Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (48 page)

IV.

Hindemith’s Kepler opera
Die Harmonie der Welt
(1957) has the right to be considered under the rubric of
the baroque in science fiction.
Like Hindemith’s earlier opera
Mathis der Maler
(1934),
Harmonie der Welt
takes place during the Reformation in the time of the religious wars, the fanaticism and violence of which threaten the protagonist. Hindemith portrays Kepler as a heroic anti-modern figure whose advocacy of Copernican cosmology entails the preservation of an essentially religious and mystic view of existence. The opera’s central metaphor, “The Harmony of the Worlds,” comes from Kepler’s treatise Harmonices Mundi (1619), in which, among other tasks that he set for himself, Kepler tried to reconcile elements of Ptolemaic cosmology with what were by then the certainties of Copernican cosmology, such as Heliocentrism and non-epicyclical orbital relations between the planets and the solar primary. Kepler sought to preserve the Pythagorean idea, incorporated by Ptolemy, of a celestial harmony or “Music of the Spheres.” This would be the same “μoυσίχή” to which Poe refers in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una.” Bruce Stephenson writes, in The Music of the Heavens (1994), how Kepler took for granted that “if God had become man on Earth, then from Earth man should surely be able to detect the outlines of the great design of creation,” even to the point of apperceiving the celestial harmony.45

In Kitty Ferguson’s summation in
The Music of Pythagoras
(2008), Kepler believed in “a mysterious inherent connection between human souls and the underlying pattern of the universe.”
⁴⁶
Die Harmonie der Welt,
in which Hindemith has his usual recourse to baroque musical procedures, ends in an extended, magnificent
passacaglia
in which Kepler, completing
Harmonices Mundi,
has a mystic vision of the intelligible universe, with the planets and stars wheeling about him.

Some actual baroque, as distinct from neo-baroque, operas have science-fictional qualities. Jean-Philippe Rameau’s allegorical operas from the middle of the eighteenth century deserve attention in this regard, most notably
Castor et Pollux
(1733),
Zoroastre
(1749), and
Les Boréades
(1763). These are all re-imaginable as
Weird Tales
narratives, especially
Zoroastre,
with its earthly battle between the forces of good and evil (Zoroastre himself and the wicked Abramane) backed up by the cosmic battle of the rival Manichaean deities. Rameau (1683–1764) published a theory of harmony as metaphysically complex as Kepler’s and garnered the nickname “The Newton of Music.” Some science fiction novels have baroque-operatic qualities, outstandingly the five installments of the
Demon Princes
by the redoubtable Jack Vance (born 1916). The five separate titles—
The Star King
(1964),
The Killing Machine
(1964),
The Palace of Love
(1967),
The Face
(1979), and
The Book of Dreams
(1981)—stage an elaborate revenge drama set against a galactic scene resembling Europe’s patchwork of republics and principalities at the time of the Reformation.

Vance’s protagonist, Kirth Gersen, belongs to the genre of emissary characters. Gersen when still a child narrowly escaped but also witnessed the murder and enslavement of his parents and siblings. Raised by his grandfather to be the avenger of the outrage, Gersen exists outside the law. His existence thus has a fugitive quality; he resembles, among others, Northwest Smith, although he is more a pursuer than pursued. The Demon Princes is a vast passacaglia in prose, repeating the basic plot five times while varying the details; and when the last evildoer tastes his just desert, the effect is not unlike that in the last act of Rameau’s Zoroastre. Vance, like Moore or Smith, also shapes many a lapidary sentence; the artifice of his prose is, however, by no means detrimental to his story telling, but rather serves it. In the extravagant epigraphic apparatus of his novelistic Pentateuch, Vance quotes Spengler: “Everything of which we are conscious… has for us a deeper meaning still, a final meaning. And the one and only means of rendering this incomprehensible comprehensible must be a kind of metaphysics which regards everything whatsoever as having significance as a symbol.”47

Science fiction is not only a large archive of prose narrative; it is also, in the twentieth century, a large archive of the painterly art. Here too on inspection an identifiable baroque subcategory emerges into view. The instances of Frank R. Paul (1884–1963) and Virgil Finlay (1914–1971) compel the interpreter, however, to invoke a musical as much as a pictorial vocabulary; their art, like baroque art generally, must be understood, like Symbolist poetry, as synesthesia. Spengler sees synesthesia as the essence of Western or Faustian Art. According to Spengler, by the mid-sixteenth century, with music taking the lead, “the great task [of the arts] was to extend the tone-corpus into infinity, or rather to resolve it into an infinite space of tone”; Spengler adds that the trend is visible “in oil painting from Titian onwards.”48 Leonardo, for example, “reveals aerial secrets with every line,” having been “the first…to set his mind on aviation” and to want “to lose [himself] in the expanse of the universe.”49 Paul’s suites of back-cover illustrations for Amazing, appearing serially in the early 1940s, show their creator working at the highest levels of imagination and execution.

Paul’s “Cities” suite ranks above the others, with “Crystallis, Glass City on Io” (July 1941), “Quartz City on Mercury” (September 1941), and “Golden City on Titan” (November 1941) being especially noteworthy. Paul does in oils what the prose artists do in words with their detailed invocations of alien and exotic architecture; he continues a painterly tradition of architectural fantasy going back to Alain Maillet and the Brueghel Family in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Virgil Finlay worked almost entirely in
chiaroscuro,
using the stippling technique; he placed a good deal of his work in
Weird Tales
. Finlay’s art while nominally illustrative remained largely independent of any text however much a given item from his hand might complement and elevate its text. In Finlay, the Faustian aspiration of sounding the infinite becomes infinitely eroticized—as happens also in Poe, Baudelaire, and Moore—under the image of the Eternal Feminine. It is the Eternal Feminine who, in Goethe’s famous words,
zieht uns hinan
or
“draws us on high.” In the Faustian world-experience, according to Spengler, “Being appears as pure efficient Space… sensually felt.”50 Spengler’s words describe Finlay’s illustrations for otherwise entirely forgotten stories by Arthur Stringer and Harry Bates. For Stringer’s “Woman Who Couldn’t Die” (Famous Fantastic Mysteries October 1950), Finlay supplies a transfigured female nude whose subtle body is indistinguishable from starlight; while for Bates’ “Triggered Dimension” (Science Fiction Plus December 1953), he superimposes the upper body of a female nude over the image of a dynamo, in a realization of the chapter on “The Virgin and the Dynamo” from Henry Adams’ Education (1918).

Finlay’s understanding of Western science must have been convergent with Spengler’s, who wrote: “Scientists are wont to assume that myths and God-ideas are creations of primitive man, and that as spiritual culture ‘advances,’ this myth-forming power is shed. In reality it is the exact opposite.”
⁵¹

It would be a shame to take leave of the topic without at least mentioning cinema. One of the earliest and greatest of all science fiction films fairly begs the description
baroque
—Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
(1926). In Lang’s masterpiece, whose final action occurs among the flying buttresses and towers of a Gothic cathedral, science intermingles with alchemy and magic while acts of primitive sacrifice happen among the ornate subterranean engines that power the city.
Metropolis
is a study of
chiaroscuro
in motion. The aptly named Maria, duplicated by the Faustian scientist-magician Rotwang as the robot, exercises her feminine power to transfix the hero, Freder, and (quite literally) to draw him on high.

Notes

¹
Jorge Luis Borges (translated by A. Hurley),
A Universal History of Iniquity,
Penguin 2009, 4.

²
4.

³
4.

⁴
Oswald Spengler (translated by C. F. Atkinson),
The Decline of the West,
Vol. I,
Form and Actuality,
Knopf 1932, 239.

⁵
239.

⁶
The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe
(edited by H. Beaver), Penguin 1976, 1.

⁷
1.

⁸
1.

⁹
1.

¹⁰
Charles Baudelaire (translated by P. E. Charvet),
Selected Writings on Art and Literature,
Penguin 1992, 185.

¹¹
220.

¹²
Baudelaire, 185.

¹³
Poe, 227.

¹⁴
212.

¹⁵
70.

¹⁶
70.

¹⁷
91 & 90.

¹⁸
90.

¹⁹
91.

²⁰
92.

²¹
92.

²²
Clark Ashton Smith (edited by D. E. Schultz and S. Connors), Collected Letters of Clark Ashton Smith, Arkham House 2003, 135.

²³
Clark Ashton Smith (edited by S. Connors and R. Hilger), The End of the Story (Collected Fantasies, Vol. I), Nightshade Books 2006, 264.

²⁴
100.

²⁵
107 & 105.

²⁶
102.

²⁷
116.

²⁸
Clark Ashton Smith (edited by J. Vandermeer), Lost Worlds, University of Nebraska 2006, 107-108.

²⁹
98.

³⁰
Clark Ashton Smith (edited by S. Connors and R. Hilger), The Vintage from Atlantis (Collected Fantasies, Vol. 3), Nightshade Books 2007, 242.

³¹
241.

³²
243.

³³
34.

³⁴
38.

³⁵
38.

³⁶
Paul Mark Walker, Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach, Eastman Studies in Music 2000, 7.

³⁷
Catherine Louise Moore (Introduction by C. J. Cherryh), Northwest of Earth, Planet Stories 2007, 18.

³⁸
The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, 83.

³⁹
Northwest of Earth, 36-38.