The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (38 page)

The first paragraph of the first story in the series—“Hawk Carse”
²⁸⁰
(
Astounding,
Nov. 1931)—displays both the vigor and the simple-minded conventionality that typified space opera.

Hawk Carse came to the frontiers of space when Saturn was the frontier planet, which was years before the swift Patrol ships brought Earth’s law and order to those vast regions. A casual glance at his slender figure made it seem impossible that he was to rise to be the greatest adventurer in space, that his name was to carry such deadly connotation in later years. But on closer inspection, a number of little things became evident: the steadiness of his light gray eyes; the marvelous strong-fingered hands; the wiry build of his splendidly proportioned body. Summing these things up and adding the brilliant resourcefulness of the man, the complete ignorance of fear, one could perhaps understand why even his blood enemy, the impassive Ku Sui, a man otherwise devoid of every human trait, could not face Carse unmoved in his moments of cold fury.

In these few lines, we may catch the materials and postures of a thousand pulp stories of gunfighters and cavalrymen, soldiers of fortune and Oriental adventurers. And, beyond them, the echoes of a long tradition of heroic sagas and legends.

It was a hot news flash from science in 1930 that made possible the reconception of the staid old utopian Eight Worlds of the Solar System as a wild frontier: A new ninth planet had been observed!

The young man credited with the discovery of the planet Pluto was Clyde Tombaugh, an astronomy-loving farmboy from Illinois. On the strength of his enthusiasm, young Tombaugh had caught on as an assistant at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and been set to the purely mechanical task of comparing photographs of small sections of the sky in search of evidence of planetary movement.

And in February 1930, he spotted a flicker of just the kind he had been set to look for. A new world! Tombaugh’s reward for the successful outcome of his labor was to be sent off to college to receive formal instruction in the regular and proper study of astronomy.

The last planet previously identified had been Neptune back in 1846. And for all the SF writers of the Age of Technology—from Jules Verne at the beginning to Edmond Hamilton and Olaf Stapledon at the end—it had been a given fact that Neptune was the outermost world, the far boundary of the Village Solar System.

But now all that was changed. What had seemed fixed and eternal was now uncertain.

Almost inevitably, there were some SF writers who took the discovery of Pluto as a bad omen. In “The Whisperer in Darkness” (
Weird Tales,
Aug. 1931), H.P. Lovecraft—ever wary of the monstrous unknowns lurking just beyond the reach of perception—had his narrator write: “Sometimes I fear what the years will bring, since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously discovered.”
²⁸¹

But for other writers, the discovery of Pluto seemed a more positive portent, the opening wide of a door of possibility. In one instant, the perception of the Solar System as a shuttered Village was altered, and it was possible to see the Solar System as a new frontier land, a fitting replacement for the now-closed American frontier of E.E. Smith’s and Clifford Simak’s boyhood.

Space opera lifted characters and story elements from every kind of popular fiction and gave them leave to exist in the rough-and-ready new world. Sailors, slave traders, homesteaders, aborigines, beachcombers, foreign legionnaires, cops, colonists, crooks and cowboys were all transposed into outer space. In tough tent towns thrown up beside exotic dying cities on Mars, smugglers and space patrolmen rubbed shoulders with indentured Venusian stoop-laborers and beautiful winged princesses from Callisto. Meanwhile, out in the Asteroid Belt, beyond the reach of law, claim jumpers attacked honest prospectors and space pirates waylaid passenger liners on the Earth-Jove run.

Not even ancient creatures of mythology were barred from the worlds of space opera. In “Shambleau” (
Weird Tales,
Nov. 1933), the first story of C.L. Moore, a 22-year-old female bank teller from Indianapolis, the mythic past of Earth was re-presented as the even more ancient and mysterious past of the Solar System. Northwest Smith, a space adventurer much like Hawk Carse, rescues a Shambleau from a bloodthirsty mob in a camp-town on Mars. Shambleaus are snake-haired psychic vampires—members of “an older race than man, spawned from ancient seed in times before ours, perhaps on planets that have gone to dust”
²⁸²
—who are remembered on Earth as the Medusae. This one thanks Northwest Smith for his aid by mentally beguiling, seducing and degrading him, until at last she is shot by his Venusian friend Yarol.

In one sense, space opera was nothing more than borrowings. It was usually rote and easy and formulaic rather than innovative and imaginative. But as a device of transition, space opera did serve several highly useful purposes.

Speaking conservatively, it gathered and preserved stereotypical fictional materials—some of which might also be archetypal story materials as old as mankind. More creatively, space opera took the wider universe—the enigmatic immensity that H.G. Wells could not conceive as containing useful work for one such as himself—and filled the immediate neighborhood with a colorful array of human social activities and a variety of roles to play.

Space opera had an immediate early flowering in the years when its formulas were first falling into place. And space opera set within the Solar System would continue to be written through the Thirties, and even after—even though the genre was only rarely an object of admiration by SF readers hungry for stories that were like nothing they had ever seen before.

Nonetheless, as the first step toward more complex and sophisticated stories of space, the space opera form would prove to have continuing influence. Even Doc Smith would make his contributions to space opera in serials of the early Thirties like
Spacehounds of IPC
(
Amazing,
July-Sept. 1931) and
Triplanetary
(
Astounding,
Jan.-Apr. 1934), and would employ incidental background material adapted from space opera throughout the Lensman series.

But the most important fact about space opera may be that it, like the epic of super-science and the new story of alien exploration, presented a reversal of figure-and-ground from previous Technological Age science fiction. In space opera, Village Earth was no longer the center of things, but was just another place, one world among a number. The basic field of play was now the wider universe.

This highly significant shift in perspective was explicitly expressed by Doc Smith in
Galactic Patrol,
the first of the Lensman stories. At one point, the young woman who will ultimately marry Kimball Kinnison and bear him super-children, Nurse Clarrissa MacDougall, has become impatient with the habitual abruptness of Kinnison’s leave-takings. But a Port Admiral knows better. He realizes that Kinnison simply has more urgent and important business to attend to:

“He knew, as she would one day learn, that Kinnison was no longer of Earth. He was now only of the galaxy, not of any one tiny dustgrain of it.”
²⁸³

But not every writer of the Thirties was satisfied with the new worlds presented in the alien exploration story or space opera. To some it seemed too simplistic to find Big Brain yet again, or beautiful alien princesses so physically compatible with men of Earth that romance might develop. The universe revealed by Twentieth Century science—the universe of Arthur Eddington, James Jeans and J.B.S. Haldane—was
queerer
than that.

One writer who picked up that sense of radical queerness from A. Merritt and attempted to express it in terms of the new scientific universe was Jack Williamson. Williamson, who began his career young, and who would still be writing SF more than seventy years later, was one of the earliest full-time professional writers of science fiction. Such was his adaptability, his enthusiasm, and his fertility of imagination that he became the one writer of the day who was acceptable to every SF magazine and every editor, selling as readily to
Weird Tales
as to Hugo Gernsback or the Tremaine
Astounding.

Jack Williamson was the last of the turn-of-the-century backwoods children who became the pioneers of Twentieth Century science fiction. He was born in Bisbee, Arizona Territory, on April 29, 1908, and he spent his first years on the Bitch-Wolf Ranch in the mountains of Sonora, Mexico. He has said, “Life there was still nearly at a Stone Age level.”
²⁸⁴
At the age of seven, as a refugee from revolution in Mexico, Jack moved with his family from Texas to the sandhills of New Mexico, traveling in a covered wagon.

Williamson was a loner, a reader and dreamer who only discovered science fiction belatedly. After an acquaintance showed him the November 1926 issue of the Gernsback
Amazing,
he sent away for a free copy, answering a promotional ad in a farm paper.

The magazine that he would receive was the March 1927
Amazing Stories.
It contained a treasure trove of reprints: the usual short story by H.G. Wells, a portion of
The Land That Time Forgot
by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and, best of all, A. Merritt’s second story, “The People of the Pit.”

Williamson was instantly hooked. And it was Merritt who most intrigued and impressed him, particularly with
The Moon Pool,
serialized in
Amazing
in the summer of 1927.

Very soon, Williamson would be led to try to write science fiction himself. Like many beginners, his first attempted steps were in other people’s shoes. First, Williamson won a Gernsback editorial contest by successfully echoing Gernsback’s own standard line. His guest editorial, “Scientifiction, Searchlight of Science,” appeared in the Fall 1928 issue of
Amazing Stories Quarterly.
Then, a few months later, when Williamson was still just 20, his first story, “The Metal Man”—modeled on “The People of the Pit”—would be featured on the cover of the December 1928
Amazing Stories.

But Williamson was more than a mere parrot. In his guest editorial, he did manage to reach beyond the limitations of Hugo Gernsback toward a new kind of science fiction that did not yet exist, a science fiction that he himself would help to invent. He wrote:

Here is the picture, if we can but see it. A universe ruled by the human mind. A new Golden Age of fair cities, of new laws and new machines, of human capabilities undreamed of, of a civilization that has conquered matter and Nature, distance and time, disease and death. A glorious picture of an empire that lies away past a million flaming suns until it reaches the black infinity of unknown space, and extends beyond.
²⁸⁵

In these words, we can hear a reiteration of old dreams of scientific utopia, and also perceive a foreshadowing of stories of galactic empire. Not to mention catch one more intimation of a mentalism that might be a replacement for
spirit.

In 1930, after two years of study at West Texas State College, Williamson dropped out of school to write full time. With the aid of an older writer, Dr. Miles J. Breuer, whom he visited in Lincoln, Nebraska, he learned to discipline his Merritt-influenced purple prose and his somewhat slapdash imagination. And gradually Williamson began to sound more original notes.

In the February 1932
Wonder Stories,
he published “The Moon Era,” an alien exploration story notable for its presentation of a thoroughly strange but warm and friendly alien being, “the Mother.”
²⁸⁶

And it was Williamson who wrote “Born of the Sun,” an audacious thought-variant story in the March 1934 issue of the Tremaine
Astounding
in which the Earth is a giant egg that hatches out into a luminescent, multicolored space-bird. Though most of mankind is killed in this great cosmic disaster, a few men are freed to roam and conquer space. At the conclusion, they look out their spaceship window at the stars and declare, “The new, free race will be greater than the old.”
²⁸⁷

Jack Williamson was also the author of the single most popular SF novel serialized during the Thirties—
The Legion of Space
(
Astounding,
Aug.-Sept. 1934). In this bold synthesis of wildly disparate elements, young Williamson at last came close to his goal of not merely copying A. Merritt, but of matching Merritt’s wide-ranging sense of fundamental mystery in the new emerging terms of science fiction.

In
The Legion of Space,
Earth in the Thirtieth Century has come under attack by an alien race called the Medusae, cold, emotionless intelligences “more like machines than men.”
²⁸⁸
With the aid of a human traitor, the aliens have kidnapped a human girl, Aladoree, the custodian of the mysterious power of AKKA, and carried her off to the stars. Four discredited but devoted Legionnaires of Space—patterned after the Three Musketeers and Falstaff—follow in the stolen ship
Purple Dream.
They hide their ship in the sea, slog through the jungles of an alien planet, enter the mysterious black metal city of the Medusae, and rescue Aladoree.

But as they escape in their spaceship, they are subjected to the terrible red gas that is the chief weapon of the Medusae. Aladoree turns green and falls into a coma, while John Star, leader of the party of Legionnaires, is thrown into a futile state of mind in which the meaningless death of mankind at the hands of the aliens seems truly funny: “What a cosmic joke!”
²⁸⁹

But, like a true hero of the new science fiction, John Star shakes off this state of doubt. And Aladoree, back home on Earth, responds to John Star’s loving pleas and comes back to consciousness in time to turn the power of AKKA into a mighty weapon.

It does not look like much:

Two little metal plates, perforated, so that one could sight through their centers. A wire helix between them, connecting them. And a little cylinder of iron. One of the plates and the little iron rod were set to slide in grooves, so that they could be adjusted with small screws. A rough key—perhaps to close a circuit through the rear plate, though there was no apparent source of current. That was all.
²⁹⁰