The world Heinlein presents in this story is the product of an entirely different course of future development from the one he had evolved for his official Future History. If “Magic, Inc.” was the story in which Heinlein had first shown that he could construct an imaginary future society around any state of knowledge or belief, Beyond This Horizon was Heinlein’s proof that he could just as readily invent future histories to order, now that he knew the method.
Heinlein had made it clear in his guest-of-honor speech in Denver in July—a mere two months after the publication of his Future History chart—that he wasn’t attached to the particulars of his prototype. He had said, “I do not expect my so-called History of the Future to come to pass, not in anything like those terms. I think some of the trends in it may show up; but I do not think that my factual predictions as such are going to come to pass, even in their broad outlines.”533
What was actually central to him was the process of “time-binding,” a Korzybskian term that meant the making of mental projections into time-to-come as an exercise of preparation for future change.
So it was, then, that in Beyond This Horizon, the future historical thread given is all different. Rather than the rolling roads, we are referred to the “Atomic War of 1970.”534 And instead of being reminded of the overthrow of the Prophets, we are bidden to recall “the Empire of the Great Khans.”535
In this variant line of development, it would seem that after the overwhelming horror of the Atomic War people were so shocked at what they had done that they deliberately did their best to breed aggressiveness out of the species. Some resisted this, however, and set themselves apart. Eventually there was a war between the new pacific strain of humanity and unaltered man—the First Genetic War. We are told:
“The outcome was . . . a necessity and the details are unimportant. The ‘wolves’ ate the ‘sheep’.”536
The Second Genetic War, some three hundred years later, was fought against the Great Khans over the issue of human general adaptability vs. special adaptation. Like Wells’s non-human Selenites in The First Men in the Moon or Aldous Huxley’s society in Brave New World, the Great Khans were willing to bend the basic form of man to produce specialized creatures for specialized tasks:
They tailored human beings—if you could call them that—as casually as we construct buildings. At their height, just before the Second Genetic War, they bred over three thousand types including the hyper-brains (thirteen sorts), the almost brainless matrons, the clever and repulsively beautiful pseudo-feminine freemartins, and the neuter “mules”.537
In fighting mule soldiers directly, generalized men did not fare well. But in the end, they won the war:
The Empire had one vulnerable point, its co-ordinators, the Khan, his satraps and administrators. Biologically the Empire was a single organism and could be killed at the top, like a hive with a single queen bee. At the end, a few score assassinations accomplished a collapse which could not be achieved in battle.
No need to dwell on the terror that followed the collapse. Let it suffice that no representative of homo proteus is believed to be alive today. He joined the great dinosaurs and the sabre-toothed cats.
He lacked adaptability.538
With this history, it is no wonder that the society of Beyond This Horizon should be genetically oriented and survival-minded. However, in its genetic selection it avoids the mistakes of the past. It rejects tampering with either human nature or the human form. Instead, it strives to eliminate heritable defects and to conserve and generalize positive qualities:
Infants born with the assistance of the neo-Ortega-Martin gene selection techniques are normal babies, stemming from normal gene plasm, born of normal women, in the usual fashion. They differ in one respect only from their racial predecessors: they are the best babies their parents can produce!539
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”540—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.’ ”541 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.”542
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.”543
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.”544
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.545
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.’ ”546
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”547 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 no
vel 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,”548 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.549
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”550—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”551 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.
15: Consciousness and Reality
THE 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.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 56
