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I have recently returned from a trip to America where I travelled from sea to shining sea on a Greyhound bus. During the course of this epic journey I stayed in nineteen hotels and discovered fifteen different ways of taking a shower.
Some shower fittings you twisted, some you pulled, some you pushed. Some had two taps, some had one. Some went clockwise, some anticlockwise. Several had something called a massage setting which produced jets of high pressure water that you could use for stripping the paint off the walls or boring holes in your skull, whichever attracted you the most.
It all struck me as being quite unnecessary. Once you have the basic principle of a shower established; once you have some simple method for getting the water from there to here, what more do you need? The fancy gadgets are just window dressing that add nothing to the simple act of washing off your smelly bits. (Indeed, they often detract from it since the intellectual exercise involved in figuring out how the damn thing works this time can be quite time consuming.)
In other words, why bother?
I used to think that this was the reason why so much SF bored me rigid—like my showers, it all seemed to be just twiddly bits lashed on to the same basic framework. Who really needed another space opera, another time travel story? When you got down to brass tacks, if you had read one then you had read them all. In some ways SF scarcely seems to have advanced at all in the last thirty years which, coincidentally, is almost exactly the length of time I have been reading the stuff. That may not be a coincidence, of course. It may be a symptom of growing up.
It is very dangerous to generalise like this. Damon Knight, the writer and critic, once reached a similar conclusion and announced that the time travel story was effectively dead. Nobody could write another decent time travel story, he said. As a punishment for such presumption, God sent him the plots of four new time travel stories …
Actually, there is rather more to the whole picture than the analogy with shower fittings might suggest. Just how much more I only recently discovered when I read The World Beyond the Hill by Alexei and Cory Panshin (Elephant Books, 1989). It is a book I cannot recommend too highly.
The book is subtitled Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence which is a perfect description of its theme. It is a critical history of SF (yet another!) but it differs from every other one I have read. It has a unified critical theme, a constant point of view. It has a thesis to prove. This unity makes it a much stronger book than the more rambling histories of other authors who have examined the genre.
The world beyond the hill is the Panshins’ analogy for the transcendental world which it is the proper business of SF to explore. On this analogy our world, the mundane world from which we start, is the village. Beyond its borders lie wonders and marvels and myths. In order to explore this world we must leave the village behind and travel beyond “the fields we know”, to quote Lord Dunsany. The literature of science fiction is the log of these travels.
Not only do the Panshins define SF in terms of this exploration, they also show the process of myth making in action. SF is the twentieth century myth and we live in a world formed by its images. I am using a computer as I write this article. Now there’s a living piece of science fiction if ever there was one.
The book is absolutely fascinating. It is stuffed with enough arcane information to satisfy all the trivia freaks (did you know that the last execution for witchcraft in England took place in 1685?). It records the first tentative steps taken into the world beyond the hill, it shows where these early explorers faltered and turned back (perhaps through a failure of nerve) and it details the way the pioneers opened up the territory.
The road map is familiar to most of us. Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells. The descent into the literary ghetto in 1926 when Gernsback started publishing Amazing Stories, the long struggle back up again. Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and Isaac Asimov. Many books have been written detailing these events and discussing these authors. But none has been written with such intellectual rigour and insight as this one. It is magnificent.
I feel that the authors rather play down the influence of Olaf Stapledon (though I do agree with their criticism of the “small-mindedness” of some of Last and First Men). I suspect this is because they are looking at SF from an American viewpoint—Stapledon was much more influential in his native Britain than he ever was overseas.
I also remain unconvinced that the writing team of Kuttner and Moore were as important as the Panshins say they were. They did not write enough to be important. Henry Kuttner died far too early with much of his promise unfulfilled. They could have been important writers—what little they wrote was excellent, but I do not think it was very influential.
But these are quibbles and have little relevance.
The Panshins end their story in 1945 with the publication of Asimov’s The Mule, the longest and most complex of his Foundation stories. In this story the psychohistorical plans of Hari Seldon and the First Foundation are overthrown by a mutant who could not have been predicted by the plan itself. The Panshins regard this story as the capstone of the quest for transcendence. The world beyond the hill, to continue the analogy, is now part of the village. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the village has grown. It is now a suburb, or perhaps even a city.) They argue that The Mule was a guarantee that determinism, as personified by Hari Seldon, has no ultimate grip on humanity. In this sense, they say, the articulation of this idea means that this story marks the end of science fiction. Progress is shown to be possible only through altered states of thought.
This argument explains a lot of my dissatisfaction with much of the SF of the last thirty years or so and gives a bit of philosophical depth to my showers. If it is true then ever since 1945 SF has simply been dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s—essentially a trivial exercise. There is no exploration of the unknown here, no progression beyond the ideas of a generation ago. There is merely a filling in of the blanks in the map now that the borders are in place. To this extent the Panshins and I share a common ground. However we also have our differences.
The Panshins see in The Mule a statement that the future of man will be found in “higher states of consciousness and not in higher science”. They say:
If the material science of the First Foundation is not sufficient to deal with the problem of Asimov’s galactic future then by implication the scientific understanding of our modern Western world cannot be a universally valid and adequate approach to existence either. At best, it is just one possible state of mind among many, and by no means the most advanced.
I cannot agree with this. I do not regard the phrases “higher states of consciousness” and “higher science” to be as mutually exclusive as the Panshins seem to think they are. Indeed I fail to see any significant difference between the two at all. A higher science is ipso facto a higher state of consciousness (or at the very least leads to it) because of the way it opens the mind’s eye to so many wonderful things—by itself it is a transcendental experience. The two go hand in hand and I cannot isolate them one from the other.
When I went to university, the first ten weeks of my chemistry course were concerned with the study of quantum mechanics. I had never in my life before been exposed to such wonderfully powerful and fascinating ideas. I was on an intellectual high for almost a year as I explored these mind-expanding concepts. At that time and for that time there is no question in my mind that the “higher science” I was studying was simultaneously a “higher consciousness” because of the different ways of thinking that I had to bring to bear. The one was simply not possible without the other. It was, as the Panshins so rightly state, a quest for transcendence and for me it was quite literally an epiphany. I was not the same person after that course of study as I was before it.
Kipling said:
There are six and ninety ways
of constructing tribal lays.
And every single one of them is right.
I agree completely with the Panshin’s thesis of the quest for transcendence but the “science” of SF is not the only road through the village to the world beyond the hill and neither is that road a cul-de-sac. It goes further on into more unknown lands. Therefore The Mule is not the end of science fiction (though it is a high point on the exploration) nor is it the end of the story of the myth of science fiction. It is only the end point of The World Beyond the Hill by Alexei and Cory Panshin.
This does not invalidate their thesis. On the contrary, I think it reinforces it. However I do think that in one respect they themselves are guilty of the “sin” of which they accuse many of the early SF pioneers—they have turned back too early in their exploration of the world beyond the hill.
They themselves recognise this to an extent. They say:
In the meantime, the transcendent spirit
underlying SF moved on…
But that is another story to tell.
I, for one, would strongly urge them to tell that story.
The World Beyond the Hill costs $US 50 and is available from:
Elephant Books
RD 1, Box 168
Riegelsville
Pennsylvania 18077
United States of America
You should include extra money for postage and packing when you write to order it.
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