The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (13 page)

This book was a heavy political document. Like “The Battle of Dorking” a hundred years later, it went through many printings and translations. The King of Spain was one of those who recognized its true implications; he banned it in 1778 as blasphemous and anarchic. In later times, Sebastien Mercier himself was ready to claim credit for having anticipated the French Revolution.

After
Memoirs of the Year 2440,
most utopias were set by convention in the Future. The Future became the locus of the rational perfection that would be. And precisely for that reason, it was no home for proto-SF.

The Romantic wildmen who first developed the materials of science-fiction-literature-to-come were rebels against the Age of Reason. They doubted social progress, rejected perfection, and assiduously sought the irrational. The utopian Future—the heartland of rational perfection—was the last place they would find what they were looking for.

There is one Romantic document that is sometimes offered as a proto-SF story with a setting in the Future—Edgar Allan Poe’s sketch “Mellonta Tauta” (1849). The story takes the form of a letter supposedly written on board the balloon
Skylark
on April 1, 2848, while the balloon is crossing the Atlantic.

But this story is quite different from Poe’s more obvious proto-SF. It is, in fact, an anti-utopian satire. Its title is another Greek pun—a retort to More’s
Utopia
and to all the contemporary futuristic utopian stories of Poe’s day. “Mellonta Tauta” means either “things to come” or “more of the same.”

Greater numbers of utopian stories were published in the Nineteenth Century than in the previous three hundred years put together. Many of these were trivial, no more than light romances set in an advanced future society. Some were stories of future war or future catastrophe. But always the perfection of society remained the focal point of this literature, its central transcendence.

There were many instances of advanced science in these utopias: cures for disease, electric-powered cities, mobile homes, weather control, and new power sources superior to steam. It would be fair to say that almost every one of Verne’s imaginary scientific devices had been anticipated at some previous time in a utopian story.

But this advanced, imaginary science was not itself transcendent. Transcendence in a story is singular, irreducible, dominating mystery. Any lesser mystery that is displayed in the progress of a story will eventually be recognized as an aspect or an effect of that central transcendence.

In the utopian story, the central transcendence was the perfect rational society. And advanced science of the kind we have cited was only a by-product of that rational perfection. It wasn’t independently transcendent, ready to go its own way and possibly even alter or destroy the society which created it. In just the same way that the steam man of the prairies, which at first glance appears to be an independent superior being, a Titan or devil, is then revealed to be a marvelous artifact created by a young master of transcendent science, so the advanced science of the utopian story was always explained to be the consequence and docile tool of rational social improvement.

It is on this ground that “The Battle of Dorking,” which otherwise might be taken as a futuristic utopian war story, can be seen to be actually an example of the new, pushy SF story intruding into the imaginative territory of utopian literature. In “The Battle of Dorking,” social advance is not the highest value. Rather, social change—the collapse of Britain’s commerce and the loss of her colonies—is seen to result from technological advance. This is a reversal of all previous utopian value—the tail, science, wagging the dog of society.

Like “The Case of Summerfield,” Chesney’s “The Battle of Dorking” is further evidence of the shift in values that in 1871 was bringing the Age of Technology into being. In a test of strength between the powers of the rational spirit and technological might, the vote of “The Battle of Dorking” is for the newer and more powerful transcendence—science-beyond-science.

For the first time, the higher potentials of material science were assumed to be more powerful than the last remnant of spirit, man’s God-given soul. In “The Battle of Dorking,” science trumps utopia in utopia’s own heartland, the Future.

In an 1871 retort to Chesney, Charles Stone’s anonymous “What Happened After the Battle of Dorking, or the Victory of Tunbridge Wells,”
⁹³
the conclusions of the original story were disputed. It was Stone’s contention that no mere superiority of arms or preparation by the Germans could outweigh the indomitable
spirit
of the British people.

But the times were on Chesney’s side. And during the twenty-five years between Verne’s heyday and the fiction of H.G. Wells, one story after another would follow Chesney in pressing the claims of the new transcendent science. Like barbarians storming the walls of Rome, SF stories would wander the streets of the fallen city Utopia and usurp whatever they pleased to of what had once been the special materials of the utopian story, and convert them to their own purposes.

Another example of this process is to be seen in our third SF story of May 1871,
The Coming Race,
which is the best remembered of the three and the only one still read. Like our other two examples—and like so many of the proto-SF stories we have looked in upon—
The Coming Race
was published anonymously, issued by the Scottish publisher Blackwood on May 1
^st
, the same day as the
Blackwood’s Magazine
containing “The Battle of Dorking.”

The author of
The Coming Race
was Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1
^st
Baron Lytton. Bulwer-Lytton was of the same high Romantic generation as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. As a young dandy, Edward Bulwer—as he was then—had been among the last to seek wisdom at the feet of William Godwin. However, rather than dying young like a proper Romantic, the ambitious Bulwer had made good in life. He became a highly successful popular novelist and playwright, author of
The Last Days of Pompeii
(1834) and other Romantic fictions. Bulwer-Lytton had a long and active parallel political career, serving in Parliament first for ten years as a liberal advocate of the views of the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and fourteen more years as a conservative. He was created a baronet in 1838, and in 1866 was elevated to the peerage.

The Coming Race
was Bulwer-Lytton’s first work of fiction in many years. And such a splash did this anonymous work make that it was even ripped off for commercial purposes. It is the super-scientific force
vril
in
The Coming Race
that is the source of the name of the popular British beef tea, Bovril. At the time of his death in 1873, however,
The Coming Race
was still publicly unacknowledged by Bulwer-Lytton.

The Coming Race
was one of three final works—the last still in serialization when Bulwer-Lytton died—that his son, the poet Owen Meredith, said had been intended “to exhibit the influence of modern ideas upon character and conduct.”
⁹⁴
The modern idea at the heart of
The Coming Race,
of course, was the new concept of science as constituting the entire sphere of knowledge potentially attainable by man.

The Coming Race
is yet another singular book, in this case a unique combination of the matter of utopian literature, science-beyond-science, and occultism. Its form, like those of “The Case of Summerfield” and “The Battle of Dorking,” is old-fashioned. In appearance, it seems to be just another conventional utopian story—static, didactic, and only minimally marvelous.

In
The Coming Race,
a young man exploring the farther reaches of a mine discovers deep underground a strange civilization populated by giant human beings. The details of this superior civilization are then unfolded to him.

This is much the same pattern as any number of previous utopian stories. It was no rare thing for utopia to be found in a tucked-away underground world. Justifications for such an unlikely situation were not a primary concern of these stories. What was centrally important to utopian literature was the description of the laws and constitution of the Perfected Society.

But we might take note that the situation presented in
The Coming Race
was precisely the same as that which Jules Verne, attempting to write scientifically, had found too overwhelming to be contemplated in
Journey to the Centre of the Earth,
published only six years earlier. That is, giant human beings living underground.

We may recall Verne, in the person of Axel, writing: “The idea that a man, a living man, and with him a whole generation, should be buried down there in the bowels of the earth is unacceptable.”

But in
The Coming Race
just such a generation of giant men does live in deep caverns, “caring nothing about the inhabitants of the surface and having no communication with them.” This idea, which was too intense to be borne by a Verne thinking primarily of scientific mystery, is rendered almost homey by Bulwer-Lytton, writing within the tamer tradition of the utopian story.

But, no, he isn’t! He is writing a story that
looks
utopian. But in spite of its conventionally didactic surface and its typically superior society,
The Coming Race
is not a utopian story. It is SF.

It is not the superior society itself that is transcendent in
The Coming Race.
Rather, the advanced society that Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator discovers is supported and maintained by the super-scientific power, vril. Vril is the very basis of civilization:

So important a bond between these several communities was the knowledge of vril and the practice of its agencies, that the word A-Vril was synonymous with civilisation and Vril-ya signifying “The Civilised Nations,” was the common name by which the communities employing the uses of vril distinguished themselves from such of the Ana as were yet in a state of barbarism.
⁹⁵

Like the utopian story,
The Coming Race
admits the notion of progress, but this progress is specifically given as
scientific
progress. It is the scientific power vril that is the measure of difference between barbarism and civilization. Here is the description of vril:

I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forms of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, etc. . . . These subterranean philosophers assert that, by one operation of vril, which Faraday would perhaps call “atmospheric magnetism,” they can influence the variations of temperature—in plain words, the weather; that by other operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic forces, etc., but applied scientifically through vril conductors, they can exercise influence over mind, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics.
⁹⁶

Now, truly this is a most impressive and powerful form of science-beyond-science. It unifies physical, mental, and electromagnetic forces. It lights the underground world. It is even used by children of the Vril-ya to dispose of those monsters that lurk in the dimmer and further caverns—those ravening Celenos and Loestrygonians with which purist utopian fiction was always unconcerned.

Vril is presented to the reader as being somehow connected to the familiar scientific practice of the Nineteenth Century, but also, as immensely superior to it. This is spelled out to the narrator during a visit to a museum:

In another department there were models of vehicles and vessels worked by steam and of a balloon which might have been constructed by Montgolfier. “Such,” said Zee, with an air of meditative wisdom, “such were the feeble triflings with nature of our savage forefathers ere they had even a glimmering perception of the properties of vril!”
⁹⁷

Bulwer-Lytton had even higher game in mind than the mere presentation of super-science, as the title of his book makes apparent. In
The Coming Race,
Bulwer-Lytton was trying to depict transcendent beings—creatures of a higher order than man. This was a feat that no writer of Romantic proto-SF had been able to bring off.

In a letter to a friend, Bulwer-Lytton explained that
The Coming Race
depended “on the Darwinian proposition that a coming race is destined to supplant our races, that such a race would be very gradually formed and be indeed a new species developing itself out of our old one, and that this process would be invisible to our eyes, and therefore in some region unknown to us.”
⁹⁸

And, in fact, when they are first introduced to us, the gigantic human beings of the underground world are presented in terms similar to the initial description of the steam man of the prairies of beloved memory. But these terms are far more extravagantly phrased and much more seriously intended:

And now there came out of this building a form—human; was it human? . . . It came within a few yards of me, and at the sight and presence of it an indescribable awe and tremor seized me, rooting my feet to the ground. It reminded me of symbolical images of Genius or Demon that are seen on Etruscan vases or limned on the walls of Eastern sepulchres—images that borrow the outlines of men, and are yet of another race. . . . I felt that this manlike image was endowed with forces inimical to man. As it drew near, a cold shudder came over me. I fell on my knees and covered my face with my hands.
⁹⁹

But that is just an initial impression. The more we see of the Vril-ya, the less transcendent they seem. Like the Indians getting over their immediate awe of the steam man of the prairies, Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator, too, soon gets over his indescribable awe. Eventually he, and we, must take the Vril-ya as more powerful than ordinary men by virtue of their employment of vril, but not as a new and superior order of being.

In large part, this occurs because Bulwer-Lytton’s intention of presenting superior beings comes into conflict with his more immediate and practical aim of reconciling the rational ideals of the utopian story with the new modern idea of unknown science. The more the Vril-ya are made to look like the rational-minded human citizens of utopia (with a basis in science that looks exactly the same as the old basis of the soul), the less they can look like transcendent “images that borrow the outlines of men, and are yet of another race.”