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Fantasy Commentator, v. 1, issue 5, Winter 1944-1945

Page 94

94
FANTASY COMMENTATOR

vaders some time in the fifth or sixth century. (I shall explain later why it is fourth-dimensional, instead of just a variation of the Connecticut Yankee theme.)

King Arthur has not yet returned in his glory, but the novels of T. E. White have brought him back to the public eye. In The Ill-Made Knight, the third of White's stories about Arthur, the story of Lancelot, torn between his fidelity to Arthur and his passion for Guinevere, is fully adult, and the legend of the Grail is treated with real devotion. Perhaps we shall see more of Arthur and his Knights before the siege of Britain is ended.

I might mention in passing that The Secret Scepter, a mystery thriller by Francis Gerard, the Holy Grail is guarded in a secret place by modern Knights of the Round Table, who foil a plot of anti-Christian and totalitarian powers to get hold of the Grail and expose it to ridicule. In the grand climax, the Grail is saved by a redeemed renegade whole middle name is Galahad, who defends the Siege Perilous and the Grail with his life.

Whether these novels add up to an actual stressing of Celtic or pre-Anglo-Saxon elements may be uncertain, but there is no question as we move on to the prevalence of the reincarnation motif. Even in 1940, it may have been forgotten that the first World War brought a tremendous interest in spiritualism to England. It would seem that in the second World War, the idea of reincarnation is dominant, at least in popular novels, although this emphasis may be due simply to the fact that reincarnation provides the writer with a workable literary device. However, since it is possible to write a fourth-dimensional novel without making use of reincarnation, the fact that so many do make use of it certainly must indicate a large reading public which finds comfort in that doctrine.

Neither reincarnation nor shifts in time are new literary mechanisms, and it is many years since H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine. But it is precisely the fact that most of the novels do make mention in some way or other of these theories of space-time, which marks them as post-Einstein.

The preferred shift in the older novels, as I recall, was to the future. Bellamy's Looking Backward, Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes, and more recently Granville Hicks' The First to Awaken are examples of the simplest type. All one has to do is to go into a cataleptic trance or be put to sleep by a scientist, and eventually one wakes up one hundred years later and finds out whether the world went fascist or socialist in the interim.

But these are not fourth-dimensional novels. The hero does not move in time; he simply lives in a state of suspended animation until he wakes up in another century. Nor does he move backward. But in these English novels of 1940, the hero or heroine moves forward and backward in time, and sometimes shuttles back and forth between past and present and future like an electron moving from orbit to orbit in no time at all.

Now there are two reasons why in most of these novels the shift is to the past. One is the obvious reason that the author can reconstruct the past, and a previous incarnation is far easier to expostulate than a future existence. The other is to be found in the pages of P. D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe, in which many hints for the origin of these concepts will be found. Perhaps in 1980 all these ideas will be as commonplace as the Oedipus complex was in the twenties. If they all seem somewhat confusing to my readers, bear with me---these authors make use of all of them.

Very briefly, then, Ouspensky points out that every moment contains a definite number of possibilities, and it is the actualization of these possibilities which determines the following moment of time, the following now. Eternity, therefore, can be an infinite number of finite "times," and the sixth dimension will be the line of actualization of other possibilities which were contained in the preceding moment but were not actualized in time. But eternity is also

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94 FANTASY COMMENTATOR vaders some time in the fifth or sixth century. (I shall explain later why it is fourth-dimensional, instead of just a variation of the Connecticut Yankee theme.) King Arthur has not yet returned in his glory, but the novels of T. E. White have brought him back to the public eye. In The Ill-Made Knight, the third of White's stories about Arthur, the story of Lancelot, torn between his fidelity to Arthur and his passion for Guinevere, is fully adult, and the legend of the Grail is treated with real devotion. Perhaps we shall see more of Arthur and his Knights before the siege of Britain is ended. I might mention in passing that The Secret Scepter, a mystery thriller by Francis Gerard, the Holy Grail is guarded in a secret place by modern Knights of the Round Table, who foil a plot of anti-Christian and totalitarian powers to get hold of the Grail and expose it to ridicule. In the grand climax, the Grail is saved by a redeemed renegade whole middle name is Galahad, who defends the Siege Perilous and the Grail with his life. Whether these novels add up to an actual stressing of Celtic or pre-Anglo-Saxon elements may be uncertain, but there is no question as we move on to the prevalence of the reincarnation motif. Even in 1940, it may have been forgotten that the first World War brought a tremendous interest in spiritualism to England. It would seem that in the second World War, the idea of reincarnation is dominant, at least in popular novels, although this emphasis may be due simply to the fact that reincarnation provides the writer with a workable literary device. However, since it is possible to write a fourth-dimensional novel without making use of reincarnation, the fact that so many do make use of it certainly must indicate a large reading public which finds comfort in that doctrine. Neither reincarnation nor shifts in time are new literary mechanisms, and it is many years since H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine. But it is precisely the fact that most of the novels do make mention in some way or other of these theories of space-time, which marks them as post-Einstein. The preferred shift in the older novels, as I recall, was to the future. Bellamy's Looking Backward, Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes, and more recently Granville Hicks' The First to Awaken are examples of the simplest type. All one has to do is to go into a cataleptic trance or be put to sleep by a scientist, and eventually one wakes up one hundred years later and finds out whether the world went fascist or socialist in the interim. But these are not fourth-dimensional novels. The hero does not move in time; he simply lives in a state of suspended animation until he wakes up in another century. Nor does he move backward. But in these English novels of 1940, the hero or heroine moves forward and backward in time, and sometimes shuttles back and forth between past and present and future like an electron moving from orbit to orbit in no time at all. Now there are two reasons why in most of these novels the shift is to the past. One is the obvious reason that the author can reconstruct the past, and a previous incarnation is far easier to expostulate than a future existence. The other is to be found in the pages of P. D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe, in which many hints for the origin of these concepts will be found. Perhaps in 1980 all these ideas will be as commonplace as the Oedipus complex was in the twenties. If they all seem somewhat confusing to my readers, bear with me---these authors make use of all of them. Very briefly, then, Ouspensky points out that every moment contains a definite number of possibilities, and it is the actualization of these possibilities which determines the following moment of time, the following now. Eternity, therefore, can be an infinite number of finite "times," and the sixth dimension will be the line of actualization of other possibilities which were contained in the preceding moment but were not actualized in time. But eternity is also