The World Beyond the Hill
Alexei PanshinThe World Beyond the Hill Sözleri ve Alıntıları
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Among that which was discarded when Western man set out on his special path was traditional myth with its spirit-based transcendent symbology. The appearance and development of SF can be understood as the gradual re-establishment of myth in the Western world, starting from first principles, and phrasing itself in a new, deliberately “non-spiritual” symbolic vocabulary.
We also have an answer to H.G. Wells’s inability to imagine what an ordinary man might find to do out there amongst the enigmatical immensities. The Skylark of Space suggests that even if we had no other reason to travel to the stars, our own human conflicts, attitudes and aspirations might be enough in themselves to provide motive to go and reason to act once we arrived.
With the coming of this era of the ordinary Joe, the popular arts in America took on a legitimacy they had never had before. Suddenly, at the end of the Thirties, there was a creative Golden Age in one medium after another all across the spectrum of popular entertainment, from Hollywood movies and cartoons to swing music to comic books.
At the time when John Campbell became an editor in 1937, there were still only three SF magazines: Astounding, Amazing and Thrilling Wonder. But by 1941, no fewer than twenty-one different SF pulp magazines were being published.
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.
The Future became the locus of the rational perfection that would be. And precisely for that reason, it was no home for proto-SF.
The Romantic wildmen who first developed the materials of science-fiction-literature-to-come were rebels against the Age of Reason. They doubted social progress, rejected perfection, and assiduously sought the irrational. The utopian Future—the heartland of rational perfection—was the last place they would find what they were looking for.
As it happened, during World War II, Canada saw fit to protect the tender sensibilities of its citizens by banning all American science fiction magazines. A partial exception was made for van Vogt, who needed to read Astounding for professional reasons, and he continued to receive his copies forwarded to him through the Canadian censor’s office.
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.
When Lovecraft was a small boy, his father went violently insane and then died in a mental institution. Howard was a mama’s boy, dressed like a girl by his mother. At the same time, she constantly told him that he was hideously ugly and refused to touch him. She would eventually die in the same mental institution as his father.
The Coming Race is not a utopian story. It is SF. It is not the superior society itself that is transcendent in The Coming Race. Rather, the advanced society that Bulwer-Lytton’s narrator discovers is supported and maintained by the super-scientific power, vril. Vril is the very basis of civilization.
Like the utopian story, The Coming Race admits the notion of progress, but this progress is specifically given as scientific progress. It is the scientific power vril that is the measure of difference between barbarism and civilization.
Writers in Weird Tales even invented a new genre—sword-and-sorcery—that preserved magic, the occult, and the materials of the lost race story by removing them to remote moments in time. Clark Ashton Smith at times wrote of a magic-haunted dying Earth—a flat Earth—under the red sun of the far future. And, in his Conan stories (1932-36), Robert E. Howard, a Texan, recounted the adventures of a vigorous young barbarian in a world of black magic and sorcery located between the fall of Atlantis and the rise of known history.