hardin, would also be thinking this way in the approach he takes to the Foundation’s second crisis. Long before there is any visible necessity to take action, Hardin does what seems utterly irrational—he founds a new religion. Then, thirty years later, when those around him are getting themselves all worked up over the renewed threat from Anacreon, Hardin never loses his composure. He has already done what had to be done at the time when it was most appropriate to do it, and now he just needs to wait for the pattern to complete itself.
The best model that Asimov had of a person who was able to think in holistic terms was, of course, John W. Campbell. Though the youngster might be a little distance ahead of his mentor in the specialized knowledge of advanced chemistry, from the moment they first met Asimov was in no doubt that Campbell was someone who saw farther and perceived more than he did.
Again and again, Asimov had the experience of bringing the editor in some idea for a new science fiction story, only to have him alter it into something a great deal larger and more meaningful, such as the Three Laws of Robotics, or a program for the attainment of New Galactic Empire. Campbell might declare, modestly enough, that he was just expressing what was already implied in the original story idea, but over and over Asimov was left marveling at his breadth of vision.
In “Foundation” and in “Bridle and Saddle,” Asimov would deliberately imagine a fictional counterpart to John Campbell in the great psychohistorian Hari Seldon. These two masters of holistic thought would be alike in setting the goal of a unified Galaxy and then standing back out of the way of its accomplishment—except for the occasional interjection of a provocative remark at just the proper moment for it to have maximum effect.
“Bridle and Saddle” declared that it was by climbing the ladder of consciousness from religion to science to holistic thought—and presumably, on beyond—that mankind would thwart the power of Fate and succeed in shaping its own destiny. That was the way to deal with the Fall of Galactic Empire.
It was also the answer to the perennial problem of Lagash in “Nightfall.” The ultimate solution to recurrent-mass freakout can come only when the people of Lagash develop sufficient holistic appreciation of their cosmic situation that sudden variations in the number of visible stars no longer faze them.
And it was the answer, too, to the Techno Age dilemma faced by Western man. Indeed, in the sequence of thought-modes offered by Asimov here in “Bridle and Saddle” we can recognize a précis of the story we have been telling in this book.
Just as soon as John Campbell finished reading the last page of Asimov’s manuscript, he picked up the phone and put in a call to Street & Smith’s accounting department to ask them to strike a check for Asimov. But perhaps because Asimov’s delay in delivering the story had left him with a scheduling problem that he still had to resolve, this time he didn’t see fit to throw in a bonus.
Campbell found his way out of his scheduling tangle by moving “Runaround,” the robot story, into the next issue that he made up for the printer—the March 1942
Astounding.
He then held back “Foundation” until May—an issue that was perhaps the most impressive in the entire Golden Age, containing not only Asimov’s novelet, but van Vogt’s “Asylum” and the final part of Heinlein/MacDonald’s
Beyond This Horizon.
“Bridle and Saddle,” of course, would follow in June. Despite the lack of bonus payment, it proved to be Asimov’s second lead story in
Astounding,
illustrated on the cover.
After that, however, more than two years would pass before Campbell would be able to publish another Foundation story. Three weeks to the day after Asimov brought him “Bridle and Saddle,” the United States was at war. And that meant radical changes for
Astounding
and for science fiction.
I
N THE SECOND PORTION OF THE GOLDEN AGE,
the years from 1942 through 1945 during which the United States was an active participant in World War II,
Astounding
would become a very different place than it had been in the initial universe-conquering phase of John Campbell’s editorship. In part, this would be a result of Campbell’s own thought and action—his sense of what was possible and necessary at this moment, and the corresponding changes in course that he elected to make in the magazine. But also, in part, it would be the result of wartime conditions that were utterly and completely beyond his control.
It isn’t always easy to say exactly where the line should be drawn between what the editor consciously intended to do, and what would be done by him unknowingly, or even contrary to his belief, his judgment and his preference. As best he was able under trying circumstances, Campbell would attempt to go on serving as the master of provocation and farseeing coordinator of the new science fiction that he had been since assuming direction of
Astounding
at the end of 1937. But the war years would have their own necessities to impose that the editor could do nothing whatever about.
For one thing, the World War II years would be the period in which the United States did its best impression of the machine-state first dreamed of in Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward.
That might be no impression at all when compared to totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany and Communist Russia which attempted to treat their people like cogs in a machine. Even so, during the war American society would be mobilized as a whole—organized and prioritized, rationed and regulated, ordered and compelled as it had never been before. The entire country would be turned into a war industry.
The most fit, able and well-educated young men would be snatched away from the careers they had been attempting to put together out of the shambles left by the Depression, and set to the work of fighting and winning the war. And among those called away to the armed services, defense plants and research laboratories would be the brightest and best of the modern science fiction writers that John Campbell had been laboring so hard to gather and train. This could not help but have a great impact upon
Astounding.
Between missing manpower and the new national priority of defeating Germany and Japan and their allies, limitations would be imposed on many aspects of ordinary life. Not the most important of these, but also not the least, would be that there were fewer lumberjacks on the job, and fewer railroad cars available to transport logs and paper and printed pulp magazines. That would have its effect on
Astounding,
too, and upon science fiction in general.
But the American people would be ready to accept shortages, disruptions and extraordinary impositions of authority. There was great anger in the country over Japan’s all-too-successful surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet based in Hawaii, and a deep accumulated dislike of the fanaticism, arrogance, brutality and treachery that had been displayed by Germany ever since the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
From the time the United States entered World War II, a public consensus rare in American history would exist that this war was just and had to be fought. This wasn’t merely one more conflict imposed upon the people by rich men in high places out to line their pockets and prove their power. Ordinary Americans had a pretty good notion that if the likes of Hitler and Mussolini and the military party that had recently seized control in Japan were allowed to win this war and rule the world, the cost would be their own freedom, and they were ready to fight to see freedom preserved.
In American eyes, the Axis powers would be looked upon as the embodiment of old-time attitudes that were now revealed as excessive and unacceptable. This was to be a war fought against all those who would set themselves up as superior to everyone else because of their race or nation or class, against those incapable of accepting difference in thought or diversity of kind, and against those who would seek to impose their will on the world through the rule of force and violence.
Offered in opposition to this elitism, intolerance and determination to prevail at any cost would be the recently emerged American ideal of democratic pluralism, the conviction that each man has his own individual value and ought to be allow the opportunity to demonstrate it. If the people of the United States were ready to overlook their differences and work toward a common goal, it wasn’t because they were forced to, or because some monolithic central authority permitted them to think no other thought, but because they aimed to show the totalitarian states what free men working together in voluntary cooperation could manage to do if they were of a mind to.
America’s new ideal can be seen in its simplest and purest form in World War II combat movies—particularly those made in the decade of reassessment that followed the war. The standard World War I story had been about the futility and waste of sending a generation of young men out of the trenches and over the top to be cut down by gas and machine gun fire in No Man’s Land, or about dashing but doomed young pilots attempting to face fate and the end of Western civilization with a smile. But the archetypical movie of the Second World War would feature a squad of infantrymen—a Texan, an Italian, a Jew, a spoiled rich kid, an immigrant Slavic coal miner, a farm boy, and a wiseguy from Brooklyn—learning to get along together and win the war.
The actual conduct of the United States during World War II wouldn’t always be equal to its best new ideal, of course. For instance, the American people may have believed that they were fighting for the principles of free thought and free speech, but during the war the actual willingness of the U.S. government to trust in the power of free thought and speech would be something less than total, and the American people would be subjected to internal censorship and propaganda.
The government was capable of a measure of Techno Age excess, particularly at the beginning of the war. The most flagrant example of this was the doubting of the loyalty of Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast. Anger against Japan over Pearl Harbor and lingering fears of the Yellow Peril—an unstoppable horde of invading Asians—would be discharged upon these American citizens. They would be arbitrarily deprived of their liberty and property and herded off into desert concentration camps.
If indeed that all-American infantry squad ever did exist during the war, it most certainly would not have included Nisei, or Negroes, let alone women. During World War II, each of these would be kept in segregated military units, separate and apart from the central melting pot of male American soldiery.
More than this, women would be allowed to serve only in highly limited roles, such as clerk, typist and nurse. And blacks in uniform would be treated, if anything, with even greater prejudice, confined to assignments such as cook, stevedore, manual laborer and truck driver, but not permitted to fight.
Even after all this has been said, however, it nonetheless remains true that Americans would be convinced they were waging this war for the ideal of democratic pluralism. While the war was on, certain sacrifices and compromises in personal freedom might be demanded. And yes, the United States might display some highly visible imperfections in its current ability to live up to its own highest ideals. But the unprecedented degree of social assent and cooperative effort that would be achieved in the U.S. during the Second World War would only be obtained through a mutual understanding between government and people that when this war was over, a more just and equitable society would emerge.
And even while the war was being fought, the United States would start becoming more genuinely pluralistic. Women and Negroes would begin to be offered opportunities and responsibilities that previously had been denied them. A woman might put on pants and go to work on an aircraft assembly line. A black man might become a streetcar conductor in Philadelphia.
It would also be during the war years that teenagers, who through the Techno Age had been considered either older children or young adults, would first begin to define themselves as a separate age group with its own distinctive clothing and music. This was the period of teenage girls in bobby socks and saddle shoes swooning over Frank Sinatra.
The ongoing broadening of society would even affect the American armed forces. Before the war was over, Negroes would be allowed a limited combat role, and Nisei from the West Coast and Hawaii would distinguish themselves fighting as a unit in Europe.
Such would be the success of these experiments in the toleration and trust of difference that shortly after the war, President Truman would issue an executive order ending all racial segregation in the military. And that would be the first major step in the tearing down of legal barriers based upon race, religion and sex which would be a central American preoccupation throughout the Atomic Age.
The pluralization of society that began taking place during the war years would have its parallel in the pages of
Astounding.
Aliens, robots and mutants would shed their former aura of fundamental otherness and be seen in new light, not as evolutionary competitors, but as variations upon the larger theme of being human.
Before the U.S. entered the Second World War, L. Sprague de Camp had stood out for his insistence that a Vandal could be the equal of a Goth, and that a talking bear, a mutant baboon, or a surviving Neanderthal might be every bit as much
a man
as the ordinary Joe in the street. But by the last two years of the war, humanistic pluralism would become the insight of the hour in science fiction.
John Campbell would be swept along by the tide of change. However, there would be aspects of the new expanded humanism that he would never wholly accept or completely understand. In this instance, he would clearly be led by his writers rather than leading them, as he had always been able to do before.
But democratic pluralism wouldn’t be the only aspect of the contemporary state of mind to have its effect on Campbell’s modern science fiction. An even greater impact would be made upon
Astounding
by the wartime mood of radical disequilibrium.
These years were heady, upsetting and uncertain, a wild emotional roller-coaster ride of stomach-churning lows and giddy highs:
There was a great overturning of familiar customs and habits in American society. All sorts of folk would use the war as their excuse for ignoring established behavior and start acting in ways that to an older generation had to seem casual, heedless, disrespectful and individualistic.
Nothing was to be counted upon, time was fleeting, anything at all might happen tomorrow, and no one could say for certain what the outcome of the war would prove to be—who would survive and by what measures, which things would prosper and which would fade away, or what the world was going to look like when all the jumbled and scattered pieces of existence were finally fit back together again.
Beneath America’s public face of confidence, solidarity and good cheer, World War II would be a time of subjectivity, introspection and strange flights of mind.
It was the war years that would see the appearance of abstract expressionist painting, a form of art whose purpose was not to represent the external world, but rather the artist’s own mental and emotional state. It would be a common thing for movies and plays of the time to feature questionings of personal sanity, psychiatric probings into the unconscious mind, dream sequences, and drunken hallucinations that just might prove to have their own reality. And there would also be a resurgence of interest in spirit-based horror and fantasy.
For its part, science fiction in
Astounding
would become a good deal queerer after America entered the war than it had been in the first phase of the Golden Age, with much more interest in mystery than in plausibility. But rather than SF writers seeking out one unknown realm of existence after another, as they had done when the constraints of the imagination had become loosened during the First World War, this time it was the universe of consciousness that they would explore.
What an alteration in perspective had taken place in the years between the two World Wars! Taking their initial clues from the otherworld adventures of the Teens, science fiction writers of the Twenties and Thirties had traveled joyfully into the furthest reaches of time and space. They had explored what it might mean to be citizens of the wider universe and had offered the exhilarating possibility that humanity’s true business might be the assumption of responsibility for the entirety of existence.
John Campbell’s first aim on taking over the editorship of
Astounding
in 1937 had been to place a grounding of plausibility beneath this wonderful glimmering vision of a new and better human destiny. He offered his writers a powerful new set of arguments and assumptions and then demanded that they use them to resolve the great Techno Age conundrum—the haunting certainty that man was ultimately doomed to failure and extinction.
So it was that in the modern science fiction stories that Campbell published, men left Village Earth to tame our own solar system and then reach out to grasp the stars. Again and again the power of cyclical history to spell an end to man was gainsaid by characters able to show that they could respond effectively and creatively to any challenge they encountered. And the most constructive of Campbell’s contributors—L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov—went even further to imagine new systems, laws and sciences that harnessed major aspects of the multiverse to the power of human knowledge and will.
But what was not recognized and assimilated in this exuberant initial phase of problem-solving and empire-building was that in the course of resolving the Techno Age dilemma, the modern science fiction of John Campbell had placed itself outside—or beyond—the Western scientific frame of reference made by men like Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Darwin.