Edgar Allan Poe in the First Year of Weird Tales

This is a very long essay, but as it is about Edgar Allan Poe, I think I should offer it to you all in one piece so that, if you're able, you can read it in one sitting.

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In early 1809, two men were born who would change the nation, though in different realms and at different scales. The first-born of them came into the world in a great eastern city. The second was born on the American frontier. The first was born in the North but grew up in the South. The other made the opposite kind of journey. Both were orphaned in their childhood. Both were frequent failures and had great tragedy in their lives. Both men served in the military, though only for a short time. Both were known for their writing, their words, and their sense of humor.

Both of these men of 1809 died too young, the second-born by violence, the first perhaps also by violence. They died within forty miles of each other, though their deaths were separated by sixteen years and more. The second died in spring, when lilacs bloomed in the dooryard. His death was mourned by millions, and millions witnessed the passing of his funeral train to the final resting place of his earthly body. The second died in autumn. His body was placed in a simple coffin and only a few attended his funeral. The service lasted all of three minutes on a "dark and gloomy [. . . a] raw and threatening day," according to one of the attendees. The headstone of the departed lacked even his name. Only decades after his death did his grave receive proper attention. Now both men are renowned all over the world and both graves are well visited.

The first-born was conservative. In his work, he explored, among other things, the afflicted psyche of the modern man. The other was liberal. He warred against the ancient institution of slavery. The first was one of our greatest writers. There is a professional football team named after one of his poems. The second was one of our greatest presidents. You will see his visage on pennies, five-dollar bills, and the face of Mount Rushmore. It's strange to think that Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe were born just twenty-four days apart.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was and is justly revered in America. There have probably been more books written about him than anyone else in our history. From the moment of his death, the Rail-Splitter, our Great Emancipator, has never been forgotten and is always close in our thoughts as we contemplate the history and meaning of our country. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) on the other hand was slandered at his death, and though his works were still in print for many years afterwards, there were long periods during which he seems to have been almost forgotten, or at least relegated to a minor place in American letters.

That changed as the nineteenth century went on. If you look at the list of collections by Poe in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, you will see big gaps--1856 to 1869, 1871 to 1878--begin to narrow as the turn of the century approached. And every year or almost every year from about 1888 to today, there has been a collection of Poe's works published somewhere in the world. One of those collections, a fairly early one in fact, was entitled Weird Tales (1895).

Jacob Clark Henneberger (1890-1969), cofounder of Weird Tales magazine, is a curious case. He helped bring Weird Tales to life in 1923 and helped keep it alive in 1924 and after. He seems to have been devoted to the magazine and to weird fiction in general, and yet we have almost nothing from his own hand on any subject at all. He seems to have been almost an invisible partner in the whole affair and to have essentially disappeared after the 1920s. But in a letter dated April 14, 1969, exactly seven months before his death, he wrote to Joel Frieman about his adolescent encounter with Poe:

As a lad of 16 I attended a military academy in Virginia. The English department was headed by one Capt. Stevens, a hunchback who was a rather chauvinistic chap in that he favored Southern writers. One entire semester was devoted to Poe! You can imagine how immersed I became in him. . . . (Ellipses in the original source, WT 50: A Tribute to Weird Tales, edited by Robert A. Weinberg, 1974, page 6.)

The school of which Henneberger wrote was Staunton Military Academy in Staunton, Virginia. Capt. Stevens was Captain Luke Leary Stevens (1878-1944), who, in addition to being a teacher, was a farmer, a school superintendent, and a state representative of his home county.

Note that Henneberger wrote that he became "immersed" in Poe. There is a suggestion but not quite an affirmation that he was in fact a fan of Poe. There is a general lack of information--a lack of being entirely forthcoming--in Henneberger's letter that I find frustrating. Why not tell us the name of the school? Why do we have to "imagine how immersed" in Poe he became? And how exactly did he feel about Poe? Why doesn't he say? But then Henneberger founded and stuck with a magazine based on Poe--or at least I believe that it was based on Poe--and so we should assume, I guess, that he was a fan not only of the author but also of weird, mysterious, and fantastic fiction in general.

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was much more direct. In his first letter printed in "The Eyrie" (Sept. 1923), he wrote:

"My models are invariably the older writers, especially Poe, who has been my favorite literary figure since early childhood."

This is how you do it, J.C.!

Henneberger and Lovecraft were contemporaries. They were born a little more than six months apart, Lovecraft in an old, Waspish New England city, Henneberger in rural and small-town Pennsylvania Dutch country. Both grew up in the 1890s. Both would presumably have been exposed to Poe's stories and poems by way of collections published during that mauve decade. Both, too, would have turned the golden age of twelve years old in 1902, when several collections, including a 787-page edition of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, were published, all in one year. As I've written before, I think that the most likely source of the title Weird Tales is in the Poe collection Weird Tales, published in 1895 by Henry Altemus Company of Philadelphia. Henneberger was "immersed" in Poe at age sixteen. Poe was Lovecraft's "favorite literary figure since early childhood." Many of Lovecraft's early stories, including "The Outsider" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1926), are very Poesque. Weird Tales itself would seem to have been a revival of and a venue for Poesque tales of mystery and imagination. Maybe its companion title, Detective Tales, was intended to follow in the footsteps of the man who wrote the first detective story in our literature.

Other early contributors to Weird Tales were also Poe fans and Poe admirers. Poe's name was mentioned frequently in early letters to "The Eyrie," including in the very first one, submitted by Anthony M. Rud (1893-1942), author of the very first cover story as well and published in that same first issue, March 1923. Rud, then, was the first reader of Weird Tales to mention Poe in its pages. Many others followed in their letters to "The Eyrie," including:

• Dr. Vance J. Hoyt, S.O.B., C.P.O., and E.E.L. in April 1923.
• Earl Leaston Bell, Edward Schultz, and A.L. Richard (who commented on "The Sequel" by Walter Scott Story, Weird Tales, Mar. 1923) in May 1923.
• Henry W. Whitehill and H.M. in July/August 1923.
• Curtis F. Day, H.P. Lovecraft, Charles White, and Maxine Worthington in September 1923.
• Dr. Henry C. Murphy in October 1923.
• Walter F. McCanless in November 1923.
• G. Peyton Wertenbacher in January 1924.
• Walter F. McCanless again in March 1924.

Walter F. McCanless (1876-1965) was a Southern author. Like Captain Stevens, he hailed from North Carolina, and, like Stevens, who was two years his senior, he was a teacher. Maybe the two men knew each other. In any case, McCanless had a long letter in Weird Tales in March 1924. Part of his letter is a complaint about the short story "The Autobiography of a Blue Ghost" by Don Mark Lemon (1877-1961), which had appeared in Weird Tales in September 1923. In his letter, McCanless also urged the editor, Edwin Baird, not to print "The Transparent Ghost" by Isa-belle Manzer (1872-1944), and for about the same reason that he objected to Lemon's tale, namely, that it would make a farce of Weird Tales. (He was too late: the serialized story "The Transparent Ghost" was already in its second part by then.) McCanless moved on to his main point:

"We, of the South, believe in Edgar Allan Poe. To have it said of one that 'He writes like Poe' is, to our minds, the highest compliment that can be paid one. (By the way, 'The Crawling Death' by P.A. Connelly [sic; Weird Tales, Nov. 1923] is, in my opinion, equal, for thrills, to anything Poe ever wrote.) We, therefore, should hate to see a publication parody his best known style of writing. Poe, however, attempted humor of a sort (example, 'Why the Frenchman Wears His Arm in a Sling'), but with no very great degree of success, since he is best known for horror and mystery stories. To see these parodied by a publication would result in making such a publication taboo in the South. We turn to joke books that do not hurt our pride."

Poe may have been born in Boston, but Southerners, including Luke Leary Stevens and Walter F. McCanless, claimed him as one of their own, and I think rightly so. They were and are protective of Poe. Manly Wade Wellman, an adopted North Carolinian, wrote a story called "The Devil Is Not Mocked" (Unknown Worlds, June 1943). Well, McCanless wanted us to know that people of his region would not stand for Poe or the Poe-like story to be mocked either. By the way, we have probably all noticed that fans of fantasy, including comic book fantasy, take their subject seriously. They don't want it to be made fun of or mistreated in any way. That desire for seriousness goes back at least as far as 1924 and McCanless' letter.

The first editorial mention of Edgar Allan Poe in Weird Tales is in the blurb for "The Sequel" by Walter Scott Story (1879-1955), in the first issue of March 1923. That blurb reads:

Walter Scott Story offers a new conclusion to Edgar Allen [sic] Poe's "Cask of Amontillado"

(You'd think that a magazine based on Poe would spell his name right.)

I'll tell you right off that I think "The Sequel" was a needless effort, one that completely alters the meaning and undoes the intent of Poe's original. Story should have left well enough alone. An overly sensitive reader might even think of his tale as insulting towards Poe or even towards the art of literature in general. That's probably beside the point, which is that early tellers of weird tales were fully conscious of Poe. Some, like Walter Scott Story, wrote imitations, homages, or pastiches. Poe's influence upon certain other authors was more subtle.

Walter McCanless was getting at something when he wrote that Poe "is best known for horror and mystery stories," and it seems to me that very many of the early stories in Weird Tales were one of those two types. Both horror and mystery are broad terms. In a narrower sense, in the case of some of Poe's stories, horror can be taken as psychological horror, an account of the workings of one man's diseased mind, sometimes told from within that mind. "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) is an example. As for mystery, we now think of that term in a narrow sense and as the name of a literary genre. There are other kinds of mysteries to be sure. But, again, Poe is credited with having invented the mystery genre, also called the detective story, with his first tale of C. Auguste Dupin, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841). Both of these examples were reprinted in Weird Tales as "Masterpieces of Weird Fiction."

The Poesque horror story and the Poesque detective tale come at things from two opposite ends. One is a tale of passion, feeling, irrationality. The other is dispassionate, reasoning, scientific. Remember that Poe called his detective stories "tales of ratiocination." He collected several stories of certain other types in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), the title perhaps inspired by Sir Walter Scott's essay, On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition (1827). I take grotesque and arabesque not as opposites but as two kinds of more or less the same thing. "William Wilson" (1840) and "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), two stories of what I think you can call psychological horror, are included in Poe's contents.

The protagonist of the horror story is flawed--physically, mentally, or morally weak or deficient, if not insane. Maybe he is in a long line descended from Jack Williamson's Egyptian-Hebraic hero and a progenitor of the weird-fictional hero of the twentieth century. The Poesque detective, on the other hand, possesses a level and piercing intellect. Later American detectives, being flawed antiheroes, have more in common with the weird-fictional hero. British detectives, perhaps their French counterparts, too, also some prissy Americans, are at a higher level of society. In any event, the tale of ratiocination can be seen as the beginning not only of the detective story but also as a beginning of the science fiction story with its strong, able, and triumphant hero, a man who applies science and reason to all problems, thereby solving them. The bad part about all of that is that there may be very little of the human in the problem and especially in the problem-solving. Otis Adelbert Kline's Dr. Dorp, for example, is basically nonhuman. It's worth noting here that in an essay entitled "Edgar Allan Poe," D.H. Lawrence wrote:

     But Poe is rather a scientist than and artist. He is reducing his own self as a scientist reduces a salt in a crucible. It is an almost chemical analysis of the soul and consciousness. (p. 111)

That essay was published in 1923 of all years. (It was reprinted in The Recognition of Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlson and published in 1966, which is my source for the quote above.) If you read Poe, you might be struck by a lack of moral sense. Maybe he was more a scientist than artist after all. On the other hand, if his subject was himself, then he was both the rational scientist and the tormented and passionate individual placed on the examination table or under the microscope, in other words, a human being and perhaps an artist after all.

So Poe had his horror stories or weird tales and his detective stories or tales of ratiocination. Under J.C. Henneberger and his business partner John M. Lansinger (1892-1963), Detective Tales came first, on October 1, 1922, to be precise. Weird Tales followed of course in March 1923. There was and is crossover between weird fiction and mystery or detective fiction. Batman for example is both a detective and a weird-fictional hero. And as I've written before, "The Call of Cthulhu," doubtless a piece of weird fiction, can also be considered a detective story. (As in "Ooze," see below, the murderer in Lovecraft's story is not human, or at least some of the murders are committed by the nonhuman Cthulhu.) If, in 1923 and after, you had wanted straight science and no horror or weirdness in your literature of choice, you could have read Hugo Gernsback's radio magazines. Or you could have waited until Amazing Stories came along in April 1926, the same month, by the way, in which Weird Tales printed one of Lovecraft's most Poesque stories, "The Outsider." Shortly after that, Lovecraft began writing "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1928), a mostly Lovecraftian story of some length, although it now occurs to me that it bears some similarity to "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" (1838) by Poe.

The first story in the first issue of Weird Tales is "The Dead Man's Tale" by Willard E. Hawkins, a decidedly Poesque story of psychological horror, even if Hawkins was inspired by The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886). The story is told in the first person by a man deranged by his love for a woman. The first detective story is "The Chain" by Hamilton Craigie, which is ten stories into that inaugural issue. Although there is a somewhat weird element in Craigie's story, it's essentially a tale of ratiocination, and its hero is very nearly without flaw or weakness.

In between those two stories is "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud, a proto-science-fictional tale of the South but also one involving some detective work, carried out by an urban-dwelling Northerner. (In "Ooze," the Southerners are generally low characters, the Northerners high, or at least medium-high.) In this case, the murderer is a giant amoeba rather than an orangutan, as in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." As for the first ape in Weird Tales, see "The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni" by Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding, also from March 1923 and also a story of super-science. And maybe at this point we should consider that all ape and gorilla stories are descended from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and that that was the real gorilla connection in Weird Tales. By the way, Poe paired "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" with another of his stories in a one-bit pamphlet published in 1843. The other is a story called "The Man That Was Used Up" (1839). If you substitute one relative pronoun for another, you get "The Man Who Was Used Up," and so maybe we have another first for Edgar Allan Poe: he wrote the first story with the title construction "The Man Who . . .". The irony is that the pronoun who is used in reference to people, while that is used in reference either to people or things. So who--or what--is the title subject of Poe's story? Is he a man or is he something else?

I'm not sure that Poe was the first literary figure to treat a narrative from the viewpoint of a diseased, depraved, insane, or dysfunctional narrator, in other words, to turn a story upside down by making the villain his protagonist and to try, at least, to make him appear sympathetic, though in a perverse way. There may have been precedent for that in Shakespeare, for example in Othello. I think Poe took a lot from Shakespeare, and I would like to read about parallels in their work. Remember that the word and concept weird may have come to us through Shakespeare. Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) and his confessions were a more immediate precedent perhaps. The hero or antihero of Gothic fiction and weird fiction, Nelson Algren's man with a golden arm, the Angry Young Men of postwar British literature--on and on they go--all may very well be descended from Poe's defective protagonists. So just remember the next time you're watching a movie or TV show and find yourself rooting for the thief, the murderer, or the drug addict: you may just be the latest consumer of a Poesque brand of fiction.

The narrator of "The Cask of Amontillado" is named Montresor. Like Iago, he has a complaint against his hapless victim, poor Fortunato. (Or Unfortunato.) You could call him a killer, but killing isn't exactly his aim. Instead, it's a perverse and depraved kind of revenge--or worse. Walter Scott Story's "Sequel" picks up where Poe left off. Story's story is overtly Poesque, a kind of pastiche in fact. Other Poesque tales are more subtle. However, the discerning reader can tell one when he or she sees it. For example, in the July/August 1923 installment of "The Eyrie," H. M. of New York, New York, remarked upon the similarity of "The Devil Plant" by Lyle Wilson Holden (Weird Tales, May 1923) to "The Cask of Amontillado." I have a feeling that if you were to study the first few years of Weird Tales contents, you would find many more parallels--which might be a polite word for ripoffs. We have seen the same thing during the past century regarding Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. (Not that I've been around for the past century.) That doesn't seem to be the case with Clark Ashton Smith, but how would you ever rip off CAS? With his language, imagery, and vast vocabulary, he seems to have made his work ripoff-proof.

The first mention of Poe in a nonfiction item in Weird Tales is in the first installment of "Weird Crimes"--its subject "Bluebeard"--by Seabury Quinn. That was in October 1923. The first mention in a story is in the March 1924 issue, in "The Fine Art of Suicide" by Howard Rockey (p. 19). Poe is also mentioned and even quoted in "Draconda" by John Martin Leahy. (p. 65; p. 70).

Rockey wrote:

"Some day," he would muse in his lighter moments, "an inspired genius will actually live or die a real story for me--with all the trimmings that even a Poe could desire--and I won"t have to fake a single detail!"

Leahy followed Rockey in his invocation of Poe, but at greater length:

     "You know," I said, "things come crowding into my mind--visions, memories, words spoken or written, some long forgotten. Among the words penned, induced no doubt by what has just been said, this haunting sentence of Poe's:

     "'No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding or believing, that any thing exists greater than his own soul'."

     "So you waded through Eureka. What did you get out of it?"

     "Not much; that and a few others. This, for instance:

     "'We walk about, amid the destinies of our world-existence, encompassed by dim and ever present Memories of a Destiny more vast'." (p. 65)

Then:

     Her figure was tall and slender and willowy. In her depthless eyes, and on and about her full lips, was a look the like of which I had never seen in all my life. It reminded one of sadness, and yet it was not an expression of sadness. If I were to say that it was one of deep experience, there would come, I believe, an idea of harshness or even cruelty perhaps; but there was neither harshness nor cruelty in the eyes of Draconda. It was, I fancy, an expression very like that in the orbs of Poe’s Ligeia: "I have felt it in the ocean--in the falling of a meteor." (p. 70)

I'm not sure that it really means anything, but Eureka (1848) is supposed to have been a work of ratiocination, while "Ligeia" (1838) is a horror story or weird tale.

May/June/July 1924 was past the one-year anniversary of Weird Tales. Nonetheless, I'll point out that Poe's name is mentioned ten times in Otis Adelbert Kline's manifesto-of-sorts "Why Weird Tales." Poe is the first author and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" the first story mentioned therein. Kline called "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" "[t]he greatest weird story and one of the greatest short stories ever written."

Edgar Allan Poe had fourteen stories and four poems in Weird Tales. Five of the stories were reprinted in the first year of the magazine in the series "Masterpieces of Weird Fiction." They were:

• "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (the cover story of the June 1923 issue)
• "The Pit and the Pendulum" (Oct. 1923)
• "The Tell-Tale Heart" (Nov. 1923)
• "The Black Cat" (Jan. 1924)
• "Never Bet the Devil Your Head"(Mar. 1924)

Poe's next story reprinted in Weird Tales was "The Mask [sic] of the Red Death," in March 1926. The last was "The Fall of the House of Usher" in August 1939. Farnsworth Wright was editor during those years. Dorothy McIlwraith took over his post in 1940. I believe she emphasized new stories, but even she eventually turned to reprinting previously published works. But no more of Edgar Allan Poe.

One last thing regarding Poe and Weird Tales. In his lecture "House of Poe" (1959), poet Richard Wilbur remarked on Poe's repeated use of spirals and vortices in his work. These are in "MS. Found in a Bottle," "Descent into the Maelstrom," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Metzengerstein," and "King Pest." Wilbur's speculation was that spirals and vortices "had some symbolic value for Poe." His conclusion: "What the spiral inevitably represents in any tale of Poe's is the loss of consciousness, and the descent of the mind into sleep." (The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 257). There were circles and spirals on the cover of Weird Tales, but I think these went beyond the symbolism of Poe's stories and sleep was not at their end.

Edgar Allan Poe on the cover of Weird Tales, September 1939, with cover art by Virgil Finlay.

This will have to do until later in the month or maybe into December when I will wrap up this series on the 100-year anniversary of Weird Tales. Until then:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

We Are Marching to Utopia

We remember Paradise and we want it back. Once History turned out of its cycle and was loosed into its flight as an arrow, we thought we had found the way: the Millennium will come and we will have it once again. Progress is the vision, the guiding force, most of all the technique. We are marching towards Utopia, the cadence called by History in the voice of its progressive interpreter.

The communist Utopia was supposed to be a Worker's Paradise, a stateless state in which the Proletariat owned the means of production and were no longer bound to their sole respective roles, where a man might be free to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and criticize after dinner.

Instead we have Cuba.

The African Utopia was supposed to be Wakanda. Instead we have South Africa. Earlier this year, the University of Capetown Library burned and with it the cultural and historical treasures of nations. The South African Post Office arrived, too, on the edge of bankruptcy. I don't know where it is now. And South African Airways, unable to survive as a ward of the State, was sold into the private sector. That might be the thing that saves it after all. Word is that the airline will resume flights in September.

I began writing this little article in July, when protesters were in the streets of Cuba. The New York Times described them in this way, from July 11, 2021: "Shouting 'Freedom' and other anti-government slogans, hundreds of Cubans took to the streets in cities around the country on Sunday . . . ."

"'Freedom' and other anti-government slogans . . . ."

Nice going, Times.

They're right of course. "Freedom" is an anti-government slogan. Where they're wrong is where their sympathies obviously lie, for they obviously lie with the Cuban government and not with the people who suffer under it.

So I made up some fake headlines:

Democrats Alarmed as Lego Group Sends Presidential Palace Building Sets to Cuba

Progressives Want End to Trade Embargo So Antifa Can Burn the American Flags Currently Being Waved by Cuban Protestors

Google Translate Changes Meaning of Spanish Word "Libertad" from "Liberty" to "We Want More Covid Vaccines"

Now here it is August and the Taliban have walked into Kabul. And now here's a real headline, from Business Insider, August 20, 2021:

A baby that was photographed being passed to US soldiers over razor wire in Afghanistan has been safely reunited with their father

Their father.

That headline sums up as well as any why the Taliban won and we lost: They were determined to defeat their enemies. We're worried about pronouns.

I don't think of the Taliban as being utopian in their thinking, although Islamism has its eyes on the future and the setting up of an all-powerful State. But like utopians and other progressives, Islamists are anti-liberal. And their victory shows what happens when men burning with a holy fire encounter the bloodless Liberal. If we are to win in any of this, we have to burn, too. 

Comic books are often described as an "adolescent power fantasy" or a "male adolescent power fantasy"--a phrase that has become a cliché and perhaps deserving of an acronym: APF or MAPF. (The latter reads like a comic book sound effect.) Power fantasy is supposed to be a pejorative, I guess, but who exactly lacks them? (If Business Insider can use a plural pronoun with a singular antecedent, so can I.) Nobody I can think of. You could say that romance novels are the female version of the power fantasy. You can come up with your own examples, I'm sure. Anyway, the reason I bring up the topic is that socialism and Marxism are adolescent power fantasies, too. They are enjoyed most by men and women with adolescent--or childish--or even infantile--minds. These people imagine, I guess, that when the Revolution comes, they will assume their power, what is rightfully theirs and has been denied them. Then you'll pay. That's right. Then you'll pay. Never mind that the merely intellectual revolutionary--the guy with the books and the ideas and the glasses to correct his myopia--always falls before his truly ruthless comrades.

Let's not march towards Utopia anymore. Let's choose a better way and a better world instead--better than Utopia--a world that is more human because it is imperfect.

One more thing: a fitting soundtrack has played as I have written this tonight: Harold Budd's Abandoned Cities. And it's from a fitting year: 1984.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

What's Your Vector, D-503?

From We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1924):

    This is merely a copy, word for word, of what was published this morning in the State newspaper:

    "In another hundred and twenty days the building of the Integral will be completed. The great historic hour is near, when the first Integral will rise into the limitless space of the universe. One thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subjected the whole earth to the power of the United State. A still more glorious task is before you: the integration of the indefinite equation of the Cosmos by the use of the glass, electric, fire-breathing Integral. Your mission is to subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets, and who are perhaps still in the primitive state of freedom. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy. But before we take up arms, we shall try the power of words.

    "In the name of The Well-Doer, the following is announced herewith to all Numbers of the United State:

    "Whoever feels capable must consider it his duty to write treatises, poems, manifestoes, odes, and other compositions on the greatness and the beauty of the United State.

    "This will be the first cargo which the Integral will carry.

    "Long live the United State! Long live the Numbers!! Long live the Well-Doer!!!"

    I feel my cheeks burn as I write this. To integrate the colossal, universal equation! To unbend the wild curve, to straighten it out to a tangent--to a straight line! For the United State is a straight line, a great, divine, precise, wise line, the wisest of lines!

--From Record One of We by Eugene Zamiatin (Yevgeny Zamyatin)

(Dutton paperback edition, [1959]), pp. 3-4

* * *

My thesis is that there is a dichotomy between infinity and entropy, between the circle and the arrow. That seems to be the dichotomy set up in We, with the man D-503 on the side of obedience and submission to an entropic Utopia in the form of the United State, versus the woman I-330 on the side of rebellion, an endless cycle of life, and no final revolution. He and the State seek happiness. She and her fellow revolutionaries prefer freedom. The same dichotomy--obedience and submission, which lead to a yearned-for happiness among humanity, versus freedom, with all of its inherent burdens and occasional and perhaps inevitable unhappiness--is also in the parable of the Grand Inquisitor.

* * *

The mission of the Integral is the selfsame mission of the historical and present-day Socialist/Statist. In summary:

To subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason those who live in a primitive state of freedom. Our duty will be to force them to be happy.

The Grand Inquisitor says that humanity yearns for unity and a unified State. The Well-Doer in We provides it, and it's the same goal that is afoot in the world today: unity, equality, and an equal distribution of all appearances, all abilities, and all things--not individuality, not freedom, not merit. As D-503 writes: 

"We" is from God, "I" from the devil.

I don't think it's any coincidence that the woman who disturbs his happiness bears the prefix I.

* * *

And so he sets out in the first of his records "[t]o unbend the wild curve, to straighten it out to a tangent--to a straight line! For the United State is a straight line, a great, divine, precise, wise line, the wisest of lines!" (emphasis added).

The entropic universe is one in which there are outward lines of force, an uncountable number of vectors or arrows pointing away from the Big Bang and an uncentered, unfocused Cosmos towards a definitive end to history. The entropic earthly State lies at the endpoint of History, at the tip of the arrow that flies through Time in its inexorable path. An arrow flies in an arc, though, its path being bent by the force of the feminine Earth. D-503 wants to unbend that wild curve: men draw lines, women move in circles.

* * *

Like Woman, infinity moves in circles that cannot be straightened. Like her, the Earth and its inhabitants are free, in their hearts wild and untamed. They--we--live in and will forever live in "the primitive state of freedom." We cannot be subdued. So get all of that out of your heads, those of you who would like to impose your will upon us. What you're trying to do cannot be done. It's a fantasy and a delusion. We are free, we are made free, and there's nothing you can do about it. Murder, torture, and imprison us: Free. Oppress us: still Free. Try to take away our rights, our individuality, our words, our way of life: Forever Free and Indomitable.

Finally a pertinent quote from a work of today:

In his objection to the idea of the fluidity and mutability of human nature, John Adams resonates with Czeslaw Milosz a century later, the Polish poet laureate who argues that the ultimate enemy of the Communist regime is not the propertied class, Kulaks, and capitalists, the nations and churches which prevent man from recognizing himself as purely proletariat worker, but "Man, This Enemy"--human nature itself, born anew in every generation, with its desire for truth and freedom, is the ultimate enemy of the totalitarian state. (Emphasis added.)

(From "How America's Adams Family Inherited And Preserved The Pilgrim Mind" by historian Susan Hansen on the website of The Federalist, November 24, 2020, here.) 

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

To Entropy and Beyond!

Winston Smith has his tormenter in O'Brien. D-503, the protagonist in We, has his in I-330. She is a different kind of tormenter, though, for D-503 is in crazy love with her. We all know about the torments of love and what we will do for it.

I-330 says some interesting things. First:

"The 'last one' is a child's story. Children are afraid of the infinite, and it is necessary that children should not be frightened, so that they may sleep through the night."

Then, in response to D-503:

"Ah, 'evenly'! 'Everywhere'! That is the point, entropy! Psychological entropy."

D-503, still bound up in the United State (the One State in some translations), believes in the last revolution and the end of history. I-330, a true revolutionary, calls him out on the absurdity of such things. She chooses infinity. He would rather have entropy. Consideration of this dichotomy opens doors . . .

* * *

I-330 is a woman, passionate and full of emotion. She pushes. She coaxes and cajoles and harangues. As a woman she moves in cycles, and cycles roll infinitely through infinite Time. What is the last revolution--literally the last revolving, the last turning of the cycle? What is the last wave? The last reaction? The last transmission? The last star? The last universe? The last woman, turning and cycling through Time?

Her symbol is a circle. Or a cup, its mouth a circle. There is no beginning or end to it.

His is an arrow, with a head and a tail, flying in a line, straight through Time, with an origin and a destination. Or, pointed, a triangle, a blade--hard and angular rather than soft and rounded.

The flight of the arrow has its beginning--its initial burst of energy--and it has its flight and its bright flash in the sunlight as it flies; then, it has its end, at which point all of its energy has been expended. Meanwhile, the circle keeps turning.

She is a planet, Earth. His arrow follows a flightpath, bends in an arc under the influence of her gravity. Her gamete is a globe. Like an arrow, his has a head and a tail. It wriggles towards hers in its sinusoidal wave. Together they renew Life in its endless cycles . . .

* * *

History has two ways, the cyclic and the linear, the circle and the arrow. There will be either infinity--no end of history, no last revolution--or entropy, an end after which there can be no further revolution, no further turning. In entropy, in fact, there is no after. Time reaches its end. There are no further events.

We move through history, turning and turning. To disrupt that turning, D-503 and people like him under the United or One State--people among us, too, people in the real world--leftists, socialists, and statists of every stripe--seek an end to history, a final expenditure of energy, an even and entropic Utopia in which there is no further change, no further events, as D-503 sees it: "In the whole world, evenly, everywhere, there is distributed . . ." These are his words and theirs: evenly, everyone, everywhere, unity, equality, equity, distribution, redistribution. To the rest of us, all of that means an even, gray sludge of humanity, a mass of undifferentiated zombies trudging over the earth and through their featureless lives, like in the Kate Bush video. To this we say no, as does I-330:

"Don't you as a mathematician know that only differences--only differences--in temperature, only thermic contrasts make for life? And if all over the world there are evenly warm or evenly cold bodies, they must be pushed off! . . . In order to get flame, explosions! And we shall push! . . ." [Ellipses in the original.]

As I-330, a woman of great passion and feeling, understands, Life is the anti-entropic Force. We live, and so we resist entropy. Dull, blind, mindless, plodding, entropy seeks the opposite, to end us, maybe not specifically but as a general process. But history will not end, for as long as there is Life, there will be cycles of Life and a forever turning . . .

* * *

Because there are two ways of history, there are also two ways of literature, or at least of fantasy and science fiction. One is entropic: Utopia, and its Mr. Hyde identity, Dystopia. (As I have written before, Utopia and Dystopia are the same thing, or, put another way, every Utopia is also a Dystopia.) Tales of Utopia were common and popular in the early days of fantasy and science fiction. I'm not sure that anyone would be so naïve as to attempt one now. (That should tell real-world utopian theorists--the socialists and statists among us--a thing or two about their prospects for bringing their fantasies to life.) Dystopian stories are still popular, though, even if they function as vehicles of satire or commentary, or as cautionary tales, or simply as escapist fantasies, rather than as serious possibilities. I see We as a satire and a fantasy, pointed to be sure but not necessarily an attempt at extrapolation or prognostication. In contrast, it's hard to think of 1984 as anything less than a nightmarish vision of our future. George Orwell may have written his novel late in life when his own prospects appeared so bleak, but he and his cohorts were still living in the shadow of totalitarianism, and the totalitarian mind and its ideas were still among them--and on the move. Stalin may have died just a few years later, but there were new totalitarian fantasies then slouching towards Babylon. We live with them today, and they stalk us everywhere we go.

* * *

The other way of literature is towards the infinite. Nearly fifty years ago, Donald A. Wollheim wrote: "The essence of science fiction is that this is a changing world." He assumed an "Infinite Future" and urged "a belief in human infinity." The essence of science fiction would seem to be towards infinity: there is reason for hope, still possibilities for progress and change, for there is still life, humanity, and the human mind still at work in the universe. But that was fifty years ago. Where do we stand now? Does science fiction still "maintain a belief in human infinity"? Or have science fiction writers and readers come to prefer entropy?

* * *

Because it is about the future, science fiction easily becomes politicized. Science fiction may in fact be inherently political (and from there, perhaps inevitably utopian). There have certainly been political controversies among writers of science fiction and fantasy. Some if not all of these have to do with racial and gender politics, in other words, the fruits of critical theory. Totalitarianism is a many-headed hydra. This is just another of its heads. Believe it or not, there are still old-fashioned Marxists or socialists among the ranks of science fiction and fantasy writers, too. Evidently they haven't gotten the memo that they and their ideas have become outdated. They still seek Utopia and entropy. But isn't every socialist or totalitarian scheme, whether Marxist or post-Marxist, utopian and entropic in its ends? And if science fiction is about the infinite future, then how can these things be reconciled? Can there be a positive entropic science fiction?

* * *

In history, in literature, in politics, there comes an inevitable confrontation with the problem of good versus evil. A neverending problem, a neverending battle. Neverending. You already know this, but neverending means forever. For as long as there is Life, there will be inputs. There will never be a winding down. When we face evil, we must also be facing infinity. Maybe that's one of the reasons that tales of infinity must not be told, because they frighten children and the childlike mind.

At every page, in front of every image, I stop to catch my breath. And I tell myself: This is the end, they have reached the last limit; what follows can only be less horrible; surely it is impossible to invent suffering more naked; cruelty more refined. Moments later I admit my error: I underestimated the assassin's ingenuity. The progression into the inhuman transcends the exploration of the human. Evil, more than good, suggests infinity.

Those are the words of Elie Wiesel, who chose to tell stories of what he had witnessed and experienced. He has been looking at albums of photographs, a graphic record of the evil that man does to man. In these images, he encounters the possibility that evil may be infinite, a frightening one for all of us. (From "Snapshots" in One Generation After [Pocket Books, 1978], p. 62.)

* * *

The utopian theorist necessarily believes that good, his idea of good, can and will--of course!--triumph over evil. That is the purpose and endpoint of History after all. It cannot be otherwise, for History is an irresistible Force. Its ways and results are known. It has an arc (like an arrow flying through Time) that always bends the right way. It has a right side and a wrong side, and the wrong side must always lose. Once evil is overcome, we on the right side of History shall have Utopia. And entropy. They leave off that part. Either that or they yearn for it--the uniform coldness of evenly distributed bodies, filled with reason and drained of Life. In this vision, the infinite, the neverending and ever-changing, the endless cycling and turning, perhaps what O'Brien calls "the process of life"--Life itself--all of this must cease.

* * *

But even O'Brien is not so naïve. He understands that there will always be an enemy to overcome, that punishment must always be meted out, for human beings will not go easily into sameness and submission. He has nothing but contempt for "the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined." (Signet, p. 220) (Could George Orwell have foreseen the coming of Herbert Marcuse?) At first glance, we might think that O'Brien seeks an endpoint to history, that he, too, seeks entropy. (I assumed that the other day when I wrote.) After all, 1984 is a dystopian work, and Dystopia is seemingly entropic by definition. But O'Brien doesn't plan for stasis. He in fact believes in action, progress, change, refinement:

"Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain."

And:

"But always--do not forget this, Winston--always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler." [Emphasis added.]

Remember, O'Brien's vision of the future is "a boot stamping on a human face--forever": the tense is the present progressive. You know this already, but forever means neverending. Not entropy but infinity. An asymptote, always approaching perfection but never reaching it. Always with inputs, never with any final expenditure. "Evil, more than good, suggests infinity." Human depravity knows no limit and no end.

* * *

Like history and literature, the cosmos has two ways: it will end either in entropy--an evenly distributed, red-black sludge of matter and energy--or with the beginning of a new cycle. Put another way, the question might be: Is the nature of the cosmos feminine or masculine? It all depends on whether or not there is enough matter hiding inside it to make it all fall back on itself. Or whether or not there is enough outward-flowing energy to make it expand forever. (Maybe these are both the same question.) If I understand things correctly, there is a tussle going on among cosmologists and astrophysicists who believe that there is versus those who believe that there isn't. There are more questions and hypotheses, too; there is not necessarily a dichotomy but maybe a polychotomy (my new word). I won't pretend to know the ins and outs of all of it, but to paraphrase an old saying, a psychologist is a man who watches everyone else when the question of dark matter and energy enters the room.

* * *

There is the question of how the universe will end, either with a whimper or a bang (or, as Robert Frost--perfect surname--pondered, whether with fire or ice), but there is also the question of why people believe--or more precisely, why they want to believe--in one thing or another. Could there be among cosmologists the same divide as among the rest of humanity, including lowly writers of fantasy and science fiction? Could there be among them a dichotomy between infinity and entropy? Between the circle and the arrow? Between Utopia and the neverending push? Between an end of history and no end at all? In every belief, there is the question, What does holding this belief offer to the holder of it? Can this or that philosophical position or scientific postulate really be just a bit of wishful thinking? A desire to force the vast universe into accord with our own minute beliefs? Do you prefer entropy because it confirms some other belief that you hold, one too dear to give up? Do you run away from infinity because it scares you? Does the possibility of the infinite suggest a Creator of the infinite? Or maybe it can be used as a substitute for that Creator. Yeah, that's the ticket. For if the universe is infinite in Time, and if it simply creates itself, again and again, then we can dispense with any Creator seated above the universe. We can apply Occam's Razor--a blade--to the problem and keep our assumptions simple: the Universe itself is the Creator, and our beliefs and non-beliefs become thereby satisfied. We can thereby believe in and yearn for infinity in the Cosmos, as it suits us, just as we might believe in and yearn for entropy on Earth. And if there is no supernatural creator of the infinite, then we as human beings--as the incarnate minds of the Creator-Universe--may create our own infinitude. We may stop at nothing--there can be no limits to anything we might imagine or do, including any evil or depravity we might commit.

* * *

But where does that leave entropy? If we are to climb the Tower of Babel, seize godlike power, and become the creators of infinitude, then what are we to do with the possibility that the universe might go on expanding forever? Entropy might be perfectly fine for the pedestrian, earthbound imagination of the utopian theorist, but what about those whose imaginations wish to wander among--ultimately to create--the planets and stars? There may be infinity in entropy, for the final, entropic universe is also infinite, in Space rather than in Time. But how satisfying is that to the believer in--to the person who desperately yearns for--an endlessly cycling universe? Not very, I suppose. And maybe it's a little frightening, too, for what is the way out? What can there possibly be outside the universe that could somehow change things inside? What can we get to help us reverse this ultimate, crushing, depressing entropy? Nothing. There can be nothing. We must be believe in nothing.

* * *

Or maybe we can believe in ourselves and our ability to create our own Mini-Me universe in which we can escape from entropy or some other universe-ending disaster, like baby Moses in his basket or R2-D2 and C-3PO shot out of the Rebel blockade runner. Yes, that's an idea in physics. Credit goes to Dr. Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It might easily be an idea for a science fiction story: "Go ahead--go eat at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Meanwhile, we're going to work on our escape pod." It sounds like the origin story of Superman. It would also allow for new Life and the beginning of new cycles . . .

* * *

Draw any line long enough in a universe warped by gravity and it becomes a circle. And so here we have a circle: to the socialist or statist imagining an earthbound Utopia, entropy is suitable and desirable. It is, after all, the goal and endpoint of History and all of his own efforts. There will be a last revolution, History will end, and there will be no after. Consequently, tales of the infinite must not be told because they will frighten the children. On the other hand, entropy frightens the materialist taking the long view, for what is he to do with his belief in and yearning for the infinite-in-Time, endlessly cycling Creator-Universe if everything is to end in a completely uniform, dull sludge of matter-energy? There must be new beginnings, new waves, new cycles, the arms of new galaxies turning in the sky like the wings of a windmill . . . 

* * *

Maybe I have been setting up a row of straw men so that I might easily knock them down. Maybe I'm imagining beliefs and non-beliefs that don't really exist. Maybe things aren't so simple. But if they do and if they are, then I might point out that there are solutions to these problems for the seeker after earthly entropy or cosmological infinity, if he or she will only have them (more for him than for her, who may believe in and seek after the Infinite by working in the merely infinite): If the utopian will give up on his idea of creating heaven on earth and allow the true Creator his greater prerogative. If the materialist will simply transfer her belief in and yearning for the unseen or unknown from dark matter or dark energy or whatever other dark force to something more. If both will believe in Life and Love, recognize and embrace the infinite, the eternal, and the absolute, have faith in the Creator of it all, who exists outside it and above it forever, keeps it all going and turning forever . . .

There could be a solution if only they would have it.

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Flying Saucers from Before the Great War

Six months ago, before the world fell apart, I wrote about the evolution of the flying saucer from nineteenth-century airship to twentieth-century flying disk. Now I write again.

It seems to me that the conceit of the nineteenth century was both progressive and romantic. The conceit was that Science, this new and exciting force, could be and would be used to solve previously intractable human problems. Airships were a symbol of this kind of thinking, the belief being that airships, because of their great power, would render war impossible to wage. There would be other benefits, too, but an end to war would have to come first if the world was to be made a better place. Salvation was literally in the air; it would be dispensed from the heavens. Here at last was progress, wrought not only by science but also by a faith in science and its power to remake (or at least tame) human nature. (1) This was the dream and the vision. And I suppose it's one of the reasons that early science fiction stories could be called scientific romances with some degree of accuracy and without fear of self-contradiction.

The events of the twentieth century taught us a different lesson, at least for those willing to listen. There are many who haven't listened. Sometimes it seems that most haven't listened, for there are still too many among us who believe in progress, the malleability of human nature, and the perfectibility of human society, thereby of individual human beings. They continue to have an overweening faith, pride, and confidence in Science and Reason. Their faith, as opposed to a faith in anything outside of science, helps to explain why the airship became the flying saucer. With all non-material and supernatural things swept aside during the nineteenth century, we as human beings were free to seize power from above and apply it to our own earthly problems. If the world was going to be made a better place, we would be the ones to do it.

Except that we didn't. Instead we used airships, and after them airplanes, rockets, missiles, and guided bombs, as weapons of war. From the heavens we rained down upon each other horrifying death, making of this Earth a perfect hell. The German State of the twentieth century is an object lesson in the progressive/romantic conceits of the one that preceded it. As Germany proved, the airship would not be used to end war. Instead airships were used to wage it. During the Great War, Germany became the first country to use a rigid airship--the infamous Zeppelin--to bombard another. It was also the first to use in war guided missiles in the form of the V-1 Buzzbomb, guided ballistic missiles in the V-2 rocket, jet-powered aircraft in the Me-262, and guided bombs in the Fritz X. Given a few more months, Nazi Germany might also have been the first to use a flying wing-type aircraft against its enemies. (2) And never mind the atomic bomb.

All of these were hard, scientific/technological developments. You could argue that, as such, they were based in a progressive faith in Science and Reason. But Germany, especially Nazi Germany, was also given to romantic, irrational, and pseudoscientific thinking. That simultaneous embrace of science and pseudoscience, of reason and irrationality, of hard materialism and soft romanticism, is itself irrational and one of the reasons that Nazi Germany remains, to me at least, an almost inexplicable phenomenon. But where had we seen this mix of science and romance before? Where had there previously been a representation of pseudoscience as science? Where else but in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pseudo-scientific story or scientific romance, a genre that evolved during the interwar period into what we now call science fiction. In realizing that, we might imagine Nazi Germany as the ultimate, real-world scientific romance, perhaps starring Adolf Hitler as an extreme perversion of the Captain Nemo-type Byronic and Romantic hero. (3, 4) And if all of that is true, then the scientific romance and the reign of the airships can be seen to have finally failed with the end of World War II. (5, 6) It's probably no coincidence that flying saucers came along just two years later to take their place.

* * *

Problems remained, though. Now, instead of originating on Earth and among human beings, airborne power came from places unknown and was held by equally unknown and unknowable beings. They are by definition alien and inexplicable. With flying saucers, questions follow upon unanswerable questions. Perhaps none is more important than this:

What do they want?

Or, put another way:

What is their function?

When I wrote in February, I speculated on the physical appearance of the twentieth-century flying saucer as a kind of natural evolution from the nineteenth-century airship. But I also touched on the function of the airship. Here is a quote, the same quote that I used before, from The Century Magazine, 1878:

As entirely new profession--that of airmanship--will be thoroughly organized, employing a countless army of airmen. . . . Boundaries will be obliterated. . . . Troops, aerial squadrons, death-dealing armaments will be maintained only for police surveillance over barbarous races, and for instantly enforcing the judicial decrees of the world's international court of appeal. (Quoted in Predictions by John Durant [1956], p. 28)

That function was affirmed in one of the great flying saucer movies of the twentieth century, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). It is also in Things to Come (1936). Now I have found another such quote from before the Great War, but only just before:

The world is tending toward universal peace--the abolition of war. And one of the greatest heralds of peace is the airship. It will make war too horrible to exist further.

The quote is from a book called Wonder Stories (p. 61), written by Francis Trevelyan Miller (1877–1959) and published in 1913. My copy is inscribed:

Charles Gray

Dec. 28th 1914

seven months to the day before the Great War began! It's astonishing to think that even at that late date, progressive-minded people had such great faith in human nature and human perfectibility. And such naïveté, too, for as we have seen since Wonder Stories was published, we haven't yet found "anything too horrible to exist." We haven't yet stayed our hands from doing the most depraved and horrifying of things. In actuality, war is proving to be one of the lesser of the horrifying things that we do. At least war is direct. More killing is done behind closed doors these days than on the battlefield. More depravity exists among the élite than among the common man, including the common foot soldier. Airships didn't do anything to change any of that. In fact that old romantic faith in science, reason, technology, and progress that drove the development of airships has only helped speed things along towards evermore horror and ever greater--or at least evermore practicable and efficient--depravity. Airships into airplanes, the promise of Things to Come, didn't halt their march. Nor did airships into flying saucers, which was the message of The Day the Earth Stood Still, as well as the contactee narratives of the 1950s and the abductee narratives after that. (7, 8) Flying saucers continue to keep their distance and we continue to kill each other. Under the sway of Scientism and materialism, we threaten to do far worse things. Imagine a coming age in which human beings are genetically engineered to be no longer human . . .

* * *

Another function of the flying saucer is to observe, to watch, to study, to see. One of the now iconic (or clichéd) images of the flying saucer is of the cone-shaped beam of light--or death ray--cast upon the Earth and its inhabitants. Here it is on a poster for another of the great flying saucer movies, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956):

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers was based on Flying Saucers from Outer Space by Maj. Donald Keyhoe (1953). Keyhoe, as it so happens, was a teller of weird tales. Click here to read his story.

Here is a similar image from Weird Tales, November 1944, without the flying saucer, although a flying saucer might be implied as the source of the descending green aliens. (9) The cover artist was Matt Fox:

Fox's cover makes me think of the little green aliens in Toy Story. I have been chosen . . . (10) Here is still another, depicting a supposedly real-life event, the abduction of Travis Walton:

This imagery has obvious religious overtones and obvious origins in religious belief and religious art. That's really a topic for another day, or maybe a week, or a month. For now, I'll show just one image and that should be enough to close this case:

The Baptism of Christ by the Dutch artist Aert de Gelder (1645-1727), executed ca. 1710. The image is the same, its elements are the same, the phenomenon is the same, the feeling and the yearning are the same. These are essentially the same picture. There is even a flying saucer in each. (Actually there is a messenger from on high in each, it's just that one is supernatural and the other is material. Both, however, are spiritual.) The difference between these two images is that they are separated by nearly three centuries, moreover by a vast and unbridgeable gap between belief in God and the completely disastrous loss of that belief, not within Travis Walton himself but within our whole culture, which believes in nothing in the form of Scientism and materialism.

Anyway, my point here is to show that the flying saucer, which is an invention of science fiction, is descended from the romantic/progressive airship of the nineteenth century (which has, as the image above shows, its own line of descent from prescientific, pre-materialistic times). So are there similar images of airships? Well . . . 

. . . how about this one from the San Francisco Call, November 23, 1896, during the first UFO flap in America? The Mystery Airships of 1896-1897 are supposed to have been real, even if there weren't any such aircraft known to exist at the time . . .

Just seventeen years later, though, when Wonder Stories was published, there were in fact rigid airships, exemplified by the German Zeppelin, which first took to the air in 1900. The author of Wonder Stories, Francis Trevelyan Miller, even mentions the Zeppelin in his book. Above is its frontispiece. The function of the airship in this picture isn't obvious at first glance. But from reading Miller's chapter on airships, I gather that the men in the airship above are observing enemy troop movements. The idea, then, is that airships will make traditional warfare obsolete because nothing can escape observation from above. It is this image that grabbed my attention when I first saw Wonder Stories because it recalls the iconography of the flying saucer and its casting of a cone of light upon earthbound people below. It also goes along with the idea that airpower--specifically the airship and later the flying saucer--will render warfare obsolete and impossible to wage. That is the message of Things to Come, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and no doubt other science fiction of the twentieth century.

I have said before that flying saucers come not from outer space but from science fiction. But then science fiction has its own origins in nineteenth-century romanticism, progressivism, and, I think, materialism and Scientism. Put another way, flying saucers flew out of the 1800s on the wings of imagination. Whether it was a naïve or even childish imagination is another one of those topics for another day of writing and reading.

Notes
Each has its own little story to tell.

(1) It's no coincidence that four of the great scientific, pseudoscientific, or pseudo-historical developments of the nineteenth century--Darwinism, Marxism, Mendelian genetics, and Freudianism--were attempts (or used as attempts) to drill down into the heart of human nature. Only one of these--genetics--is actually a science and only one of the originators--Gregor Mendel--was actually a scientist. Consequently, he was the most hardheaded among them. It so happens that he was also a man of faith.

So: a man of faith (Mendel)-->an actual science-->rejected by a twentieth-century regime--the U.S.S.R.--in which reason was supposed to have been supreme, to be replaced by a pseudoscience, in this case Lysenkoism; or, conversely, pursued and used as a kind of pseudoscience by progressives and Nazis (they're hard to tell apart sometimes) in the form of eugenics, abortion, forced sterilization, and bizarre experimentation on human beings and human society, either real and murderous or aspirational and murderous.

Meanwhile: skeptics, doubters, and outright atheists (Darwin, Marx, Freud, and their acolytes)-->pseudoscience, pseudo-history, or weak or soft science-->embraced by the murderous regimes of the twentieth century, or at the very least embraced by aspiring tyrants and murderers, for example, the New Left, the critical theorist, and the politically correct offspring of the teratogenic mating of Marxism and Freudianism. For another, the Fascist/Antifa people currently overrunning some of our cities and threatening and hoping to overrun our whole civilization.

What a strange and curious world we live in.

(2) Like the airship of the previous century, the flying wing-type aircraft of the twentieth is a symbol of scientific and technological progress. You know that if you've seen Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which has as one of its set pieces a fistfight around a Nazi flying wing. In our popular culture, Nazi technology = advanced technology. In recent years, there have even been conspiracy theorists who believe that Nazi scientists were the first to develop flying saucers. For some reason, these flying saucers look like the fakes that George Adamski built out of a chicken brooder or a desk lamp. Some technology. We shouldn't forget, either, that one of at least two early descriptions of the first flying saucers (June 24, 1947), was of a scimitar-shaped, flying wing-type aircraft. If Kenneth Arnold hadn't described them as skipping like saucers, the whole history and iconography of the phenomenon would have been far different, and maybe there wouldn't have been a flying saucer era at all.
(3) Captain Nemo was reincarnated in Maximilian Schell's character, Dr. Hans Reinhardt, in The Black Hole (1981). There is of course a lot of German and maybe a little bit of German romantic in his character. His ship, the USS Cygnus, looks like it came straight out of the nineteenth century, not as an airship so much as a great, flying Crystal Palace, a nineteenth-century progressive/romantic wonder that burned to the ground in the same year that Things to Come was released. "This is the end of an age," remarked Winston Churchill. And how.
(4) The phrase "Nazi science fiction" would, like "scientific romance," seem self-contradictory and any discussion of it might risk foundering on the rock of German-romantic or Nazi irrationality. Here's the best quote I can find on short notice:

The science fiction novel, with its technical emphasis, at first seems to be the most difficult genre to integrate into the National Socialist literary canon. Science fiction, however, fit perfectly into the Nazi project of returning to a preindustrial world where science is really a craftsmanlike technology that has its source in the ancient currents of magic and racial myth but not in rationality. In real life this was the final goal toward which the Führer led the German people in a total war. In literature the irrational that is capable of subsuming technology in a rudimentary sense had been prepared as early as Heimatkunst [the "Homeland Art" movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s]. It would be more precise to refer to Nazi science-fiction novels as magical-technological novels. These novels--because the real-life dismissal of science was at the core of National Socialist ideology and its self-destructiveness--constitute the one literary genre in which Nazi ideology showed its true face most clearly. [Emphasis added.]

See what I mean by near-foundering? But at least we have a workable term, "magical-technological novel," which approximates, I think, "scientific romance." From German Literature of the Twentieth Century: From Aestheticism to Postmodernism by Ingo Roland Stoehr (2001), p. 192.
(5) Perhaps the crash of the progressive/romantic airship was prefigured in the flaming disaster of the Hindenburg, which came to grief on May 6, 1937, at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. Speaking of flames, the UFOs of World War II were called "foo fighters," from the Smokey Stover comic strip and its popular saying, "Where there's foo there's fire." For those who don't know it, Smokey Stover is a fireman. Supposedly a nonsense word, foo is almost certainly from the French, feu, meaning fire. (I think that's called a tautology: "Where there's fire, there's fire.")
(6) Ten days before the Hindenburg went up in flames, Nazi and Fascist air forces bombed the Basque town of Guernica, a terrifying event memorialized by Pablo Picasso in his epic painting Guernica. Though not the first aerial bombardment of a town or city, it was one of the first to gain international attention and international opprobrium. Again, the lesson of the twentieth century is that airpower will not end war but only extend it into another element.

(7) The Day the Earth Stood Still can be seen as an abductee/contactee story, screened at about the same time that supposedly real-life narratives of the same kind began making the rounds of flying saucer fan gatherings. The message was the same, too: our space brothers--which tended to be of the Aryan or Nordic type--wanted to bring us peace and brotherly love. First, an end to war, then, brotherly love, hopefully a little sisterly love, too, with those tall, blonde Nordic aliens.

(8) It occurs to me that The Day the Earth Stood Still and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) have similarities except that in the first, the single mother is the abductee, while in the second it is her son who is taken aboard the alien spacecraft. In both, the military is a sort of enemy or at least an obstacle to the fulfillment or salvation-through-knowledge sought by the main characters. The opposite is true in The Thing from Another World, also from 1951 and also a great flying saucer movie. In that movie, the scientist is the sort-of villain, and the military men the obvious heroes. He wants to understand. They mean to defend. The journalist, who might be the intermediate figure between men of action and men of ideas, reconciles the two at the end, a nice touch made by the screenwriters.
(9) At first glance, Matt Fox's cover seems simple enough. But isn't it actually an inversion of traditional Christian imagery? There is the cone of light or beams of light issuing from Heaven. Smaller, lesser angels descend in the background, while two heralds flank the larger and obviously superior angel or archangel in the center. He has come to Earth on a mission, but what is it? What does he want? Here is a similar image, again from an age of faith:

The Annunciation to the Shepherds by Abraham Hondius (ca. 1631-1691), a painting from 1663. It looks like the heralds are missing from this painting, but we have all seen them in other paintings of the same type.

The spiraling cherubs above lead back to another Weird Tales cover:

Weird Tales, September 1941, cover art by Margaret Brundage. In this case, the spiraling figures are being taken up instead of being sent down. And instead of joy, they express fear and apprehension, at least until the taking up and spiraling begins.

The spiral motif makes me think of the Tower of Babel and its spiraling, ascending walkway. In biblical times we built for ourselves a Tower of Babel so that we might ascend to the heavens and thereby gain godlike power. (The title of C.S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength [1945] refers to the Tower of Babel.) Instead we were scattered. But with the airship first and later with airplanes, we could make our ascent without a tower--we were cut loose from foundations of slime. Again, it seems to me that the purpose of the airship is to exercise godlike power--to make the world a better place without God's help, this in an age that discarded belief in God and substituted for it a progressive/romantic belief in human beings and the power of the human mind. Now, using Gregor Mendel's insights, we are attempting to drill down into the heart of the cell and to manipulate another spiral, the double helix that resides within each. Again, we seek godlike power, in this case to remake the Creation because we believe it to be flawed. In our own very fine thoughts and minds, we believe we can make the world a better place, alone, without God's help. We're trying once again to build a Tower of Babel. That didn't work before. It's unlikely to work again.

The cover story, by the way, was "Beyond the Threshold" by August Derleth, a notably Catholic author.

(10) That statement--I have been chosen--essentially summarizes the abductee/contactee narrative: I have been chosen--I, who am so small and insignificant in my own life [goes the subtext]--I have been chosen. I stand out. I am special. I alone have been selected to receive the only truth from the heavens and to disseminate it among a benighted and earthbound humanity. I have hereby gained importance and significance. I can hereby feel and am right to feel self-esteem. I.

If there had been social media in the 1950s, we would have had selfies taken with aliens, and the abductees/contactees would have posted them on the Internet in their desperate search for the esteem of their peers. Millions of likes and thumbs-up would have awaited. The significance of the aliens themselves would have been pretty negligible, as the flying saucer phenomenon is ultimately not about flying saucers or aliens from space but about human beings and the spiritual emptiness we feel in this overly scientific and materialistic age. We seek transcendence and will find it or make it any way we can.

Well, that's a long article, with lots of ideas and notes. I wanted to give you plenty to read, though, as I'm going to be gone again for a while. I'll let you know when I come back.

Original text and captions copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley