I, Dynamo

Eugenics And Dysgenics Pt. 2a

Actions And Reactions

by

R.E. Prindle

The fabulous nineteenth century progressed from Enlightenment to sound scientific knowledge with an accelerating pace that meant that what was learned in one’s youth was passé in one’s maturity. Thus the knowledge of a sixty year old was out of date for a thirty year old. The eternities were disturbed. Initially overwhelmed, by century’s end the forces of reaction had had time to realign and offer challenges to the new world of knowledge even as their reaction to the new knowledge had been surpassed by newer more current knowledge.

It was in this state of confusion that the world entered the new even more rapidly evolving twentieth century that left the nineteenth century in the dust. And, this quick evolution was very unevenly distributed. It was shared by no other place on Earth than the US/Canada and Europe, that is the Aryan race. From those locations scientific knowledge began to be distributed by the Aryans throughout the world. Assimilation to the scientific knowledge was not easy and still has not been achieved.

As the Western world entered the Post WWI years the glories of what was called the Victorian Age, once revered, became despised. But they would reemerge in the twenty-first century as Steampunk.

One of the more interesting reactions came from the re-emergence of the Romantic era as the neo-Romantic era that flowered from nineteen-nineties through the outbreak of WWI and has persisted into the twenty-first century as science fiction, horror and fantasy- three different expressions of the demolished fairy world.

To return to the nineteenth century. The neo-Romantics could not return to the Land of Faerie unaffected by scientific achievements. The literature of the neo-Romantics was as beautiful as that of the Romantics. Several seminal works were to persist in influence through the twentieth century to the present. Of first magnitude was Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Published in 1886 it incorporated elements of the psychological unconscious that were then emerging. The story ranks among the most influential. Naturally there was a great difference in the dissemination of the story between the two centuries.

In the twentieth movies had come into existence and by 1927 the talkies began to replace silent films. This was revolutionary. With sound, movies came into their own. I’m sure a silent film of Jekyll and Hyde was made but it was the first sound version that gave the story universal distribution. Many versions and variations were made of Stevenson’s story some of which distorted the original story to the point of unrecognition. The original sound version is the one most people know, or knew. As that version is now nearly a hundred years old several generations may never have seen it except for film buffs. The novel version is quite different from all film versions.

Looking back toward the late Victorian Age the movie makers make Dr. Jekyll a rather stuffy academic type who, as a chemist, or possibly an alchemist, while experimenting discovers a drug that releases him from all inhibitions letting the evil or mostly evil unconscious of Jekyll emerge as Mr. Hyde

This in itself was an expression of the understanding of the unconscious. The discovery, or examination of the unconscious began with Dr. Anton Mesmer in the eighteenth century and by Stevenson’s time in 1886 when his story was published was a well-known phenomenon among the cognoscenti. In Stevenson’s story Jekyll had been a wild and rowdy lad in his youth and longed to relive those golden days. Many drugs, including absinthe, were in use already in those days thus their effect on personality being noted so that Jekyll using some sort of concoction was able to remove his inhibitions with disastrous consequences.

Literary characters of dual personalities began to pop up everywhere. One duo, as influential as Stevenson’s was Conan Doyle’s marvelous creation of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. It isn’t noted that the two were complementary aspects of the same personality.

Perhaps the writer most devoted to the Jekyll-Hyde problem was the fantastic American late neo-Romantic writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs.

This extraordinary writer was perhaps at one and the same time the most Romantic, scientific, fantasy and horror or proto-sci-fi author of all time. He carried the Jekyll-Hyde story to new heights and wide variations.

In his first published novel, A Princess Of Mars, his chief character, John Carter, who had survived the split personality of the US in the Civil War as a Confederate officer, while running from an Indian war band of the post-civil war Western era stumbles on a cave of strange provenance where he abandons his body to be, one assumes, spiritually transmitted to Mars. Thus, this photo-copy of himself takes up a career on Mars while his body remains in the cave on Earth.

Another novel, one that made Burroughs’ life, Tarzan of the Apes, followed a year later. In this story Tarzan, or John Clayton, to give his civilized name, was born on the coast of Gabon in Africa to noble English parents who were killed by the ‘Great Apes’. These Apes are of no known species, perhaps they were meant as the Missing Link, a great evolutionary trope of the day when it was thought there was a single link between apes and humans that was missing.

Rescued from death by the ape Kala, who had lost her own ‘balu’ or baby, the baby Tarzan was reared as an ape. His ape name Tarzan thus means ‘white skin’ as opposed to the hairy black apes. While not exactly having super powers, yet Tarzan as a boy discovers his parents tree house containing a primer or two intended for John Clayton’s future education, he teaches himself through pictures and texts how to read and thus discovers he is not an ape at all but a human being. Thus in Jekyll and Hyde terms he becomes the Man-Beast. Stevenson’s novelette had been read by Burroughs who entered into the notion of dual personality whole heartedly. Thus, when wearing civilized clothing Tarzam is a cultured English lord but when he strips to the loin cloth he becomes an actual beast. Still intelligent but a sort of noble savage. Tarzan had other dual personalities. At one time a look alike named Esteban Miranda challenges him for the love of his wife while Tarzan is repeatedly bashed in the head at which he becomes a different amnesiac personality. Dual personality was a real fixation of Burroughs. He himself was cracked on the head at the age of twenty-two which definitely changed his own personality.

Burroughs was sort of an odd duck. He was a wide reader and the stories he read seemed to take on an independent existence in his head so that he apparently couldn’t differentiate his original story from a variation on someone else’s story so that in the sequel to Tarzan of the Apes, The Return of Tarzan, he retells Edgar Allan Poe’s story, The Murders In The Rue Morgue as his own. I’m not sure how his career survived that unless a very few of his readers had ever read Poe. Poe wasn’t especially well thought of at this time. However his editor Metcalf surely had. Metcalf rejected the novel but Return was later picked up by another magazine desperate for a Tarzan story.

Burroughs even titles his story ‘What Happened In The Rue Maule. Even though the source of Burroughs story is easily recognized in Poe’s story today still Burroughs manages his details in such a way that it seems a new and almost original story.

In Poe’s story the split personality is the lead character C. Auguste Dupin, the is CAD and the unnamed narrator. It should also be mentioned that Poe explored the dual personality in several of his stories of the 1830s-1840s including the remarkable William Wilson. Poe obviously suffered from a split personality.

In Burroughs’ story the suave cultured Tarzan now living in Paris, at the sight of blood reverts back to this savage upbringing among the apes, becoming a ravening beast. In Poe’s story an escaped Orang outang commits the murders, in what is essentially a locked room story and escapes.

In Burroughs story a hereditary enemy by the name of Rokoff sets up a situation to lure Tarzan into a building and apartment where there are a half dozen villains waiting to kill him. How Rokoff would know that Tarzan would be walking down the most villainess street in Paris, ask any policeman as Burroughs writes, isn’t adequately explained.

Nevertheless, hearing a woman’s screams of distress Tarzan rushed into the building, Rue Maule #27, third floor, Burroughs was always great at details, where in a sort of Badger game he discovers the woman and a roomful of villains. ‘Yoicks’ or something similar, he says, and the melee begins as Tarzan begins to demolish the mini mob out to injure him. Rokoff waiting outside quickly finds a phone, cell phones were not yet invented, while one is surprised to find one so easily available in Paris at this time. The point is that Rokoff calls the police to tell them there is a riot going on at #27, third floor. Still a savage beast although dressed in the height of fashion Tarzan flattens the cops, blows out the candle, phones being available in #27 but not electricity, and leaps out the window onto an adjoining telephone pole not unlike Poe’s Orang, scampers across the rooftops of Paris, as the telephone pole is taller than the third floor, similar to swinging through the jungle trees, drops to the ground, steps into a corner drug store to use the toilet to tidy up and wash his hands then, this is the word Burroughs uses, saunters, down the block just like any bored boulevardier. There you have Poe rewritten into a story only slightly inferior to the original.

Amazingly Poe’s story served as a basis for Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes and Watson replacing Poe’s Dupin and narrator.

In this tremendously creative period another of the great genres persisting down till today was Bram Stoker’s incredible version of the vampire Dracula on which today’s versions of vampires are based. Stoker did not create the vampire character, there are earlier examples including Polidori’s short story that set the rage off. Among other versions Varney The Vampire a long novel by Rymer in mid-century really developed the theme and from blood sucking vampires, the psychic vampire also emerged. Our times’ Anne Rice had made a career out of vampire stories.

A creation of the first Romantic period, Mary Shelley’s man created life, Frankenstein and his monster, evolved into a whole genre of androids, robots and various forms of artificial humanity. Interestingly the ubiquitous Edgar Rice Burroughs offered his contribution of The Monster Men, as he covered almost all the modern genres adding The Mastermind Of Mars to the catalog of artificial life in the 1930s. He even managed to attach Henry Ford’s mass production methods to the process.

The reaction against the nineteenth century scientific revolution was epitomized by the Pre-Raphaelites of England. They were called Pre-Raphaelites because they rejected all society after the artist Raphael. Following in their tradition William Morris wrote a number of haunting nostalgia novels that are quite charming but overly sentimental.

Perhaps my favorite of the neo-Romantics is the English writer George Du Maurier and his three novels, Peter Ibbetson, Trilby and The Martian. Du Maurier himself was a Frenchman who was removed to England in youth causing a sort of split personality in himself. For a couple decades he made a name for himself writing and drawing for the great humor magazine of the period Punch. Then he was passed over when the editorship opened up; that was more than he could he bear. He quit and began writing his novels. Apparently his talents had been under appreciated at Punch as his great success took the magazines contributors by surprise.

The first novel, Peter Ibbetson was well thought of but didn’t establish him. His second, Trilby, was a smash mega seller influencing the Mauve Decade of the Nineties to its roots. His villain Svengali is still widely used to describe a person who seems to control another under the influence of hypnotism. Du Maurier died as his last novel, The Martian, was published. It is a lovely book. I like it, but it does not have the concentration of the first two. However it’s proto-sci-fi fantasy theme is very interesting for the right minds, overall the three are a great trilogy. A fourth was projected dealing with politics but the Grim Reaper came between it and Du Maurier.

George might be considered the arch-typical neo-Romantic. His influence is probably greater than realized. His themes have been reopened by writers like the great American novelist, Richard Matheson.

For Du Maurier memory was everything, and in his mind, that necessitated life after death or as he thought, what good was having accumulated them. His novels are monuments to memory. Born in 1834 he spent his childhood in France a childhood he turned into a fairyland; he was removed to England as a youth and the two national characters lived side by side in him as two almost distinct personalities. The writers of the first Romantic period fueled his memories, most notably the English poet, George Gordon, Lord Byron and the Frenchman Charles Nodier.

Nodier was the composer of the interesting short novel Trilby. In the 1890s Du Maurier would rewrite the story in his novel of the same name. In Nodier’s novel Trilby was male fairy who visited the girl Jeannie in Scotland. As Nodier was writing in the Romantic period that was a revival, a last gasp itself, as fairies had been disproven by science. So Jeannie having revealed the visits of the fairy Trilby to her, she was treated as deluded and compelled to give up her friend Trilby. Then she sickened and died.

In Du Maurier’s novel, Trilby, his middle or second novel, he reverses the sexes of the duo making Trilby a young woman and turning Trilby into the evil hypnotist, the Jewish Svengali.

The story is placed in Paris in the 1850s where Du Maurier was an artist living the Bohemian life in the classic age of Bohemianism. Du Maurier portrays an ideal beautiful fantasy life with boon companions and a carefree Bohemian existence. Trilby is a grisette or what might have been called a ‘hippie chick’ in our own 1960s, an artist’s model or whatever but virtuous unlike the other grisettes.

She and the Little Billee character of Du Maurier fall in love. Little Billee is modeled after his namesake in Thackeray’s poem of the same name. The romance is scotched when Little Billee’s aristocratic mother visits him and rejects Trilby as a daughter-in-law.

Another regular visitor to the atelier was a beteljew named Svengali. He was also a musician and musical theorist who played piano well. He noted that Trilby’s oral cavity was perfect for a great singer however Trilby couldn’t carry a tune and could scarcely hit a note. After her rejection by Billee’s mother, the gang breaks up with Billee and his friends returning to England.

A few vicissitudes find Trilby at the hypnotist Svengali’s door. Her oral cavity now belongs to him. Returning to his native precincts in Poland Svengali after hypnotizing Trilby makes her sing like a bird. To shorten the story, in a Jenny Lind like career, Trilby and Svengali take Europe by storm.

While visiting Paris Billee and friends reuniting for the moment, watch Trilby and Svengali’s triumphant entry into Paris. Svengali spots them watching and gives Little Billee a hard look. The shows were sold out so the trio missed them but were first in line for the London shows in the first box. Trilby could only sing while making eye contact with Svengali. He made the mistake of looking up to see Billee. A jealous rage overcame him, his eyes popped, he went apoplectic, croaking on the spot. Without eye contact Trilby returned to herself and could only croak off key and out of tune. The audience was merciless.

Trilby became sick and withered away. Her dying words were Svengali, Svengali, Svengali.

Thus, Nodier’s story was reversed and told in the most charming manner, neo-Romantically.

In the telling Du Maurier wove a lifetime of memories, musical and literary, reincorporated Bohemian Paris at its peak, a Jenny Lind type story at the end and the then current fascination with hypnotism. A thoroughly pleasing mix. He transfigures his life into a fairy tale.

Nearly the same fairy tale he used in his first book, Peter Ibbetson. I’m not sure I could call Ibbetson a great book but the three novels together are a sui generis. Events fit into a sci-fi context but yet are more ethereal, other worldly. Du Maurier’s inventions are really quite daring as he seeks to relate to reality yet evades it as much as he can, blending the inner with outer world in a tantalizing manner. Memory, always memory but a memory made immediate.

E.T.A. Hoffman’s introduction to his tale ‘A New Year’s Adventure’ explains the feeling better than I can:

Quote:

The Travelling Enthusiast from whole journals we are presenting another “fancy flight in the manner of Jacques Callot ,” apparently not separated the events of his inner life from those of the outside world; in fact we cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. But even if you cannot see the boundary very clearly, dear reader, the Geisterseher may beckon you to his side, and before you are even aware of it, you will be in a strange magical realm where figures of fantasy step right into your own life, and are as cordial with you as your oldest friends.

Unquote.

Du Maurier captures that feeling perfectly and if you enter into his fabulous story of memory and reality co-existing together seamlessly you will be carried along to a supreme adventure. E.T.A. Hoffman himself was from the first Romantic era, one of its stellar authors. The divine muses, Calliope and Clio, not only sat on his shoulders whispering, but entered his head and dictated his stories. I have no idea whether Du Maurier read Hoffman but Hoffmann was in the same time frame as Charles Nodier who wrote the first version of Trilby.

Du Maurier was familiar with the Romantic oeuvre. As with many nineteenth century writers Du Maurier was fascinated with the poems of Byron. He makes frequent references to the Giaour, one of Byron’s tales. The poem seems to be a central fixation guiding Du Maurier’s pen.

Peter Ibbetson tells the story of Ibbetson’s crime, his incarceration, his descent into madness and removal from prison to the Colny Hatch, where he lives his life out. In France Ibbetson grew up with a little girl named Seraskier. He loved her greatly and the separation from her when he was taken to England was quite painful to him. And then, as if by magic, as a grown man living with his cruel uncle he attends a ball to discover Seraskier as a grown woman, the Duchess of Towers. Of course, a married woman, she is unobtainable but they begin a platonic love affair.

But then, Peter’s nasty uncle raises Peter’s ire and in a fit of anger Peter bludgeons him to death. He himself is condemned to be hanged but through the efforts of the Duchess of Towers and her powerful friends his sentence is commuted to life imprisonment. It is in prison that he loses control being transferred to the insane asylum.

It is while there that he discovers that he can enter the Duchess’s dreams and she can enter his, and this is done on real terms and not imagination. They actually physically interact. He now lives to sleep and enter the alternate reality of his dreams shared with the Duchess. In a carefully elaborated system the two can travel anywhere they know having been there or do anything they have done in the outside world in the past. Thus memory is everything. The inner and outer worlds become one.

She is still married so that the relationship is platonic until her husband dies, and Peter and the Duchess can be lovers. Happy in his insane asylum where his sanest dreams are realized. Peter is supremely happy but then one night as he snuggles into bed drifting off to dreamland a terrible thing happens, as he reaches the portal from his dream to hers he finds it blocked, boarded up. With a cold shiver he realizes the truth, the Duchess has died.

Having completely entered this world of Du Maurier’s I broke down in tears along with Peter. Of course his sanity or insanity is jarred and he collapses. But whatever gods may be had pity on Peter. As in ancient days they let the Duchess return to Peter’s dream to console him and promise him that they would be together eternally. One assumes then that in death Peter found the happiness that had eluded him in life.

Today the theme has been explored in many variations, notably in Richard Matheson’s Somewhere In Time and also his What Dreams May Come. I have no idea whether Matheson read Du Maurier but it is not improbable. Time has passed now and Victorian literature no longer holds the place it then did but Matheson was born well before me and for my age cohort there was no literature taught written after 1914 so there’s no reason Matheson wouldn’t have been familiar with a range of Victorian authors unread today.

Du Maurier’s story at the time was as original as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde written a few years before. While The Martian, the last of the trilogy, is perhaps the weakest of the three it too is very innovative in a proto-sci-manner.   It too is a memory capsule centered around the loss of vision in one of George’s eyes. The loss seems to have been the result of a torn retina. Given the knowledge of the time there was no hope to save the eye but even then he fell in with a medical quack.

But, just as Ibbetson went to prison and the asylum and in the process discovered how to meld dreams with the Duchess of Towers, in this story he is contacted by a little fairy from Mars, the Martian of the story also named Martia. She attaches herself to the protagonist Barty Josselin. She is sort of a female Wandering Jew (another great European legend) who for centuries has been attaching herself to men as a sort succubus.

Her term as a Wandering Fairy is up. She is intensely in love with Barty so she arranges to become his next child who is a little girl he names Marty. At a young age Marty dies and Barty dies both souls are released at the same time so that together with Barty’s memories they continue the journey after death to the heart of the sun.

Beautiful story, longingly told.

The neo-Romantic period coincided with the apex of European power in history as Europe had conquered the seas and continents of the entire world; all its peoples were its subjects. But, as always happens the moment of triumph begins the descent. Even in the first decade of the twentieth century there were those who knew that European power was in decline and then the Great War cut it short. The passing was commemorated in the American Madison Grant’s great book: The Passing Of The Great Race. Before it did a great literature was written, written in the neo-Romantic style, in a sort of fair land style. The scramble for Africa had brought nearly the whole monstrously huge continent under European control, a blessing and a curse. In European writing it is depicted as a sort of wondrous fairyland.

Europe produced three great epics over its two thousand year span, the sprawling epic of which the Iliad and Odyssey are part, the huge Arthurian cycle and finally the search for the source of the Nile that embraces the discovery of Africa. Why the last should be true isn’t clear.

The real life adventure was looking back at it the incredible search for the source of the Nile. England bent its energies on the search for the exact spot from which the flow of the White Nile trickled. Huge sums were spent and men devoted their very lives in the search and it produced a great literature. The solo adventures of Samuel Baker and his slave, also his wife, purchased in Hungary. The fabulous safaris of Henry Morton Stanley spanning tens of thousand of miles, his books reading like improbable adventure novels even far surpassing them while his own life was stranger than fiction. Perhaps his life is only believable as fiction. Disparaged now because they speak of a far gone time and even more ancient expectations and attitudes.

Kipling wrote of the Indian Raj when a few thousand Englishmen controlled a sub-continent. Joseph Conrad wrote his tales of the daring adventurers who seized Asian kingdoms.

Perhaps the greatest of all were the novels of the English writer H. Rider Haggard. He, the author of two of the greatest neo-Romantic adventure novels, King Solomon’s Mines and single word title She. The title in full: She-who-must-be-obeyed.

The neo-Romantic period also saw the re-emergence of esotericism. It burst into full bloom in Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and her creation of Theosophy. It burst too late to be an influence on Haggard, at least his early career but Haggard seems to be fully conversant with its ideas. The novel She itself is said to be a perfect expression of Theosophy and that from Madame Blavatsky herself.

African romance after African romance rolled out of his pen, all of very high quality. Haggard commemorated the notion of the Elephant’s Graveyard that fascinated generations up until perhaps the 1950s when the legend lapsed into infinity. One doesn’t hear of it anymore.

The Imperial novels of that time while still heard of are definitely out of favor. More people wish it had never existed than care to remember it and explore its remains. More people would rather visit holocaust museums and gaze at the ashes of dead bodies.

However, Romanticism has continued to evolve. Many of the best stories of the pre-WWI era passed into the realm of boys’ stories laying their riches at the feet of a couple three or four generations of lucky boys. Many also were preserved in the nascent talkie film industry, versions preserved on reels of film.

And still the need for the Land of Faerie persisted and Romanticism took a new turn scarcely recognized for what it was. Science had left that empty space that had to be filled. The Land of Faerie had to be reorganized. At first Mars replaced the Land of Faerie, seemingly safe at least 30 million miles distant from Earth and at other time half across the solar system. Martian stories began to make their appearance precisely during the neo-Romantic period. There was still room to speculate as high powered telescopes were still to be perfected. Camille Flammarion and Perceval Lowell could still write of dead seas and canals on Mars. The last of the neo-Romantics, Edgar Rice Burroughs, could still exploit faerie kingdoms on Mars but that could only last until the killer telescopes were developed.

The Universe began to expand rapidly through the twenties and thirties. As late as 1950 it was thought that the Universe was as small as 450,000 light years. But then it exploded through millions and hundreds of millions of light years and on into the billions. Mars was no longer tenable as a Fairy refuge. Ray Bradury wrote his Martian Chronicles and in the last chapter all the fairy tale characters were driven from their last refuge into oblivion.

About this time however Flying Saucers made their appearance. Is there anything more Fairy than Flying Saucers? Think about it. The alien abductions began; we discovered that we were being watched by little green men from distant planets and galaxies. Little green fairies?  In the wonderful sci -fi of the Fifties writers worked up incredible scenarios. It was imagined that aliens from perhaps billions of light years away had exhausted their own mineral resources and wished to remove ours to their planets. The most imaginative of the sci-fi writers going by the name of William Tenn even posited that the inhabitants of the star Betelgeuse were building a bridge, a sort of conveyer belt from there to here to convey the resources. The logistics of that were too much for my young mind.

At that time also, the first few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki radio active fall out was creating all kinds of monsters, human and otherwise, Giant Crabs came forth, fifty foot men, even the greatest of them all, matching Frankenstein, The Creature From The Black Lagoon. After Bikini and Eniwetok anything was possible.

Aliens landed, as in The Day The Earth Stood Still, to check out Earth’s suitability to join the Intergalactic Peace League. This was shortly after WWII and during the Korean War so naturally the savage earth people were found wanting and not needed to disturb the peace prevailing throughout the intergalactic League. So, aliens, in this case Klaatu and Gort, hopped back in their Saucer leaving us with the admonition that they would check back in a few thousands of years to see if we had evolved.

Meanwhile, perhaps hundreds of saucers hovered over Earth from near space carefully observing us, occasionally crashing, once near Roswell, New Mexico where the search for the wreckage still goes on. Abductions continued.

A parallel development that was as influential as the space operas was the development of the super heroes. Perhaps the first of the super heroes were creations of the redoubtable Edgar Rice Burroughs with his creations of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. Carter coming from the heavier gravity and atmosphere of Earth had actual super powers on Mars while if Tarzan didn’t actually have super powers he could certainly do what no other human beings could do.

But, Time does not have a stop, or even stand still. Science and technology were rapidly moving ahead, especially in the print medium. Comic strips in the newspapers had been around from the 1890s but in the early thirties some genius invented what would become the graphic novel today, that is comic books. The comics were turned into illustrated four color folders at a dime a piece. How the comic book would have developed isn’t clear. Since super heroes such as the Shadow and the Man of Bronze, Doc Savage had arisen to compete with the like of John Carter and Tarzan something extra was needed for the comic books, fortunately for the idiom a man named Adolf Hitler had assumed he governance of Germany. Adolf Hitler was a bete noir of the Jews and he stimulated their imagination in the US so that in 1938 the first issue of Superman (original title Action Comics) was released and the super hero with truly upper human powers and the very latest scientific gadgets came into existence. Batman, Capt. America and a host of others followed on the heels of Superman while WWII which started supplied prime grist for the comic book mill. The comics were a Jewish enterprise and the super heroes were therefore Jewish. And under the care of the very Jewish Stan Lee have remained so down to this day.

Aiding the super hero phenomenon since translated to film was the emergence of more science in the form of CGI (Computer Generated Images). With that addition the impossible could be made visible so that the human mind no longer had to grapple with mere reality. It conquered reality. Neo-Reality had arrived. Perhaps Faerieland had won after all.

Put all the above together and a new alternate reality or Land of Faerie had been created to fill he void left when Science had destroyed the possibility of the old Land of Faerie, even on Mars. The Universe was huge and there was no way to either prove or disprove the universe of Star Trek, a place where no man had gone before or was likely to go in the future. So, that fairyland is secure.

The Land of Faerie was only one imagined realm that had to be dealt with, there was also the imagined kingdom of God or the gods that was challenged out of existence. That in Part 2b to follow.