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

by Alexei Panshin

  The presentation by Wells of an alien realm in The Time Machine was not the only contribution to science fiction that he would make. During the last half-decade of the Nineteenth Century, in a brief period of intense creativity, Wells wrote several dozen SF short stories and six book-length romances, the most conscious, controlled, concentrated and complete SF expression that any writer had yet produced. Not just one powerful dream-generated story like Walpole or Mary Shelley, nor a half-dozen hoaxes and incomplete gestures like Poe, nor even a series of stories cut to a patented pattern like Jules Verne—but a coherent body of work, a brilliant and varied presentation of the mythic implications of the new scientific universe of time and space.

  These stories of Wells may be seen as a summation and re-expression of all the SF that had come before him. He took up themes from Mary Shelley, from Poe, from Verne, and even from contemporary work, and made them his own by converting them into terms of purest scientific materialism.

  Other writers of imaginative literature in the late Nineteenth Century, like Edward Page Mitchell or the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, might waver between appeals to science and arguments based on spirit. Even writers of the Twentieth Century, men who followed Wells by fully fifteen or twenty years, like Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft, might cheerfully intermix scientific and occultist elements in their stories.

  But not Wells. In the more than sixty years that separate the early Verne from the founding of Amazing Stories, it is Wells who stands head and shoulders above all other writers for the purity and totality of his commitment to science.

  Spirit simply had no place at all in Wells’s work. Neither traditional religion nor the rational soul meant anything to him. If he wrote occasional fantasy stories, they were material fantasies like his satiric story of an angel shot out of the sky by a vicar with a shotgun. If he took up themes or ideas that were conventionally associated with the spiritual or occult, he found a way to convert them into terms of unequivocal scientific materialism. The Time Machine is a ready example—a scientific and material equivalent to the out-of-body time-traveling dreams of the utopians.

  Wells took on all of the major themes current in the imaginative fiction of his day that could be treated in purely scientific terms, and he added a number of new ones. He wrote of strange inventions and horrifying experiments, scientists both mad and sane, cosmic catastrophe, prehistoric man, scientific dystopia, weird creatures, future war, space travel and alien invasion. The only story forms that Wells did not take up were those in which the scientific and the occult were inextricably interwoven, like the lost race story.

  Along with all else that he managed to accomplish during his reign as the enfant terrible of the fin de siècle imagination, the gleeful disturber of late Victorian peace of mind, Wells wrote a number of times of transcendent aliens. As we have seen, the depiction of transcendent aliens had been a continuing problem for Nineteenth Century SF. Fitz-James O’Brien had half-shown aliens, but without real conviction. Edward Bulwer-Lytton had intended to show a superior race of beings, but then emphasized vril power instead. Finally, during the expansive Eighties, there had been a couple of even nearer tries at presenting superior aliens.

  One of these was by Edward Page Mitchell. “The Balloon Tree” (1883) presented a sentient flying cactus plant with the psychic presence of “a beautiful and gentle woman.”137 This “Migratory Tree”138 rescues the dying protagonist, carrying him through the air on a fantastic night journey over a hundred miles to safety. But then, at the conclusion of the narrative, our license to believe is suddenly withdrawn. There is a reversal, and we are told that what we have heard is no more than a stretcher, a tall tale, a well-rehearsed club story.

  A more self-convinced attempt at the presentation of alien beings is to be found in the first short story of the French writer J.H. Rosny aîné. In “Les Xipéhuz”—published in the significant year of 1887—hostile crystalline beings that alter in color and shape appear in ancient Mesopotamia a thousand years before civilization. They threaten to increase in number, expand their circle of influence, and take over the world. One man—a rationalist and monotheist ahead of his time whose doctrine is “that men should really believe only in those things tested by measurement”139—carefully observes these beings. He defeats the aliens by noting a point of vulnerability and then overwhelming them with sheer weight of numbers, sacrificing ten human lives for each Xipéhuz slain.

  With Wells, there were no hoaxes, no dream fog, no removal to prehistoric times, no occultism, and, most important, no assurances of the superiority of human reason. Wells, typically, went straight to the heart of the matter. He had no difficulty in imagining that the scientific universe of time and space might produce creatures whose powers exceed our own.

  The first major example of Wellsian aliens is the invading Martians of The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, three years after The Time Machine. These vast, cool and unsympathetic intelligences are masters of advanced science, able to shoot themselves in cannons across the gulf of space from Mars, to stride over the countryside in great glittering tripods, and to fire deadly heat rays. They are superior to us by our own scale of valuation. But at the same time, these beings are blood-sucking monsters, ravenous and unfathomable. Here is the first description of a Martian:

  Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedge-like lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon groups of tentacles, the tumultuous breathing of the lungs in a strange atmosphere, the evident heaviness and painfulness of movement due to the greater gravitational energy of the earth—above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes—were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty. Even at this first encounter, this first glimpse, I was overcome with disgust and dread.140

  Except in its horror, disgust and dread, this description is not altogether unlike our first view of the Time Machine—simultaneously vague and highly specific. And the invocation of “the greater gravitational energy of the earth” is the perfect scientific materialist touch.

  Best of all, however, the ambiguity and alienness of the Martians never grow less as the story proceeds. We are not being presented with beings that impress us first as Titans but then prove to be no more than mobile steam engines. Unlike the Vril-ya of The Coming Race, the Martians are stranger than the super-science they command.

  Indeed, by describing them in various ways throughout the story, Wells contrives to compound and increase our sense of the radical differentness of the Martians. For instance, at one point a soldier calls them “octopuses”141—and we must be reminded that cephalopods were one of Wells’s nominations for a possible successor to mankind in his article “The Extinction of Man.” Then at a later point in the story, the narrator gets a longer, more sober look at the invaders and describes them as “huge round bodies—or, rather, heads—142about four feet in diameter” and identifies their tentacles as “hands.”143 These beings are also Big Brain, and after a page or two Wells’s narrator spells this out for us by citing and discussing Wells’s 1893 article, “The Man of the Year Million.”

  So there the Martians are—scientists, monsters, cephalopods and Big Brains all at the same time. Like the Future presented in constantly shifting guise in The Time Machine, the Martians are a shimmering ambiguity, simultaneously weird, wonderful, awful and impossible to put your finger on.

  These are transcendent beings, both plausible and mysterious. But they are also mortal beings, as we may remember Wells pointing out in the very first sentence of The War of the Worlds. The Martians have a weakness, also glancingly referred to in the first paragraph of the story: the infusoria under the microscope.

  Having “eliminated th
em ages ago,”144 the Martians have no defense against microorganisms. And so, at the very hour of their complete ascendance, the Martians are overthrown. They fall down and die, “slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprotected.”145

  But even with the passing of these Martian invaders, there can be no grounds for human beings to rest easy. It was not the intelligence and power of man that defeated the Martians, but rather humble bacteria. If the Martians should remember the trick of how to eliminate microorganisms, they might yet return, this time better prepared for an assault on Earth. But even if they don’t, there is still no comfort. We can only recall that in “The Extinction of Man,” along with cephalopods, Wells also named crustaceans, ants and microbes among our potential successors.

  Who is to say that what the infusoria did to the Martians, they might not do to us? Who can predict from what direction the next blow of the universe will come?

  Expectably, The War of the Worlds culminates in one more antinomy. In one breath, Wells delivered himself of as grand a vision of human possibility as he ever allowed himself to express in any of his scientific romances, immediately followed by one more reiteration of cosmic doubt:

  Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed-bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space. But that is a remote dream. It may be, on the other hand, that the destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.146

  In his short career as a creative mythmaker, H.G. Wells did more to advance SF than any previous writer. He opened the door to a wonderful and terrible transcendent realm, a place where anything might happen if given sufficient time and space. And he introduced us to alien beings—like so many mirrors of our own nature, our limitations and our potential.

  Set aside all else. Set aside Wells’s fecundity, his range, his useful metaphors and arguments, his pure commitment to material science. Beyond all those things, this was Wells’s contribution to the development of science fiction:

  SF, when Wells took it up, was like a small child raised inside a closed house, daring occasional peeks through the curtain, but always turning back to the familiar world within. H.G. Wells, in the period in which there was nothing he didn’t dare to imagine, took science fiction by the hand, and led it outdoors, saying, This wider world is the real universe, marvelous and deadly. You cannot ignore it. There are other beings out here like no one you have ever seen. Some of them are older and more powerful, and may mean you harm. You have no choice in the matter. Survive if you can.

  And that is the state in which Wells left SF—like a child abandoned in the cold, barren front yard of the vast universe of space and time, gazing around in fear and anticipation.

  7: The Relativity of Man

  IN THE WESTERN WORLD, the most dynamic and powerful social fact of the Nineteenth Century was the growth that took place in the influence of science and technology. At the beginning of the century, the practical influence of technology was slight. By the end of the century, the dynamos of science were about to become the central power source of Western society.

  In company with this great change of outward circumstance, and helping to mediate it, there occurred a parallel radical increase in the effect, the power and the scope of the metaphorical science imagined in Western fiction. One step at a time, and with much reluctance and drawing back, the writers of SF re-created the powers, places and beings of the World Beyond the Hill in the new terms of science.

  With H.G. Wells, this process of reinvention became complete. Wells was the first SF writer to fully accept the apparently limitless powers of unknown science, the vast new universe of space and time, and the potential of evolutionary forces to transform or destroy all that appears fixed and stable. As a result, the entire universe beyond Earth in the present moment became for him the World Beyond the Hill, filled with transcendent marvels.

  However, with the onset of the Twentieth Century, Wells—just like the two earlier innovators, Mary Shelley and Jules Verne—found his sticking point, backed off from his great vision and pursued its implications no further. Wells would continue to write SF books to the end of his long career, as well as stacks of writing of other kinds, but after The First Men in the Moon, he ceased to be the central innovator of SF that he had been. Of the twenty-six novels and stories by Wells that Hugo Gernsback would come to reprint in his early science fiction magazines of the Twenties as examples of the literature he wished to publish, the vast majority were the product of the Nineties. A mere four were originally published between 1901 and 1905, and none later than that.

  Wells left SF with a great deal to get used to. It would be more than a full generation after the early Wells before writers accustomed themselves to the vast distances and cold stillness of the universe of space and time. That same new lot of writers in the Thirties would also learn to tolerate dealings with domesticated aliens—beings imagined as fashioned differently than we, but not clearly our betters.

  Still, the question remains—why did Wells need to retreat? Was it that the receptivity of his audience had changed, or was it that Wells had simply grown chubby and content? Was he frightened by the aliens that he imagined? Or did he just turn his attention to more practical work a little nearer home than the ends of the universe?

  The best answer may be yes—all of these possibilities were true at one and the same time.

  The temper of the times definitely altered at the turn of the century. The fin de siècle was over and the world had not ended. A new untouched century lay waiting. And in January 1901, just three weeks into the first year of the new century, Victoria, queen of England since 1837, finally died. What a relief! Freed at last from the eternal, smothering, oppressive bosom of Mama the Empress!

  The new Edwardians drew in great gulps of fresh air and gazed around them at the nascent century. In this bright new morn, it was clear that the time for philosophizing was past. There was business to be attended to.

  Nightmares emphasizing mankind’s precarious existence in a hostile and rapacious universe were passing out of fashion, at least for the time being. There was a new and more confident mood stirring. For this reason alone, Wells may have felt the need to shift ground.

  But it is also undeniable that he had changed personally. He was no longer a nonentity, an invisible man with nothing to lose by telling society the grimmest and nastiest cosmic howlers that he could imagine. He was financially successful, he was admired by the likes of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and he was no longer a dying man. With a brand-new century opening wide, for the first time H.G. Wells had a future of his own to look forward to and plan for.

  Yes, he did get fat. After the opening of the Twentieth Century, he changed in form from the gaunt-ribbed mustachioed mutt of the Nineties into the plump bristling terrier we remember as H.G. Wells.

  Did this more attached, more connected Wells shrink back before the prospect of the aliens of his imagination? It is possible that he did. Certainly, his last great scientific romance, The First Men in the Moon, in serialization at the turn of the century, is a curious, ambivalent and broken-backed book. It ends once with an apparent minor success, then starts itself up again and concludes in what looks like disaster. And it is superior aliens who are the stumbling block.

  In this novel, the scientist Cavor and the narrator Bedford, a failed business speculator turned would-be playwright, travel together to the Moon in a sphere treated with Cavorite, a substance “opaque to gravitation.”147 It is Bedford’s hope to make himself rich from the commercial exploitation of Cavorite.

  The Moon proves to be a wondrous realm that springs to life when the sun shines. And in caverns below the surface of the Moon, by the shores of an underground sea, live intelligent beings, the antlike Selenites, who wear garments and tend machines and use gold as casually as we use iron.

  Cavor and Bedford are take
n captive by the Selenites. At this low moment Bedford is driven to make a passionate outburst against science:

  “It’s this accursed Science,” I cried. “It’s the very Devil. The medieval priests and prosecutors were right, and the Moderns are all wrong. You tamper with it and it offers you gifts. And directly you take them it knocks you to pieces in some unexpected way. Old passions and new weapons—now it upsets your religion, now it upsets your social ideas, now it whirls you off to desolation and misery!”148

  More optimistically, however, Cavor maintains that it may be possible to communicate with these Selenites. But Bedford believes that the gap between the Selenites and humanity is “insurmountable.”149 In a fit of passion, Bedford strikes out and smashes a Selenite—the first of many he will kill—and the two humans escape.

  When the two separate to search for their vehicle, Cavor is recaptured, leaving only an incomplete and blood-stained note for Bedford to find. Bedford then returns to Earth in the sphere with several bars of Moon gold—precisely the riches he hoped to realize from Cavorite.

  The anti-gravity sphere is lost almost immediately through the meddling of a boy. The adventure is apparently over—a successful smash-and-grab expedition into the World Beyond the Hill.

  But then there is a strange coda, seemingly written while the story was in serialization, as though Wells realized that something about his story was insufficient. But what he provides does not really make the story more satisfactory:

  Radio messages—radio was newly invented then—have been received from Cavor on the Moon. It would seem that more of this story remains to be told that Bedford, because of his limitations, could not tell—Bedford being that fragment of Wells who could not handle the thought of Selenites, creatures different from us if not superior to us. Like Axel and his party in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, he has had to be sent home from his story early.