Table of Contents
Preface
1: The Mystery of Science Fiction
PART 1: BEFORE SCIENCE FICTION2: A Mythic Fall
3: The New Prometheus
4: Into the Unknown
PART 2: SCIENCE FICTION EMERGES5: The Higher Powers of Science
6: A Universe Grown Alien
7: The Relativity of Man
8: The Death of the Soul
9: Evolution or Extinction
PART 3: MODERN SCIENCE FICTION10: Mastery of Time and Space
11: The Laws of Chance
12: Universal Principles of Operation
13: Shifting Relationships
14: A World of Change
15: Consciousness and Reality
16: A New Moral Order
17: An Empire of Mind
18: Man Transcending
Afterword
This Book Would Not Have Been Possible Without
References and Notes
Supplemental Bibliography
Index
Also by Alexei and Cory Panshin
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The World Beyond the Hill
Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence
by Alexei and Cory Panshin
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The World Beyond the Hill
Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence
by Alexei and Cory Panshin
In 1990, Alexei and Cory Panshin's massive history of science fiction, The World Beyond the Hill, won the Hugo award in competition with books by Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula LeGuin, and Harlan Ellison. Isaac Asimov called it, "The best, the BEST, history of science fiction I have ever read." Exploring the genre from its roots in the Romantic Period to the late 20th century, the Panshins make the case for science fiction as modern mythology. The ElectricStory edition includes hyperlinked contents, index, and notes sections for easy navigation.
THE WORLD BEYOND THE HILL: SCIENCE FICTION AND THE QUEST FOR TRANSCENDENCE
Copyright © 1989 by Alexei Panshin and Cory Panshin. All rights reserved.
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This book is dedicated to
John W. Campbell
Edmond Hamilton
E.E. “Doc” Smith
and
Jack Williamson
The intermediary between the world of Mystery and the world of visibility can only be the Imagination . . .
—IBN ARABI
Preface
FOR AS LONG AS WE HUMANS HAVE EXISTED in our present intermediate state as creatures more than merely animal but also less human than we can be and will be, there have been mythic storytellers. These are men and women who have taken the best knowledge of their time and place and combined it with a sense of the incompleteness of mankind and the fundamental mystery of existence, and then told stories of higher possibility: Stories of fear and wonder. Stories of quest into unknown lands and return with magical gifts which transform the world. Stories of the beginning and the end of all things.
The myths that we learn as we are growing up provide us with guidance in life. In their conservative aspect, myths confirm us in our localness. They teach us how to be a citizen of Rome, a Huichol Indian, or a contemporary American. But far more important is that in their radical aspect, myths alert us to the limitations of how we presently live and who we take ourselves to be, and lead us on toward what we are not yet.
By the manner in which we conduct ourselves and the goals for which we strive, we attempt to make our myths come true in the world. The efforts we make change the world and alter our knowledge. Then new myths become necessary.
The myth of the modern Western world has been science fiction. The ability of this literature to guide our efforts and set our goals can be seen all around us.
The submarine that first traveled to the North Pole—the first nuclear-powered ship—was named the Nautilus after the superscientific submarine of Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo. And its commander would later say that he had been inspired to become a submariner by reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a youngster.
The idea that an atomic bomb might actually be made first came to a physicist who had originally encountered the concept of atomic weapons in a story by H.G. Wells.
An orbital shuttle—an almost-spaceship—has been named the Enterprise after the galaxy-exploring spaceship imagined in the television series Star Trek.
The world that we live in has been formed in the image of the myth of science fiction. Anything we use today may have been made by a robot. Children play interactive games with household computers, and thinking machines play championship-level chess. Men in rockets have traveled to the moon, and we have even sent off greetings to the stars.
The story of the complete life cycle of this myth is presented in this book, beginning with the first faint glimmerings that “science” might be a new name for higher possibility, and ending with modern mythmakers able to imagine that mankind might assume control of its own destiny, establish a galaxy-wide stellar empire, and evolve into a higher order of being.
For those who are interested in the dynamics of myth, this book tells how a new myth comes into being, how the makers of myth conceive and produce their stories, how myth both responds to worldly change and anticipates it, and how one myth at the conclusion of its usefulness may evolve into another.
For those who have love for the myth of science fiction, this book shows where its central ideas and images came from and how they developed, from a time prior to the point when this literature even had a name up until the moment of crisis and opportunity when mythmakers came to the realization that their sense of higher human potential could no longer be contained by the name “science” and began to use another.
And for those with dreams of a sounder, more holistic, more human way of life beyond the fragmentation and purposelessness which presently dominate our society, this book indicates not only how our myths change us, but how we change our myths. It shows how the storytellers of SF, having come to recognize the limitations of a world built upon scientific materialism, altered their myth and laid down the basis for a new age of higher consciousness.
1: The Mystery of Science Fiction
SCIENCE
FICTION IS A LITERATURE of the mythic imagination. In science fiction stories, spaceships and time machines carry us outside ourselves, outside our world, outside everything we know, to distant realms that none of us has ever seen—to the future and outer space. In science fiction, we encounter unknown powers, alien beings, and worlds of wonder where things become possible that are presently impossible to us.
These marvels are the very essence of science fiction. They are the source of science fiction’s fascination and appeal. Without them, science fiction would be just like everything else—normal, known, ordinary, and commonplace. As it is, science fiction is irrational, extraordinary, elusive, wonderful, never completely to be known.
This quality of the unknown, the marvelous, and the wonderful we may call transcendence. No matter how rational and fact-based science fiction has attempted to be, the marvelous has been a constant element as well. The acknowledgment of transcendence was present from the moment that science fiction existed as a distinct literary form.
It was the conscious hope of Hugo Gernsback, the immigrant technocrat who named the genre, that science fiction should be fiction about science. It was Gernsback’s aim to publish a literature that would foresee the possibilities of science-to-come, stories of imaginary technology, stories that would be extravagant fiction today, but cold fact tomorrow.
To this end, in 1924, Gernsback sent out a circular to 25,000 people announcing a new magazine. It was to be called Scientifiction. This was a portmanteau word of Gernsback’s own devising, meaning “scientific fiction.” But the response to Gernsback’s circular was so poor that he abandoned his idea for two years.
Then, in March 1926, Gernsback took a gamble. Without any prior announcement, he issued the first number of a new magazine which he described as “a magazine of scientifiction.” But this magazine was called Amazing Stories.
In an editorial in an early issue, Gernsback attempted to justify what he had done. He wrote:
We really need not make any excuse for Amazing Stories, because the title represents exactly what the stories really are. There is a standing rule in our editorial offices that unless the story is amazing, it should not be published in the magazine. To be sure, the amazing quality is only one requisite, because the story must contain science in every case.1
Gernsback was able to fulfill his true desire to the extent that it was he who selected the name by which this new literature would present itself to the world-at-large: First “scientifiction,” and then later the name that would stick—“science fiction.”
But when Gernsback chose a title to attract an audience to the magazine he published, he had to put transcendence—“the amazing quality”—ahead of science.
And so it would be, again and again. The transcendence at the heart of science fiction can be seen revealed in the meanings of a whole constellation of words used as the titles of one science fiction magazine or another. These words have been the promise of the genre for those who have loved it: amazing, astonishing, astounding, fantastic, marvel, miracle, startling, thrilling wonder, unknown, worlds beyond.2
These evocative words are related to each other. Many of them share common roots. To look up the meaning of one in the dictionary is inevitably to be referred to another:
To astound is to bewilder with sudden surprise, to amaze.
To amaze is to fill with great surprise or sudden wonder, to astonish.
To astonish is to fill with sudden wonder or surprise.
To wonder is to be seized or filled with amazement, to marvel.
To marvel is to become full of wonder, be astonished or surprised.
Around and around these words chase each other, all the while pointing to something unexpected, mysterious and impressive. The deeper we look into these words—and into the older words in other languages from which they sprang—the more we can see that taken together, they indicate a unique extra-dimensional presence.
What characteristics are to be discerned of this elephant in the dark?
It is baffling to the rational mind, as bewildering as a blow on the head. It is sudden or shocking. Its appearance is strange or weird. It is piercing, like being struck by a bolt of lightning. It causes shivers of excitement. It arouses feelings of admiration and awe. It apparently contradicts known scientific laws. It has a connection with the faculty of the imagination. It “seizes,” it “fills,” it “shows,” it “makes visible.” It is of a higher reality. It is the measure of things.
That is what these potent words have meant during their long history. They are the indications of transcendence: of unknown things, higher possibilities, and human becoming.
We are all familiar with the transcendent symbols of ancient myth. Even though they are no longer believed in by modern Western culture, these symbols have been preserved into the present in religious texts and fairytales and echoed in contemporary fantasy stories.
As examples, there are the marvelous old magical powers: wishing rings, enchanted swords, draughts of immortality, caps of invisibility, seven-league boots, ever-filled purses, wells of wisdom, runes, spells, curses and prophecies. There are the ancient mythic beings: gods and ghosts, witches and wizards, brownies and elves, ogres and angels, cyclopses and centaurs, giants and jinns. And in ancient myth, there are places of wonder, countries where anything might happen to us, mysterious realms with names like Eden and Arcadia, the Forest Primeval, Valhalla, the Isles of the Blessed, and East of the Sun and West of the Moon.
Science fiction has been different from this. Like ancient myth, science fiction has presented transcendent powers, beings and realms, but they have had very different names and been conceived of in different ways than the wonders and marvels of previous myth:
The transcendent powers of science fiction have been “scientific” rather than “magical” in nature.
The transcendent beings of science fiction have not been demons and spirits, but rather mechanical robots, mutated humans, and alien creatures from other planets.
The transcendent realms of science fiction have not been located in the heavens or the underworld of ancient religious conception. Instead, these marvelous countries have been placed in the outer space of astronomical study, or in the parallel worlds theoretically posited by our mathematics, or in the future.
From its beginnings, science fiction has been the mythic vehicle of one particular culture, the rational, materialistic, weigh-and-measure, science-and-technology minded culture that has arisen in Europe and America since the Renaissance—so-called modern Western civilization. As a myth, science fiction speaks in their own language to those persons who “think Western,” those people who are the product of the logic of Descartes, the physics of Newton, the encyclopedism of Diderot, the skepticism of Voltaire, the practical experimentation of Franklin, the biology of Darwin, the inventions of Edison, and the revised relativistic physics of Einstein.
This is our culture’s best knowledge. And active myth always presents the transcendent in terms which reflect current best knowledge and then reach beyond its bounds.
It is no accident that Hugo Gernsback declared that fiction in Amazing Stories had to be scientific—true to best knowledge—as well as transcendent. This is the recipe for myth in every culture and at every time.
We seek that which is beyond the bounds of our best knowledge. And when we find it, we bring it home and add it to our store. This is how human beings learn, and how cultures change and develop.
Fantasy stories are not fully mythic because they cling to ancient images of transcendent possibility which no longer appear plausible. Although these may inspire us with reminders of the mysteriousness of transcendence, they are inconsistent with our best knowledge and so cannot guide us to action.
Mundane fiction is also incompletely mythic because the only things it sees as possible are those which exist or which have existed. As strongly as it may reinforce our sense of plausible possibility, at best it can only present larger-than-life characters and situa
tions that remind us of the existence of transcendence without actually daring to be transcendent.
Science fiction has been effective myth for our time because it respects both the actual and the transcendent. It takes account of what we know and what we don’t and then looks beyond the here-and-now to thrill and inspire us with dreams of what might be.
This is the story of the dreams that have been presented by the modern myth of science fiction—and of the consequences when they began to come true.
· PART 1 ·
BEFORE SCIENCE FICTION
The end of our Foundation is the knowledge of Causes, the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible.
—FRANCIS BACON
2: A Mythic Fall
IN FOUNDING AMAZING STORIES IN 1926 , Hugo Gernsback recognized science fiction as the special mythic vehicle of modern Western scientific culture. He gave the genre a name and a home of its own.
But science fiction was not Hugo Gernsback’s private invention. SF had a long and slow proto-development before the days of Gernsback, before it was a named and recognized form.
Gernsback was aware of himself as working in a tradition that Amazing Stories was intended to extend. In his very first editorial in Amazing, Gernsback attempted to define and justify his “new” literary form by pointing to the work of three writers of the previous hundred years: “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”3
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