The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (40 page)

Just as there was a quickening of space, so was there a parallel quickening of time. Formerly thought of as static and inert, time now began to pulse and shimmer and assume a dynamic quality it had never had before.

We can see this happening in the very first piece of fiction selected by F. Orlin Tremaine as a thought-variant, Nat Schachner’s time travel story, “Ancestral Voices” (
Astounding,
Dec. 1933). In earlier stories of travel through time, like Wells’s
The Time Machine,
time was fixed. What had happened, would happen. The coming and going of the traveler had only obvious first-order consequences. But in Schachner’s story, a time traveler to the year 452 
A.D.
kills a Hun in a fight—and the result is to cause his own disappearance plus the complete elimination of 50,000 more people from our time.

The dimension of time had now suddenly become fluid and subject to alteration. Messing with the past might change the present. Decisions made in the present might determine the nature of the future. Writers began to play around with the paradoxical possibilities inherent in interference with the course of time.

But also in the SF of the last decade of the Age of Technology, new definition and structure were projected onto time. A larger and more inclusive history was invented for mankind that carried men up from the caves and out to the stars. We can see this new consensus history in the making in Olaf Stapledon’s
Last and First Men,
in Edmond Hamilton’s Interstellar Patrol stories, and in E.E. Smith’s Lensman series. But it is also visible in such things as the easy historical detailing thrown off in a short story like “A Martian Odyssey.”

And there was enough disagreement among the historians and sufficient gaps in the account that almost anything might still be imagined to happen. Writers in
Weird Tales
even invented a new genre—sword-and-sorcery—that preserved magic, the occult, and the materials of the lost race story by removing them to remote moments in time. Clark Ashton Smith at times wrote of a magic-haunted dying Earth—a flat Earth—under the red sun of the far future. And, in his Conan stories (1932-36), Robert E. Howard, a Texan, recounted the adventures of a vigorous young barbarian in a world of black magic and sorcery located between the fall of Atlantis and the rise of known history.

Among the most intriguing and fruitful speculations on time published in the SF of the Thirties were the ideas presented by Jack Williamson in another romantic adventure,
The Legion of Time
(
Astounding,
May-July 1938). In this short novel, there are “two conflicting possible worlds of futurity”
²⁹⁹
—the utopian city of Jonbar, which may lead to the further perfection and glory of man, and the black city of Gyronchi, which spells the way to man’s dehumanization and extinction. Which of the two comes into permanent existence will ultimately depend on whether a 12-year-old Ozark country boy in 1921 pauses to pick up a rusty magnet or a stone.

The beautiful red-haired Lethonee, spokeswoman for Jonbar and for the even more glorious New Jonbar that lies beyond it, explains to Williamson’s hero, Denny Lanning:

“The world is a long corridor, from the beginning of existence to the end. Events are groups in a sculptured frieze that runs endlessly along the walls. And time is a lantern carried steadily through the hall, to illuminate the groups one by one. It is the light of awareness, the subjective reality of consciousness.

“Again and again the corridor branches, for it is the museum of all that is possible. The bearer of the lantern may take one turning, or another. And always, many halls that might have been illuminated with reality are left forever in the dark.”
³⁰⁰

It remains an open question whether Lethonee and Jonbar will prevail—or the blonde and malevolent Sorainya, ruler of the slave legions of the city of Gyronchi. But if one of these two comes into existence, the other will not.

The balance between these two possible futures has been disturbed by the temporal probings of Denny Lanning’s one-time Harvard roommate, the mathematician and inventor Wil McLan. In his book
Probability and Determination,
McLan writes:

“Probability, in the unfolding future, must be substituted for determination. The elementary particles of the old physics may be retained, in the new continuum of five dimensions. But any consideration of this hyperspace-time continuum must take note of a conflicting infinitude of possible worlds, only one of which, at the intersection of their geodesics with the advancing plane of the present, can ever claim physical reality.”
³⁰¹

After many adventures, much effort and suffering, Wil McLan, Denny Lanning, and the brave companions of the Legion of Time manage to retrieve the crucial rusty magnet from the possession of Sorainya, who has stolen it. They replace it in the path of John Barr, the Ozark country boy in 1921, and he picks it up.

But the result of all their interference with time is that it is neither Jonbar nor Gyronchi that comes into permanent existence, but rather a blending of the two. This state of neither utopia nor extinction is symbolized by Lanning receiving the love of a girl who is a fusion of Lethonee and Sorainya.

In pulp science fiction and fantasy stories of the Thirties, dimensionality itself became interconnected in wholly new ways. C.L. Moore wrote a series of stories in
Weird Tales
about Jirel of Joiry, a warrior maid in a medieval world that is not necessarily our own past, who has adventures in a number of different realms.

In the third of these stories, “Jirel Meets Magic” (
Weird Tales,
July 1935), Jirel finds herself in a hall belonging to the sorceress Jarisme. The hall is filled with doors. And each door opens into a different time or place. Jirel thinks:

It must be from here that Jarisme by her magical knowledge journeyed into other lands and times and worlds through the doors that opened between her domain and those strange, outland places. Perhaps she had sorcerer friends there, and paid them visits and brought back greater knowledge, stepping from world to world, from century to century, through her enchanted doorways.
³⁰²

In yet another story of the period, “Sidewise in Time” (
Astounding,
June 1934)—a thought-variant by old pro Murray Leinster, whose first SF story had appeared in
Argosy
in 1919—dimensionality comes all unhinged. In this novelet a professor of mathematics says:

“We talk of three dimensions and one present and one future. There is a theoretic necessity—a mathematical necessity—for assuming more than one future. There are an indefinite number of possible futures, any one of which we would encounter if we took the proper ‘forks,’ in time.”
³⁰³

But it is not merely a number of possible futures that are given to exist in “Sidewise in Time,” but any number of possible pasts and alternate presents. A variety of worlds of possibility exist, of which ours is only one. And in a cosmic disaster—a time-quake—a scrambling together of all these worlds takes place. Until things settle back down to something like normal, contemporary Virginians find themselves co-existing with Chinese colonists of America, Confederates, wild Indians, Roman legionaries, Vikings, and even dinosaurs.

In these American SF stories of the Thirties, former notions of stability and certainty were gradually abandoned in keeping with the new ideas of quantum physics. In Williamson’s
The Legion of Time,
mathematician Wil McLan puts it like this:

“Certainty is abolished. Let a man stand on a concrete floor. It is no longer certain that he will not fall through it. For he is sustained only by the continual reaction of atomic forces, and they are governed by probability alone.

“It is merely a very excellent statistical probability that keeps the man from radiating heat until his body is frozen solid, or absorbing it until he bursts into flame, or flying upward into space in defiance of Newtonian gravitation, or dissolving into a cloud of molecular particles.

“Mere probability is all we have left.”
³⁰⁴

It is this replacement of certainty by probability that is the key to all of the burgeoning of dimension that occurred in the SF of the Thirties. There was no longer to be merely one single Future in which the inevitable decline and fall of man was absolutely mandated. Rather, humanity was now free to choose among a variety of possibilities.

This was a breathtaking and wonderful realization, but also a frightening and demoralizing responsibility. This is shown in another Stanley Weinbaum story, “The Lotus Eaters” (
Astounding,
Apr. 1935).

In this story, Ham and Pat Hammond, two venturers on the dark side of Venus, encounter a mobile, warm-blooded sentient plant, whom they dub Oscar. Oscar is a deep philosophical thinker, an able extrapolator.

He says: “I start with one fact and I reason from it. I build a picture of the universe. I start with another fact. I reason from it. I find that the universe I picture is the same as the first. I know that the picture is true.”
³⁰⁵

Oscar is a perfect informational mirror. He will answer any question for Ham and Pat—but only in the words they are able to provide him with. Pat asks:

“Oscar, I have the words time and space and matter and law and cause. Tell me the ultimate law of the universe?”

“It is the law of—” Silence.

“Conservation of energy or matter? Gravitation?”

“No.”

“Of—life?”

“No. Life is of no importance.”

“There’s a chance,” said Ham tensely, “that there is no word!”

“Yes,” clicked Oscar. “It is the law of chance. These other words are different sides of the law of chance.”
³⁰⁶

Oddly enough, however, in this universe that is ruled by chance, Oscar’s own fate is still completely determined: Like the rest of his kind, he will be eaten in due course by a Venusian triops. Very soon, these philosophical plants will become extinct. And it really doesn’t matter much to them.

Pat tells Ham that this is the difference between humanity and Oscar’s kind: “An animal has will, a plant hasn’t. Do you see now? Oscar has all the magnificent intelligence of a god, but he hasn’t the will of a worm.”
³⁰⁷

Without some exercise of
will,
a universe of chance must prove as inevitably deadly as the old absolutely determined universe. But to what end should human will be applied? It appeared that if mankind was not to succumb numbly to a storm of random buffets, like Oscar and his kind or the doomed Eighteenth Men of Neptune, then man must turn all of his science and power to the task of making himself master of the laws of chance.

The one writer of the Thirties to whom this was most evident was John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell approached science fiction as though it were a form of theoretical science. During the decade, in stories that were deliberate thought experiments, he sought to work out answers to the continuing dilemmas of the Age of Technology—the threat of the vast unknown universe, the dangers offered by hostile superior aliens, and the prospect of inevitable human decline—in terms suggested by the radical new science of the Twentieth Century and by the expansive new science fiction of Edmond Hamilton and E.E. Smith.

John Wood Campbell, Jr. was born in Newark, New Jersey on June 8, 1910. His father was a science-minded authoritarian. His mother was emotionally manipulative. Their influence bent John Campbell into a compulsive doubter and disputer, just the youngster to deliberately attempt to take apart the givens of Technological Age science fiction and then reassemble them in a new pattern.

Campbell’s father, John, Sr., worked as an engineer for Bell Telephone. He was a Vermont Yankee, a Scot, a Victorian, and a Man of Science—a cool, remote man who prided himself on his complete objectivity in all matters as he laid down the law for his family.

Very early, young John lit upon science as an activity that his father would not disapprove of and reject. One of his continuing fascinations became the new physics and astronomy as expounded by Arthur Eddington and James Jeans. He turned into an able scientific tinkerer and experimenter—except for one occasion as a teenager when he blew up his basement chem lab.

Campbell also did his best to overset his father’s rule by developing a superior command of fact and facility at argumentation. Campbell would become so successful at this by the time he reached his teens that all through the rest of his life, his major mode of relating to other people would be to attempt to draw them into argument.

It may be understandable that living in such a household, Campbell’s mother should rely on playing upon the emotions that her husband habitually denied as her most effective means of getting her own way. But greatly complicating this tendency toward emotional gamesmanship was the fact that Dorothy Campbell was one of a set of identical twins so alike that not even her own family could tell them apart. And never would she be more sweet and affectionate to her son than in the presence of her childless twin—who retaliated by snubbing and rejecting the boy. When he approached what appeared to be his mother, young John could never be certain what his reception would be.

John W. Campbell, Jr. grew up a doubter of appearances and a rebel against orthodoxy, always ready to stand up in class and challenge the pronouncements of a teacher. Not surprisingly, his grades were erratic. He failed to graduate from the prep school he was sent to, and his lack of enthusiasm for the required study of German caused him to flunk out of M.I.T. in his junior year. He completed his degree at Duke University in North Carolina in 1932.

Campbell was a longtime reader of SF. As a boy in the Teens, he had delighted in the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He bought
Argosy
and
Weird Tales
for their science fiction stories, and he snatched up the very first issue of
Amazing Stories
when it appeared on the newsstand. The climax of his SF reading was that wonderful moment in 1928 that saw “Crashing Suns” and
The Skylark of Space
published just as Campbell was preparing to set off for college.