The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (39 page)

But this seeming child’s toy is enough to utterly destroy the Moon, and with it the invading force of Medusae.

In
The Legion of Space,
we can see a synthesis of ancient myth, fairytales, romantic novels, stories of alien invasion, space opera, the story of alien exploration, the lost race story and the epic of super-science. And a wonderful proliferation of marvels.

H.G. Wells would not have approved. We may say this because in 1934—the very year in which Williamson’s story was serialized—Wells published a highly revealing preface to
Seven Famous Novels,
the American version of a collection of his great early scientific romances.
²⁹¹
In all of the most innovative and exploratory pulp SF stories of 1934—“Colossus,” “Born of the Sun,”
The Legion of Space, Skylark of Valeron,
or
The Mightiest Machine
—wonder may have been heaped upon wonder. But meantime, in his preface to
Seven Famous Novels,
H.G. Wells was vainly protesting that the number of marvels in any SF story should properly be limited to one:

Anyone can invent human beings inside out or worlds like dumbbells or gravitation that repels. The thing that makes such imaginations interesting is their translation into commonplace terms and a rigid exclusion of other marvels from the story. . . . Nothing remains interesting where anything can happen. . . . Any
extra
fantasy outside the cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention.
²⁹²

Wells might have a point if SF were only stories of the manifestation of super-science within the confines of the Village. But he must be wrong where stories of the World Beyond the Hill are concerned. It is only by the multitude of wonders encountered that we can ever know that we have entered a realm of transcendence.

What Wells says cannot even account for the underground wonderland of Verne’s
Journey to the Centre of the Earth,
let alone for
The First Men in the Moon,
with its anti-gravity metal, its marvelous lunar landscape, its antlike lunar society, and its Big Brain lunar overlord. And it doesn’t begin to come to terms with the burgeoning new science fiction of the American pulps.

It was not merely that the new epics of super-science, stories of alien exploration, and space operas accepted the wider universe instead of fearing it. Nor that there had been a fundamental switch in primary point of view from the Village to the World Beyond the Hill. In the pulp science fiction stories of the Thirties, the wider universe itself underwent a
quickening
that can only be compared to the sudden increase in the power of super-science at the beginning of the Age of Technology. The wider universe was suddenly both more plausible and more mysterious than it had ever previously been imagined.

We can see both an increase in plausibility and a heightened strangeness on display in the best-loved SF short story of the Thirties, the highly influential “A Martian Odyssey” (
Wonder Stories,
July 1934), by Stanley Weinbaum.

Weinbaum, born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1902 and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was the forerunner of a new breed of SF writer who would only become common in the Forties and Fifties—the slick, bright young urbanite. Clever as he was, however, Weinbaum was neither happy nor successful in life. He was a Jew in early Twentieth Century mid-America—in that time and place, a natural outsider—who was burdened with unfulfilled longings for social acceptance, glamour and fame.

Weinbaum was Hollywood-struck. The promises of Hollywood were the product of men not unlike Weinbaum—and Weinbaum desired all that was promised by Hollywood. He dreamed Hollywood dreams.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1922, but rather than working as a chemical engineer, Weinbaum spent the Twenties managing movie palaces. As his ticket to the big time, Weinbaum attempted to write popular fiction. But the best he was able to do was to place a society romance,
The Lady Dances,
in newspaper syndication under the pseudonym Marge Stanley.

Weinbaum was a longtime fan of SF. He had read Poe, Verne, Wells, Burroughs, and the utopian writers, and he had picked up
Amazing Stories
from the first issue. But his own attempted science fiction novels,
The Mad Brain
and
The New Adam,
were old-fashioned movie-minded variations on the Jekyll-and-Hyde theme, and went unpublished.

As he read the science fiction magazines of the early Thirties, Weinbaum must have felt provoked by the stupidity and simple-mindedness of stories about idyllic planets and fairytale space princesses who recognize the hero’s valor and virtue at first glance. His scientific training told him that the universe was odder and less comprehensible than this. His own continuing lack of success in the pursuit of his dreams may have suggested that victories come as much through chance as from displays of right-minded effort. And his ego surely whispered to him that his own unpublished writings were far superior to tripe like this.

So science fiction readers wanted stories of Mars, did they? Very well, then, he would give them a Mars to remember.

The story that Weinbaum produced was “A Martian Odyssey”—the tale of the first human expedition to land on another planet. This thoroughly bizarre piece of fiction was unlike anything previously published in the SF magazines. It was at one and the same time a good-hearted spoof, a surreal movie cartoon, an expression of cynicism and dismay, and an exercise in personal wish-fulfillment.

One example of this wish-fulfillment at work is the main character of “A Martian Odyssey.” Dick Jarvis is the professional chemist that Weinbaum might have been. And his girlfriend back home on Earth is the famous vision entertainer, Fancy Long.

At the outset of the story, Jarvis, who has been off on a lone scouting trip, has just been rescued after having been missing for ten days. His fellows are gathered close in the cabin of their spaceship, all eager to hear of his adventures.

This will turn out to be a very queer tale indeed, so to draw the reader in and gain his confidence, Weinbaum employs every device he knows to ensure that “A Martian Odyssey” appears plausible. One is this circle of attentive listeners. These are not skeptical folk back home in the tidy little Village who must be convinced, as in Wells’s
The Time Machine.
These are Jarvis’s companions in this strange world—ready to serve as confirming witnesses for portions of his story.

Weinbaum adds further immediate plausibility with a trick taken from the futuristic utopian story—the setting of his narrative in a historical context. It is a well-known past event that we are asked to contemplate:

Dick Jarvis was chemist of the famous crew, the
Ares
expedition, first human beings to set foot on the mysterious neighbor of the earth, the planet Mars. This, of course, was in the old days, less than twenty years after the mad American Doheny perfected the atomic blast at the cost of his life, and only a decade after the equally mad Cardoza rode on it to the moon. They were true pioneers, these four of the
Ares.
Except for a half-dozen moon expeditions and the ill-fated de Lancey flight aimed at the seductive orb of Venus, they were the first men to feel other gravity than earth’s. . . .
²⁹³

What makes this buildup so effective is not just its historical certitude, but its tone of breezy familiarity. Who could possibly doubt it? And take notice that at the same moment we are accepting these offhand historical references, we are also accepting the impetuosity and imbalance of early space travelers and the mystery of Mars.

But there is more. In the opening pages of “A Martian Odyssey,” Weinbaum deliberately deconstructs familiar romantic expectations of Mars derived from reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and space opera. The Mars he presents has no red-skinned, egg-laying Martian princesses or exotic dying cities. Instead it is given as a prosaic place—a gray plain, a flat and desolate landscape. The air here is thin and cold, and Jarvis has developed a badly frost-bitten nose from exposure.

And, in one last ploy adapted from the hoaxes of Edgar Allan Poe, Weinbaum fills the early pages of his story with fact. In particular, with calculation after calculation of distance and time and weight:

“ ‘Weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds earth-weight, which is eighty-five here. Then, besides, my own personal two hundred and ten pounds is only seventy on Mars, so, tank and all, I grossed a hundred and fifty-five, or fifty-five pounds less than my everyday earth-weight.’ ”
²⁹⁴

Taken together, all of this amounts to a much heavier freighting of plausibility than pulp science fiction was used to carrying. And the result was that “A Martian Odyssey” appeared far more real to its readers than previous interplanetary SF.

At the same time, however, in the tradition of Poe, the narrative of “A Martian Odyssey” was jokey and quirky and not at all to be relied upon. Two of the crew members talk in music-hall foreign accents and comically misinterpret much of what is said. And one of them even bears the humorous name Putz—like Poe’s Rubadub or Von Underduk.

And the account that Jarvis gives is nothing less than an old-time marvelous journey transplanted to Mars. A real whopper of a traveler’s tale:

Jarvis says that while walking back from his crashed scoutship to rejoin the expedition, he came across an ostrich-like creature on the banks of a Martian canal, struggling to free itself from the grip of a black tentacled dream-beast, a projector of delusions. He shot the monster with his automatic, and he and the birdlike Martian became fast friends.

Tweel the Martian—admired by the likes of H.P. Lovecraft for being so strange yet sympathetic—is probably the best remembered element of “A Martian Odyssey.” He thinks and acts in a manner totally peculiar. He travels by making prodigious leaps through the air and then landing on the point of his beak. But although Tweel is so different that he and Jarvis can hardly communicate, he is not hostile. The two have a natural affinity:

“ ‘Our minds were alien to each other. And yet—we liked each other!’ ”
²⁹⁵

Traveling on together, these two unlikely companions encounter a series of mysteries. And all of them involve strange Martian creatures.

First, they stumble across an age-old exercise in futility. This is a half-million-year-long trail of larger and larger empty pyramids built by a creature that does nothing but shit bricks, erect structures around itself, and then move on. Jarvis says:

“That queer creature! Do you picture it? Blind, deaf, nerveless, brainless—just a mechanism, and yet—immortal! Bound to go on making bricks, building pyramids, as long as silicon and oxygen exist, and even afterwards it’ll just stop. It won’t be dead. If the accidents of a million years bring it its food again, there it’ll be, ready to run again, while brains and civilizations are part of the past.”
²⁹⁶

Then they have a second encounter with a dream-beast. This time it is Jarvis who is subjected to the power of one of the black tentacled monsters. He is dazzled by an alluring vision of Fancy Long, his video star girlfriend. And it is Tweel who saves him by shooting the dream-beast with a steam-powered glass pistol.

Finally, the two enter a mud-heap city that belongs to odd little barrel-shaped beasts who rush around shoving pushcarts full of rubbish and accomplishing nothing. At the heart of their anthill, there is a great machine. The barrel beasts empty their pushcarts here and then throw themselves under the wheel of the great machine to be ground to pieces.

On a pedestal that stands beside this strange machine, Jarvis finds a fluorescent crystal egg. This proves to have the property of destroying diseased tissue while leaving healthy tissue unharmed. It cures a wart on Jarvis’s hand and soothes his frost-bitten nose.

Just then, however, the barrel beasts attack Tweel and Jarvis while chanting, “ ‘We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!’ ”
²⁹⁷
over and over. The two must make a run for it. In the nick of time, Putz the engineer comes along to rescue Jarvis and carry him back to the spaceship, while Tweel escapes, bounding away to safety on his beak.

As proof of this story, Jarvis displays to his friends the cause of the fight with the barrel beasts. It is the wonderful fluorescent crystal—which the captain of the Ares expedition has just suggested “ ‘might be the cancer cure they’ve been hunting for a century and a half.’ ”
²⁹⁸

And this was another example of wish-fulfillment. Only eighteen months after the publication of “A Martian Odyssey,” Stanley Weinbaum would be dead from throat cancer.

But the strangest thing of all is that “A Martian Odyssey” proved to be the great success that had always previously eluded Weinbaum. Whatever Weinbaum may have intended this surreal series of encounters with the alien, the delusory, the futile and the incomprehensible to mean, it was interpreted by the SF audience as a wonderful new sort of science fiction.

Readers delighted in its realism, its breezy charm and screwball humor, its glamour, and its bizarre creatures. Above all, they appreciated the eccentric but lovable Tweel. “A Martian Odyssey” was the best-liked piece of fiction ever published in
Wonder Stories.

The underlying darkness of the story, its conservatism, and its futilitarian philosophy went completely unnoticed. All that the SF audience of the Thirties was prepared to see was that “A Martian Odyssey” was faster and funnier, more plausible and yet more mysterious than other science fiction.

“A Martian Odyssey” was immensely influential. Its virtues were copied over and over, and refined both by Weinbaum himself and by other writers, including E.E. Smith. This story would set new standards for both detail and inventiveness in fiction about other planets.

But it was not the dimension of space alone that took on heightened definition and greater mystery during the early Thirties—as in almost all of the stories we have been considering thus far. It was every dimension of the scientific multiverse.