The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (20 page)

The essay opens with a parable, a first attempt at an expression of man’s true cosmic position. It is a cruel little fable of limitation and futility supposedly told by Mephistopheles to Faust as a history of creation.

It begins with a bored God, weary of worship by the angels to whom he has given endless joy. Ah, but then this God has a thought: “Would it not be more amusing to obtain undeserved praise, to be worshipped by beings whom he tortured?”
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And so he creates a mad, monstrous world full of creatures breeding, fighting, devouring, and passing away, a world whose ultimate product is Man, touched with the power of thought and “the cruel thirst for worship.”
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The fable ends:

And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man’s sun; and all returned again to nebula.

“Yes,” he murmured, “it was a good play; I will have it performed again.”
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But even this nihilistic little fantasy of human torture, humiliation and destruction allows humanity some purpose. It capitalizes the name of Man. It puts him at the center of the play. God may be shallow, stupid and sadistic, but mankind still has some importance to him, some amusement value that at least ensures that the play will be performed again.

This parable is at best a first approximation for Russell. It captures something of the Edwardian attitude. But it doesn’t fully express the true situation as Russell understands it, so immediately on concluding his little fantasy, he discards it in favor of another vision which he suggests is like it, but is both more awful and more accurate. After the God of Mephistopheles murmurs his intent to repeat his comedy, Russell says:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.
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Wow! With this as the new standard of belief, it is no wonder that acclimatization was necessary. Russell’s image of meaninglessness could haunt a science fiction writer born a generation after this essay was first published, and still seem a thorny problem to an adolescent born two generations later.

And yet, even in as bleak and awful a statement of the human situation as Russell’s, there is still some mitigation. The name of Man is still capitalized. And the remainder of the essay is a call in the style of Thomas Huxley for mankind to resist the hostile universe and continue to assert human moral values. The essay concludes:

Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gates of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.
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In the Edwardian decade there was a strange confidence in the powers of humanity, that weary but unyielding Atlas, a sense that even though the solar system might die and all of Man’s achievement be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins, still there was a proudly defiant element in Man that was superior to this rude treatment and would prevail. This unreasonable confidence was shared by nearly everyone, regardless of their other beliefs. It might be called a common denominator of the period.

The given bases for Man’s presumed superiority to the rest of material creation varied widely. The basis might be found, for instance, in a reaffirmation of traditional religion. In an SF story, a scientific probe might be imagined as peering two thousand years into the past and confirming the existence and miraculous nature of Jesus. Or occultists might write of scientific demonstrations of the existence of the soul. Humanists might assert the special worthiness of human morality, while pure materialists might suggest that the difference that made humanity superior was based in human intelligence. But all Edwardians were agreed that
something
about Man justified giving him that capital letter and setting him apart and above the rest of creation.

Edwardian SF stories say, yes . . . but. Yes, the cosmic night is dark . . . but
still
somehow Man will prevail, even though the universe grinds his bones.

Edwardian SF stories are like the endings of Wells’s great scientific romances of the Nineties. Time and again, Wells would present the darkest visionary implications of the new universe—but then draw back, soften them, even contradict them. In
The Time Machine,
a sweep of time-to-come is revealed that is so vast that it makes man’s civilization seem nothing more than a foolish heaping. But the narrator concludes: “If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.” In
The War of the Worlds,
the technologically advanced Martians may yet return and wipe us out. But there is the counterweight of that dim and wonderful vision of mankind “spreading slowly from this little seed-bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space.” And in
The Island of Dr. Moreau
(1896), the entire novel is a demonstration to the narrator that he and his fellow men are nothing better than poor tortured half-human animals. But still he says, “It must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope. I hope or I could not live.”
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Similarly, Edwardian SF might admit—or half-admit—that time would bury all human accomplishment, that humanity might well be in jeopardy from cosmic indifference or cosmic hostility, and that mankind was only an animal. And still, Edwardian SF would cross its fingers, close its eyes, and hope. Somehow, human specialness would justify itself and win through.

The one clear exception to this Edwardian sentimentalization of Man was the tales of an Irish nobleman, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Lord Dunsany. This was one writer who would not deny the true relativity of man. Was the human situation awful, grotesque, and richly humorous—no better than a cosmic joke? This young soldier, at least, this veteran of the Boer War with its concentration camps and other harbingers of atrocity to come, was one person able to stand up and state the facts.

Dunsany was a strange fringe writer. He was an aristocratic debunker of aristocratic pretensions writing during the last happy decade that aristocratic ideals were to know. But even as his stories took Man down a peg, they themselves were a very special and superior kind of writing—glittering, colorful, cynical little fantasies set off in a special secondary universe, a nonce world like the settings of William Morris’s last stories. The location of Dunsany’s tales is sometimes given as “the little kingdoms at the Edge of the World,”
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sometimes as “the Third Hemisphere.”
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What makes Dunsany special—one of the very few Edwardians to have an influence on the later development of SF—is that while there is no apparent modern human science in his fantasy stories, nonetheless they are steeped in the new scientific philosophy. More than any other imaginative fiction of their time, they are built on the firm foundation of unyielding despair.

Indeed, Dunsany’s stories resemble nothing else so much as that first approximation of the human situation, that opening parable of human futility, torture and doom by Bertrand Russell in “A Free Man’s Worship.” The similarity between Dunsany and Mephistopheles’ fable of human creation and human fate can be seen in this passage from a typical early Dunsany story:

“ ‘Once I found out the secret of the universe. I have forgotten what it was, but I know the Creator does not take Creation seriously, for I remember that He sat in Space with all His work in front of Him and laughed.’ ”
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Everywhere in Dunsany there is a seeking after gods. But the gods that are found are invariably cruel, or trivial, or false, and have nothing to offer to their human worshipers except suffering, disillusionment and death.

The title of Dunsany’s collection
Time and the Gods
(1906) tells the true story. “Time” is one of the names of the vast and chilly god of science. So great is the power of the new science that even in the alternate universes of fantasy, time still holds sway. Time turns lesser gods into monkeys and mankind into an insect.

Dunsany was a mocker of idols—and the Edwardian exaltation of Man was an idol. Holding onto the belief in the innate specialness and superiority of humanity was a form of self-flattery, an easy way out of the dilemmas posed by the new scientific universe. Pretending that humanity was already Man was a way of avoiding the true hard facts of the matter.

Dunsany saw through that. His stories were specifically aimed to kill illusion. Would you put your faith in gods? After reading Dunsany, you must spit on all monkey gods. Would you take comfort in mankind’s special superiority? After reading Dunsany, you must know man for what he really is, a pretentious, self-deluded piss-ant.

Lord Dunsany was not a highly popular writer. His unique combination of elitist artistry and mockery of the pretensions of Man made him a special taste. It seems no wonder that he had to pay for the publication of his first book.

If Dunsany had an effect on later writers and has continued to be read, it is largely because the history of the Twentieth Century has been a confirmation of Dunsany’s criticism of human pretension.

The idea of innate human specialness and superiority—usually expressed and understood as the supposed superiority of some class or race or nation—would receive a terrible put-down in the Great War. It would be further humiliated in the Great Depression and be definitively discredited in World War II.

It was bound to happen. There was a fundamental incompatibility between the new scientific universe of space and time and outworn elitist principles ultimately based in the old idea of the rational human soul, that last wispy remnant of the long-rejected spirit realm.

During the Edwardian decade, the first expressions of a new idea of the nature of man more in keeping with the dictates of science began to be put forward. This line of thinking suggested that rather than stoically and futilely maintaining Man’s moral superiority while the universe heaps rocks on our grave, perhaps humanity might get farther with the cosmos if we simply admitted and accepted our animal nature.

If the universe cared nothing for human moralizing, but did value survival, who were we to argue with that?

Human civilization seemed an ugliness that separated mankind from nature. On the one hand, it twisted and deformed humanity. On the other, it made man too soft to survive.

Of what value was civilization? Was it possible that the way to survive in the cosmos was to reject civilization altogether and become a wild animal?

One writer torn to pieces by these questions was the American, Jack London. London was born illegitimate in San Francisco in 1876. He suffered a rough and precarious upbringing. In his teens and early twenties, he was an oyster pirate, a sailor on a sealing ship, briefly a student, and then a tramp. Finally, he joined the Alaska Gold Rush of 1897 and prospected without success in the Klondike. After contracting scurvy, he retreated to California—and there began to write stories reflecting his experiences in the Far North.

These stories made London immediately and hugely popular, but popularity set up a tremendous conflict within him. Civilization had treated London badly, even brutally, torturing and repressing him. To escape civilization, he had run off to the purity of the wilderness. But the wild life had been more than he could handle. Still, he was able to celebrate it, and to throw it into the teeth of civilization. And only then was society ready to embrace and accept him.

It was a mind-bending paradox. London was more than a little bit like H.G. Wells—an outcast of society winning the acceptance of society by speaking against society. At what price this kind of success?

London loved and hated civilization, loved and despised his own popularity, loved and loathed himself. His writing was all an attempt to untangle the conundrum of his own life, to resolve the nature of man, and to reorder society on some saner basis. He wrote stories of powerful and violent men living brutish lives on the edge of society. He wrote socialist tracts and novels of the class struggle. And throughout his career, he wrote SF stories.

London’s ambivalence can be seen very clearly in two of his early novels which disguise the question of human nature and civilization by seeming to ask it about domesticated animals.
The Call of the Wild
(1903) and
White Fang
(1906) are apparently naturalistic animal stories, a type of fiction that became highly popular in the early Twentieth Century. But the books are obviously more than that. They are a first, and more than a little tentative, inquiry into the possibility and desirability of embracing our own animal nature.