The humans are awestruck by the creature’s ability to survive in space and to walk through walls. And one of them declares, “ ‘A race which has solved the final secrets of biology must be millions, even billions of years in advance of man.’ ”630
Psychologically, however, Xtl is much less advanced. Despite the opportunity he has been granted for heavy meditation all alone there in the timeless quiet of the extra-galactic darkness, his thinking remains cycle-bound. And Korita the archaeologist is able to recognize that Xtl displays the blinkered vision typical of a peasant.
As a peasant, his first aim is to safeguard his posterity. It is his overriding concern to find hosts for the eggs he carries within his breast that gives men the time they need to organize themselves and to devise plans against him.
Furthermore, having a peasant’s personal attachment to his own little territory, Xtl is unable to conceive until too late that the men might actually halt their ship in the middle of intergalactic space and then abandon it in order to trap him alone inside while they temporarily turn their ship into “a devastating, irresistible torrent of energy”631 to rid themselves of him.
After Xtl has fled into the intergalactic dark, one crew member suggests that they had a natural advantage over the creature: “ ‘After all, he did belong to another universe and there is a special rhythm to our present state of existence to which man is probably attuned.’ ”632 But another replies:
“You assume far too readily that man is a paragon of justice, forgetting apparently that he lives on meat, enslaves his neighbors, murders his opponents, and obtains the most unholy sadistical joy from the agony of others. It is not impossible that we shall, in the course of our travels, meet other intelligent creatures far more worthy than man to rule the universe.”633
In these first three science fiction stories by van Vogt—“Vault of the Beast,” “Black Destroyer,” and “Discord in Scarlet”—there were two common elements. The more readily apparent of these was monsters possessing more-than-human powers. Indeed, so obvious was this that it would begin to seem to some—van Vogt himself among them—that it was possible he was only a one-plot author.
A more complete and sympathetic assessment, however, would understand that van Vogt was yet another intuitional SF writer following his nose wherever it chose to lead him—and, moreover, one who had rather less conscious awareness of where he was bound and what he was really up to than was usual even amongst this gang of creative sleepwalkers.
Van Vogt would begin writing a story when he had nothing more to work with than some faint glimmering—an image, or a mood—and then grope his way toward the end one scene at a time, working by feel and by inspiration. He would say frankly: “I have no endings for my stories when I start them—just a thought and something that excites me. I get some picture that is very interesting and I write it. But I don’t know where’s it’s going to go next.”634
He would throw in every single idea that he had during the time he was writing a story, holding back nothing. And when he got stuck, van Vogt found that the necessary new turn he needed would arrive in a dream that night or in a flash sometime the following morning:
Generally, either in a dream or about ten o’clock the next morning—bang!—an idea comes and it will be something in a sense non-sequitur, yet a growth from the story. I’ve gotten my most original stories that way; these ideas made the story different every ten pages. In other words, I wouldn’t have been able to reason them out, I feel.635
As we have had more than one occasion to notice, earlier writers of SF, in imagining their stories, had again and again taken their cue from some dream or sudden insight. But A.E. van Vogt was the first writer of science fiction to attempt to turn this into a system and rely upon non-rational processes to light his way through one story after another.
However, the truth of the matter may be that he simply couldn’t help but do this. Writing out of mental imagery, lack of conscious foreknowledge of what was to come next, and dreamstuff was the only effective way that van Vogt knew to produce science fiction at all. He says, “I have tried to plot stories consciously, from beginning to end, and I never sell them. I know better, now, than to even attempt to write them that way.”636
The less obvious, less superficial, common element in van Vogt’s earliest stories—the message from his unconscious that he was forced to repeat until at last he understood it—was morality, or, as the more psychologically minded Atomic Age would prefer to call it, sanity. In each of his first three science fiction stories, super-powered monsters are undone by their drives and hungers, by their egotism, ruthlessness and cruelty, and by their inability to surrender cherished attachments, while men constituted much like ourselves are able to prevail over them through decency, self-sacrifice, cooperation and breadth of vision.
After three of these science fiction monster stories—plus that paler imitation for Unknown—and just when he was beginning to think that this might be all he could write, van Vogt finally came to a conscious recognition of what his unconscious mind had been getting at all along. It was telling him that true superiority was not a matter of age or biology or personal power. Rather, it lay in being able to distinguish between mere self-interest and the good of the whole.
Having finally gotten this message, van Vogt would state it as explicitly as he could in his next science fiction story, the aptly titled “Repetition” (Astounding, Apr. 1940).
In this story, an envoy has been sent from Earth to persuade the stubbornly defiant colonists of the Jovian moon Europa to allow their world to be ceded politically to Mars in order to bring Mars into union with Earth and Venus and forestall a Solar System-wide war. The envoy admits that short-term suffering for this colony is a real possibility, but argues that it should lead to a greater long-range good:
“Remember this, it’s not only Europa’s recoverable metals that will be used up in a thousand years, but also the metal resources of the entire Solar System. That’s why we must have an equitable distribution now, because we can’t afford to spend the last hundred of those thousand years fighting over metal with Mars. You see, in that thousand years we must reach the stars. We must develop speeds immeasurably greater than light—and in that last, urgent hundred years we must have their co-operation, not their enmity. Therefore they must not be dependent on us for anything; and we must not be under the continual mind-destroying temptation of being able to save ourselves for a few years longer if we sacrifice them.”637
The envoy’s concluding exhortation, which convinces a young Europan to switch from being his enemy to being his earnest protector, is this:
“I have talked of repetition being a rule of life. But somewhere along the pathway of the Universe there must be a first time for everything, a first peaceful solution along sound sociological lines of the antagonisms of great sovereign powers.
“Some day man will reach the stars, and all the old, old problems will repeat themselves. When that day comes, we must have established sanity in the very souls of men, so firmly rooted that there will be an endless repetition of peaceful solutions.”638
The story had little of the intensity, heat and drive that had made van Vogt’s three previous science fiction stories different from all other SF. Next to them, “Repetition” was merely conventional—similar in appearance and scope to other short fiction in Astounding in 1940. More than that, it was a talky story, in essence no more than a dramatized lecture.
Even so, it did have one highly important statement to make. If men were ever to become the beings that van Vogt had described in “Black Destroyer”—if they were ever to reach the stars at all, let alone inherit the galaxy—they would first have to learn simple sanity: breadth of vision, surrender of self-interest, and peaceful cooperation. And if they couldn’t achieve this, they would be just so much chopped liver for creatures far simpler and less powerful than Coeurl.
That this indeed was the point implicit for van Vogt in “Black Destroyer” and “Disc
ord in Scarlet” would be confirmed in 1950 when he put these stories together with two others and added new material to make what he would call a “ ‘fix-up’ novel”639—The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The overall point made by this book would be the necessity for integrated vision. Sanity.
In the novel, van Vogt would introduce a new central character, Elliot Grosvenor, a Nexialist, or applied holist. He might be understood as the van Vogtian equivalent of Heinlein’s ideal man—the “encyclopedic synthesist”640 or master of all knowledge. The difference between them was that in Heinlein’s version the weight of emphasis was on photographic memory and perfect command of fact, while in van Vogt’s case the emphasis was on holistic vision.
At the outset of the story, Grosvenor is something of an odd man out aboard the exploration vessel. He is all but invisible:
He was becoming accustomed to being in the background. As the only Nexialist aboard the Space Beagle, he had been ignored for months by specialists who did not clearly understand what a Nexialist was, and who cared very little anyway. Grosvenor had plans to rectify that. So far, the opportunity to do so had not occurred.641
Grosvenor intends to apply Nexialism to the splintered viewpoints of the various scientific specialists aboard the ship and to resolve the small-minded political infighting that divides the men of the Space Beagle. His opportunity to demonstrate the value of holistic thinking arrives in the encounters with Coeurl and Xtl—here given as Ixtl—and other bizarre life forms. With his broader view of things, Grosvenor becomes the person most responsible for the survival of the expedition.
By the end of the book, the need for Nexialist thought has become sufficiently well-established that Grosvenor is giving classes in holism to the men of the Space Beagle which even his former chief antagonist has begun to attend. Grosvenor says:
“The problems which Nexialism confronts are whole problems. Man has divided life and matter into separate compartments of knowledge and being. And, even though he sometimes uses words which indicate his awareness of that wholeness of nature, he continues to behave as if the one, changing universe has many separately functioning parts. The techniques we will discuss tonight . . . will show how this disparity between reality and man’s behavior can be overcome.”642
In late 1939, however, van Vogt’s thinking had not yet explicitly progressed as far as this. Rather, we can say that with “Repetition,” he had answered one question for himself, but then raised another. He had satisfied himself that men who were well-integrated into the universe could face any selfish Village-minded creature to be found in this galaxy or beyond it, and prevail. But he had also begun to wonder what men must become if they were to be successful in making their own transition from the Village Solar System to the wider universe.
It seemed to him that men would have to transcend themselves and become better attuned to the universe as a whole. So to John Campbell, van Vogt suggested the possibility of a novel about Homo superior emerging out of man as we presently know him. This story, Slan, would be told from the point of view of the new higher order man.
Campbell’s immediate reaction to this proposal was that what van Vogt wanted to do simply couldn’t be done. It wasn’t possible.
Some twenty-five years later, in a letter to Doc Smith, Campbell would recall what he told van Vogt: “I pointed out to him that you can’t tell a superman story from the superman’s viewpoint—unless you’re a superman. He pulled a beautiful trick in that yarn, and proved me 100% wrong.”643
What Campbell threw at van Vogt was nothing less than orthodox wisdom, received truth. During the Age of Technology, it had been presumed that superior meant superior—clearly better in every significant regard. If a being were to be acknowledged as a superman, by definition that must mean that his thoughts and motives and values were completely beyond the ability of lesser men to understand.
The very unfathomability of the superman would be a central evidence of his superiority. Consequently, a superman story in the Techno Age, like Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John, would invariably be told by some uncomprehending but tolerated human who is allowed close enough to the New Man to look upon his radiant splendor in something of the same way that a dumb but adoring cocker spaniel might gaze upon its lord and master.
The “beautiful trick” that van Vogt would pull off in Slan was to tell his story from the point of view of an isolated, ignorant and immature superman—a young and vulnerable boy on the run, seeking to learn more about himself and his kind.
And this was something that John Campbell could accept. Not only would he be willing to concede that a superman who wasn’t very old and didn’t know all that much might be within the power of ordinary human beings to comprehend, but he would be thoroughly delighted with van Vogt for demonstrating the insufficiency of an accepted truth. There was nothing Campbell liked better than that.
So much did Campbell like it, in fact, that he would adopt the narrative argument of Slan as his own and attempt to pass the lesson he’d learned on to others. Here is how Campbell would phrase that lesson in a letter to Clifford Simak:
The super-man can’t be fully portrayed. But since ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, a super-human must, during boyhood and adolescence, pass through the human level; there will be a stage of his development when he is less than adult-human, another stage when he is equal to adult-human—and the final stage when he has passed beyond our comprehension. The situation can be handled, then, by established faith, trust, understanding and sympathy with the individual as a character by portraying him in his not-greater-than adult human stages—and allow the established trust and belief to carry over to the later and super-human stage.644
This Campbell-eye view of Slan would be accurate and perceptive—but only as far as it went. For instance, it would be quite true that van Vogt would portray his superman, Jommy Cross, at different moments in his early life—in boyhood, in adolescence, and as a young man. But to van Vogt, these different points would not represent a series of discrete stages, climaxed by a leap to some single final stage of supermanhood in which Jommy passes beyond our power to understand. Rather, they would delineate a steeply rising curve of growth that might well continue on to even higher levels.
For van Vogt, being a superman was a relative condition, not an absolute one. Because he was more able and together than an ordinary human being, Jommy Cross would be a superman. But he wouldn’t be the superman—the one and only kind of superman there could be—in the old Techno Age sense.
Again, Campbell would be perfectly correct in noting that trust and belief in Jommy’s motives and behavior were established when it was easiest, while he was a helpless, hunted, innocent kid. There can be no doubt that van Vogt, the writer who had evoked empathy with blobby creeping androids and id-thirsty tentacled cat-monsters, spared no effort to hook the reader into making an emotional identification with his nine-year-old telepathic boy with golden tendrils in his hair, separated from his mother on a city street and forced to flee for his life.
What’s more, he would make the boy an unflagging idealist as well, and completely convince the reader of Jommy’s constant desire to find out the truth and to do right.
Where Campbell would be mistaken, however, would be in thinking that Jommy Cross’s innocence and idealism were only a narrative ploy, a device to gain reader identification and sympathy. In fact, Jommy Cross’s purity would have its own reason for being. It would be the very essence of what van Vogt was attempting to express in this novel.
The central plot-problem of Slan would be young Jommy’s struggle against all the old Techno Age stereotypes which insisted that the superman must be a remote, unfeeling, hyper-intellectual—Big Brain’s younger brother. Jommy would be told that this was the true nature of his own kind, the tendrilled slans. Again and again he would be offered reason to perceive them as utterly cold and ruthless and cruel.
In the meantime, however, through his own maturation and gradual self-discovery, Jommy would demonstra
te what it really might be like to be a superior human being. We’d see for ourselves that a superman didn’t necessarily have to be brainy, heartless and amoral, because Jommy himself would not be at all like that.
Jommy Cross would be the first example of a new and radically different sort of Earth-born superman—good and noble and altruistic.
It was van Vogt’s holistic sense of an organic, evolving, inter-connected universe that permitted him to reconceive the superman in these terms. More than permitted him—compelled him.
If the universe was indeed a whole and not merely a jumble of unrelated parts, then it was obvious to van Vogt that true superiority must consist in being relatively more in tune with the purposes of the whole. To be superior was to be more integrated and less partial. To better approximate the wholeness of the whole.
However, it would be one thing for van Vogt to come to an apprehension of this gestalt—to have a sudden gut awareness that there was a novel demanding to be written about a superman whose superiority ultimately lies in his relatively greater integration with the purposes of the universe—and another to actually write the story. Like most of van Vogt’s work, Slan was completed only with considerable effort.
Because van Vogt was so often vague and implausible and had so little concern for exact factuality, there would be those among the readership of Astounding who would take him for a hasty and careless writer. That wouldn’t exactly be the case, however.
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