The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (32 page)

Through the Thirties, the West sat lost in a puddle of depression, nursing its aching head. If the way to face the scientific universe and its threat was not nobility, and neither was it hedonism, then just what was the way?

Most of the West hadn’t a clue. But in fact there was a solution to the Western dilemma—if only the courage and vision existed to perceive and pursue it.

The two most crippling limitations of the Technological worldview were its insistence on anticipating the dictates of Fate, and its resolutely Village-centered point of view. The Technological Age looked forth upon vast new sweeps of space and time—but from a standpoint that was firmly rooted on this planet during the brief current phase of its existence. Western man held up his brave little matchflame of quasi-ignorance and looked out into the greater darkness of unknown possibility that surrounded him—and quailed.

He could not help but feel small and helpless and overwhelmed as he awaited a doom that seemed both preordained and inescapable.

At the outset of the era, the West had been only too glad to accept the dictates of Fate. Late Nineteenth Century Technological man was taking over the world, seizing, ruling and making a profit everywhere. Fate was on his side, an easy justification for every act of force and greed. He was Fate’s darling.

But the period had run its course only too quickly, and now, at the end of the Technological Era, certainty of success had given way to certainty of doom. Fate, once taken to be Western man’s ally, was now cast as his executioner.

The ineffective behaviors of the early Twentieth Century—the stoic nobility and the outrageous hedonism—were both attempts to deal with implacable Fate. First the resolve to be brave and keep a stiff upper lip no matter what. Then the jaunty attempt to say what the hell, shrug, and blot the whole thing out with party noises and strong drink.

But fatalistic reactions such as these were surrenders. They offered no possibility of a way out of the Western dilemma. After the wars and parties were all over, the threat of the scientific universe was still there demanding to be dealt with. And the only way to deal with this threat with any hope of effectiveness was to abandon all illusions of certainty and predetermination. To take one’s chances.

What? Take one’s chances with the unknown? That was a very difficult proposition to entertain. The scientific universe was so very large and dark and intimidating. Who in all the world was prepared to imagine taking his chances with that?

Well—not H.G. Wells, for one.

Little Bertie Wells, the social outcast, had grown up to become H.G. Wells, the oracle of the age. As early as the beginning of the Twentieth Century, Wells had identified the problem of human fate and dedicated himself to doing what he could to solve it.

It was abundantly clear to Wells that if human decline and extinction were to be avoided, it would be necessary for mankind to change its nature, and he said so over and over again. If human beings were to survive, men would have to become scientific and assume control of their own destiny.

So far, so good. But Wells’s advice was only a partial analysis of the problem and only a partial solution. His attachment to the conventional Earth-centered perspective of his time prevented Wells from perceiving that his cool and knowledgeable new scientific man—so urgently necessary in the face of the threat posed by the scientific universe—only made sense
within the context
of this larger unknown.

Wells could never completely accommodate himself to that larger universe. It is true that during his rebellious youth, when he had nothing to lose, Wells had been capable of imagining daring smash-and-grab excursions into the depths of time and space in stories like
The Time Machine
and
The First Men in the Moon.
But as an all-too-successful adult—with a heavy investment in his one-man program to make humanity scientific—Wells found the sheer immensity and incomprehensibility of the wider universe too much to contemplate, and had to turn away from it.

Wells’s response was no more than the response of the era. Technological men might well feel an occasional urgency to go outside and look at the heavens for portents. But always after a short time they would begin to find the stark glitter of the enigmatical immensities too alien and chilling to be endured. And then they would turn away with a shudder and hastily return to their familiar business indoors.

The name of the urgency that first drove Techno-man outside to study the stars was Fate. It was Fate that frightened him. It was Fate that set him to meditating on the unknown possibilities of the world waiting beyond the limits of little Village Earth. Oh, but then the remote and forbidding appearance of the scientific universe would suddenly overwhelm him and send him scurrying once again pell-mell back indoors. Back into the waiting clutches of Fate.

That was the deadly circle of futility and fear that the Age of Technology could not see any way to break. We can view the dilemma of the era written large for us in the most grandly conceived and most noble-minded SF work of the entire Technological Age—
Last and First Men
(1930). The author of this sweeping book was Olaf Stapledon, a 44-year-old British philosopher who was influenced by Wells, but who aimed to see beyond him.

Last and First Men
is a work of fiction, but it is not a story in any familiar sense. There is very little concern with the doings and fate of individuals. Instead, this book is a historical account of the future development of man.
Last and First Men
is an experiment in the recounting of future history.

Stapledon’s scope is immense. He imagines the progress of mankind over the next two billion years. He sees man migrating from planet to planet of the Solar System, altering worlds, altering himself, passing through seventeen future forms.

Man’s culmination is as winged beings, creatures of great aspiration, living on the planet Neptune. It is one of these Last Men, projecting his thoughts back to a person in our own time, who is given to be the ultimate source of our narrative:

A being whom you would call a future man has seized the docile but scarcely adequate brain of your contemporary, and is trying to direct its familiar processes for an alien purpose. Thus a future epoch makes contact with your age. Listen patiently; for we who are the Last Men earnestly desire to communicate with you, who are members of the First Human Species. We can help you, and we need your help.
²²⁷

What a wonderful promise is delivered here in
Last and First Men
—that humanity will not perish now, but will continue to survive for fully two billion years to come, growing and changing all the while. How far this book carries us beyond the temporary conditions and petty worries of the early Twentieth Century moment! What a sense of evolutionary possibility it displays!

And if we should pause for a moment and look back upon the first hesitant probings of time and space by SF at the beginning of the Age of Technology, and then compare these to
Last and First Men,
with its restructured human beings living on the farthest planet of the Solar System at an incredibly remote moment, we can only marvel. What a sweeping transformation of SF has occurred! What a lifting of horizons!

Ambitions previously unknown to SF were at work in the making of
Last and First Men.
In presenting his book to the reading public, Stapledon wrote:

Our aim is not merely to create aesthetically admirable fiction. We must achieve neither mere history, nor mere fiction, but myth. A true myth is one which, within the universe of a certain culture (living or dead), expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admirations possible within that culture. A false myth is one which either violently transgresses the limits of credibility set by its own cultural matrix, or expresses admirations less developed than those of its culture’s best vision. This book can no more claim to be true myth than true prophecy. But it is an essay in myth creation.
²²⁸

But for all its broad horizons and sense of evolutionary possibility, we must reckon
Last and First Men
at least a failed myth, if not a false one. And the reasons are not hard to find, even in Stapledon’s own terms. Stapledon had too much affection for the tragic, he was too unwilling to chance transgressing the limits of his own cultural matrix, and he failed to take into account the newest admirations developed by his culture, the new scientific thinking of men like James Jeans and J.B.S. Haldane.

Or, as we might put it instead,
Last and First Men
founders as myth because Olaf Stapledon was unable to overcome the most typical and familiar limitations of mind of the Age of Technology. Like his fellow philosopher, Oswald Spengler, Stapledon fell victim to the early Twentieth Century dilemma. And the result was that
Last and First Men
is both Village-centered and Fate-ridden.

We never do directly experience the future that we are told about. Rather, we poor petty beings fixed in our own time are condemned to sit in a circle and listen to some inadequate contemporary as he cups his hand to his ear and relays the messages he says he is receiving from the ends of time. And what he tells us sounds remarkably like the most typical fears of the Western world in the 1920s—but imagined on a larger scale.

The Last Men are the Last Men because they are a dying breed. Fate has them by the throat. From somewhere in the outer darkness, strange intense “ethereal vibrations”
²²⁹
have come to bombard and infect the sun. Now it is flaring up with a cosmic fever that will either completely consume it or reduce it to a cinder. Neptune is doomed, and with it, mankind.

Already the sickness of the sun has begun to affect men:

Drenched for some thousands of years by the unique stellar radiation, we have gradually lost not only the ecstasy of dispassionate worship, but even the capacity for normal disinterested behavior. Every one is now liable to an irrational bias in favour of himself as a private person, as against his fellows. Personal envy, uncharitableness, even murder and gratuitous cruelty, formerly unknown amongst us, are now becoming common.
²³⁰

It is very difficult to avoid seeing the similarity between this situation and the mental state of the Western world in the early Twentieth Century. The sick sun and attendant “general spiritual degradation”
²³¹
of the Last Men sound remarkably parallel to the Technological Age’s cretinous God and loss of belief in the soul.

We have heard the Last Man who is the narrator of the story tell us that the Eighteenth Men need our help. And were we capable of speaking to them, we might have help to give them.

The lesson that the Last Men have for us First Men would seem to be that there is a vast expansive future for mankind. We should not give up too soon.

The best help that we First Men could give to the Last Men would be exactly this same message: There is still a vast unknown future waiting. Do not give up.

Or, more specifically, we might say: If men in the past have moved from planet to planet of our solar system as it became necessary to do so, growing and changing all the while, well, why not do it once again? Why not leap boldly to the stars and become Nineteenth Man?

But, alas, the traffic on this particular phone line is all one-way. We can listen to the future, but we cannot reply.

And what we hear is that the Last Men—who would advise us poor pitiful First Men to give up our petty attachment to Village Earth—are themselves undetachably wedded to their limited Village Solar System. Listen—they are telling us that they tested the outer darkness once, and like characters out of Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft, the experience drove them mad:

Recently an exploration ship returned from a voyage into the outer tracts. Half her crew had died. The survivors were emaciated, diseased, and mentally unbalanced. To a race that had thought itself so well established in sanity that nothing could disturb it, the spectacle of these unfortunates was instructive. Throughout the voyage, which was the longest ever attempted, they had encountered nothing whatever but two comets, and an occasional meteor. Some of the nearer constellations were seen with altered forms. One or two stars increased slightly in brightness; and the sun was reduced to being the most brilliant of stars. The aloof and changeless presence of the constellations seems to have crazed the voyagers. When at last the ship returned and berthed, there was a scene such as is seldom witnessed in our modern world. The crew flung open the ports and staggered blubbering into the arms of the crowd. It would never have been believed that members of our species could be so far reduced from the self-possession that is normal to us. Subsequently these poor human wrecks have shown an irrational phobia of the stars, and of all that is not human. They dare not go out at night.
²³²

Well, if this is the case, no wonder the Eighteenth Men are so resigned to their Fate. We really shouldn’t expect them to dare the stars.

In the end, it would seem that what the Last Men really wish to have from us is not help at all, but appreciation of the artistry with which they are going forth to meet their fate. The book concludes:

But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.
²³³

Thus, amidst forced laughter, self-congratulation, and whistling in the dark, exits Humanity stage left—pursued by a bear. We hear the muffled sounds of offstage carnage. How noble. How sad.

We might be forgiven for the thought that we have come altogether too far in time and space only to find ourselves at the end right back where we started from—face to face with the early Twentieth Century dilemma, and still unable to solve it. At the least, we must conclude that, grand myth though it may have aspired to be,
Last and First Men
was ultimately a prisoner of its own period.