The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

  The transcendent aliens and realms that were impossible for Fitz-James O’Brien and Edgar Allan Poe to imaginatively sustain in the first part of the Nineteenth Century would become readily possible by century’s end when Charles Darwin’s arguments for evolution, published in 1859, had been absorbed and assimilated. In the meantime, however, SF had another necessary stage of development to pass through, a stage in which SF grew accustomed to the rarefied air of the World Beyond the Hill. In these stories, hysteria was quelled, the nature and uses of super-science were investigated, and transcendent realms were entered at last.

  4: Into the Unknown

  AFTER MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN and the suggestive but incomplete stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the next great contribution to the development of SF was made in half-a-dozen books written during the 1860s by a Frenchman, Jules Verne. In these stories, nominally written for boys, Verne was able to do what the Romantics had not done. He treated science-beyond-science calmly and seriously, not as a joke or as an object of fear. He brought transcendent science out of the closet and into the world-at-large and allowed it to have influence on the policies of nations. And in a series of imaginary thrusts into the unknown, Verne was able to pass beyond those mental barriers which had baffled Poe, Verne’s master and model, and prevented him from entering the true region of novelty and wonder.

  The great difference between Verne and the writers who came before him was that he trusted and believed in transcendent science in a way they did not. The artistic priority of the Romantic movement of the early Nineteenth Century had been the recovery of spirit, or something very much like it. To the extent that science-beyond-science was invoked at all by the Romantics, it was as an argument of convenience, a quick assurance that seemingly supernatural events did have some justification. It was a thin wash of plausibility over a central mystery.

  For the Romantics, mystery—the demonstration that rational materialism was not all—was primary. It is a common concern with the assertion of states other than the ordinary which binds a New England Transcendentalist like Emerson, a mystic like Blake, and an opium-taking poet like Coleridge. Likewise, the dreams, drugs, hoaxes, ciphers, and jokes that are found throughout Poe are all intended to be jolts to conventional thought, varying expressions of a single artistic strategy: hang the explanations, take them by the scruff of the neck and show them something different.

  Plausibility was a matter of relative indifference to the Romantics, and the specific means by which plausibility might be achieved even more so. Inevitably, in this atmosphere, the argument for science-beyond-science was only one among many for the evocation of mystery, and not at all the most important, ranking far behind opium and mysticism. In order for the special significance of transcendent science to be perceived, changes in attitude and changes in the world were necessary.

  As the Romantic Period drew to a close, changes of precisely this sort were taking place. Science was no longer a hobby, as it had been in the Eighteenth Century, but a daily activity, even a profession. The word scientist was coined in 1840. And, as more and more such men appeared, and more and more scientific knowledge was accumulated and integrated, the very concept of scientific practice began to alter. In the Age of Reason, science had chiefly consisted of the observation and classification of facts. In this new day, there was an increasing tendency to perceive science as the elaboration of general laws and the discovery of new truths.

  At the same time, it was becoming easier to perceive the practical power of science. The application of scientific knowledge to the daily affairs of men, the increasing dependence of society on scientific advance, made scientific mystery a more and more plausible concept. Indeed, it was near the end of the Romantic Period, in 1859, that the word technology first began to be used to describe the new products of applied science. This new daily world of “scientists” and “technology” was the world in which Verne would grow up.

  Jules Verne was born at the height of the Romantic Period, in 1828, in the inland port city of Nantes—the very place where the inventor of the mysterious gas in Poe’s “Hans Pfaall” was said to live. As a boy, Verne once stowed away aboard a ship, but he was pursued and caught before it reached the sea. He was whipped by his father and, so he later recalled, made to promise his mother, “From now on, I will travel only in my imagination.”43

  At the age of 20, Verne was sent to study law in Paris. He arrived in the aftermath of the popular Revolution of 1848, which Verne had longed to take part in. The Romantic Era was in decline. Verne found himself in a position to absorb the fruits of Romanticism without being overwhelmed by them.

  While a student living on the Left Bank, Verne fell into the orbit of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas accepted a one-act farce by Verne for production in his theater in 1850, and its moderate success confirmed Verne in his desire for a literary career. When he finished his law studies in 1851, he declined to return to Nantes and join his father’s law practice as he was expected to do.

  In the most respectful manner, this young Romantic rebelled against parental authority. He wrote to his father:

  The only career for which I am really suited is the one I am already pursuing: literature. I am deeply moved by your suggestions, but surely I must trust my own judgement in this matter. If I took it on, your practice would only wither away. Please forgive your respectful and loving son.44

  Verne was not simply a Romantic young boulevardier, a writer of light comedies and operettas. He had a continuing interest in geography, and a taste for science. He was a fan of science, reading regularly in the subject at the Bibliothèque Nationale.

  At mid-century, the popular attitude toward science was beginning to shift. At the outset of the Nineteenth Century, Erasmus Darwin’s poetic celebrations of the powers of science were so unusual as to make him a figure of fun, the butt of mad-scientist jokes like the one about Darwin and the vermicelli. By mid-century, the hysterical and ambivalent Romantic view of science was giving way before the everyday reality of a new world made by technology. An enthusiasm for science, if by no means a universal, was no longer a rarity. It was possible that your neighbor might share the same passion, or perhaps his bright young son.

  The year of Verne’s declaration of independence, 1851, might serve as a key year to illustrate the change in progress. Mary Shelley, the representative of the old Romantic attitude who had argued for science-beyond-science but feared it, died in 1851.

  This was also the year of the Great Exhibition, the first great international science and trade exposition. It was housed in Hyde Park in London within a splendid building of glass and iron enclosing twenty acres—the Crystal Palace—specially erected for the occasion as a boast of the new powers of modern technology. The Great Exhibition was a wondrous fair in which the bounties of Western science, technology and commerce were displayed. In the five and a half months that it was open, six million visitors trooped through, discovering the new world-to-come of this century of invention. International expositions became a fad of the Fifties. In 1855, one was held in Verne’s own city of Paris.

  Recently, what may prove to have been the first use of the term science fiction has been traced to our same representative year of change. In 1851, in the course of setting down somewhat commonplace reflections on the subject of poetry, a writer named William Wilson made the suggestion of a new form of literature which he called “Science-Fiction.”45 In almost Gernsbackian phrases, Wilson wrote: “the revealed truths of Science may be given, interwoven with a pleasing story which may itself be poetical and true—thus circulating a knowledge of the Poetry of Science, clothed in a garb of the Poetry of Life.”46

  As far as anyone has discovered, Wilson’s suggestion had no influence on the actual course of development of SF. He made only passing mention of the potential powers of science and technology. His argument was chiefly for the celebration of actual present science.

  But if Wilson’s term
was not adopted until the time of Gernsback, and then was used somewhat differently, to refer to stories with “prophetic vision”47 and “the amazing quality,”48 the seeming parallel of thought between Wilson and Gernsback is no illusion. Wilson and Gernsback are united by their uncritical enthusiasm for science. They represent the beginning and the end of a common attitude. Even though it didn’t bear the name during the period, it is precisely during the seventy-five years from 1851 to 1926 that SF might most deservedly have been known as “science fiction.”

  Jules Verne, who would have the actual impact on the development of SF that William Wilson did not have, was open to the same insights that swept over Wilson in 1851. In that year, Verne conceived the notion of writing romances of science that would be the equivalent of the historical romances of his mentor, Dumas. He criticized himself in a letter to his parents for “lingering on well-trodden paths, when science is performing miracles and thrusting into the unknown.”49 Here in a phrase are the materials of the fruitful SF stories that Verne would write in the 1860s.

  In 1851, Verne published his first short story, “A Balloon Journey,” in which he not only symbolized the transition from Romantic to Victorian attitudes toward science, but clearly foreshadowed his own later work. Like so much of Verne, “A Balloon Journey” was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, then two years dead.

  In “A Balloon Journey,” a balloonist discovers a stowaway aboard his balloon car—“a pale and excited young man”50 who tells him, “ ‘I have studied aerostatics thoroughly. It has affected my brain.’ ”51 The young man claims that he knows the only way to steer a balloon. He wishes to plunge higher and higher into the celestial depths. “ ‘We shall land on the sun!’ ”52 he cries. The balloonist and the madman wrestle for control of the ship. The Romantic falls to his death. The technologist survives and rides a leaky gas bag back to earth.

  Here, in this one early short story, is the very substance of later Verne. In Verne during the Sixties, there is the extension of fact beyond fact, as in the experimental balloon of this story. There are the great visions of impossible possibility, like the madman’s dream of landing on the sun. Finally, there is the split between the dreamer and the man of fact, the man of fact’s fear of reaching too high and falling, and a wrestle between the two for control.

  Before these intimations of 1851 bore fruit, more time had to pass. Verne was not yet ready to write his significant stories. He did not yet recognize his materials or know how to express them. Before he would discover his form and his audience, he would spend more than ten years as an unsuccessful playwright, the victim of a catalog of psychosomatic disorders, a man forced to earn a living as a stockbroker.

  By the early 1860s, Verne was in a state of desperation, the literary success he had hoped to attain by the age of 35 still eluding him. He had written a long essay on Edgar Allan Poe, but had been unable to sell it to his usual essay market. A book-length manuscript on the history of ballooning, including speculation on the use of balloons in African exploration, had met with rejection. Verne even threw the manuscript into the fire, from which his wife rescued it.

  In the fall of 1862, Verne’s friend, the balloonist and pioneer photographer Nadar, whom Verne had met at the new club, Le Cercle de la Presse Scientifique, and from whom he had derived many of his ideas on the future of ballooning, directed Jules to Pierre Hetzel. Hetzel was a publisher of George Sand and of Balzac whose new specialty line of books for children had been so successful that he was entertaining plans for a children’s magazine. He was looking for writers.

  Hetzel declined to publish Verne’s book in its original form. He suggested that it might be rewritten as a story for boys presenting all the factual matter Verne had gathered, but focusing on the possibilities of exploration of Africa by balloon. Verne had written no fiction since 1855, only essays and plays. Here, however, suddenly, was a possibility that resonated with that idea Verne had once entertained of writing a romance of science like the historical romances of his friend Dumas. But not a romance . . . a strange journey, a thrust into the unknown using the powers of advanced science.

  Verne rushed home and began to write furiously. In a matter of two weeks, so great was the power of the spell that gripped him, he produced a novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, which Hetzel published as a book the day before Christmas, 1862.

  Verne’s story concerns the crossing of the continent of Africa from east to west by a party of Englishmen in a balloon named the Victoria. Five Weeks in a Balloon obviously owes something in inspiration to Poe’s “A Balloon Hoax” (1844), in which a party of Englishmen is said to have crossed the Atlantic Ocean from east to west in a balloon also named the Victoria.

  Just like the actual European explorers of Africa of the time, Verne’s travelers hope to spy that once nearly mystical goal, the sources of the Nile. Verne writes: “Formerly, to seek the sources of the Nile was regarded as the act of a madman; a wild dream, in fact.”53

  The Victoria is a minimally transcendent super-scientific balloon. It was based on the new experimental design of Verne’s friend Nadar, then in the planning stage, with the addition of a furnace to heat hydrogen so that the balloon might rise and fall in search of favorable air currents without the use of ballast or the loss of gas. This science-beyond-science may seem questionable today—to heat hydrogen in this manner would surely risk an explosion—but Verne made it appear thoroughly plausible to the audience he was addressing by the confident citing of “fact.”

  Within the story, so effective is Verne’s imaginary science that the Victoria successfully negotiates its passage across Africa, whereas, by contrast, the nonfictional (and non-steerable) balloon constructed by Nadar crashed after a flight in Europe of only four hundred miles in October 1863. Verne’s balloon crosses portions of Africa that were then unexplored. However, nothing more fundamentally mysterious than the sources of the Nile is spied. The Nile is confirmed to have its rise in Lake Victoria, as the English explorer John Speke had suggested in 1858, and the characters congratulate themselves that their “discoveries are entirely in accord with the forecastings of science.”54

  In the France of 1863, Five Weeks in a Balloon was exactly the right book at the right moment. The use of domesticated science-beyond-science to influence the present-day world was something new in fiction. Verne’s story was an imagination, to be sure, but so spare and in command of fact was it, so confident and plausible in presentation, that it almost might be tomorrow’s headline.

  And it was. Not only was the construction and launching of Nadar’s actual balloon widely discussed in the press in 1863, but, in a masterpiece of timing, just after Five Weeks in a Balloon was published, John Speke emerged again from the jungle to say that he had found the source of the Nile in Lake Victoria the previous July—just one month after Verne’s fictional balloon was supposed to have made its passage. To use imaginary science to steal a march on the contemporary explorers of Africa, and be proven correct—how audacious! Five Weeks in a Balloon was a great popular success, not just with those boys born since mid-century who were its intended audience, but with adults as well.

  Here, at last, was the literary career that Verne had always desired. He bade farewell to his friends at the stock exchange—according to one of them, in these words:

  I am leaving you. I have had an idea, the sort of idea that, according to Girardin, ought to come to every man once a day, but has come to me only once in my life, the sort of idea that should make a man’s fortune. I have just written a novel in a new form, one that is entirely my own. If it succeeds, I shall have stumbled upon a gold mine. In that case, I shall go on writing and writing without pause, while the rest of you will go on buying shares the day before they drop, and selling them the day before they rise. I am leaving the Bourse. Good evening, my friends.55

  What was this once-in-a-lifetime idea that had descended upon Verne and kissed him on the brow so tenderly? Lacking direct testimony from Verne of the kind that we have had from
our earlier writers, it is difficult to say how he might have phrased his intentions in 1863—or how he did actually phrase them. Verne had such an intense sense of personal privacy that in 1898, seven years before he died, he burned his early unpublished manuscripts, his letters and private papers. His thinking is veiled from us.

  However, one bit of evidence about his idea is to be found in the public phrase that Verne chose to characterize this new novel form of his—voyages extraordinaires. Extraordinary voyages. This is the outwardness, the common frame within which sixty-five books by Verne would be made. In this concept is Verne’s abiding love of geography and imaginary travel.

  As for the content of his voyages, that was foretold by Verne in that long-ago letter to his parents in which he spoke of science “performing miracles and thrusting into the unknown.” Verne had faith in science. Science—performing miracles and thrusting into the unknown—was Verne’s chosen guide and companion on his extraordinary voyages.

  Whatever conscious thoughts of geography and science Verne may have had in mind, however, there is another element in Verne’s formula for the extraordinary voyage that cannot be overlooked. It may be the most important: Edgar Allan Poe. In the same way that Mary Shelley’s original intent in conceiving Frankenstein was no more than to write a ghost story right, at its most essential and immediate, Verne’s gold mine of an idea might well have been as simple as this—to write Edgar Poe right.

  Verne the late Romantic admired Poe deeply. He liked Poe’s cryptograms, puzzles and strange facts. He was fascinated by Poe’s fevered characters. He loved Poe’s occasional use of scientific materials, and his sense of mystery, his ability to dislocate vision.