The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Read Free Page A

undergone in the West. Long-standing political arrangements, the power of religion, the social order itself—all these were eventually to be altered by the change in belief. Much was gained and much was lost in the shift of worldview.
    On the one hand, in the West, the great static accumulated weight of the invisible spirit realm was shrugged off. Popular revolutions of a kind previously unthinkable took place in England in 1642 and 1688 and in France in 1789. Kings with a right to rule that had been given to them by God were turned into mere mortal men who might be executed or sent into exile. The Roman Catholic church, which had held the power and dignity of a state for more than a thousand years, was reduced to wielding a merely theoretical authority.
    The superstitions of the ages were discarded overnight. There was a great release of pent-up energy. Everything was open to examination; nothing was free from doubt. Armed with his newly invented weapons and machines, his science and skepticism, Western man set off to conquer the whole world.
    On the other hand, what was sacrificed was also great: all traditional wisdom, morality, and knowledge based in spirit. Western man, as he launched himself into the world-at-large, was a brainy toolmaker with no morals, out for the main chance, practical, powerful and unscrupulous.
    There have always been those in the West who have regretted the choice that was made. For as long as the new ways have been adopted, there have been nostalgists who have longed for the secure order of the old ways, who have wished again for the comfort of mother church and the natural order of feudal society.
    But, of course, there is no going back. We are now three hundred years down this particular road. The existential decision to abandon the old given spiritual authority has been made, and it is compelling. Whether we like it or not, we in the West are condemned to examine everything for ourselves and to accept responsibility for the decisions that we make. We were set on this road long ago and we cannot resist it now. We can only follow it out to the end and see where it leads, remembering as we do that what far too often has been taken by Western man as a right to license in the absence of moral rule, first began as the existential moral decision to subject all aspects of life to scientific scrutiny.
    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. From 1685 until the time of Gernsback and his consolidation of the genre, SF developed almost subliminally, slowly working out those basic arguments that would permit transcendent powers, beings and realms to be considered plausible within the special terms and standards of Western rationality and materialism.
    But the very first step that was taken by SF—the new myth—was a fall. Hamlet and Paradise Lost, which might be named as final works written within the old imaginative order, are high literature. The Age of Reason can boast no imaginative work of comparable stature.
    The early Eighteenth Century is a mythic desert. There is very little imaginative literature of any kind from this period, as though without recourse to the traditional symbols, the mythic faculty was stunned into silence. What little imaginative work there was, like Gulliver’s Travels, can boast only such limited wonders as dwarfs and giants and talking horses employed for purposes of satire. Next to examples of the old myth like The Odyssey or Beowulf, The Divine Comedy or Doctor Faustus, a story like Gulliver’s Travels must seem an imaginative, moral and mythic reduction.
    The nearest thing to a new contemporary myth that the period could offer was the