The truth of the matter was that A.E. van Vogt toiled endlessly over the stories he wrote. He wasn’t facile—anything but. It was often difficult for him to find any words, let alone the right words set down in the right way to express the images and relationships that came to him in dreams or sudden flashes.
Like a Romantic of the previous century, he struggled to express the all-but-inexpressible: his sense of where transcendence was to be found. And with his eye fixed on the whole of things, he was always capable of tripping over the English language and taking a header.
It wasn’t that van Vogt had no ear at all for the language. One of his real pleasures in writing lay in coining names like Coeurl and Xtl and Jommy Cross. And he loved what he liked to call “the great pulp music,”645 and aimed to emulate it, most successfully in his ringing final lines.
But the truth must be admitted—his prose wasn’t as consistently clear as Asimov’s, as consciously clever as Heinlein’s, or as exquisitely cadenced as Theodore Sturgeon’s. Van Vogt was capable of bashing words together in the most dismaying manner without seeming to take any notice of the damage he was inflicting. One example of this is the phrase “ ‘fix-up’ novel”—but there have been and will be others that we may quote without lingering over.
At the some time, however, it is also true that a considerable portion of what looked to be clumsiness on van Vogt’s part was in fact deliberate and hard-won technique: A word used more deliberately for its sound value than for its meaning in order to set up some subliminal resonance. Or a provocative vagueness introduced in order to prevent his readers from understanding too clearly and exactly what was happening and thereby losing their sense of mystery. As van Vogt would eventually say:
Each paragraph—sometimes each sentence—of my brand of science fiction has a gap in it, an unreality condition. In order to make it real, the reader must add the missing parts. He cannot do this out of his past associations. There are no past associations. So he must fill in the gap from the creative part of his brain.
On several different occasions, van Vogt would offer this passage as an example of what he meant by this kind of writing: “The human-like being reached into what looked like a fold of skin, and drew out a tiny silver-bright object. It pointed this shining thing at Hagin.”646
But so difficult and trying did van Vogt find it to write in this way—in dream-born, emotion-charged, headlong sentences, each with its own special element of oddness or not-thereness—that there were times when he would more than half-envy those SF writers like L. Ron Hubbard who could just sit down at the typewriter and bang out finished story copy as fast as they could type.
He would think of writers like that as intuitional—and himself as not. Indeed, van Vogt’s own self-description would be: “The writer with the slowest natural intuition—meaning the least naturally talented, in terms of normal creativity availability—of any successful writer that I, personally, have ever met.”647
It was van Vogt’s firm belief that it was only his systems for contacting his unconscious processes and for writing stories that allowed him to produce science fiction at all. He would say: “People do not seem to realize that form does not bind. It frees. If your form seems to constrain you, learn others. . . .”648
We should also take note, however, that at another moment he would say: “I mean, I’m always trying to write by methods, see. I’m mad about methods and I sometimes feel that’s the only thing that makes my stories worth it, but it’s really not true. There is a place for method in writing, but I’ve overdone that many times and had to back away from it and start all over.”649
So here we have A.E. van Vogt, for whom words always came with a certain difficulty, systematically at work on his first novel, the revisionist superman story Slan. It would take considerable self-alignment and constant self-monitoring to produce this story. But, with the aid of his methods for contacting his creativity and engaging the intuition of his reader, and the further systems he used to guide him in the construction of his stories, science-fictional sentence by science-fictional sentence and scene by scene, van Vogt would inch his way along, only occasionally having to back away and start over.
Making Slan go slower, however, was the fact that van Vogt was a part-time SF writer who had to steal his moments to work as best he could. Most of his attention was required elsewhere.
Until two months after the publication of “Black Destroyer,” van Vogt still continued to write trade paper interviews for the likes of Hardware and Metal, Sanitary Engineer and Canadian Grocer. But then, in September 1939, Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and World War II began, and Canada was carried into the war along with the rest of the British Empire.
Poor eyesight rendered van Vogt unfit for active military service. But the Civil Service, rummaging through its files, recalled him as someone who had worked on the census eight years before. A telegram was sent to van Vogt offering him a job as a Clerk II in the Department of National Defence.
In his heart, van Vogt didn’t really want to take this job. Working as a low-level paper-pusher once again felt like taking a big step backward. But he thought that everyone should try to be of some use in the war effort, so he accepted the offer.
He traveled to Ottawa by bus, leaving Edna in Winnipeg to pack, sell their furniture, and follow. It was November by then, and the newspapers told them there were only fourteen apartments to be had in the entire city. They felt highly fortunate to locate a nice place to live, even though the monthly rent was $75 and van Vogt’s take-home pay was just $81.
The gap between his pay and their actual living expenses could be made up for a time out of the money for the furniture they had sold back home. But it was evident that if they wished to eat, to meet the time payments on their new furniture, and to have such amenities as a phone, a working stove, or lights, it was going to be necessary for van Vogt to push ahead and finish that novel of his and bring home some writing income.
But the new job didn’t leave him very much time for it. Van Vogt had his Sundays free, and half a day on Saturday, but for the most part he did his writing in the evenings, when he wasn’t too tired. He’d come home from the job, eat dinner, take a short nap, and then press on with Slan until eleven at night.
At the times when it was going well, he could complete a scene in longhand during a single writing session. And sometimes, especially toward the end when the narrative had gained a momentum of its own, it might be two scenes. Then, the next day while he was off at work, Edna would transcribe what he had written.
It took six months for van Vogt to write his story, all the time existing in such a state of tension that he was constantly waking and worrying over his novel in the middle of the night. Somehow, however, between Campbell’s pronouncements, his own vision of things, his conscious methods for writing, his dreams, his urgent need for money, and the ever-dwindling amount of time he had in which to write, he finally managed to complete Slan in the late spring of 1940.
Van Vogt rushed his novel off to John Campbell, who not only received it with considerable pleasure but backed his enthusiasm with a swift check which included a highly welcome quarter-of-a-cent per word bonus.
Van Vogt says: “Checks from Campbell were always prompt. He evidently knew writers starved, because you could send him a story and, apparently, he’d read it almost immediately, and put the check through.”650
Slan would be serialized in Astounding from September to December 1940, and would be far and away the best-liked story published in the magazine that year—more popular than either Robert Heinlein’s story of the overthrow of the Prophets, “ ‘If This Goes On—,’ ” or L. Ron Hubbard’s endless war story, Final Blackout.
But what a completely unusual story Slan actually was! The more closely it was examined, the stranger and more elusive it had to seem. Like all of van Vogt’s early stories, except for his most recent, “Repetition,” it had that bizarre, intense, dreamlike quality—but this time at the extended len
gth of a novel.
At the outset of Slan, nine-year-old Jommy Cross and his mother are on a city street, surrounded by an unseen but mentally sensed circle of hostile humans. People blame the slans for their use of the mutation machines of ancient scientist Samuel Lann, which have caused ordinary humanity to give birth not only to slan babies, but also to grotesque failures and botches. They aim to exterminate the tendrilled telepaths.
As the humans close relentlessly in on them, Jommy’s mother sends her son running in a desperate but successful try for life that has him clinging with super-strength to the rear bumper of a speeding “sixty electro Studebaker.”651 But before she is cut down, she gives Jommy a final mental admonition to kill the man behind the anti-slan campaign, the dictator of Earth, Kier Gray. She thinks:
“Don’t forget what I’ve told you. You live for one thing only: To make it possible for slans to live normal lives. I think you’ll have to kill our great enemy, Kier Gray, even if it means going to the grand palace after him.”652
When he is 15, Jommy follows a hypnotic command from his long-dead scientist father. He enters the catacombs underneath the city to recover his father’s great discovery, the secret of controlled atomic power, from the place where it has been hidden. However, he is caught in the act, and in order to escape he must use an atomic weapon to kill three guards. This is something that causes him continuing remorse, and which he becomes determined not to repeat.
In his own right as a teenage super-scientist, Jommy develops “ten-point steel,”653 a metal that approaches the theoretical ultimate in hardness. And he invents “hypnotism crystals,”654 which enable him to control the thinking of ordinary human beings.
Jommy also roams the world looking for other slans with golden tendrils in their hair—but he is never able to find any. Where can they be?
However, again and again he stumbles across a widespread network of “tendrilless slans,”655 who are also products of Samuel Lann’s mutation machines but lack telepathic ability. They have mastered anti-gravity and built spaceships, and established settlements on Mars that are completely unknown to ordinary Earthbound humanity.
But these half-slans look on Jommy as an enemy, too. It seems that when the tendrilled slans were in ascendancy, they persecuted the slans without tendrils, and the tendrilless slans have neither forgiven nor forgotten. They call Jommy “ ‘a damned snake’ ” and strive even more diligently than the simple humans to kill him.
Jommy steals a spaceship from them, and has the opportunity to kill a tendrilless slan, Joanna Hillory. But he forbears in spite of the enmity she shows him. Instead, he assures her of his good will:
“Madam, in all modesty I can say that, of all the slans in the world today, there is none more important than the son of Peter Cross. Wherever I go, my words and my will shall rule. The day that I find the true slans, the war against your people shall end forever.”656
And he sets Joanna Hillory free.
Then, at last, when he is 19, Jommy finds another slan like himself, a girl, Kathleen Layton, seeking refuge in a long-abandoned slan hideout, an underground machine city. Kathleen has been kept for observation by Kier Gray ever since she was a child, but now, with her life in imminent danger from the slan-hating secret police chief, John Petty, she has fled the palace.
The meeting of Jommy and Kathleen is a wonderful moment of mutual recognition:
“And she was a slan!
“And he was a slan!
“Simultaneous discovery!”657
But almost in the moment in which they find each other and fall in love, John Petty invades the cave hideout and surprises Kathleen there alone. He shows her no mercy at all, but straightaway puts a bullet into her brain.
Jommy arrives on the scene with Kathleen’s dying telepathic goodbye to him still ringing in his mind. He might pay John Petty back in kind by blasting him into nothingness with his atomic weapon, but he stays his hand. He leaves the crucial button unpressed, and withdraws under heavy fire in his car made of ten-point steel.
Then, when Jommy is 26—still not fully mature by slan standards—the tendrilless slans launch an all-out attack upon his secret laboratory and his spaceship, hidden under a mountain twenty miles away. But Jommy signals his spaceship, and it tunnels its way to him, and he escapes.
He travels to Mars to spy upon the tendrilless slans. Posing as one of them, he confirms his speculation that they soon intend to make a general attack upon the Earth.
But no sooner is he certain of this than he is suspected of being himself. He is taken to the office of Joanna Hillory, now the tendrilless slan military commissioner who has the job of tracking him down. She has written no less than four books on the subject of Jommy Cross.
While he waits, he is allowed the opportunity to consult what we today would think of as a computer:
Inside the fine, long, low building, a few men and women moved in and out among row on row of great, thick, shiny, metallic plates. This, Cross knew, was the Bureau of Statistics; and these plates were the electric filing cabinets that yielded their information at the touch of a button, the spelling out of a name, a number, a key word.658
Jommy asks these electric filing cabinets to tell him about Samuel Lann—and in no time he is reading Samuel Lann’s diary for 1971, and then further random entries from 1973 and 1990, and from them is discovering that there never was a mutation machine at all. From the very outset, the tendrilled slans were and always have been a purely natural mutation.
Then, when he is called into the office of Joanna Hillory, he finds that his idealism as a 15-year-old was so convincing to her that she has spent the years since maneuvering herself into a position to help him in just such a moment as this. She aids him to escape and to return to Earth with the knowledge of a secret entrance to the slan-built palace of Kier Gray.
Van Vogt has said, “From a fairly early time, towards the end of my stories . . . I would launch my subconscious into free associations, and, within the frame of what I was writing—roughly—would just let it rattle on.”659 This kind of creative process would seem to underlie what happens next in Slan.
In a very strange scene, Jommy hurls himself down a hole in the palace garden, and when he reaches the bottom he is two miles beneath the surface. There he encounters signs which presume him to be a slan and tell him where he is and what his circumstances are. Then walls close together around him, and in a kind of prison-elevator he is raised high up into the palace to the most private inner sanctum of Kier Gray.
And once again, as in the Greek plays that van Vogt had read, a scene of recognition takes place. Jommy looks on the ruthless and powerful, but noble, face of Kier Gray and knows him for what he really is:
“Kier Gray, leader of men, was—
“ ‘A true slan!’ exclaimed Cross.”660
At first, Gray’s manner is cold and hard. He even threatens to amputate Jommy’s tendrils. But then Jommy demonstrates his own power by effortlessly freeing himself from his bonds, and the recognition becomes mutual. Kier Gray knows that this must be the son of Peter Cross, the master of atomic energy, and immediately his manner completely alters:
“Man, man, you’ve done it! In spite of our being unable to give you the slightest help! Atomic energy—at last.”
His voice rang out then, clear and triumphant: “John Thomas Cross, I welcome you and your father’s great discovery. Come in here and sit down. . . . We can talk here in this very private den of mine.”661
And Gray then proceeds to tell Jommy all.
Slans, he says, really rule the world from behind the scenes—something like those Scotsmen running the British Empire: “ ‘What is more natural than that we should insinuate our way to control of the human government? Are we not the most intelligent beings on the face of the Earth?’ ”662
Slans are “ ‘the mutation-after-man.’ ”663 Despite the fact that ordinary humanity hates and fears them, the slans are watching out for poor feckless old-style man, who is now grow
ing sterile and beginning to pass from the scene. And if the slans in the past gave the tendrilless slans something of a hard time, well, that was all for their own good, to keep them tough.
The fact of the matter is that all unknown to themselves the tendrilless slans are the true slans. Their special characteristics—tendrils, double hearts, more efficient nervous systems, and so on—have been temporarily genetically suppressed to keep them safe from the wrath of humanity. But one by one the slan characteristics have been re-emerging. And in another forty or fifty years, the tendrils and telepathic power will start coming back, too.
The problem for the slans-behind-the-scenes is to make the transition from man to slan a smooth one. They would like to keep the humans from launching one last desperate anti-slan witch-hunt. And they would also like to keep the tendrilless slans from exterminating ordinary man before he passes naturally from the scene.
Now, however, it appears that both problems can be solved. With the aid of Jommy’s atomics, the tendrilless slan attack from Mars can be turned away. Those slans who are in the know will “ ‘make a big noise with a small force’ ”664 that should send the invaders back to Mars until the tendrils of their children grow in. Then, with the hypnotism crystals that Jommy has developed, it will be possible to soothe the hysteria, jealousy and fear of man-as-he-has-been, and make his passing painless and happy.
With this solution worked out, Slan concludes with a dramatic entrance, and a final recognition scene. A young woman comes into Gray’s private study—and it is Kathleen. Kathleen resurrected! Kier Gray then introduces her to Jommy. . . .
“It was at that moment that Kier Gray’s voice cut across the silence with the rich tone of one who had secretly relished this instant for years:
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 66
