The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence by Alexei Panshin, Cory Panshin Read Free Book Online Page A

and his brother while remaining unseen by anyone but Victor.
    But the arguments Mary had made for bringing the creature to life in a miraculous manner provided no justification for representing it as the master of higher powers of its own. As a result, when he is finally observed at close range, the creature does not retain his mystery. The instant he opens his mouth to speak and give an account of himself, he reveals himself to be just one more Romantic, pained and wounded by the world. He wonders why men are not more rational, and strikes out wildly in fits of passion and revenge. Another young modern.
    No, of the three forms of transcendence, it was transcendent power alone that Mary Shelley was able to reawaken. The simplest transcendence—the power of creation and destruction. As presented in Frankenstein, this was superior power without a proper home, or source, or realm of being. It was superior power without superior beings to operate it. It was live, raw, untamed power, standing alone.
    A further limitation of Frankenstein was that its transcendence was made after the model of the spirit-based transcendence of former times. Mary Shelley was attempting to write a story—in more contemporary terms—that would be the functional equivalent of The Castle of Otranto. The embodiment of her new transcendent science-beyond-science was set to do the work of an old-fashioned ghost—to haunt poor Victor, clank, clank, rattle, rattle —as though science-beyond-science didn’t have any better work to do than that.
    Mary Shelley should suffer no blame for this. She had, after all, set forth with the intention of writing a ghost story in the first place. She was making up her argument for the first time, and because it was the model of transcendence available to her—and the appropriate model to offer to the state of understanding of her audience—her new transcendent science-beyond-science necessarily looked very much like old-fashioned spirit-based necromancy in its effect. Even so, this cutting of science-beyond-science to the shape and size of spiritual conjuring was a limitation.
    A third limitation in Frankenstein was the attitude of horror taken toward the new transcendence. Within the story, it is precisely because of this attitude that everything goes wrong for Victor Frankenstein. If he had only been able to master his ambivalent passions and sit down and have a chat with his creature, he would have found that they had much in common and a great deal of useful information to exchange. Instead, the instant the creature is born, Victor gets a rising gorge and runs and hides under the bedcovers, and it is this act of rejection that turns his creature against him.
    Again, this is not so much a fault as it is a sign of the state of mind of the early Nineteenth Century: They were launched into the new worldview. Science and the general mood of inquiry were having effects on life. People didn’t know how they felt about it.
    Mary was looking to speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and to curdle the blood. She needed something she genuinely felt ambivalent about. She found that in the speculative conversation between Byron and Shelley. It was well enough to be a freethinker, a challenger of convention, but here was the promise of material science to usurp the power of the Creator and awaken life, even in a corpse. She didn’t know how she felt about that. It seemed like a step too far. To write her story was to deal with her anxiety.
    But this kind of anxious horror, however necessary a stage, was an impediment. As long as this stage persisted, it effectively prevented any development of the possibilities of science-beyond-science.
    Frankenstein was the model of SF for the following forty years, until the 1860s and the stories of Jules Verne. It was not quite as singular and inimitable a model work as The Castle of Otranto —but neither was there any clear advance or development of the insights of Frankenstein .