Emperor of the If

Emperor of the If (1926) is one of the most ambitious novels of the 1920s British scientific romance tradition, and one of the most unusual. Its premise centers on the scientist Chilton-Greyne, who has constructed, within a massive "puff-ball" concrete laboratory, a living organism grown from a preserved human brain. Greyne's theory is not time travel but something he calls Materialized Thought. The universe, he argues, is saturated with a creative Force much like wireless waves, for which the ordinary brain is too weak a receiver. His amplified organism can tune into that Force and, when prompted with a mental picture of a historical or hypothetical condition, reconstruct that reality and superimpose it directly over the existing present.

In Part I, Greyne prompts the brain with a vision of England before the Ice Age. London is immediately overrun by tropical vegetation; prehistoric plants tear through the pavement of Piccadilly; the Albert Hall collapses into itself and dissolves in a cloud of dust. But the transformation is not instant. Greyne describes the process using the image of a great flywheel, a power-house driving wheel turning at hundreds of revolutions per minute, from which the power has been cut. It does not stop at once. It coasts; for a while you cannot even tell it is slowing. He calls this the "Inertia of Custom," the momentum of established reality resisting the new. People either adapt to the change or they do not. Those who cannot, who keep seeing the world as it was, who cannot accept that their previous existence has dissolved, collapse into themselves as completely as the Albert Hall did, dissolving back into the primeval ooze.

While reality transforms around them, Greyne and Blatherwick journey on foot toward the Sussex Downs, near Chanctonbury Ring, where Greyne believes he will find the supreme vindication of his experiment: human beings evolved over millions of years under conditions of unbroken tropical heat, never softened by an Ice Age, forged entirely by survival. What they find is a tribe of enormous, camouflage-skinned humans, their bodies naturally striped and silver-slashed for concealment against the weathered downland rock. When Greyne addresses them, he instinctively shifts into a broadened Sussex dialect, and the tribe's chief spokesman answers in kind before shifting to match Greyne's own precise diction with uncanny exactness, like a puppet actuated by his thoughts. The spokesman speaks with controlled, rising rage. These people have done nothing, built nothing, achieved nothing, because fear has been their only inheritance. Every attempt to overcome terror depletes the brain of the very power needed to lift the body out of the morass. They are, he says, exactly what a god-playing altruist made them to be, creatures who know only the lash of their environment, who exist as walking advertisements of a potential never given the chance to develop. Greyne is standing face to face with what his own Sussex lineage would have become under this alternate projection of reality; he has created them, and they hold him responsible.

Part II shifts the novel into a terrifying far future. Seeking to understand where the materialist, scientific course of civilization leads, Greyne prompts the brain forward. What they find is a world ruled by two warring factions of self-reproducing sentient machines, known to their servants only as Them (the round machines) and They (the square ones). The history of how this came about is narrated by the most articulate of the human survivors, a neckless, nearly mindless dwarf whose superior memory, a gift from his father, sets him apart from his tribe and brings him no happiness. His account is a darkly comic cascade: first came the war fought with gas-proof machines; then the war to end that war; then the Great Revolt when machines began inventing themselves and could not be stopped; then the War of the Two Main Divisions; and finally the ongoing conflict "to decide when the next war shall start." Each war longer and more pointless than the last. The machines now build enormous tripod masts and egg-shaped constructs for no discernible purpose, and collect their human servants by scooping them up in pincer-armed tentacles. These servants, the Wallipergurnians, are hairy, neckless dwarfs with monstrous hands nearly two feet across, bred over ages into near-mindlessness, their most elaborate amusement a rolling scramble across the pebble-strewn plain. The most articulate of them has memorized what his father told him was important: fragments of the ancient language, the concept of "the daily paper," isolated phrases from a civilization none of them can comprehend. He is the most wretched figure in the book, cursing his father for having passed on the memory of something better.

The novel closes at the laboratory. Greyne, against all opposition, has connected the apparatus one final time. Blatherwick arrives too late. Greyne is gone; he has, evidently, projected himself into an alternative of his own choosing. Blatherwick is left alone before the pulsing brain. The final pages make Dent's underlying argument explicit without quite stating it: Greyne has released, from somewhere immeasurably remote in thought, a new Force into the world, which humanity will only recognize long after it has begun working. As the light of a distant star travels for a million years before it becomes perceptible to watchers on earth, so Greyne's action may already have started something. Blatherwick, sitting in his ordinary London house and staring at familiar walls, is no longer entirely certain whether the streets outside are the real world or simply the Inertia of Custom holding it together a little longer.