The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Read Online Free PDF

the mysteriousness of transcendence. While other Western literary forms have favored either mystery or plausibility, SF is the line that has striven to be complete myth.

3: The New Prometheus
    T HE FIRST WRITER AFTER WALPOLE concerned to find a point of balance between mystery and plausibility was Mary Shelley. She was able to solve the problem that Walpole had not solved, nor any other writer of the Eighteenth Century. In her story Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), begun when she was not yet nineteen years old, Mary Shelley presented an argument that rendered transcendent power plausible in contemporary Western terms.
    The argument that Mary Shelley discovered was an argument for the potential transcendence of creative science. Walpole could not have thought of it—but more than fifty years had passed since The Castle of Otranto. The times had changed. The quality of life had changed. In this altered atmosphere, new arguments were possible.
    It takes time for new beliefs to be accepted, and even more time for changes in belief to be translated into changes in life. The roots of modern Western scientific thought can be traced at least as far back as the Thirteenth Century, when the English Franciscan friar-philosopher Roger Bacon taught the tools of mathematics and deductive scientific reasoning, and for this and other reasons, such as denying the truth of unexamined authority, was perceived as dangerous by the superiors of his order and placed in confinement. It took no less than four hundred years after this, as we have seen, until the late Seventeenth Century, for the philosophy of scientific rationalism to wrest the leadership of society from the traditional spiritual philosophy.
    Even then, the argument between materialism and spiritualism was not settled. Through the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the representatives of spirit were a great conservative force in society. Spirit had vast inherited material wealth and position. It had prominent spokesmen. It had great capacity for resistance to the pace and direction of scientific progress. Even as late as 1860, it was possible for a bishop and a biologist to debate in public the propriety of the scientific theory of evolution. It was only in the 1920s—the era of Gernsback and the founding of Amazing Stories —that scientific materialism finally broke the last grip of traditional thought on the reins of Western society.
    For the first hundred years of the modern period, well into the Eighteenth Century, it was possible for most people in the West to live as though nothing had changed, as though the old traditional beliefs were still the rule of society. The scientific doubt of Descartes and the scientific theory of Newton might convince a reasonable man, but for all that, life was still much the same. There was a great deal of radical thought, but very little radical action. Kings and nobles were still kings and nobles, priests were still priests, merchants still merchants, peasants still peasants. Whatever ideas for new parts and for independent action might be in their heads, the actors in the social drama still fit their traditional roles.
    The perfect example is Horace Walpole. Just as The Castle of Otranto combined the ancient and the modern with no apparent sense of the fundamental contradiction in terms that defeated all imitators, so was Walpole’s personal life also a contradiction in terms. In politics, as a member of Parliament, Walpole was a liberal—a modern man. In private lifestyle, Walpole was a conservative. He was a member of the British ruling class, in the last years of his life inheriting the noble title Earl of Orford. He had traditional tastes. He lived a traditional life of high privilege. Life and thought were two different matters to him.
    At the end of the Eighteenth Century, when Walpole was an old man, the social stasis was shattered. The American Revolution of 1776 and, even more, the French Revolution of 1789 were