The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (31 page)

10: Mastery of Time and Space

T
HE FIRST STEPS TOWARD
“modern science fiction”—the re-emphasized, reformulated SF of the Atomic Age—were taken in three boldly imaginative American magazine stories of the late Twenties. Two of these significant stories—
The Skylark of Space
by E.E. Smith and “Armageddon—2419 
A.D.
” by Philip Nowlan—appeared in Hugo Gernsback’s
Amazing Stories.
The third, “Crashing Suns” by Edmond Hamilton, was published in
Weird Tales.

In another of the felicitous coincidences that have marked our narrative, all three of these stories saw original publication in the very same month, August 1928. Just as though some crucial line of demarcation had been passed, suddenly it became possible for a number of different writers to think and say what no writer had found it possible to think and say before this moment.

In these central stories—and in the sequels that followed each of them—a fundamental reorientation of vision was given its first expression. A stultifying perspective based on Earth in the here-and-now was swapped for a new viewpoint based on the future and outer space. The result was an exuberant new sense of power and freedom, the overwhelming impact of which we can only dimly appreciate today, so much have time, thought and SF changed since then. Even so, it is at least possible for us to catch fleeting echoes of that original feeling of wild exultation still ringing across the years in titles like “Crashing Suns” and
The Skylark of Space.

The worldview that these liberating stories rejected had prevailed in the Western world for nearly sixty years—ever since the time of the Franco-Prussian War and the beginnings of the Age of Technology. We have seen one major aspect or another of this worldview reflected in the lost race story, in the scientific romances of H.G. Wells, in Jack London’s “The Scarlet Plague” and in Edgar Rice Burroughs’
A Princess of Mars.

This Technological Age worldview was a biologically based vision of eternal growth and decay. Its central image was of struggle to live, of flowering, and of inevitable decline.

According to this view—which we may take as a first crude attempt at evolutionary conceptualization—one great epoch was succeeded by another. Each distinct era was marked by its own brutal contest for survival. Each such period was bound to throw up a ruling species, or race, or civilization—which would enjoy its brief moment in the sun and then be doomed to fall like all the rest and pass from the scene.

But there were distinct limitations to this grand conception. For one thing, the Technological worldview was not so much truly evolutionary as it was an image of a succession of discrete episodes in which the same inevitable story was played through over and over again. For another, as broad as the sweep of these eternal cycles was, this great cosmo-historical pageant was perceived and interpreted from a fundamentally limited and egocentric viewpoint. A determinedly Village point of view.

Citizens of the Technological Era might be aware of the existence of immense expanses of space and time. They might have haunting suspicions of man’s ultimate cosmic insignificance. And still somehow they were able to continue to presume that True Reality lay on this little planet Earth during this current phase of its existence. Indeed, to presume that the locus of True Reality was themselves.

They felt they needed to know no more than this: Western Scientific Man was in the saddle and riding high. He was boss of the whole world—exploring it, seizing it, taming it, ruling it, and turning it to his purposes. That in itself should serve as proof of his centrality and essential rightness.

The garnering of monopolies and the establishment of empires that so typified this period were justified by another major aspect of the worldview—the half-evolutionary credo of Social Darwinism. This popular philosophy suggested that we inhabit a dog-eat-dog world in which only the strong survive. Western man looked all around this world and congratulated himself on being topmost dog. And believed that he recognized the basic evolutionary necessity to do whatever was called for in order to stay that way.

Not altogether surprisingly, however, a great and growing nightmare troubled Western man’s dominion over the Earth. This gnawing fear was that the rule of the West would prove to be as tenuous and temporary as that of
T. rex
or Alexander the Great.

Modern civilization, the white race, mankind as a species, the planet of man itself . . . it seemed that all of these were vulnerable. Just as the day of the dinosaurs had passed and the mighty ancient empires of Sumeria, Egypt and Rome had come to fall, so inevitably must Western man fall, too.

The only questions were when and how it would happen. But that it must inevitably happen, of this there seemed to be little doubt.

The fatal blow could come from almost any direction. Another race, perhaps—the dreaded Yellow Peril. Or armies of ants suddenly grown intelligent and invincible might sweep over us like a tide. A plague might bring civilization down. Alien invaders might land, or a cosmic fireball might strike from the heavens.

Contrariwise, the end might be spelled by human weakness and decadence, or by human pride. We might grow soft and lose our keen fighting edge. We might lose our sense of purpose. We might even become balloon-headed Big Brains and have nothing better to do than flop about passively thinking our deep thoughts until some larger, fiercer, more vital creature appeared out of the unlit darkness of space and time to destroy us utterly.

But whatever the particular details of our mode of passing might prove to be—whether it be later or whether it be sooner, whether at the hands of other creatures or by fiat of the universe—one thing at least was dead certain: In due time, our end must inevitably come. And then a new cycle would begin.

A relatively calm and dispassionate phrasing of the attitude of the Technological worldview toward humanity and its competitors and possible successors is to be found in a blurb that Hugo Gernsback attached to H.G. Wells’s
The War of the Worlds
when he reprinted it in
Amazing
in 1927:

Wells has often been condemned because of his pictured ruthlessness of Martians, but, after all, why should they not be ruthless? Are we not ourselves as ruthless when we dissect insects and low animals for our scientific investigations? If there were a superior intelligence, to which, by comparison ours was as inferior as that of a chicken compared to a man’s, there would be no good reason why it should not be ruthless if it wanted to conquer the planet for its own designs. We humans ourselves would not hesitate to do the same thing if we sent an expedition, let us say, to the moon, if we found what we considered a low species there.
²²⁶

In a universe of ruthless struggle, all that appeared to count was coming out on top. And if humanity should reveal for a single moment that it was not smart enough or strong enough to maintain the upper hand, why, so much for mankind.

At the outset of the Age of Technology, ordinary Western man held faith in two forms of transcendence—the personal soul and modern science. At this point, the two were allies. The successes of science were taken to be the proof or demonstration of man’s rational soul. But the soul was master and science was the servant.

By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, however, science and the soul had fallen into extreme conflict. As the last tattered remnant of that belief in
spirit
which now seemed so completely unfounded, the soul was highly vulnerable. An immense weight of scientific doubt was increasingly being brought to bear against the very idea of the existence of a personal human tie to God.

At the same moment that science was now prepared to dismiss the soul as a baseless superstition, unnecessary and unprovable, it was ready itself to unveil an awesome new transcendence all its own. This was the existence of a universe that was more immense than man had ever previously suspected, and that was possibly more alien than he was prepared to tolerate.

Science challenged man to rid himself of his illusions and face the true facts of existence . . . as science saw them. The soul of man was stripped away by science and discarded, and with it all of man’s accustomed sense of worth and purpose. In its place, science offered man a new identity. Henceforth he was to be an orphan child in a universe vastly beyond his comprehension.

According to the scientific view—as we heard it from Bertrand Russell—man and all his works are nothing more than the result of accidental heapings of atoms. Man’s devotion, his inspiration, his genius and his labors must ultimately count for nothing. All of these are doomed to total extinction in the vast death of the solar system. It is necessary for us to accept as inevitable that the sum of human achievement must eventually come to lie buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.

There was to be no safety for the soul in the spiritual connection to God. To the most informed and thoughtful people of the age—such as Bertrand Russell—it seemed that at best God must be a monstrous joker, if indeed he could be said to exist at all, a matter which seemed increasingly doubtful.

And there was no safety to be found for the soul in the material universe, either. The material universe was the domain of science, and modern science stood ready to say that the cosmos was a vast and alien place that held no special concern for mankind. Man was condemned to struggle to survive in this hostile world and do his utmost to rule—but he should bear in mind all the while that even if he should prove to be temporarily successful, his inevitable fate must still be disaster and death.

Man’s noblest course was to lift his chin and laugh at the Great Cosmic Joke. To accept the immense weight of the universe on his puny shoulders and smile a resolute smile even as he was inexorably ground into dust.

The shift in belief from faith in God and the rational soul to a belief in material science left Twentieth Century Western man in a confused, vulnerable and highly dangerous state of mind. Not to have a personal relationship between the individual soul and God deprived Western man of his accustomed sense of direction and value, and set him adrift.

What should he do and why? He was no longer sure.

It was at exactly this moment in the early Twentieth Century that the old-fashioned social utopian story ceased to be written. Imagining and realizing the rationally perfected Godly state no longer seemed a viable goal.

More and more, Western society looked to science for guidance, but science did not offer much help. What science seemed to say was: “Survival is all that counts. So contend among yourselves. Fight it out. Attempt to prevail. But do remember that the wages of success are still death.”

The loss of purpose, moral confusion, belligerence and despair so widespread in the West in the early Twentieth Century led almost inevitably to World War I. This war, so long rehearsed, had been imagined as a nice, clean, evolutionarily decisive struggle among nations to see which was fittest to survive and rule. In the event, however, the Great War proved to be a static, muddled, aimless, grinding conflict that nobody quite dared to win and that nobody was willing to lose.

Ever so cautiously, the war was conducted from the shelter of entrenched positions. Ever so recklessly, waves of men were sent forth from the trenches to be slaughtered in No Man’s Land. The only recognized heroes of the war were the fighter pilots on both sides—men of technology who were somehow perceived as gallant knights of the air sailing high above the fog, barbed wire and confusion. It was these men whom H.G. Wells would come to nominate as the model of what men must be if mankind were to survive.

If it accomplished nothing else, the monstrous and irrational catastrophe of the war dealt belief in the rational soul a mortal blow, and forced the acceptance of the frightful new universe revealed by modern science.

The postwar state of mind was particularly glum and apprehensive. Western man had entered upon the Age of Technology still guided by the soul, and armed with a reckless new confidence in science and its powers. The world was a ripe plum there for the taking, and the West was only too eager to seize it. But then in the Great War, technology had turned upon man. All the familiar Western dreams of empire were suddenly shattered.

Thoughts of alienation, sterility and doom now bedeviled the West. The immediate era was drawing to a close. And not at all surprisingly—given the set of beliefs that had dominated the Age of Technology—there were a good many people to whom it appeared that the long-prophesied last days of Western man were finally at hand.

These fears were lent a measure of intellectual credence with the publication of a major book by a German philosopher named Oswald Spengler.
The Decline of the West
(1918) was the ultimate scholarly expression of the nightmare of the age. It captured a large international audience by telling people what they were more than half-inclined to believe already.

Like some pulp storyteller, Spengler recounted the now wellworn tale of the life and death of cultures. He took the measure of Western civilization, and was prepared to say outright that it had passed its peak. He even was ready to nominate a successor. Like the editor of a common tabloid, out to boost circulation, Spengler looked to the East and foresaw the rise to power of the yellow race.

It seemed that there was no way out. Every dog has its day, and the West had had its moment. Now it must be prepared to suffer the consequences.

In a succession of attempts to cope with the inevitable Fate it saw waiting, the early Twentieth Century Western world lurched from one state of bewilderment and overreaction to another. During the Teens, the West attempted to face the inexorable universe with nobility and stoic courage—and instead found itself fighting World War I, a war in which nobility and courage meant almost nothing. In the Twenties, the West did what it could to ignore the fearsome machine universe. If this was to be The End, well, what better way to go out than with one whale of a drunken party! But the world did not come to an end with the Twenties—and the wild whoopee concluded with a great economic crash.