The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence by Alexei Panshin, Cory Panshin

Mary Shelley and her fellow Romantics, was a form of transcendence Verne could face without fear. He’d grown up with it. It seemed almost natural to him.
    In Verne’s stories, transcendent power was presented as familiar and plausible. It was identified with contemporary scientific knowledge and practice. Its mysterious effects were limited to the powering of super-scientific means of travel and exploration, vehicles and devices similar to actual inventions of the day but in advance of them, like the balloon Victoria in Five Weeks in a Balloon. This domesticated science-beyond-science was one of Jules Verne’s two major contributions to the development of SF.
    The other and greater was his penetration into unknown places in the World Beyond the Hill, one of them at least an undeniably transcendent realm. This was difficult for Verne. Domesticating science-beyond-science was a plausible and rational thing to do. But to leap with this science-beyond-science into the World Beyond the Hill was not rational. In the World Beyond the Hill, far beyond the reach of Village society and law, untamed undomesticated mystery is to be found. For Verne, this was almost as frightening and unbearable a prospect as it had been for Poe.
    To Poe, the unknown region of novelty and wonder wore the aspect of Death. It was guarded by awesome spectral figures. It was filled with dark and hideous mysteries.
    For Verne, the World Beyond the Hill was not quite as deadly as it was for Poe. For Verne, the unknown World Beyond the Hill was identified with sex and irrationality. He pictured it again and again as the Abyss, alluring and dangerous, a yawning chasm gaping wide into which rationality dare not take a header. To his great credit, however, once or twice Verne took the plunge.
    Verne’s formula of imaginary science, travel and Edgar Allan Poe, and his yearnings and limitations, can all be seen displayed in his second extraordinary voyage. The Adventures of Captain Hatteras was serialized in 1864, initiating Hetzel’s new juvenile magazine, the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation, of which Verne had been made a co-editor.
    In The Adventures of Captain Hatteras the aim of travel is the North Pole. Like the goal in Five Weeks in a Balloon, this was a unique spot on the Earth that contemporary explorers strained to reach, a place with mystical overtones. The Poles were still a great unknown in the Nineteenth Century. As in Poe’s A. Gordon Pym or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, they might be treated as a region of novelty and wonder.
    We may remember that at the end of Frankenstein the creature intends to make his way to the North Pole and there immolate himself. Even more interestingly, at the outset of Frankenstein the polar explorer who receives Victor Frankenstein’s story and the last confessions of his creature writes in anticipation to his sister:

    “I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. . . . There snow and frost are banished; and sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe.” 57

    But if a transcendent land with the familiar wonders of the old spirit realm does not reveal itself to this explorer at the Pole, he expects that he may at the least discover there a wonder of a new kind—the secret of the compass. That is, if not old-fashioned transcendence, then science-beyond-science.
    For his part, Edgar Allan Poe was fascinated by the theory of one John Cleves Symmes that great holes exist at the Poles which lead to another world at the interior of the Earth. Poe suggested this theory a number of times in his stories without ever quite daring to propound it directly. We may remember the great chasm at the South Pole at the conclusion of A. Gordon Pym. Beyond this, in Poe’s very first story, “MS. Found in a