Rockets & Raytheon: Fandom, Science and the Esoteric

In the previous chapter of this set of occasional essays, I looked at the fandom connections with rocketry both as a hobby and as a discipline. The first half of the twentieth century saw multiple connections between technical hobbies and genre fiction. For example, Hugo Gernsback built up his proto-science fiction fandom on the back of popular interest in radio and early electronics. However, fandom has other roots and one I briefly mentioned in Debarkle predates was the 1871 novel The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.

Lytton’s fantasy tale involved a master race with incredible powers living underground and it became a publishing sensation. The secret energy forced used by the hidden people was known as Vril and in 1891 the Royal Albert Hall hosted the “Vril-Ya Bazaar and Fete”. The fete had many of the features of a modern science fiction convention including costumes and side events.

The Coming Race was written as fiction but it arrived at a time of increasing interest in esoteric ideas. With better (but often confused) knowledge of religious and spiritual traditions from South Asia and East Asia in Europe and the US, as well as renewed interest in Ancient Egypt, the cultural range of ideas was expanding. Alongside this was improving scholarship about mainstream Christian theology leading to greater scepticism about established religion. All of this, of course, within the rapid political and cultural change fuelled by the growth of modern capitalism and rapid industrialisation. In the heady brewery of the late Victorian middle classes, powered by colonialism and new wealth, radically different ways of viewing the universe were developing.

To see this worldbuilding/myth-building urge as a common trait within science-fiction/fantasy and the growth of movements such as Theosophy and Spiritualism is, I feel obvious. However, I acknowledge that I’m coming from a perspective of an atheist and empiricist. Yet, I don’t think this repudiates the possibility of spiritual or revealed truths as being merely fiction. The common aspect of both is cognitive — the capacity of our imaginations to describe/create systems of connected abstract ideas. That cognitive capacity covers not just SF&F and esotericism but mathematics.

This idea of a cognitive curiosity about big, abstract and strange ideas was one that in the 1930’s would be picked up by the economist John Maynard Keynes. One of Keynes’s many polymath side interests was Isaac Newton, including the purchase in 1936 of several of Newton’s private papers. Those papers contained a wealth of information on Newton’s broader interests, which in turn led to Keynes’s famous 1946 speech to the Royal Society of “Newton the Man”:

“In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason.

I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child bom with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.”

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Keynes_Newton/

I could draw Venn diagrams or versions of the Schwarzenegger/Weathers two muscular arms doing an epic handshake, with pairings of SF&F, theology, mathematics or physics and “using creative thought to imagine complex systems underpinning reality”.

The Wikipedia list of “known or alleged members” of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is a fascinating slice through the pop culture of late 19th/early 20th century Britain. Bram Stoker, E. Nesbit, Sax Rohmer, Arthur Machen and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stand out but the list contains stage actors and political radicals, as well as more obvious occultists. The political dimension in this slice of influential figures is not easy to summarise. For example, the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne was of progressive economic policies but also a lifelong anti-semite. Meanwhile, author E. Nesbit was a key figure in the founding of the socialist Fabian Society.

Among those cultural figures in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was Aleister Crowley, one of the most influential people in 2oth century Western Occultism. Crowley’s complex belief system, known as Thelema, emphasised self-expression. His infamous law “Do what thou wilt” was less an expression of hedonism and more of an injunction for a person to find their true inner calling and to follow it. That element of self-expression combined with Crowley’s prodigious skill at social networking, led to a wide variety of creative people becoming involved with or influenced by Thelemite teaching.

Those creative thinkers were not just confined to the arts. An unusual but notable figure was the British military strategist J.F.C. Fuller. Prior to World War I, Fuller was actively involved in groups Crowley had established, while also pursuing his military career. The two men would later fall out. Fuller himself was most notable not for his occult writing but for developing military doctrines on mechanised warfare. Towards the end of WWI he devised a plan known as Plan 1919 to use tanks to effectively decapitate the command centres of the German army. The war ended before the plan could be attempted and Fuller would spend later years in a futile attempt to orientated the British Army towards a strategy of rapid, highly mobile mechanized attacks. Fuller’s strategies would go on to influence the Blitzkrieg strategy of WW2. Fuller himself would later go on to join the British Union of Fascists and in 1935 was also the subject of praise from Adolf Hitler.

In Chapter 4 of Debarkle, I already discussed some of the influence of esoteric ideas within Nazi Germany. Notably, Wily Ley’s 1947 essay Pseudoscience in Naziland outlined a wide variety of fantastical and pseudoscientific ideas that gained degrees of popularity and influence in German nationalist circles in the lead-up to the Nazi take over and within the Nazi party itself. These included interest in “vril” but also a more general interest in the roots of Western culture, often in confused and garbled forms. I don’t want to dwell too much on this area, as this aspect of the Nazis has often been sensationalized and itself has fed into popular fiction and culture. The more relevant point is that this creative urge and curiosity about alternative ways of thinking about the world was expressed politically in a variety of ways.

The thesis I am stumbling around is that there is a creative urge, a desire to use our imaginations to build alternate views of fundamental aspects of the world we inhabit. That urge can be expressed in scientific, and technological ways but also within politics, theology, esotericism and even warfare. In particular, the borders between those domains in the first half of the twentieth century were particularly thin.

Within US science fiction, that porous boundary between overt fiction and what we might call “speculative reality” (i.e. claiming purely fictional ideas are real based on the aesthetic appeal of those ideas) was exemplified by the so-called Shaver Mysteries published in the popular science fiction magazine Amazing Stories from 1943 to 1948. Written by Richard Shaver, these were presented as narrative stories but with the implication that they contained true revelations about the world, specifically pulling on that same wellspring of ideas about superhuman races living underground. The supposed factual nature of these stories did not go unchallenged but the weird ideas contained within them would have a dual life, both as inspiration for fiction and also as ideas that would be picked up later esoteric, pseudoscientific and conspiracy theory-inspired movements.

Of course, US science fiction in the 1940’s could not escape the impact of World War 2. With the US economy geared to supporting the war effort, there were few parts of American society not reshaped by the war. Science fiction was no different. furthermore, the line between the fictional and practical application of science to war was blurred on all sides during World War 2. Writers Robert Heinlein, L. Spraque DeCamp and Isaac Asimov famously worked together on research at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. While their work did not amount to superweapons, the idea of science fiction writers conceiving ideas for war-winning devices was one dear to the heart of the influential editor John W. Campbell. However, Campbell’s dream of coordinating the collective imaginations of America’s science fiction community toward the war effort proved to be impractical.

“Campbell’s other strategy was to solicit ideas from writers in private correspondence. Heinlein encouraged this, and he also approached Will Jenkins, a brilliant inventor who wrote science fiction under the name Murray Leinster. Jenkins responded with “a very careful, long, and elaborate letter in which I listed all the imaginative gimmicks that I thought could help win the war,” and the three men formed an unofficial triumvirate for brainstorming, with Heinlein at the Navy Yard, Campbell at the magazine, and Jenkins at the Office of War Information.”

Nevala-Lee, Alec. Astounding (p. 187). HarperCollins.

Campbell’s hope of exploring speculative ideas about technology in his magazine to discover material ways of helping America win the war also ran into the issue of potentially revealing military secrets. A possibility which would eventually lead Campbell to run foul of the FBI after running a story by Cleve Cartmill which (at Campbell’s insistence) included details on the principles of an atomic bomb. In Robert Silverberg’s account of the incident, he describes how the alien setting of the story did little to disguise the relevance to current events.

“So Campbell, in the next letter, told Cartmill how to construct an A-bomb, how it would be triggered, and what the probable consequences of an atomic explosion would be. Cartmill wrote the story, “Deadline,” and Campbell used it in his March, 1944 issue, which went on sale in early February. It was not a particularly distinguished story. It was, in fact, a klutzy clunker. We have already seen that Campbell was desperate for material in the fall of 1943. (Cartmill had cleverly disguised the Allies and Axis of his imaginary world by calling them the “Seilla” and the “Sixa.” The main contending countries were “Ynamre” and “Ytal” on the evil Sixa side and “Acireb” and “Aissu,” though not, oddly, “Niatir,” among the Seilla.) The readers rated it last, sixth out of six stories, in the monthly story-popularity poll that Campbell conducted.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20130618175748/http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0310/ref.shtml

The so-called Cleve Cartmill Affair would blow over but the underlying aspiration of science fiction being a source of military invention was a continuing element in Campbell’s legacy. Not that Campbell had invented the idea of space exploration as a military endeavour — the idea of spacecraft being “ships” and hence organised on naval lines is a pervasive one. What Campbell was adding to the genre was a route towards legitimacy by usefulness to the national defence.

In reality, science fiction had little to directly offer the US government in the post-war period other than support for the space program. In principle, the large sums of money needed to develop a space program need not be fuelled through defence spending. Former general, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had raised his own concerns about the role of the technological elite in his farewell speech at the end of his term of office in 1961.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp

Under Eisenhower’s administration NASA (aka the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) had been established as an expressly civilian organisation, although one with the requirement to liaise closely with the US military. NASA inherited projects that had previously been run by the Air Force and Navy and drew from the military for recruiting potential astronauts.

Despite the civilian nature of NASA, the US space program was still deeply embroiled in cold war politics. The competition between the USA and the USSR was multidimensional, expressed in terms of economics, technology and political/cultural/ideological influence. Nuclear weapons made a direct war impossibly dangerous (a feature of post-war politics that George Orwell had anticipated in his seminal work of dystopian science fiction 1984). The space race was one of several proxies for the broader conflict between the world’s two superpowers. The bloody wars in Korea, South America and Vietnam would take more lives but the drive for supremacy over the orbital region of Earth would spur on research in both power blocks.

Apologies, you started reading an essay about esotericism and fandom and yet somehow I’ve landed on a discussion of NASA and the cold war. Also, there has been a general shortage of rockets in this essay. Let me pull things back together with two characters. The first one is a brilliant rocket scientist who had a massive influence on America’s post-war military and space technology. The second character was a devotee of Thelema who would be a notable influence on L. Ron Hubbard. The twist, is that they are both the same person: Jack Parsons. However, that is a story for the next essay.