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

by Alexei Panshin

  To Sigmund Freud, Jung could only seem a prodigal son who had elected to turn his back on Freud’s authority and the certainty of material science in order to go scrambling and panting after that old whore spirit. In truth, however, it was in the realm of the unconscious mind and not in the spirit world that Jung was searching for contemporary transcendence. It wasn’t that he was using mind as a veil for old-fashioned religiosity so much as that he was attempting to preserve for his time whatever was still viable in former vocabularies of transcendence and to translate this into the new terms of mind.

  To Jung, accepting the plunge into the unconscious was the necessary road to self-transcendence—the overcoming of limitations and the attainment of higher states. For the patient, the hope was for the integration of the conscious and the unconscious mind. For the artist, the aim was acts of genuine creativity. And for Western culture in general, the goal was the successful surmounting of the current state of excessive rationality.

  On each of these levels, Jung would have his natural allies. These would include all of those who had sufficiently come to terms with the new existential Twentieth Century reality that they were prepared to trust their own individual experience above received authority of whatever stripe—and who had come to recognize mystery in the workings of their own minds. Included, too, would be all of those artists and writers of the day, from James Joyce and Pablo Picasso to A. Merritt, who were starting to look to consciousness for their orientation and inspiration. And finally, included would be the new quantum physicists with their challenge to the completeness and sufficiency of Western science and their tendency to suggest that the apparent material world is spun out of mind-stuff.

  In the end, Jung would be able to progress about as far in his line of inquiry as the quantum physicists would get in theirs. That is, both of these new areas of study—the psychology of the unconscious and quantum mechanics—demonstrated the existence of heretofore unrecognized aspects of being lurking as near to us as the napes of our own necks. Both of these unknowns would persistently elude precise rational scrutiny. Both called into question the basic assumptions of modern Western thought. And, ultimately, the two might even be identical, even though one was nominally the understructure of matter and the other was nominally the night side of mind.

  Taken together, quantum mechanics and Twentieth Century psychology—the psychology of the unconscious, in particular—may be understood as the first steps in the emergence of a new phase in Western social and psychic evolution that could be termed post-materialistic.

  SF, dealing as it always does in best knowledge and in the areas of mystery beyond best knowledge, could not be oblivious to these new developments. But recognizing what they meant and then applying the implications to science fiction stories was no simple and obvious task. Not only would it take years to assimilate the new physics and the new psychology, but in the process SF literature would be altered into something different from the fiction of transcendent science that it had formerly been.

  The first major agent of this change—in part knowingly, but in even larger part despite himself—would be John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding. For exactly as long as he was able to hold together states of mind that were ultimately incompatible through a pure faith that he would be able to make them come out even in the long run, Campbell was the perfect person to oversee the transformation of materialism into emergent post-materialism. The contradictions in his own thought and character were exactly suited to the needs of this moment.

  The inner conflict that was the driving force of John Campbell’s nature was that he loved science, but hated finality and constraint.

  John Campbell was born the son of a scientific man in the midst of an era of unprecedented scientific and technological achievement.308 For someone living in this hour and raised in this family, science was the only possible path to follow. And at some very early moment in his life, John did make a fundamental identification with the precision of science, the curiosity of science and the practical power of science to get things done.

  At the same time, however, the young Campbell deeply resented his father’s authoritarian style, his claims of scientific objectivity, and his automatic presumption in any conflict that he must be the possessor of the true facts. John gradually discovered that the way to successfully oppose and confound his father was to be more scientific than he was—to be more objective, to know more of the actual facts of the matter, and to argue them better.

  The young Campbell extended this attitude to school. He began to challenge the pronouncements of his instructors, refusing to accept that they could be any kind of final word. After all, most of his teachers knew a good bit less than his father did, and his father was very often wrong.

  By the time he got to college, he was so established in this pattern that when one professor stated that the amalgamation of iron was an impossibility, John brought an experimental apparatus into chemistry class and showed that he was mistaken. And when another declared that ball lightning could not exist because there was no theoretical basis for such a phenomenon, Campbell was ready to stand and say that he himself had witnessed ball lightning and knew for a fact that it did exist, whether it could be explained theoretically or not.

  Eventually, the young Campbell grew to perceive himself as a person committed to a nobler and purer standard of science than that observed by the ordinary scientific man. He was more open to strange facts. He was more ready to ask difficult questions. His frame of reference was larger.

  As a corollary of this line of thought, it would begin to seem more and more clear to him that he could no longer continue to accept the authority and sufficiency of present-day science. In the scientific romances and scientifiction stories that he’d read, Campbell had caught convincing glimpses of the wonders of man’s progress to come. And Campbell was also aware that from Newton to Einstein, those scientists who were genuinely of the first rank had always been frank to admit their true degree of ignorance and limitation.

  To Campbell, it appeared an absolute certainty that whatever modern science might have managed to accomplish thus far, and whatever it might think it knew at the present moment, there was yet much more to be learned—and much, much more to be accomplished. Present formulations were bound to be superseded. New discoveries would be made. What was not possible now would become possible in time.

  That was the kind of science that John Campbell wanted to associate himself with. If he was going to be a scientist, it seemed to him that the only kind of scientist worth being was a metascientist—one who was able to separate himself from the orthodoxy and ignorance of the current moment and look beyond them to perceive what might really be possible.

  Henceforth, the only authority that Campbell would agree to acknowledge was the authority of the universe—the final arbiter. But nobody else and nothing less than that.

  This would mean that at the first moment and again at the last, John Campbell would be ready to rise and join more conventional scientists in their ritual pledge of allegiance to the power and truth and inviolability of the laws of the universe as indicated by modern science. But at every other instant, as a measure of his true respect for them, he would be attempting to test these rules to discover for himself how aptly they had been phrased and how well they were actually understood.

  The true scientific challenge, as Campbell perceived it, had to be the discovery of the overlooked principle, the odd implication, the unconventional application, the hidden clause, the loophole or the exception that would permit the accomplishment of all those things that lesser men were content to assume could never be done.

  This ideal of science would be written large in Campbell’s earliest SF, produced while he was still in college and published under his own name. These stories were simple exuberant dramatizations of the wondrous power of science-to-come. His characters would twist the tail of the universe, produce a new principle of super-science, and then hie themselves off to have some f
un with it, traveling to the stars or another dimension, blowing up planets and suns, and showing off in front of alien races.

  It was only natural that a young John Campbell with an eye for the unorthodox but undeniable should glance in the direction of quantum physics and Twentieth Century psychology. These new areas of mystery were exactly the sort of exceptions to the completeness of contemporary science that he was seeking.

  Quantum mechanics was a center of heated scientific debate when Campbell first went off to study at M.I.T. in 1928. He had to become fascinated by advanced science that was inherently paradoxical, that didn’t make any sense at all in the familiar terms of received physics, and yet that was able to stand up to one challenge after another from the likes of Albert Einstein. If he hadn’t gotten caught up in writing science fiction—and if he hadn’t flunked German—he liked to think that he would have become an atomic physicist playing with the nature of possibility.

  Then at Duke, Campbell’s second university, he wandered somewhat farther afield in his search for science reaching beyond the bounds of science. He offered himself as an experimental subject—of no special distinction, as it turned out—in the pioneer efforts of Dr. Joseph Rhine to study telepathy and other forms of extrasensory perception scientifically.

  It would, of course, be no accident that of all the different investigations of mind that Campbell might have chosen to involve himself with, the one that he did pick—Rhine’s parapsychology—was designed along the lines of an experiment in physical science. As avid as he was for strangeness, it was Campbell’s long-term expectation that the powers of the mind, and quantum uncertainty, too, would eventually be brought within the rule and understanding of material science.

  But yet, despite all the interest Campbell was taking in the new Twentieth Century wild science, neither consciousness nor probability was more than peripheral matter in his earliest stories of men having fun with science-beyond-science. However, during his second and more thoughtful writing career as Don A. Stuart, this would gradually come to change.

  The alternate writing persona of Don A. Stuart was invented by Campbell to deal with a problem that was completely beyond the scope of simple, super-scientific “John W. Campbell, Jr.” This problem was the Techno Age dilemma—which was the same as the essential contradictions at the core of his own nature:

  It was science that had brought the Western world, and John Campbell, too, to their present state of thought and development. And both the society (with a certain amount of doubt) and Campbell, Jr.-the-science-fiction-writer (with no apparent doubts at all) were counting on further science to be the means that would carry mankind beyond the limitations of the present moment.

  But it seemed that this very same science in which so much faith was placed was also prepared to declare that do whatever he would, in time man must inevitably be brought low. The laws of nature—whether they be called fate, determinism, cyclical history or entropy—guaranteed that humanity must fail and the universe must perish.

  Here was a thoroughly nasty fact that had to be faced:

  Underneath the apparent invitation of its smile, the science that supported man today and promised him marvelous new accomplishments tomorrow wore the chilly grin of a messenger of death.

  How was that to be dealt with? If John Campbell couldn’t find an answer, it seemed that all the whooping and hollering he’d been doing on behalf of the power, fun and noise of science-to-come was only so much whistling past the graveyard.

  To his credit, once he had recognized this basic conundrum, Campbell didn’t shy away from it. Clearly and unflinchingly, in “The Last Evolution” under his own name, and in “Twilight” and “Night” as Don A. Stuart, Campbell dramatized the scientific case for the passing of mankind, the passing of man’s mechanical offspring, and the passing of the universe.

  Having done this, Campbell then set out to take the true measure of this ultimately final finality. There was nothing he wasn’t ready to examine, no question he dared not pursue, no authority he wasn’t prepared to challenge.

  In the stories that he wrote during the Thirties in the person of Don A. Stuart, Campbell put man and universe to the test. He tested humanity’s ability to cope with advanced aliens. He tested mankind’s relationship with the machine. He tested the scientific process. He tested natural law. And at each turn, he looked for the crucial misunderstanding or ignorance or alternate possibility that would permit men to survive and to prevail.

  Campbell’s ongoing interest in consciousness and probability began to become more specific during this second science fiction writing career as Don A. Stuart. If in former times he’d only thought of these new areas of study as exceptions to the completeness of contemporary science, now he began to value their common ability to contradict the absolute power of determinism.

  Eventually, Campbell managed to evolve an argument, a provisional answer to the problem of human fate that he had set himself to solve. Effectively, the argument ran like this:

  What appears determined to us now may only be the reflection of our current state of limited understanding. The brilliant but still rudimentary achievements of modern science give us cause to believe in the existence of the Laws of the Universe, but as of yet we don’t know what those Laws actually are. Indeterminacy suggests the possibility of free will. Wild talents suggest the existence of possible higher states of consciousness. The best course for humanity is to keep striving to learn and apply the real Laws of the Universe, and to deal with problems as they arise. In due course, Man will find out what is actually possible, and anything that is possible he will contrive to do.

  We can see this argument unfolding in the last few stories that Campbell wrote under the Stuart name. In “Forgetfulness,” he said that humanity was not yet finished growing up, and that man’s future would ultimately lie not with his artifacts, but in the full development of his mental powers. And in “Who Goes There?” Campbell suggested that if natural law was truly universal, applying everywhere and to everything, then men might be able to turn that universality into a tool which no alien creature, however awful or powerful it might be, could possibly deny.

  The final Don A. Stuart story was “The Elder Gods,” a short novel written in a rush by Campbell to fill a hole in the October 1939 issue of Unknown. Here Campbell linked consciousness and indeterminacy and pitted the two against the forces of mechanism and fate.

  “The Elder Gods” takes place in a remote future moment, long after our civilization has destroyed itself. Its setting is a country where men “ ‘know more of minds and the works of the power of mind than any people of the Earth.’ ”561

  But this island society has grown isolated and static. It has fallen under the sway of a set of man-created “gods,” mechanistic in nature, who deal in inflexible logic and the “ ‘absolutes of nature’s laws.’ ”562 However, set in opposition to these entities is another, older group of gods, who are described as crystallized thought-forms and identified with chance. These elder gods draft a shipwrecked adventurer into service as their chosen instrument, and this bold fellow proves able to overturn the usurper gods and re-establish free will amongst the people of this land.

  Don A. Stuart went off into permanent retirement after this story—with a public explanation that the press of work made him too busy to continue writing science fiction. But the special line of inquiry that Campbell had been pursuing under the Stuart name would go on. In fact, John Campbell would tell his writers that it was really Don A. Stuart who was now editing Astounding.

  The most pressing item that Stuart/Campbell had on his agenda as editor of Astounding was to counter the perceived power of cyclical history and the certainty of eventual human decline and failure. In place of Techno Age fatalism, he aimed to open up the future and outer space and offer man his fair chance to master them.

  Any tool that promised to advance this work, Campbell would employ. But the tools he most favored were the ones he had been working out in his Don A
. Stuart stories: indeterminacy/free will, consciousness/wild talents, and universal operating principles.

  Campbell would feature stories of unusual states of consciousness and stories of shifting realities in Astounding from the beginning of his editorship. In fact, the very first story that he would deem new and different enough to dub a “Mutant” in 1938, that initial year of constant deliberate change in the magazine, was Jack Williamson’s serial novel The Legion of Time—originally announced in “In Times to Come” under the title The Legion of Probability. And the first two contributions to Astounding by L. Ron Hubbard, “The Dangerous Dimension” and The Tramp, would be wild talent stories concerning teleportation and the mental power to kill and to heal.

  At this early moment, it wouldn’t yet be clear which of Campbell’s chosen weapons was truly paramount. But, if anything, the implicit weight of presumption was on the side of universal operating principles.

  That is, if there were no problems the universe could present to man that he couldn’t grab by the tail and turn to his own advantage, then it seemed likely that one way or another mental phenomena and quantum reality, too, would eventually be tamed and placed under the rule of law. And if in the meantime mind and reality were to run a little bit wild, that was quite all right as long as the cast-iron future which condemned men to decline and extinction was controverted.

  Once more, we ought to stress that the phrase “universal operating principles” was never used in the pages of the Campbell Astounding. We coined it ourselves in the course of writing this book, taking our cue from Buckminster Fuller, as a way of expressing the characteristic attitude and approach to natural law favored by Campbell, by Fuller, and by other systems-minded innovative thinkers of their generation.