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

by Alexei Panshin

  As though the thought of a twelve-foot monkey herding mastodons in an electrically lit underground wonderland would be any more inherently plausible. No, it is ultimately Verne himself for whom the shaggy man has been too much. It is Verne who finds his own imagination unacceptable and rejects it. Verne can no longer go on splitting his vote between Axel and Lidenbrock, mystery and plausibility, dream and fact. He is in a transcendent realm within the World Beyond the Hill and the strangeness of it is more than he can bear.

  Immediately after refusing to confront this fearsome alien creature, the travelers find their path downward blocked. When they attempt to blast it open with guncotton, the earth splits apart and their raft is swept into the abyss by the waters of the ocean.

  For hour after hour they fall—and then they begin to rise again, carried upward on a magic cushion of boiling water and red-hot lava, an experience they find trying but not threatening. Axel once more loses consciousness. When he awakens, he is on the slopes of the newly erupted volcano Stromboli, near Sicily, safe and sound with his companions in the familiar world of everyday. Back in the Village again, and without a single burn to show for having been spewed out of a volcano.

  The twelve-foot shaggy man has frightened Verne into retreating, as though it were Frankenstein’s monster returned, and he Victor Frankenstein. He has had to bail out of his story any way that he can, and hang the implausibility of the device. No matter that the volcanic fire that he could not face with Hatteras is given as the safe and easy means of return with Lidenbrock. In their relief to be home, Verne, Axel and the reader will all agree not to question this mystery.

  But in spite of this abrupt ending, what Verne had accomplished in Journey to the Centre of the Earth was the beginning of a new step in the development of SF. Sleepwalking, splitting his awareness, pretending to himself all the while that he knew not what he was doing, Verne had penetrated into the World Beyond the Hill with the aid of super-science and found transcendence there. It is of no importance that Verne thereafter lost his head and ran away from what he had found. The entire history of SF, one step at a time, has been made by people who were out of their heads or beyond their depth.

  What is of importance is that Verne had connected the World Beyond the Hill and the Village. The return passage from the realm of wonder into the world of known things at the end of Journey to the Centre of the Earth may have been mysterious; the journey outbound from the familiar into the unknown was a thoroughly plausible step-by-step slog. After this story, a roadway existed from the Nineteenth Century Village into the World Beyond the Hill.

  Journey to the Centre of the Earth was the most forthright penetration of the World Beyond the Hill that Verne ever made. It was the only one that took him into territory that was not merely unknown but completely imaginary, and therefore free to display any imaginative possibility that Verne might conceive of. In no other book by Verne was the subtle balance between the Romantic dreamer and the Victorian man of science maintained so successfully.

  However, in further extraordinary voyages written during the 1860s, Verne did nerve himself sufficiently to return twice more to the World Beyond the Hill—in each case seeking undomesticated transcendence, but in each case avoiding a confrontation with it. In both stories he protected his characters from mystery by encasing them in tightly closed super-scientific exploratory vehicles and filling their heads with litanies of scientific fact to chant in self-defense.

  The fourth extraordinary voyage was Verne’s attempt to improve on “Hans Pfaall,” which he had criticized so specifically for implausibility in his essay on Edgar Poe, finally published in 1864. From the Earth to the Moon (1865) was the most technically detailed SF story written to this point. In constructing it, Verne not only enlisted the aid of his cousin, a mathematician, but claimed to have consulted five hundred reference works.

  In Verne’s story, the American Civil War is over and the artillerymen who make up the Baltimore Gun Club are restive. They decide to shoot a projectile from a giant cannon and strike the Moon. While their 900-foot-long gun is building, a French adventurer, Ardan, modeled on Verne’s friend Nadar, arrives and alters the thrust of the project. When the gun is fired, he wishes to be inside the cannonball. His enthusiasm is so compelling that eventually a party of three—Ardan and two scientists—decides to go on this one-way trip to the Moon.

  Verne’s space-gun was no more realizable science than the hydrogen-heating furnace described in Five Weeks in a Balloon. Firing this giant cannon would instantly kill all within the projectile. So great would air resistance within the barrel be that the aluminum bullet would not even reach the mouth of the gun. From the Earth to the Moon is a convincing demonstration that plausibility in SF is far more a matter of effective arguments aimed at the state of knowledge of a particular audience than an absolute condition of accuracy to literal fact. Verne’s wealth of fact and figure, his calculations and arguments were all more than sufficient to establish the literary plausibility of his super-scientific space-cannon.

  But the story is only half a story. From the Earth to the Moon ends abruptly with the firing of the cannon and the announcement from Cambridge Observatory that the projectile has not struck the Moon as it was aimed to, but rather has gone into orbit around it. How strange! How mysterious!

  Once again, Verne proved himself capable of entering the celestial abyss by super-scientific means. But no more than Poe was he prepared to explore the Moon and face what he might find there. He has had to stop his story in the middle, put it in a state of suspension, and leave his readers dangling.

  It took Verne four years to complete his story. In Around the Moon, serialized in 1869, it is explained that a meteor whizzing unexpectedly out of space had deflected the course of the space-bullet.

  Verne cannot allow his party’s expressed intention of landing on the Moon and introducing itself to the inhabitants to be fulfilled. His travelers only approach the Moon closely enough to make observations that confirm the plausible speculations of contemporary science, but not closely enough to see anything radically unexpected. In this manner, Verne shields his characters—and himself—from intolerable levels of mystery.

  In Around the Moon, the viewpoint shifts from Earth to the three men aboard the space-bullet, off in the World Beyond the Hill. And what a strange dissociated trip it is! In his striving for plausibility, Verne has overburdened us with fact. He has placed us safely (good heavens!) inside a cannonball and shot us into space. With a cosmic hand, he has altered the course of the voyage. And all the while, he keeps the attention of his characters firmly fixed on detail so that they won’t notice what is happening to them: “Instead of asking where they were going, they passed their time making experiments, as if they had been quietly installed in their own study.”71

  Verne keeps his characters as distanced from the mystery of the Moon as he can. The bullet swings around to the far side of the Moon, where Poe had placed those dark and hideous mysteries he prayed we might never have to witness, but the passage is made during that region’s nighttime. Darkness conceals whatever may lie below. Only for one brief moment, by the light of another convenient cosmic fireball rushing by in space, do Verne’s voyagers get a glimpse of what may be traces of atmosphere and water. And later, the French adventurer Ardan conceives the Romantic possibility that certain formations below might be ruined buildings.

  But this is as much of a hint of lunar mystery as Verne can permit himself. That the Moon might be an active, present transcendent realm is a possibility that Verne won’t allow into his story. Never again! Verne draws the line there.

  His characters will not be granted the opportunity to encounter the lunar equivalent of that alien shaggy man in the underground wonderland of Journey to the Centre of the Earth. They will not be given the chance that Axel had to perceive that the material of scientific theory and the archetypal symbols of dreams and madness may be the same.

  No, Verne draws his limits exactly. When his voyag
ers fire their tiny guidance rockets with the renewed intention of landing on the Moon, Verne summarily overrules them. Far from landing on the Moon, quite unexpectedly, as though the laws of physics had temporarily been suspended, they find themselves headed back home to Earth again.

  With Verne’s heavy auctorial hand nudging the space-bullet this way and that, first parking it in orbit at a discreet distance from the Moon, then directing it back home contrary to the intent of his voyagers, the most that his characters can do is speculate. They can conclude that if the Moon ever did support life and civilization, these must now be long extinct. And then his travelers can subside back into Village normality.

  In a return that is reminiscent of the end of Journey to the Centre of the Earth in its convenience, the space-bullet comes to a safe splashdown in the Pacific. When rescuers arrive, they find the voyagers calmly playing cards, just as though nothing at all had happened to them.

  Verne’s last great work of SF was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869-70). The novel opens with a reminder to the reader of the mysterious sea-thing that was disturbing the nations of the world by ramming ships in the year 1866. This thing is the Nautilus, a super-scientific submarine under the command of Verne’s most interesting and powerful character, the anonymous Captain Nemo. Nemo is a nationless outlaw with a hatred of tyranny. He is an idealist who has seemingly been embittered by the betrayal of the popular revolutions of 1848 which had shaped the political thought of the young Jules Verne.

  Here we have a dangerous and exciting departure for Verne: a story in which a Romantic is the master of science-beyond-science. We might say that Nemo represents Verne’s final attempt to regain the imaginative balance displayed in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, his last attempt to give the two sides of his nature an integrated expression.

  But this attempt is only partially successful. The narrator of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is Pierre Arronax, a more conventional scientist than Nemo, who has set out to investigate the great mystery and, in company with his servant and a harpooner, has fallen into the hands of Captain Nemo. We are never allowed to witness Nemo’s thought directly. He is an aloof and enigmatic personage, his true motives revealed to us only in occasional outbursts of passion.

  Arronax and his companions are not sufficiently Romantic themselves to fully appreciate the wild and nearly transcendent nature of Nemo and his undersea realm. The only transcendence that Arronax is capable of apprehending is the super-scientific submarine. Arronax is astonished by the Nautilus, and well he might be. It is Verne’s most evolved vehicle of super-science, capable of going anywhere under the ocean.

  The Nautilus is Verne’s best-remembered imaginary invention, cited as an example of accurate prediction by those like Hugo Gernsback who have most forcefully presented the idea that science fiction is fiction about science. In his editorial in the first issue of Amazing Stories, Gernsback would write: “Take the fantastic submarine of Jules Verne’s most famous story, ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,’ for instance. He predicted the present-day submarine almost down to the last bolt!”72

  In fact, however, as a true vehicle of transcendence, the Nautilus is capable of being interpreted as both plausible and mysterious. In the last years before he died, Verne gave several interviews to British journalists in which he made revealing remarks on the nature of the Nautilus which have it both ways.

  In the first interview, in 1903, he came down on the side of the mystery of the submarine. He said:

  The Italians had invented submarine boats sixty years before I created Nemo and his boat. There is no connection between my boat and those now existing. These latter are worked by mechanical means. My hero, Nemo, being a misanthropist, and wishing to have nothing to do with the land, gets his motive force, electricity, from the sea. There is scientific basis for that, for the sea contains stores of electric force, just as the earth does. But how to get at this force has never been discovered, and so I have invented nothing.73

  Here Verne gives credit for the bolts of his submarine to the Italians. He takes credit only for imagining (in a properly scientific manner) that the sea is a great electric battery from which the Nautilus draws power. Since no one has discovered how to do this, he, Verne, is an imaginist and not an inventor.

  In the second interview, given in 1904, Verne placed his weight on the other foot. In the course of trying to distinguish his work from that of H.G. Wells, Verne spoke again of the Nautilus, by way of example, and this time emphasized its plausibility rather than its mystery:

  Take, for instance, the case of the Nautilus. This, when carefully considered, is a submarine mechanism about which there is nothing extraordinary, nor beyond the bounds of actual scientific knowledge. It rises or sinks by perfectly feasible and well-known processes, the details of its guidance and propulsion are perfectly rational and comprehensible. Its motive force is no secret: the only point at which I have called in the aid of the imagination is in the application of this force, and here I have purposely left a blank for the reader to form his own conclusions, a mere technical hiatus, as it were, quite capable of being filled in by a highly-trained and thoroughly practical mind.74

  That is transcendence for you—an attainable leap that remains unattained, a goal for highly trained and thoroughly practical minds to strain after vainly.

  In fact, the power source of the Nautilus, as the actual pages of the story make clear, is transcendent power passing under the plausible name of “electricity,” as so much transcendence did during the Nineteenth Century. The unveiling of the motive power of the submarine in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a model presentation of domesticated science-beyond-science:

  “Before going any further, Professor, I must explain a few things,” said Captain Nemo. “So please listen.”

  After a few minutes of silence, he said: “There is one source of power which is obedient and rapid, easy and pliable, and which reigns supreme aboard my ship. It does everything. It gives me light, heat and is the soul of all my machinery. This source is electricity.”

  “Electricity!” I cried, somewhat surprised.

  “Yes, Monsieur.”

  “But Captain, the great speed with which your ship can move would seem to have little to do with electric power. Until now, its dynamic force has remained very limited and able to produce no more than a very small amount of energy!”

  “Professor,” answered Captain Nemo, “my electricity is not the usual kind, but I hope you will permit me not to go into it further.”75

  And there you are. First, a promise of complete explanation. A trumpet blast, then the pronouncement: “Electricity!” followed by the proviso (not of the usual kind)—and a quick duck behind “I hope you will permit me not to go into it further.”

  Arronax can’t help wondering:

  There was a mystery behind all this, but I did not want to ask too many questions. How could electricity be made to produce such power? Where did this almost limitless force originate? Was it in some high tension developed by a new kind of coil? Was there something about its transmission that an unknown system of levers could increase infinitely?76

  But there is no way of knowing exactly, nor any assurance that we ever shall:

  “Captain,” I said, “I can only admire what you’ve done. You have obviously discovered something which other men will one day find out: the true dynamic force of electricity.”

  “I’m not so sure they will find it,” Captain Nemo answered coldly.77

  In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the undersea realm is the World Beyond the Hill. It is not only a source of electrical power, it is Nemo’s garden, providing him with every necessity of life. One last time, Verne probed into the World Beyond the Hill, hoping still (and fearing) to confront the mysteries of the Abyss.

  The first suggestions of mystery that they encounter are muted. Together, Arronax and Nemo brood for an hour over the ruins of Atlantis—which, like those hypothetical ruins sighted on the Moon in Around the Moon,
are unthreatening because they are safely dead. The Nautilus dives under the great ice barrier that guards the South Pole—but this time what is discovered is neither a Symmes Hole nor a volcano crater, living or dead, but merely a stark peak of volcanic rock.

  Although his companions are anxious to escape, Arronax is fascinated by the adventure. He distracts himself from the strangeness and peril of his situation in the typical Verneian manner—by constantly enumerating the species of fish that can be seen from the windows of the Nautilus as they travel from ocean to ocean.

  At last, however, Nemo can no longer keep his passionate Romantic nature contained. He sinks a warship and heads north at an enormous rate of speed. It is only then that Arronax finally admits the region of novelty and wonder that he finds himself in: