The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (68 page)
Read The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Online
Authors: Alexei Panshin,Cory Panshin
And we are allowed to see that they are getting somewhere. In the course of
Beyond This Horizon,
in a satiric modern science fiction reversal of an old-time scientifiction situation, an anomaly—“the Adirondack stasis field”
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—is finally opened and proves to contain a time traveler, a wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, young go-getter from 1926 named J. Darlington Smith. Smith, looking for something to do, introduces football to this latter-day world, but though he was twice an All-American himself, he can’t play now. Nor does he dare to wear a gun. His reflexes simply aren’t fast enough to allow him to compete with genetically improved future man.
The central story line of
Beyond This Horizon
would be Heinlein’s best attempt to phrase and resolve his great dilemma about the relationship between the man of competence and his society. Heinlein’s protagonist, Hamilton Felix, is a man of superior ability who fritters his time away as a designer of what he terms “ ‘silly games for idle people.’ ”
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Though the District Moderator for Genetics, Mordan Claude, informs Hamilton that he is a biological crown prince, a genetic star line, the best of the best, he feels like a failure. He lacks a photographic memory, and this has disqualified him from being what he dreamed of becoming as a boy—“an encyclopedic synthesist.”
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The occupation of synthesist was something that Heinlein had called for in his speech in Denver. His suggestion was that these men of encyclopedic understanding would “make it their business to find out what it is the specialists have learned and then relay it to the rest of us in a consolidated form so that we can have, if not the details of the picture, at least the broad outlines of the enormous, incredibly enormous, mass of data that the human race has gathered.”
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And he had offered his boyhood hero, H.G. Wells, as his example of a pioneer synthesist. He called him “so far as I know the only writer who has ever lived who has tried to draw for the rest of us a full picture of the whole world, past and future, everything about us, so we can stand off and get a look at ourselves.”
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This was the kind of man that Hamilton Felix had aimed to be:
All the really great men were synthesists. Who stood a chance of being elected to the Board of Policy but a synthesist? What specialist was there who did not, in the long run, take his orders from a synthesist? They were the leaders, the men who knew everything, the philosopher-kings of whom the ancients had dreamed.
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But when it became apparent to Hamilton that he wouldn’t be able to become a synthesist because of his lack of an eidetic memory, everything else available came to look no better than second-best to him. Life seems pointless. His society wants him to have children and fulfill four generations of genetic planning, but he isn’t disposed to cooperate. He says to Mordan:
“You can probably eliminate my misgivings [in my children] and produce a line that will go on happily breeding for the next ten million years. That still doesn’t make it make sense. Survival! What for? Until you can give me some convincing explanation why the human race should go on at all, my answer is ‘no.’ ”
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However, when a revolution by people who fancy themselves superior and aim to emulate the Great Khans comes along, and they ask Hamilton to join them, he isn’t flattered or attracted. The society of
Beyond This Horizon
was the soundest and most uncorrupt, the purest and most ideal that Heinlein could imagine at this moment, and Hamilton Felix, for all his disaffection, finds it worth defending. He serves as a spy and does his best to see the revolt put down.
And when it is, Hamilton’s society does him return service. The synthesists of the Board of Policy deem it worthwhile to launch a project to scientifically investigate the fundamental questions of human meaning and purpose, and Hamilton is offered a place in this “Great Research”
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for the unorthodox quality of his imagination.
At last he has something to do that he finds worth doing. So reconciled does Hamilton become that he even marries the girl picked out as his genetic match and fathers the children the Planners wish him to have.
Along with everything else that
Beyond This Horizon
had to offer—its utopianism, its satire, its future-building, its alternative history-making, and its philosophical ventures—this novel would go at least partway toward solving the intractable evolutionary problem that Heinlein had been banging his head against throughout 1941.
This novel suggested that even human evolution might sometime be domesticated, brought under the conscious direction and control of mankind. So far, so good—especially if you should happen to be a genetic crown prince like Hamilton Felix and not a despised, discriminated-against “control natural,”
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or unimproved man.
However, in
Beyond This Horizon
the larger and more difficult part of the evolutionary question—how humanity might learn to cope with the fact of the existence of superior beings—was scamped. It was acknowledged as a potential problem, but then put out of mind.
That is, in this story there are no other intelligent races in the Solar System. (Mention is made of a news report of the discovery of intelligent life on Ganymede which proved to be erroneous.) And though the Great Research is perfectly willing to concede the possibility of non-human intelligence somewhere else, lacking the starships to go and check, human beings are not soon going to be put on the spot and embarrassed again as they were on the voyage of the
New Frontiers
in Heinlein’s other future.
Hamilton Felix does consider the question:
If there were such [non-human intelligences], then it was possible, with an extremely high degree of mathematical probability, that some of them, at least, were more advanced than men. In which case they might give Man a “leg up” in his philosophical education. They might have discovered “Why” as well as “How”.
It had been pointed out that it might be extremely dangerous, psychologically, for human beings to encounter such superior creatures. There had been the tragic case of the Australian Aborigines in not too remote historical times—demoralized and finally exterminated by their own sense of inferiority in the presence of the colonizing Anglish.
The investigators serenely accepted the danger; they were not so constituted as to be able to do otherwise.
Hamilton was not sure it
was
a danger. To some it might be, but he himself could not conceive of a man such as Mordan, for example, losing his morale under any circumstances. In any case it was a long distance project. First they must reach the stars, which required inventing and building a starship. That would take a bit of doing.
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In short, the genetically refined society of
Beyond This Horizon
is spared from suffering a rude evolutionary awakening by its own comparative technological ineptitude. Though privately we may wonder whether Mordan Claude really would fare any better in the temple of Kreel than Slayton Ford did, this question is not about to be tested.
Heinlein, however, had clearly not rid himself of his own fear and doubt. This is indicated by his very last pre-war story, “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag,” written in April 1942 while he waited to take up war work as an engineer in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. He sent this fantasy short novel to Campbell with the new pseudonym John Riverside, and it would be published in the October 1942 issue of
Unknown
—by then called
Unknown Worlds.
In this unsettling story, the contemporary world is once again revealed to be a sham. We are offered two Twenties-style explanations to account for its true nature:
There are “the Sons of the Bird”
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—horrid, powerful Lovecraftian creatures who lurk in the space behind mirrors and yearn to torment and demean us with the knowledge of our own true inferiority. Are they right in their claim to be the proper rulers of our world?
Or is prissy, creepy Jonathan Hoag right when he offers the alternative Cabellian explanation that this world, including the Sons of the Bird, is actually only an interesting botch by a promising young artist on a higher plane of existence? It is Hoag’s claim that he is an “art critic”
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from that superior dimension, here in the form of a man to experience this world from within and determine how much of it, if any, is worth saving.
In either case, however, ordinary human beings and their efforts cannot amount to very much. The best the frightened protagonists of this story, a private detective and his wife, are allowed is to hang on tight to each other and wait to find out what may happen to them.
And on this note, after three intense years at the typewriter, Robert Heinlein ceased storytelling and went off to war. The conundrum of evolutionary superiority was left for somebody else to resolve.
This would be the Canadian writer A.E. van Vogt. But to understand the basis of van Vogt’s accomplishment and why it was possible for him to achieve what Heinlein could not, we must first take a look at an aspect of the Golden Age and of universal operating principles that we haven’t examined previously.
T
HE STARTING PLACE OF OUR STORY
was the great mythic and religious crisis that was initiated in the Western world during the Seventeenth Century—the ultimate impact of which is only being felt now, some three hundred years later. This crisis resulted from the decision by the leading lights of Western thought to draw a basic distinction between matter and spirit, and to cast the fate of the West with matter.
By the Twentieth Century, with the loss of spirit and the misplacement of God, many of the people of the West would come to feel rootless, disoriented, without purpose, and disconnected from reality. Without the moral compass of spirit to guide them, they would be in a quandary to know how to proceed in this new universe of malleable materiality.
If we should say that the citizen of the Age of Technology at his most pitiable was a poor lost lamb, a solitary soul trying his best to be brave even as he was ground into extinction by the vast uncaring material universe, then Atomic Age man at his most bewildered was an amnesiac orphan child awakened to consciousness in a kaleidoscopic world of matter, not quite certain who he was, or where he was, or how he came to be here, yet somehow saddled with an imperative obligation to make choices and to take actions.
But our story hasn’t been about the poor fish who were left to gasp and flop on the rough shoals of materiality when the tide of transcendent spirit receded, leaving them high and dry. Instead, the story we’ve had to tell has been of the way in which a succession of dreamers, drug-takers, mystics and science-minded speculators—each generation recognizing and building on the one before it, incorporating its insights and attempting to go it one better—were able to gradually evolve new expressions of transcendence in terms of materialism during the 175 years between the beginning of the Romantic Era and the end of the Age of Technology.
This new matter-based literature of transcendence did not come into being without rejection from both of the great contending parties of the West. To the defenders of spirit, science fiction was impious materialism carried to an extreme of presumption and pride. To simple kick-a-rock materialists, science fiction was contrary to self-evident reality. It was idle fancy. But whichever your belief might be, SF appeared excessive.
It was necessary, then, for SF to make its way where it could, as it could, most usually operating near the fringes of social acceptability. Ultimately, during the Great Depression, even as it was failing in Europe, science fiction would find a small safe niche for itself as the last-established of the specialized American pulp magazine story genres.
But yet, for the relatively small but devoted audience that was able to find it, to read it, and to accept it, SF was the truest, most effective guide that society had to offer to the direction in which the West was headed. It was genuine myth. In the science fiction of one period would be outlined the daily reality of the next. To read SF would be a means of preparation for new jobs, new styles of life and thought and relationship, for change after change after change.
Inventors and explorers, submariners and pioneers of rocketry, theoretical and applied scientists, engineers and technocrats—all of these would grow up finding their ideas of possibility and their sense of direction in SF, and when they went forth to bring the modern world of science and technology into being, it was with images from the stories of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and E.E. Smith dancing in their heads.
However, by the end of the Age of Technology, science fiction as a myth of scientific materialism was approaching a dead end—not least because of the very degree of its success.
Material science was losing its former mystery. All the old superscientific wonders so long imagined in science fiction stories—rockets, computers, television, atomic power—were beginning to come true. As they did, they were ceasing to be transcendent. They were changing from a
might-be
into an
is.
Even the dark corners of knowledge where the Techno Age had hoped to find wondrous unknowns were being exhausted. As one example, between 1939 and 1945, the last three empty slots in Mendeleev’s periodic table of 92 elements were filled in. This meant no more beakers of X the unknown metal, capable of sending a Richard Seaton hurtling off to the stars.
To be on the verge of a new world made in the image of science fiction was intensely exciting for the heirs of Hugo Gernsback. And John Campbell and the writers he influenced were motivated to get things right—to bring their imaginary science into line with the new reality. This meant that the science-beyond-science in
Astounding
became more plausible than it had ever been before. But it also became less mysterious.
Where was new mystery to be found?
In the 1920s and 1930s, at the very moment that Techno Age science fiction was mastering space and time with the aid of transcendence based in matter, advanced Western thought had taken a very strange new turn. Atomic physicists, seeking to locate and identify the ultimate fine grit out of which existence is made, fell through matter entirely and out the other side.
Underlying the visible material world, they found a hitherto unknown subatomic level of existence. This substrate was more fundamental than our familiar realm of being—it was the stuff out of which the things we see and hear and smell and taste and touch are made. But this stuff, whatever it was, wasn’t matter in the usual sense. It was something very different, paradoxical and elusive.
In our world—as science was accustomed to dealing with it—matter has surface and substance. It can be observed directly. It can be weighed and measured and manipulated. Most important of all, in interactions of matter it is possible to attribute effects to antecedent causes. All of the efforts and successes of material science had been based upon this premise.
In the microcosmic world, however, none of these things would prove to hold true. As Werner Heisenberg, the brilliant young physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his contributions to the foundation of quantum mechanics, would eventually come to put it: “All the words or concepts we use to describe ordinary physical objects, such as position, velocity, color, size and so on, become indefinite and problematic if we try to use them of elementary particles.”
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Here are some of the strangenesses and difficulties that arise in dealing with the microcosm:
In contrast to the mass and extension that characterize our sphere, the world within the atom would be overwhelmingly empty. The apparent solidity of the things we see around us would be revealed as an illusion.
In the world of conventional scientific experience, elements are what they are. In the microcosm, however, matter could be energy in another form, light would be simultaneously a wave and a particle, and elements might be transmuted from one kind to another.
This underlying level of being could not be observed directly, but only by means of its impact upon scientific instruments. But human-made recording devices would be severely limited in what they could report about the microcosm.
In the subatomic realm, cause-and-effect would not hold true. Here events would occur in terms of probabilities.
What is more, for scientists to make any attempt to spy upon the workings of the microcosm would inevitably be to influence what was observed. Whatever they selected to look for would absolutely determine the nature of the results they got.
This new subatomic level of being might not be the old spirit realm. But, clearly, neither was it any simple cause-and-effect, weigh-and-measure world of tangible lumps where the kicking of rocks could serve as a sufficient test of reality. It was a whole new facet of existence.
It was undeniable that the quantum world did exist. It would be confirmed, in all its strangeness, by experiment after experiment. Its actuality would underlie one aspect of the coming Atomic Age after another, from the atom bomb to the computer chip.
But what
was
it that was lurking down there beyond the range of our ability to see and touch?
Max Born would think that it was probability waves.
Werner Heisenberg would suggest that it was mathematical forms, which he would identify with Platonic Ideas.
A.S. Eddington would simply say, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
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The kind of understanding human beings were to have of our interactions with this realm of uncertainty and indeterminacy was even more problematic. What were we to make of the fact that poking it with one kind of stick gave one kind of result, and that poking it with another kind of stick would just as consistently yield the contrary?
The first construction of this to be offered would be the so-called “Copenhagen interpretation”
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of Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1927. Bohr would suggest that quantum phenomena come into being only as they are observed. That human intention partly determines what the structure of the physical world shall be. That the human mind is a creator of reality.
Albert Einstein couldn’t accept this, and at physics conferences in the late Twenties, he did his best to overturn Bohr. At last, however, he ran out of arguments and had to step back out of the way of the further development of physics.
Other physicists, however, would be more ready than Einstein to accept quantum mechanics—and to take in stride the fact that to do so was to admit the previous insufficiency and the future incompleteness of modern Western science.
There was a considerable irony here. Science had routed spirit in large measure by its claim to be able to answer all questions through weighing and measuring. But at the very moment of spirit’s failure, here was advanced science ready to admit that perhaps it had been a bit over-optimistic in the claims it had formerly made. It would appear that there were undeniable fundamental entities that Western science was inherently unable to weigh and measure.
The old-time language of spirit had largely been left behind during the long passage through materialism, so when the time came for the Twentieth Century physicist-turned-philosopher to step forward and attempt to explain this new-found mystery to the general public, he was unlikely to resort to the bygone vocabulary of traditional religious belief. Instead, he was apt to speak in the contemporary terms of mind and consciousness.
Here is how Eddington would say it:
To put the conclusion crudely—the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by “mind” I do not here exactly mean mind and by “stuff” I do not at all mean stuff. Still, this is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds, but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to the feelings in our consciousness. The realistic matter and fields of force of former physical theory are altogether irrelevant—except in so far as the mind-stuff has spun these imaginings.
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And he would say further:
“The mind-stuff is the aggregation of relations and relata which form the building material for the physical world.”
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We might compare this to A. Merritt writing in
The Metal Monster
in 1920, half-a-dozen years before the devising of quantum mechanics:
Is there a sea of this conscious force which laps the shores of the farthest-flung stars; that finds expression in everything—man and rock, metal and flower, jewel and cloud? Limited in its expression only by the limitation of that which it animates, and in essence the same in all.
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The answer that scientists like Bohr and Jeans and Eddington would come to give to Merritt’s question would be: “Yes, indeed. Allowing for poetic expression, this is very much the way we suppose things to be.”
But there should be no surprise that they and Merritt should perceive things in such highly similar terms. In the early Twentieth Century, a considerable number of Western artists and scientists were beginning to look to
consciousness
as an emerging name for mystery.
This new awareness of mind as an unknown—perhaps the fundamental unknown—was an almost inevitable result of the failure of spirit.
Mind had figured centrally in the origin of the modern Western adventure back in the Seventeenth Century. It was a series of three vivid dreams on the night of November 10, 1619 that prompted the young René Descartes to begin the radical philosophical inquiry that resulted in the foundation of the modern scientific method. And, even before he made his basic division between matter and spirit, Descartes’ initial conclusion in his seminal work,
A Discourse on Method
(1637)—the first principle of his philosophy—was “I think, hence I am.”
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In elaboration upon this, Descartes would go on to say:
I . . . concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that “I,” that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is.
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This is where modern Western science would begin: with one man’s dream of himself as being in essence a disembodied thought—a placeless, immaterial atom of consciousness observing itself and the material world around it, including its own accidental outward trappings of flesh and blood—and that man’s ability to convince others that they were creatures of this same kind.
Until the 1920s and the advent of quantum physics, the dream of complete objectivity would be a continuing unexamined assumption of modern science. Western scientists would believe that they could stand outside materiality and observe it without affecting it, or, for that matter, being affected by it.