FT261

Once upon a time, though poss­ibly not so long ago as you might like to kid yourself, the world was full of wonders: monsters, freaks, fairies, unknown animals and weird ‘technologies’ such as the carbuncle, a precious stone that glowed with its own light and so could be used to illuminate the marvellous palaces of strange races that no one had yet met. However, if they existed at all, these things were actually quite a long way away. They were literally ‘beyond the pale’, when ‘pale’ meant a perimeter fence and so, by extension, known territory.

Frankly, I don’t have the slightest interest in what the carbuncle might have been, whether the griffin was a misidentified triceratops fossil or even whether fairies were remnants of an extinct race. What is at issue here has less to do with facts than beliefs, so for the sake of simplicity let’s lump all this stuff together and just call it the ‘Other’. So, where was the Other to be found? Essentially, the answer to that is not here… not within the bounds of the villages, towns or cities where, throughout history, ordinary people have lived their normal lives. And why was that? Probably because, especially in past eras, ‘normal life’ was so grindingly mundane that people needed to be able to believe in at least the possibility of various wonders that transcended everyday reality, if only as an escapist fantasy. And fantasies best retain their glamour, of course, if they’re placed a safe distance away, where they can’t be checked and proven not to exist: somewhere outside the known world.

Originally, of course, when people hardly travelled at all, the known world was correspondingly small, and the fairies might well have lived under the neighbouring hill, or all kinds of weird stuff might go on beyond the next forest. Back then, that sort of thing would only have been recorded in oral tradition, but when civilisation arrives, with written records, we get something rather more concrete to work with… if such nebulos­ities can ever be described as ‘concrete’. But still we find the Other lurking at the fringes: beyond the borders of empire or, ultimately, at the ends of the Earth itself.

For the Greeks and Romans, the Other was mostly to be found in India or Africa (often referred to at that point as ‘Libya’). So, for example, back in the 5th century BC Herodotus wrote (Histories, 4.191) that: “The land westward of Libya is extremely hilly, and wooded, and filled with wild beasts; in this region there are giant snakes, and bears, and vipers, and asses with horns, and dog-headed men, and headless men with eyes in their breasts…” Now, you might think that, actually, what lies west of Africa is the Atlantic Ocean, but that’s hardly the point: “beyond Libya” is outside the confines of the known world, and so a likely place for all sorts of wonders to occur. India, largely terra incognita too, was just as weird, with the Sciapodes, who had such large feet they fell on the ground at noon and used their own feet for shade, people with long ears, cyclopean eyes, and so on. And as for the land of the Seres, as the Chinese were then known, who lived even further on…

Actually, the ancient Chinese had distinctly par­allel views, recording similar marvels in the Shanhaijing, ‘The Classic of Mountains and Seas’; and again it’s notable that these mountains and seas are actually placed at the edges of the world, beyond the reach of empire. The same sort of thing continues centuries later with mediæval Western travel writers like Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo, who placed entire mythical kingdoms, such as that of Prester John, in the unexplored wastes of Asia. As always, the Other is placed just too far away for its authenticity to be verified.

Gradually, of course, the world became fully explored and such marvels disapp­eared for lack of somewhere to place them. The Other still exists, however, though more often disguised these days as certain types of fortean phenomena… yet once again, it frequently comes from, or is only to be found, somewhere quite difficult to access. For example, Mokele-mbembe (see FT86:32–35; 145:30–32), the putat­ive dinosaur-survivor, is said to survive only in the dense and unexplored jungles of the Congo (though as my garden shed appears on Google Earth, it’s hard to imagine something the size of a brontosaurus escaping notice in this day and age). Again, the phantom airships at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (see FT196:46–49; 198:48–50 and passim) were frequently said to be piloted by foreigners, or if the pilots were American, to have come from the other side of the country… always somewhere far enough away to be uncheckable. By 1947, of course, it was fairly obvious that unidentified aerial machines were unlikely to originate anywhere on Earth (unless they happened to be Nazi flying saucers from similarly inaccessible subterranean bases beneath the poles), and so the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis was born; all the more wonderfully convenient because it was impossible to verify, just like all those old Greek and Roman tales.

At this point, it might be useful to look, in very general terms, at the development of science fiction, and particularly the interplanetary romance. From the earliest surviving examples, by Antonius Diogenes and Lucian of Samosata, back in the 2nd century AD, through until the late 19th-century works of Verne and Wells, fictional space-travellers rarely went beyond the Moon, which was still conceived as being able to support life in some form. With the early 20th cent­ury, we find the horizons expanding to include ancient, canal-riven Mars and the cloudy, jungle planet Venus… locations remaining popular until the 1950s, when it was finally realised that they were actually uninhabitable. But by then SF had already moved on beyond the solar system, first with the aid of multi-generational long-flight ships and later with the faster-than-light drive, to create the interstellar romance. Here we see the same sort of process: the more we explore and understand our local territory, the more both the Other, and the settings of our fantasies, recede into the distance, until they’re eventually to be found mainly beyond the celestial seas of near-Space.

By the mid-1960s, though, the physical difficulties of interstellar travel were becoming more apparent, and the SF-universe began to implode, thanks largely to writers of the ‘New Wave’ based around the Michael Moorcock-edited magazine New Worlds. From here on, the emphasis switched away from space-opera adventures on other planets to dys­topian tales of social breakdown, drugs, near-futures and parallel universes, etc., as it finally dawned on people that our interior worlds and parochial societies were actually rather more interesting than completely fictitious alien worlds. Human, rather than non-human territory had become the place to explore.

The parallels with ufology are easy to see here. The contactees of the early 1950s, such as George Adamski, allegedly met human-like people from Mars and, more particularly, the myst­erious, cloud-enshrouded Venus, both of which were, in the popular imagin­ation at least, still considered habitable. Only later were UFOs thought to come from such locations as the Pleiades, and it’s interesting to note that, as their homeworlds recede into the distance, so the visitors become progressively more alien: hardly anyone ever tried to place little grey aliens on Venus, after all.

It’s also notable, though, that by the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis as an explan­ation for UFOs was starting to collapse, particularly in Europe, and we began to see the rise of other approaches to such encounters, most notably the psychosocial one, which finds just as much of interest in the witnesses and their social milieu as in the perceived phenomena themselves. As was the case with SF, the emphasis switched away from interstellar orig­ins and toward the human dimension of UFO encounters.

This is not to deny the existence of the Other, of course… or perhaps more to the point, the place of the Other in the way we construct our worldview, as it seems to have been present throughout history and across the globe. It does rather imply, however, that we’ve been looking for it in the wrong place. It’s less likely to be found outside us, literally existing somewhere over the horizon; instead it’s far more likely to be found inside our heads. And, ultimately, that’s probably a far more interesting space to explore than anything that might be lurking out there in the Pleiades.

Further reading
Anne Birrell (trans): The Classic of Mountains and Seas, Penguin Classics, 1999.
Adam Roberts: The History of Science Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007.
James S Romm: The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, Princeton University Press, 1992.