The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (35 page)

The second point of importance to be found in
The Skylark of Space
is the rejection of ruthless self-interested rationalism, that road of intellectuality that leads eventually to Big Brain, and perhaps beyond. In
The Skylark of Space,
this line of development is resisted in three different forms—first in the person of Dr. Marc “Blackie” DuQuesne; again in the aspect of the malevolent disembodied intelligence; and finally in the arrogant and untrustworthy Mardonalians of the planet Osnome.

In
Skylark Three,
the rejection of the rule of intellectual superiority alone is presented in the form of a war against a galaxy-threatening race of aliens, the Fenachrone. Early in
Skylark Three,
one of these announces to Seaton:

“Know you, American, that we supermen of the Fenachrone are as far above any of the other and lesser breeds of beings who spawn in their millions in their countless myriads of races upon the numberless planets of the Universe as you are above the inert metal from which this your ship was built. The Universe is ours, and in due course we shall take it. . . .”
²⁵²

Seaton and Crane counter the threat of the Fenachrone by gathering together the knowledge and power of a variety of beings, including the formerly warring Mardonalians and Kondalians.

This brings us to the third point of importance. What E.E. Smith sets in opposition to the road of hierarchic superiority is a kind of democratic pluralism that recognizes the validity of more modes of being than merely one.

We can see this illustrated in the various natures of the company of the
Skylark.
All are different, but somehow, united in their difference, all together they count for more than the purest of pure intelligences.

Margaret Crane is a sensitive moral being of vast insight. She is capable of seeing wonder in the most alien of races and something inherent in man as great as all they are encountering.

Dorothy Seaton is a cultured being. She is a Doctor of Music who can play the violin so beautifully that a staid old race is moved.

Richard Seaton is a refreshingly humble flashing genius—and also a bit of a goof, casual enough to hack around the universe in tennis sneakers.

Martin Crane is bright enough to follow Seaton into unknown realms of science, even though he lacks Seaton’s originality. And he is also strong enough of character to serve as Seaton’s balance wheel, his good common sense.

And there is even room in the mix for Blackie DuQuesne, a damned good man gone wrong—if only he will behave himself and act like a member of the party.

In
Skylark Three,
the danger of the Fenachrone is successfully met by the union of alien races organized by Seaton and Crane. One of these races, millions of years older than humanity, salutes Seaton for what may actually be the human party’s one true mark of superiority—their larger frame of reference, their greater breadth of vision:

“Doctor Seaton, I wish to apologize to you,” the Dasorian said. . . . “Since you are evidently still land animals, I had supposed you of inferior intelligence. It is true that your younger civilization is deficient in certain aspects, but you have shown a depth of vision, a sheer power of imagination and grasp, that no member of our older civilization could approach.”
²⁵³

It is not in inventions that human power ultimately lies—not in stardrives, spaceships and object-compasses—but rather in the ability to accept and unify vastly different beings and points of view. It is this combined power that ultimately defeats the Fenachrone, the would-be galactic master race.

In
The Skylark of Space
and its sequels, we are offered a solution to the Twentieth Century dilemma. Doc Smith’s Skylark stories say that there is no necessary limit to human attainment. Mankind need not huddle in its stifling little Village, alternating between delusions of superiority and nightmares of cosmic doom. Rather, the way out of the problem of the age must lie in the abandonment of hierarchy and claims of special privilege, acceptance of the wider world of unknown possibility, and mastery of its perils through the unprejudiced cooperation of unlike persons and beings.

This democratic approach to the question of human survival was not just Doc Smith’s alone, but was characteristically American. If the Europeans would very shortly come to the end of their ability to write creative SF, it was because they lacked the depth of vision and the sheer power of imagination necessary to alter their attitudes. The ultimate example of this rigidity must be Nazi Germany with its Aryan supermen, its attempts to eliminate the inferior and different, and its intent to rule Village Earth for a thousand years.

Significantly, the new attitudes on display in
The Skylark of Space
may be seen point for point in our other two crucial American magazine stories of August 1928.

In “Armageddon—2419 
A.D.
” by Philip Francis Nowlan, published in
Amazing
alongside
The Skylark of Space,
we are presented with the narrative of Anthony Rogers, a veteran of the Great War. In a brief prologue, Rogers informs us that in the year 1927 he was exploring some abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania on behalf of his employer, the American Radioactive Gas Corporation, when a cave-in trapped him in a pocket of gas. He was preserved in a state of suspended animation for nearly five hundred years, awaking in the year 2419.

Unlike a time machine, this mode of removal to the future allows Rogers no easy means of return to his own time. But no matter—Rogers does not tear his hair and bemoan his fate. He doesn’t even think twice about the Village world left behind. He is as open-mindedly ready to become a citizen of the future as Richard Seaton and his friends are ready to become citizens of space.

The new world of wonder that Anthony Rogers discovers is a North America fallen from its former high state. The continent lies under the domination of the Hans, a race of arrogant and decadent Orientals ruling from the security of their great machine-cities.

The Hans are the living embodiment of the entire spectrum of early Twentieth Century fears: They are another would-be master race. They are the Yellow Peril. They are the eternal tyrant who rules for five hundred, a thousand, or even six thousand years. They are representatives of the grinding, inexorable and sterile machine universe.

In the sequel, “The Airlords of Han” (
Amazing
, Mar. 1929), it is further suggested that the Hans are crossbreeds, a mixture of native Tibetans and “a genus of human-like creatures that may have arrived on this earth with a small planet (or a large meteor) which is known to have crashed in interior Asia late in the Twentieth Century, causing permanent changes in the earth’s orbit and climate.”
²⁵⁴
Thus the Hans are also to be identified with racial mongrelization, cosmic catastrophe, and alien invasion.

Here in these stories of the adventures of Anthony Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century, we are offered one of the last literal presentations of the concept of the soul to be found in American science fiction: The Hans, we, are told, are mentally superdeveloped, but they have “a vacuum in place of that intangible something we call a soul.”
²⁵⁵

In opposition to the Hans, Rogers finds a wide variety of gangs and tribes, the remnants of the ordinary Americans of an earlier era. These are true scientific barbarians, living in the forested ruins of the civilization of our day like wild Indians, yet still tending the precious flame of science.

Here, in these stories, we may recognize the basis for the comic strip
Buck Rogers,
begun in 1929 and scripted by Phil Nowlan. We may take it as meaningful that in the initial episodes of the comic strip, which were based on the original
Amazing
novelets, a major new character is added to the story. This is an antagonist figure, the Blackie DuQuesne-like “Killer” Kane, an inventor, self-seeker, and rejected suitor of Buck Rogers’ sweetheart, who is ready to betray his fellow Americans to the Mongol horde out of personal pique.

Ultimately, the scattered American gangs—one of them led by Anthony Rogers—defeat the Hans by joining their disparate forces together. A new age is inaugurated—“the most glorious and noble era of scientific civilization in the history of the American race.”
²⁵⁶

In short, once again in the adventures of Anthony Rogers we find a ready acceptance of the World Beyond the Hill, a rejection of ruthless hyper-intellectual amorality, and the triumphant union of varying fragments working together synergetically to make a greater whole.

There can be no doubt that set beside the imaginative scope and detail of
The Skylark of Space,
Philip Nowlan’s stories appear dull, clumsy and vague. But it is also clear that “Armageddon—2419 
A.D.
” and “The Airlords of Han” are pointing in the same new direction as the Skylark stories.

Exactly the same thing is true of “Crashing Suns” by Edmond Hamilton, serialized in
Weird Tales
in August and September 1928. Compared to
The Skylark of Space,
this novelet and its sequels are simple-minded, dreamlike and repetitive. Even so, they also present the same new set of attitudes.

Edmond Hamilton was born in Ohio on October 21, 1904, and raised on a farm. He was the first major SF writer to be born in the Twentieth Century—fourteen years younger than Doc Smith and sixteen years younger than Philip Nowlan. But he was as impressed as they by the coming of the technological world. He once wrote:

“My formative first 7 years were spent on an Ohio farm so far back in that it must have had a time-lag of a decade. Horses reared up in buggy-shafts at sight of an automobile, and a steam-threshing-machine was a thing which frightened me horribly.”
²⁵⁷

Hamilton was a precocious youngster. At the age of 14, he was a college freshman majoring in physics, he was eagerly reading
All-Story
and
Argosy,
and he was attempting to write his first SF stories.

His first published story was sold to
Weird Tales
in 1926, and Hamilton would soon become a regular contributor to the magazine. His science fiction stories were
Weird Tales’
answer to the challenge lately offered by
Amazing
.

Hamilton’s crucial novelet, “Crashing Suns,” is different in one important regard from the other two significant American SF stories of August 1928.

Doc Smith’s Richard Seaton is a Twentieth Century person who makes the transition into the World Beyond the Hill, likes it, and stays to become a citizen of outer space. Philip Nowlan’s Anthony Rogers is likewise a native of our Village who makes the transition from here and now, and then finds himself eager to become a citizen of the wild and marvelous land of the future.

But Edmond Hamilton’s viewpoint character, Jan Tor, is a Captain in the Interplanetary Patrol one hundred thousand years in the future. “Crashing Suns” begins with his spaceship racing in toward Earth from the vicinity of Uranus, and coming to land beside “the gigantic white dome of the great Hall of Planets, permanent seat of the Supreme Council and the center of government of the Eight Worlds.”
²⁵⁸

In this story, as in Stapledon’s
Last and First Men,
the outermost planet is still Neptune, and men are confined to the solar system. And once again, as in
Last and First Men,
the life of the sun is threatened. This time, however, it is not mysterious ethereal vibrations that are the danger, but rather a dying sun that has mysteriously changed its course and one year hence is due to smash into our star, shattering forever the peace and harmony of the utopian Eight Worlds:
“ ‘For the planets of our system will perish like flowers in a furnace, in that titanic holocaust of crashing suns!’ ”
²⁵⁹

Boyish and naive as it undoubtedly was even in its own time, “Crashing Suns” nonetheless affords an effective yardstick by which to measure the limitations of
Last and First Men.
In Stapledon’s would-be myth, the one human expedition ever to brave the outer tracts beyond the solar system returned mad. And throughout the final 20,000 years of human existence, as Eighteenth Man declines and society disintegrates, no party of Last Men ever sets off into the universe to pit itself against the source of the ethereal vibrations that are destroying one star after another.

On the other hand, Jan Tor strides into the Hall of Planets to hear the bad news of our sun’s impending destruction, and is appointed captain of an expedition to investigate. He is told, “ ‘If we can discover what phenomena are the causes of the star’s deflection, there is a chance that we might be able to repeat or reverse those phenomena, to swerve the star again from the path it now follows, and so save our solar system, our universe.’ ”
²⁶⁰

Only minutes later, Jan Tor is in the conning tower of an experimental space cruiser—which incidentally uses “etheric vibrations,”
²⁶¹
the great threat of
Last and First Men,
as its means of propulsion—and is taking off for the dying star. Within a matter of hours the ship is beyond the last frontier of the solar system, in regions previously unknown to man.

Stapledon’s voyagers proceeded no farther than the point where the sun was reduced to being the most brilliant of stars, and found themselves crazed by the aloof and changeless presence of the constellations. By contrast, Hamilton’s bold venturers travel past the point where the sun becomes just one speck of light among millions. And here they find that “even more than between the planets, the stars lay before us in their true glory.”
²⁶²
And they are clearly thrilled.

Quite interestingly, when Jan Tor’s space cruiser reaches the dying red sun, the expedition discovers that it is not a cruel, uncaring cosmos that threatens humanity with destruction. Rather, it is an alien race who hope to catch a light by crashing their dying sun into ours. Our destruction will be their reinvigoration.