Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (47 page)

The notion that a high civilization might also be a precarious one in its final dazzling efflorescence before catastrophic dissolution appears in Poe’s “Colloquy of Monos and Una.” The associated idea that our own civilization might not be the first to perfect science and technique, and that it will not be the last, appears famously in Giambattista Vico’s
New Science
(1720) and, less famously but more provocatively, in Olof Rydbeck’s
Atland eller Manheim
(four volumes, 1679–1702).

The Dean of Atlantologists Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901) owed much to Vico, Rydbeck, and Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680). Donnelly’s
Ante-Diluvian World
(1882) and
Ragnarok
(1883) popularized the idea that the known ancient civilizations stemmed from a prehistoric high civilization of which those historic ones were mere paltry survivals. C. J. Cutcliffe-Hyne’s
Lost Continent
(1899) tells a sword-and-sandals story set in the decadence of Atlantean civilization and reaches its climax with the famed cataclysmic disappearance of the accursed island-kingdom. The subgenre of Atlantean fantasy reached perfection, however, in the authorship of the Californian Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), who once wrote to Lovecraft regarding Donnelly that The Ante-Diluvian World struck him as being “quite solidly done.”22 Smith often added to the Atlantean formula another baroque trope, the Faustian alchemist or necromancer. An Anglophone Symbolist who idolized Baudelaire, Smith created variants of Atlantis. His “Poseidonis” stories take place among the degenerate polities of the last-surviving splinters of the “Lost Continent,” whereas his “Zothique” stories have for their milieu the dusky geography of earth’s remote future.

Even when Smith spins an extraterrestrial yarn, his interest lies in archeological survivals. Smith’s stories, most of them published in
Weird Tales
beginning in 1930, continue in prose the import of his early Baudelairean poems, evoking fantastic landscapes and architectural imagery using the Gallic resources of English with an occasional Saxon archaism for heightened flavor. Religious turmoil, inquisition, transcendent yearning, and exile structure the tale frequently.

In “The Monster of Prophecy” (1929), in Smith’s own summary, “A starving poet who is about to throw himself into the river… is approached by a stranger who befriends him and afterwards introduces himself as a scientist from a world of Antares.”23 In one of his first glimpses of the Antarean civilization, Alvor, the world-weary poet, sees “a perspective of hills and plains all marked out in geometric diamonds and squares and triangles, with a large lake in their midst,” while “far in the distance, more than a hundred leagues away, were the gleaming domes and towers of some baroque city, towards which the enormous orb of the sun was now declining.”24 The use of the adjective baroque implies less than does Smith’s evocation of twilight (elsewhere dawn) and distance, typical qualities of seventeenth century landscape painting, according to Spengler; typical qualities of Symbolist verse, and the symbols par excellence of Faustian yearning. Alvor’s sojourn on the alien world amounts to “an experience beyond the visionary resources of any terrestrial drug,” part of which is the poet’s awareness “of an unimaginably old and alien…life.”25 The Antarean scientist tells Alvor: “We are a very old people,” among whom “religious sentiment and veneration of the past have always been dominant factors.”26 Alvor soon finds himself the object of priestly inquisition and ends up an asylum seeker among another Antarean people who “had mastered the ultra-civilized art of minding their own business.”27

In the “Poseidonis” story “The Death of Malygris” (1934) Smith describes the master necromancer’s chamber: “Everywhere, by the light of opulent lamps…were tables of ebony wrought with sorcerous runes of pearl and white coral; webs of silver and samite, cunningly pictured; caskets of electrum overflowing with talismanic jewels; tiny gods of jade an agate; and tall chryselephantine demons.”28 The Baudelairean piling-up of luxuriant and luminous figures aims at overloading the readerly imagination so as to simulate rhetorically what Baudelaire himself, in the poem “Correspondences,” referred to as “l’expansion des choses infinies… qui chantent le transport de l’esprit et des senses.” The botanical imagery in another “Poseidonis” story, “A Voyage to Sfanomoë” (1931), strives towards the same Symbolist effect. The only two survivors of “Poseidonis” arrive on Venus where they experience “torrid heat… dazzling color… overwhelming perfume”; they see “flowers everywhere… of unearthly forms, of supermundane size and beauty and variety, with scrolls and volutes of petals many-hued” that exhale “perfumes…like elixirs and opiates.”29 The phenomena in “Malygris” and “Sfanomoë” dazzle their respective protagonists immediately before they nastily die, Smith having borrowed the Baudelairean assumption that violently overloading the sensorium likely entails the (sacrificial) demise of the subject-percipient.

Balcoth, the sculptor-protagonist of “The Plutonian Drug” (1934), tells the pharmacist-physician Manners that in his “romantic days” on provocation by “Gautier and Baudelaire” he had experimented with mind-altering pharmacopeia, such as
“cannabis Indica”;
whereupon Manners convinces him to try “Plutonium,” the story’s titular substance.
³⁰
Dr. Manners recommends “Plutonium” over
“cthini”
and “mnophka,” two other extraterrestrial narcotics, for its lack of a “bad aftermath” and as the stimulus to awaken “some rudimentary organ” with the resultant “metamorphosis of sensations.”31 Ingesting the potion, concocted from fossilized vegetation immensely old, Balcoth finds himself drawn down into a Poe-esque “whirlpool of prismatic splendor” out of the “infinite chaos” of which emerges coherently an “infinite vista.”32 Balcoth, like the characters in “Malygris” and “Sfanomoë,” must pay with his life.

Philip Hastane, narrator of “Beyond the Singing Flame” (1931), makes the transition from a lonely ridge high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to an unknown world, the most remarkable feature of which is the sacred flamboyance of the title, the object of fervent worship in a phantasmagoric city of “solemn architectural music.”
³³
Alien beings venerate the Flame, which Maelström-like compels its devotees to throw themselves into its maw. Hastane taking the plunge
malgré lui
grows conscious of “god-like union with the flame”; he reports latterly that, “every atom of [his body] had undergone transcendental expansion.”
³⁴
Not perishing, but like Poe’s Eiros and Charmion entering a higher order of existence, Hastane immediately confronts “endless avenues of super-prismatic opal and jacinth, arches and pillars of ultra-violet gems, of transcendent sapphire, of unearthly ruby and amethyst, all suffused with a multi-tinted splendor.”
³⁵

III.

Weird Tales
served as the main venue of baroque science fiction although most critics regard that magazine as something other than and inferior to a science fiction periodical. To the extent that John W. Campbell’s vision defined the genre then perhaps
Weird Tales
really was not science-fictional. Nevertheless, Lovecraft published there, who admitted no supernatural elements in his fiction, along with Smith and Robert E. Howard. Indiana born Catherine L. Moore (1911–1987), linked to Lovecraft through her correspondence with him, seems however closer to Smith than to H. P. L. in more ways than one, beginning with her interest in intensely visual figuration, often architectural or ornamental, voluntary derangement as an antidote to unbearable
ennui,
and the emissary protagonist, all of which one can only classify as Symbolist. Now Symbolist aesthetics is related to baroque aesthetics, both by direct affiliation (Swedenborg to Baudelaire and Mallarmé) and in view of a persistent determination on the part of the individual artist to fill his canvas with detail and to impregnate every detail with meaning. The non-baroque artist regards his baroque co-practitioner as decadent, extravagant, self-indulgent, illogical, and repetitious—someone who pushes too many adjectives against his nouns. The baroque artist sees his critic as a Calvinist and a prude.

Moore’s Northwest Smith, like Poe’s narrator in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” fulfills the roles both of pursuer and pursued; he too is
fugitive,
freethinking, not at all prudish, and never a Calvinist. He sits in bars viewing the traffic like a Baudelairean flaneur, consumes potions like a shaman, plumbs the depths of despair and ecstasy, and, last but not least, acts a knight-errant in defending victims against the sacrificial madness of crowds, hierarchies, and cults.

“Shambleau” (1934), the first of the Northwest Smith stories, is entirely fugal, nearly to the point of being, as Spengler might put it, more a musical composition than a literary text. But more than that: An extraordinary improvisation in the rhetoric of synesthesia. And more yet again than that: A moral tale. A brief discussion from Paul Mark Walker’s
Theories of Fugue
(2000) seems apposite to “Shambleau”: “The Latin noun
fuga,
meaning ‘flight’ or ‘fleeing,’ is related to both the Latin verbs
fugere,
‘to flee,’ and
fugare,
‘to chase.’ The vernacular equivalents are
chace
and
caccia,
nouns that likewise designate a chase or hunt.”
³⁶
“Shambleau” commences with a pursuit, one that could equally well find its context in the
Simplicius
narrative, with a crowd chasing the eponymous Shambleau the way a
posse
of Lutheran bullyboys might harass a suspected witch. “Into [Smith’s] range of vision flashed a red running figure, dodging like a hunted hare from shelter to shelter in the narrow street.”
³⁷
Commentary on “Shambleau” recognizes it as Moore’s variant of the generic vampire story; no one seems to have noticed that the tale is also a reworking of “A Descent into the Maelström.” That the mob’s quarry, the Shambleau, initially occupies the position of a victim moves Smith to protect her; she then gradually fascinates him, she drawing him to her despite himself the way the Maelström draws Poe’s narrator, inexorably.

Once the Maelström grips Poe’s narrator in its eddying clutches, panicked anticipation gives way to “the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself” so that the subject “positively felt a wish to explore its depths.”38 Once Smith crosses the threshold of the vampire’s lethal allure, his attitude too alters unexpectedly. In musical terms, he has come to the stretto of the experience, a gesture regularly repeated in Moore’s tales of her tough-guy character. While the creature drains Smith of his life-energy, he perceives that “somehow there was beauty in it,” a luster “like the depths of a jewel,” a “blazing darkness,” and a “devouring rapture.”39 Only his partner’s timely intervention saves Smith, who says that being ingested felt inebriating, like the action of a drug; Moore’s prose makes it equally clear that submission to the monstrous hunger provoked in the victim strong erotic pleasure. In “The Scarlet Dream” (1934), a shimmering swatch of red fabric pulls Smith into an extra-dimensional bubble, where “the sky was a great shawl threaded with lightning that shivered and squirmed as he watched,” and where the twilight was “cloudy…blurred with exquisite patches of green and violet…in a land where the air was suffused with colored mists.”40 The ambiance turns sinister, but of such impressions, ambiguous though they are, Smith remains a connoisseur. He likes to stand, as one might say, on the lip of the volcano spinning on his heel; he likes to drink segir, the Venusian whiskey.

Moore’s colorist penchant derives from her Symbolist sensibility. A passage like this one from Baudelaire’s “Salon of 1846” would not be out of place in one of Moore’s stories: “Let us imagine a beautiful expanse of nature where the prevailing tones are greens and reds, melting into each other, shimmering in the chaotic freedom where all things, diversely colored as their molecular structure dictates, changing every second through the interplay of light and shade, and stimulated inwardly by latent heat, vibrate perpetually, imparting movement to all the lines and confirming the law of perpetual and universal motion.”
⁴¹
In Moore’s novel
Judgment Night
(1943), Juille, the Amazonian warrior-princess of planet Ericon, visits the pleasure-satellite Cyrille, where everything is elaborate
trompe-l’oeil
. Juille has recourse to Cyrille in part so that she might “relax…the rigid self-consciousness” of her usual demeanor.
⁴²
The relaxation entails some erotic license. Thus with a companion Juille lulls in the spell of “distant music” while contemplating “great shining rosettes of light, shimmering from red to blue to white again in patternless rhythms” and a vista of “stars [that] blazed like great fiery roses against the dark.”
⁴³
Judgment Night
concludes in an
Armageddon
of galactic civilizations with an apocalypse of resurgent gods, who announce a new age.

Planet Stories,
in publication from 1939 to 1955, also served as a venue for the baroque in science fiction, most especially in the planetary romances that Leigh Brackett (1915–1978) destined for that gorgeous periodical. The notion of the plurality of worlds, which provides the premise of planetary romance, stems—this fact should by now be unsurprising—from seventeenth century. Kepler’s Somnium (1610), with its depiction of exotic flora and fauna of the moon, qualifies, in Gale. E. Christianson’s phrase, as “the fons et origo of modern science fiction.”44 Equally antecedent to planetary romance are the Cosmotheoros (1695) of Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) and the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757). “Plurality” is as much a theological conviction as it is a scientific principle. God would never have fashioned the stars and their undoubted planets leaving them untenanted; but rather he will have fashioned them to be the mansions of the plenteous and varied humanities that thrive and proliferate, reflecting His divine reason and dignity, throughout the universe. Brackett, like Moore and Smith, often employed in her stories long, quasi-archaic periods and psychedelic imagery.