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

utopian story. Though a form of fiction, utopian stories primarily consisted of static and didactic descriptions of the workings of the Perfected Society. This superior mode of living, conceived as the outward expression of man’s God-given rational soul, was the only transcendence this form of imaginative literature had to offer.
    In the absence of high mythic literature—epic, romance and tragedy—the new major literary form of the Eighteenth Century was the mimetic novel of social and sexual intrigue, the reflection of the mundane, materialistic middle-class world that was beginning to emerge. One reason that SF developed in comparative obscurity from the beginning of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment to Gernsback’s time was that imaginative literature in general was completely overshadowed by the successes of the mimetic novel as exemplified by Fielding and Austen, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Twain. Beside fictions about the real factual world of materiality, the new SF seemed frivolous stuff, merely fanciful.
    And SF was also overshadowed by the imaginative literature of former times, which was still held in high regard, even though it was no longer believed in. Next to ancient myth—or even next to comparatively graceless contemporary imitations or retellings of ancient myth—the new SF seemed trivial.
    Trivial and frivolous—those were the beginnings from which science fiction grew. SF before Gernsback, and even since, has very often been trivial and frivolous—that is, apparently playful and unserious. Deliberately courting these qualities has been a survival strategy for SF in its times of unpopularity, a way of attracting an audience craving to be entertained, and even a deliberate artistic method. But underneath this protective disguise of playful unseriousness, throughout its history SF has been continuously engaged in the very serious business of reestablishing transcendence in all its guises, and the reinvention of high myth.
    The state of the invisible and nonexistent SF of the Eighteenth Century—its uncertainty, its limitation, its special problems and the first tentative steps toward their solution—is best illustrated by one novel published nearly eighty years into the rational era: The Castle of Otranto (1764), by Sir Horace Walpole. What is significant about The Castle of Otranto insofar as SF is concerned is that it was the first attempt to reshape traditional mythic material into a form acceptable to the modern Western sensibility.
    The author of The Castle of Otranto, Sir Horace Walpole, was the youngest child of a British prime minister. Walpole was himself a member of Parliament, an extreme political liberal, but is better remembered as a writer of letters and as an eccentric. Walpole was a nostalgist, an antiquarian, one of those who long for the bygone days and ways. In 1753, he began the physical conversion of his country villa, Strawberry Hill, into a little Gothic castle, with details copied out of one book and another. The haunted medieval castle described in The Castle of Otranto is Strawberry Hill combined with Trinity College, Cambridge, and written large.
    The Castle of Otranto is Walpole’s only novel, although he wrote one play and a number of other books, including a defense of Richard III. Like various SF stories in other eras, The Castle of Otranto came to its author in a dream, and then gripped him utterly. In 1765, the year after it was written, Walpole described its genesis in a letter to a friend:

    I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands, and I grew fond of it—add