Heinlein’s sticking point came with the second tenet—the presumption that men with a knowledge of the way the universe really works could contrive to cope with any difficulty they might encounter. Heinlein had been a relatively late convert to the doctrine of universal operating principles, and even though at his most confident he might envision a dedicated elite of competent men, the overseers of society, who could solve any problem that might present itself and manage to ease ordinary folk past the rough spots, when he put his beliefs to the test, he wasn’t able to maintain confidence. The truth was that shepherding mankind from the present to the stars looked like no easy task to him.
He had little trust in the willingness and ability of normal less-than-competent humanity to do the right thing. He could wonder whether the capable, responsible few could manage to raise stupid, greedy, unheeding humanity up to the stars without snapping under the strain. But what really haunted Heinlein was the possibility that when mankind did reach the stars, it would find beings more able and advanced already established there.
In a universe responsive to competence, these aliens might effortlessly outstrip the most brilliant human genius, even Andy Libby of Methuselah’s Children. They could be more adept manipulators of universal operating principles—like the rapport groups of the Little People who by the power of thought alone can convince plants to bear fruit that tastes like mashed potatoes and gravy. Or, like the gods of the Jockaira, they just might be so highly evolved that try as men could it would never be possible for them to catch up.
It is this spectre that causes Heinlein’s long-lived people in Methuselah’s Children to turn back from the stars and retreat to Earth. Heinlein’s Best of Breed are motivated and sustained by the confident knowledge of their own superiority. Without this assurance, they despair of life, wilt, go mad, and die.
Until World War II finally intervened, and he went off to serve his country at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Heinlein went round and round with this problem in one story after another. But he never came close to resolving it.
Heinlein’s limitation was his lingering attachment to Techno Age notions of survival of the fittest and evolutionary superiority. These caused him to look upon transcendent aliens if not as hostile, certainly as dismaying. To someone who craved to have the edge, to know all the answers, and to be in charge as badly as he, the imagined indifference of higher beings could seem shattering—as he indicated in Methuselah’s Children, “By His Bootstraps” and “Goldfish Bowl.”
There was another writer for Astounding, however who would tackle the thorny questions of fitness, evolution and the future development of man and deal with them more creatively than Heinlein had been able to do. This was A.E. van Vogt, the most radical and visionary of all Campbell’s authors.
Alfred Elton van Vogt was born on his grandparents’ farm in Manitoba, Canada on April 26, 1912. At this time, van Vogt’s father and three of his uncles were partners in a general store in the village of Neville, Saskatchewan and his father was studying by correspondence to earn a law degree.
Like Isaac Asimov, who developed a case of double pneumonia at the end of his second year from which it was feared he wouldn’t recover, van Vogt had an early brush with death. When he was two, he fell from a second-floor window onto a wooden sidewalk, knocked himself unconscious, and remained in a coma for three days.
Van Vogt was like Asimov in another regard—the original language of this writer-to-be was not English. Until his mother put her foot down on the matter when Alfred was four, it was a dialect of Dutch that was spoken in the van Vogt household.
Young Alfred had something of a divided nature. He was an insatiable reader who for many years devoured two books a day and knew early that he wanted to be a writer when he grew up. But there were also moments when he was “an extrovert of extraordinary energy”592—as he put it in a 1981 memoir entitled “My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story.”
Van Vogt was a horseback rider as a youth. In summers during his teens, he worked as a separator man on a threshing outfit and drove a truck for a combine. He was a good rifle shot, and even came close to going off on a trapping expedition to northern Canada.
In later years, van Vogt would look back upon his younger self and try to determine just when it was that the more outgoing part of himself had gotten suppressed. Did it stem from that traumatic fight with another boy that occurred when he was eight? Was it the teacher who had caused him to doubt himself for reading fairytales at twelve? Or was the crucial event when he was 17 1/2 and killed a snake, and then suffered a revulsion against doing harm to any wild creature?
Though van Vogt might make guess after guess, he would never be able to pinpoint the exact moment when it happened. And, in fact, even well into his twenties, when he was an advertising space salesman and writer of interviews for a string of trade papers, van Vogt could still call on some lingering residue of brashness in his character to gain the attention of businessmen and store owners—as long as no one challenged him.
The truth of the matter seems to be that van Vogt’s withdrawal into himself took place over a considerable period of time. The beginning of it may lie in the fact that young Alfred was a highly idealistic small town boy with a number of wide-eyed notions about right and truth and justice in his head. When the world failed to conform to his expectations, he found that a substantial shock.
Beyond this, it was also true that Alfred was a boy who had something a little strange and left-footed about him. He didn’t think or talk exactly like everyone else, and reaction to this may have had its effect on his developing personality.
As the Twenties boomed, van Vogt’s lawyer father moved his family once and then again, first to the larger town of Morden, Manitoba, and then to the city of Winnipeg, where he became the western Canadian agent of the Holland-American Shipping Lines.
These moves were very difficult for van Vogt. He would recall: “Childhood was a terrible period for me. I was like a ship without anchor being swept along through darkness in a storm. Again and again I sought shelter, only to be forced out of it by something new.”593
Morden was twice as large as Neville. It was a conservative community with a predominantly English population, and here van Vogt was made aware that Canada was British but that he was not.
Winnipeg was even more trying. It was a city of 250,000—two hundred times the size of Morden—and Alfred felt lost there. He quickly fell behind in school “in the five subjects that you just can’t catch up on easily: algebra, geometry, Latin grammar, Latin literature, and one other that I can’t recall.”594 In consequence, he was asked to repeat the tenth grade.
The broader horizons offered by science fiction—still not yet called this—were one answer he found to his difficulties. He came across SF first in Morden at the age of eleven in a British boys’ magazine called Chum, the yearly collected volume of which he contrived to borrow for a dime from another boy who soon became his best friend.
Then, in Winnipeg, in his dark days of failure in school, he discovered the November 1926 issue of Amazing Stories on a newsstand and recognized it as what he was seeking. During the next three years—until Hugo Gernsback lost control of the magazine and it came under the more conservative editorial direction of ancient T. O’Conor Sloane—van Vogt would read Amazing assiduously, seeking signs of another and higher order of being than that which was to be found in Winnipeg, Manitoba in the late 1920s. As van Vogt would eventually come to express it:
Reading science fiction lifted me out of the do-be-and-have world and gave me glimpses backward and forward into the time and space distances of the universe. I may live only three seconds (so to speak), but I have had the pleasure and excitement of contemplating the beginning and end of existence. Short of being immortal physically, I have vicariously experienced just about everything that man can conceive will happen by reading science fiction.595
If Amazing had defects and limitations, this wasn’t apparent to young Alfred. Wh
at he saw in the pioneer magazine of science fiction was the wonders of man’s progress-to-come, and his imagination was fired by one grand new concept after another: “ESP; trans-light speeds; exploration of space; the infinitely small turning out to be another universe; new super-energy sources; instant education; the long journey; shape changing; vision at a distance; time travel; gravity minimization; taking over another body; etc.”596
A considerable impression would be made on van Vogt by E.E. Smith’s The Skylark of Space, of course. But the writer in Amazing who had the most to say to him was A. Merritt.
When Gernsback left the magazine, the youngster couldn’t help but notice the change. Amazing lost the magic it had held for him and became dull. Consequently, in 1930, in one of the utterly abrupt transitions that were to become typical of his conduct of life, van Vogt put science fiction aside.
He wouldn’t look at SF again for more than eight years, until, just as abruptly, he was ready to begin to write it. In the meantime, however, he had a great deal of self-preparation to do.
Lack of spare cash was one reason for his ceasing to buy science fiction magazines. The stock market crash of 1929 took place at the beginning of van Vogt’s last year in high school. Before that school year was over, van Vogt’s father had lost his shipping-lines job and it was apparent there wouldn’t be sufficient money available for Alfred to go to college. Although in later life, van Vogt would sit in on college courses in many subjects from economics to acting, this was to be the end of his formal education.
For the next six months, he hid out in his bedroom and wondered what to do with himself. Mostly he continued to read. He read hot pulp fiction—historical romances, mysteries and Westerns. He read serious turn-of-the-century British fiction and Nineteenth Century French novels. He read history and psychology. And he also read books of science.
The science that interested van Vogt the most was not familiar Newtonian science. It seems possible that the unrecallable essential subject he flunked in tenth grade, along with Latin and math, just might have been chemistry or physics. Unlike a John Campbell or a Robert Heinlein, van Vogt hadn’t spent his youth building radios or carrying out a search for a better way to blow up the basement. There was never much likelihood that he would grow up to become an aeronautical engineer like de Camp or a biochemist like Asimov.
The science that van Vogt did care about was the new wider science of atoms and galaxies. But even here, what interested him was not the details, but rather concepts and overviews—the philosophy and meaning of science. And so it was only natural that he would find his way to the writings of Arthur Eddington, James Jeans and J.B.S. Haldane.
However, the book that had the greatest influence on the formation of his thinking may have been Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1925). At one time or another, this pioneering work of post-materialistic philosophy passed through the hands of most of the youngsters who would grow up to become the science fiction writers of Campbell’s Golden Age. But it was van Vogt alone amongst them who would be able to take insights derived from this difficult little book and make them the basis for his SF writing.
Until the year preceding the publication of Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead’s career had been spent as a mathematician, first for twenty-five years at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then, from 1911, at the University of London. We might recall Whitehead in his role as Bertrand Russell’s collaborator on the Principia Mathematica (1910-13), a heroic three-volume attempt to reduce all mathematics to logic. Some thirty years after it was published, Pratt and de Camp would draw upon the opening pages of this work for the symbolic equations which Harold Shea employs to transfer himself from one reality to another.
We might also remember that in his brilliant 1931 metamathematical paper, “On Formally Undecidable Propositions,” the German Kurt Gödel had demonstrated that it was impossible for either the Principia Mathematica or any like system to be self-consistent and complete. Certain statements must necessarily be admitted as true that the system itself was incapable of either proving or disproving.
Even before the publication of Gödel’s paper, however, Alfred North Whitehead himself had already come to perceive the inadequacy of his and Russell’s monumental effort. In fact, Whitehead had been led by his understanding of mathematics, of the new quantum physics, and of physiology and psychology to doubt the sufficiency of the entire modern scientific philosophy.
He would object: “We are content with superficial orderings from diverse arbitrary starting points.”597 And, with disarming gentleness, he would further inquire: “Is it not possible that the standardized concepts of science are only valid within narrow limitations, perhaps too narrow for science itself?”598
So it was that in 1924, at the advanced age of 63, Whitehead traveled across the Atlantic to join the faculty of Harvard University as a professor of philosophy. And the first fruit of this new career was Science and the Modern World, based in the main on eight Lowell Lectures that he delivered in 1925.
Two complementary lines of argument were to be found intertwined in this remarkable book. In one, Whitehead reviewed the entire history of Western objection and exception to scientific materialism: The philosophical arguments that had been raised against it at the outset of the modern Western scientific adventure, during the Age of Reason. The experiential objections—often phrased in poetic terms—of the Romantic Era. And finally, the problems that had been recently raised for scientific materialism by the strange new science of the later Age of Technology.
And meanwhile, in his other, concurrent line of argument, Whitehead sketched out a basis for an alternative post-materialistic philosophy—“a system of thought basing nature upon the concept of organism and not upon the concept of matter.”599
As Whitehead would draw the distinction:
The materialistic starting point is from independently existing substances, matter and mind. The matter suffers modifications of its external relations of locomotion, and the mind suffers modifications of its contemplated objects. There are, in this materialistic theory, two sorts of independent substances, each qualified by their appropriate passions.
The organic starting point is from the analysis of process as the realisation of events disposed in an interlocked community. The event is the unit of things real.600
Following the arguments that Whitehead was setting forth in Science and the Modern World was not at all easy. His presentation was intricate, wide-ranging, dense and elusive, as though Whitehead himself wasn’t always completely sure just what it was he was attempting to say.
In the course of his discussion, Whitehead would draw a contrast between thinkers who are clear, yet limited, and thinkers who are muddled, but fruitful. Beyond question, he himself was a thinker of the second sort. In consequence, following out the nuances and implications of Alfred North Whitehead’s arguments and attempting to determine exactly what they meant would remain something of a challenge even for professional students of philosophy.
It was little wonder, then, that van Vogt’s contemporaries—the other boys who would grow up to write the science fiction of the Golden Age—should largely find Science and the Modern World unintelligible. Or that in the places where these earnest young scientists of the basement could comprehend Whitehead—as in his repudiation of scientific materialism—they would not be prepared to accept and follow him.
However, it would be quite otherwise with van Vogt, in large part precisely because he was not a professional student of philosophy, and neither did he have any special allegiance to the given assumptions of Western science. He was just an out-of-step kid from farther Canada who above all things desired to broaden his mental horizons and was ready to take his ideas wherever he could find them.
For van Vogt, reading Science and the Modern World provided him with exactly what he was seeking. From out of the general murk of Whitehead’s argumentation, certain key remarks leaped forth to speak directly to hi
m.
As one example, there was this:
My theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.601
What a mind-boggling suggestion this was—that everything is everywhere at all times, so that each and every standpoint to some extent mirrors all that exists! Now that was food for thought.
So was this:
“If organisms are to survive, they must work together. Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide.”602
And this:
“Successful organisms modify their environment. Those organisms are successful which modify their environments so as to assist each other.”603
It mattered little to van Vogt that he might not be picking up every last detail of Whitehead’s reasoning. What did matter was that he grasped the whole: In place of a universe of constantly competing particles effectively going nowhere, Whitehead was offering the alternative vision of an organic and interconnected universe evolving through creativeness and cooperation.
Thinking such as this—neither spiritual nor materialistic, but holistic, organic, environmental and evolutionary—was a genuine rarity in the Twenties. But the young Alfred van Vogt found it highly appealing and took to it eagerly.
The extraordinary ideas that he stumbled upon in Science and the Modern World would linger in the back of his mind. Eventually, after they had incubated long enough and become his own, they would emerge again as the philosophical basis for the science fiction van Vogt would write for John Campbell’s Astounding. And the fundamental difference distinguishing his stories from the Golden Age SF produced by all the writers who still remained card-carrying scientific materialists would be van Vogt’s Whitehead-inspired post-materialistic sense of a universe of interconnected organisms evolving together.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 62
