The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence

by Alexei Panshin

  If Kier Gray really does aim to be a dispassionate universal caretaker with a concern for the welfare of all, then it might not be altogether pointless or crazy for him to be the leader of more than one party. Especially if the various sides aren’t actually as separate and opposed as they believe themselves to be.

  We might consider that what at first seem to be ordinary human beings prove instead to be communities of tendrilless slans living unnoticed amidst the general population. And further that what are initially identified as tendrilless slans eventually turn out to be all-unknowing true slans. And finally, that what are at first suggested to be the unnatural and inhuman product of a monster-making machine—the tendrilled slans—are ultimately revealed to be not only a completely natural mutation, but the next stage in the evolutionary development of man.

  The truth is that behind the appearance of difference and the assumption of difference, man, tendrilless slan, and true slan are one.

  This is the pattern that suddenly flashes into view in the climactic scene of Slan at the moment in which it is revealed that Kier Gray, the great human antagonist of the slans, is in actuality the most powerful and visionary of true slans, and that the slans are the mutation-after-man. Even more than Jommy Cross’s intelligible character and good intentions, it is the unifying nature of Kier Gray that demonstrates the continuity of man and slan to the reader.

  Slan isn’t really a story of politics or power relations at all. It’s a story about a difficult species-wide transition of man to a new and higher state of body and mind.

  The audience that received Slan had lately been reading stories about the passage from Neanderthal man to Cro-Magnon, like Lester del Rey’s “The Day Is Done.” And they had found themselves able not only to look back upon poor vanished Neanderthal and pity him for his grossness and imperfection, but also to feel a genuine human kinship with him.

  Van Vogt asked his readers to make a corresponding leap of imagination and empathy, but this time in the opposite direction, and to perceive the beauty and desirability of becoming man-beyond-man. He offered the opportunity and challenge of identifying with the tendrilled slans, and of seeing them not as intolerably Other but rather as the manifestation of the transcendent potential waiting within us.

  If the underlying message of van Vogt’s novel was that the possibility of transcendence exists even within our present moment and condition, this communicated itself to John Campbell. One year after Slan began serialization—in the same September 1941 issue of Astounding containing Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”—Campbell would publish an article entitled “We’re Not All Human.” Here he would suggest that superior human beings already exist among us without fully appreciating their own specialness. And he would name Slan as the initial stimulus for this line of speculation.

  There would be readers of Astounding who not only got this message from Slan, but who were prepared to take it personally. Some fans, for instance, would give their boardinghouses or communal living places joking names like “Slan Shack”672 or “Tendril Towers.”673

  Another, much more earnest about his identification with the idea of imminent human self-transcendence, would declare in the first issue of his amateur magazine, Cosmic Digest:

  Man is still evolving toward a higher form of life. A new figure is climbing upon the stage. Homo Cosmen, the cosmic men, will appear. We believe that we are mutations of that species. We are convinced that there are a considerable number of people like ourselves on this planet, if only we could locate and get in touch with them. Someday we will find most of them, and then we will do great things together.674

  This youngster would announce a new organization called “the Cosmic Circle”675 and attempt to rally his fellow SF readers to its banner with the slogan “Fans are slans!”676And even though his efforts would be greeted with more amused tolerance than visible success, nonetheless it is clear that van Vogt had done his work in making slanhood seem a desirable condition to aspire to.

  A.E. van Vogt became the first superstar of Campbell’s Golden Age on the strength of two special stories—“Black Destroyer” and Slan. But then, with the serialization of Slan complete and van Vogt at a peak of popularity as an SF writer, he all but disappeared from the pages of Astounding.

  During the fourteen months that followed Slan, through all of 1941 and into 1942, while Robert Heinlein/Anson MacDonald was dominating the magazine with a great burst of stories—Sixth Column, “Logic of Empire,” “Universe,” “Solution Unsatisfactory,” Methuselah’s Children, “By His Bootstraps,” and a good many others—van Vogt would only manage to contribute two short stories to Astounding. And after the second of these, “The Seesaw” in July 1941, he would be completely absent for the next eight months.

  The reason for this difference was that Heinlein was waiting for the war to catch up with the United States, and while he waited he filled his time, earned some money and scratched an old itch by writing science fiction stories. Van Vogt, however, was already caught up in World War II and scarcely had time in which to take a deep breath.

  There had been months of inaction following the original declaration of war in September 1939. But just about the time that van Vogt was finishing Slan in the late spring of 1940, Hitler launched a lightning flank attack that swept across the Netherlands, Belgium and France and pushed the remnant Allied armies into the sea at Dunkirk. Then, in the summer and fall of 1940, the Germans sent wave after wave of aircraft across the English Channel to bomb Britain, their last surviving opposition in Western Europe.

  The worse that things went for the mother country, the more hours the Canadian Department of National Defence required of van Vogt. He was fortunate to find enough time in the space of the next year even to write two short stories.

  Brief and rare as “The Seesaw” was, however, it would manage to be one of the most remarkable of all Golden Age science fiction stories. The line of thought that culminated in “The Seesaw” was set in motion when van Vogt read John Campbell’s editorial note in the February 1941 Astounding officially announcing that all of Heinlein’s stories of the future fit together in one common historical framework. Seeing that note got van Vogt to thinking about the unity of his own fiction.

  He says:

  Being a system thinker and a system writer, I realized at once that in the area of overall purpose I had no system, except, yes, hey, wait a minute; yes, I had already started one but not called it anything.

  The underlying premise was: In every rock, in every grain of sand, in every cell, there is a “memory” of ancient origins, and of the history of that cell going back to the beginning of things. If we could but read the signals that these bits of matter are showing us, we would have the answers we seek.677

  Once his own continuing concern with identity and organic wholeness had become apparent to van Vogt, he set out to express this in the structure of his next story. “The Seesaw,” more explicitly than any other van Vogt story, would be a representation in narrative form of his Whiteheadean sense of the holistic interconnection of all things. No writer who was working from a rational, linear, materialistic Village-centered point of view could possibly have conceived it.

  “The Seesaw” begins with a newspaper story dated as recently as the middle of last week—that is, the week before the on-sale date of this very issue of Astounding. The clipping tells of the materialization of a strange building in the space on a city street normally occupied by a lunch counter and a tailor shop, and the eventual disappearance of this anomalous store. The entire episode is presumed to have been the work of some unknown master illusionist.

  It seems that across the front of the strange building, but directly readable from every angle, there was a large sign that said: “FINE WEAPONS. THE RIGHT TO BUY WEAPONS IS THE RIGHT TO BE FREE.”678 And in the window of the store, along with a display of curiously shaped guns, another sign read: “THE FINEST ENERGY WEAPONS IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE.”679

  The newspaper clipping says tha
t the door of the shop would not open when a police inspector made an attempt to gain admittance. But that it did open for a reporter, C.J. McAllister, who thereupon entered the building.

  The story proper then proceeds to relate what happened to McAllister after he went into the gun shop—and saw the handle of the door swinging shut behind him writhe to avoid the grasp of the policeman trying to follow him inside.

  Within the store, the reporter discovers that here it isn’t June 1941 at all. Instead, the girl and her father who run this weapon shop inform him that it is “ ‘eighty-four of the four thousand seven hundredth year of the Imperial House of Isher.’ ”680

  This weapon shop and other similar shops, connected in a network by matter transmitters, serve as an independent force that counterbalances the power of this long-enduring empire. And the temporal displacement of McAllister is a sign to the gunmakers that something is seriously awry. Very quickly they determine that he has been jerked into this present moment as an accidental by-product of an invisible attack that has been launched against all of the weapon shops by the forces of the empress.

  McAllister is informed that in his passage through time he has accumulated a charge of “ ‘trillions and trillions of time-energy units.’ ”681 If he should step outside the confines of the weapon shop or even be touched by another person, he would cause a monumental explosion. However, if he can be returned through time to 1941, this would have a significant effect on the great machine behind the Isher attack.

  As one representative of the weapon shops explains to him:

  “You are to be a ‘weight’ at the long end of a kind of energy ‘crowbar,’ which lifts the greater ‘weight’ at the short end. You will go back five thousand years in time; the machine in the great building to which your body is tuned, and which has caused all this trouble, will move ahead in time about two weeks.”682

  This maneuver will give the gunmaking guild the opportunity it must have to counter the threat of the Isher Empire and maintain its independent existence.

  However, when McAllister is sent back through time, something completely unforeseen happens. He arrives where he started from in 1941—but he doesn’t stay there long. Instead, he begins careening back and forth through time in a great series of pendulum swings that takes him ever further into the future and into the past.

  If the great Isher machine is on the other end of this wild seesaw ride, then it seems certain that the attack by the empress on the weapon shops has been successfully disrupted. But even if someone were aware of what is happening to poor McAllister, there is nothing to be done for him.

  The story concludes with a burst of van Vogtian music as a calm and contemplative McAllister comes to a recognition of what the eventual conclusion of his bizarre adventure must be:

  Quite suddenly it came to him that he knew where the seesaw would stop. It would end in the very remote past, with the release of the stupendous temporal energy he had been accumulating with each of those monstrous swings.

  He would not witness, but he would cause, the formation of the planets.683

  What an altogether unusual story! Taken in terms of characterization or social observation or simple plausibility, there was nothing at all to it. The central character, McAllister, has no specific personal nature whatever; he is more a function than an individual. The world of five thousand years hence is not a complete, complex, ongoing society. All that we ever see of it is the eternal naked polarity—weapon shops vs. Isher Empire—and not a single thing more. And the explanations and interpretations that are offered in the course of this story are at best simple images or metaphorical indications like “crowbars” and “seesaws,” but nothing more consistently reasoned or fully imagined than this.

  However, if we agree to leave aside the questions of plausible argument and fullness of detail and take this little story instead as a kind of pattern or general statement, there is a great deal more to be found in it. In fact, we can get the most from “The Seesaw” if we elect to look on it as an active meditation on the nature of the cosmos and our place within it.

  Casting about for precedents and antecedents, we might say that it has a kinship with that “prehistoric daydream” in Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth in which Axel the narrator travels back in his imagination through past evolutionary ages to the fiery creation of things. And it also has a relationship to all those tales of time travelers brooding over red and chilly suns and the fate of man, from Wells’s The Time Machine to Don A. Stuart’s “Twilight” and “Night.”

  But there was a crucial difference between “The Seesaw” and these older cosmological meditations. In the Age of Technology, a narrative overview of existence would be sure to present a story of birth in primal gas and fire, which in good time would necessarily be followed by entropic death in darkness, cold and rubble.

  However, that wasn’t the story that van Vogt had to tell. Instead, he wrote of a Yin-and-Yang universe of reciprocal maintenance. In the cosmos as presented in “The Seesaw,” there is no such thing as strict linear cause-and-effect. Rather, the whole universe is seen as existing through the mutual collaboration and support of its subordinate aspects, and the aspects as existing through the overallness of the whole. At least four obvious examples of fundamental interdependency can be seen in van Vogt’s short story:

  First, there is the title and central metaphor—the seesaw. A teeter-totter in action is an instance familiar to everyone of a dynamic equilibrium that requires the active participation of two different parties.

  Second, there is the interpenetration of 1941 A.D. and the year 4700 of the Isher Empire. Here we have a cross-connection of elements from very different eras, so that McAllister becomes a pivotal factor in the doings of time-to-come, and the slogan that the right to buy weapons is the right to be free—a message that most assuredly had a point for a democratic yet still nominally neutral United States in early 1941—becomes impressed upon the here-and-now.

  Third, there is the symbiotic nature of the weapon shops and the Isher Empire. Though one party can be seen as standing for the force of determinism, authority and control, and the other for the power of free will, free thought and free action, the two appear to be absolutely necessary to each other.

  And fourth, there is the chicken-and-egg question of which comes first, the universe that will produce McAllister, or the McAllister who will not witness but will cause the formation of the planets?

  With all the intertwining, mutual dependence and reversal of temporal sequence here, how are we to say what is really a cause and what is an effect?

  It is because of the Isher Empire’s attack on the weapon shops five thousand years from now that McAllister is snatched out of the year 1941 A.D. And it is for the purpose of defending themselves against the forces of the empress that the weapon shops send McAllister back through time again. And it is because of this joint effort by the Isher Empire and the weapon shops, and because of McAllister’s movements back and forth through time that a primal explosion will result which in due course will produce the conditions for McAllister, and subsequently the weapon shops and the Isher Empire, to come into existence. Somehow, through their own mutual yearning to be, 1941 A.D. and 4700 I.E. work together to call themselves into being.

  But even this can’t be the whole story. It fails to take into account the counterweight on the other end of the seesaw. In order for McAllister to do his stuff, it seems essential for the great Isher machine to serve as a balancing force. And even though van Vogt may say nothing about the fate of the machine, imagination suggests to us that at the moment that McAllister is going bang at one end of existence, the great machine must necessarily be going ka-boom at the other.

  By this reading, the various collaborations between the future and the present, the weapon shops and the Isher Empire, and McAllister and the Isher machine all add up to one crucial action-event that begins creation and also brings it to an end.

  And were our perspective eve
n broader, we might be able to see this as nothing exceptional. Perhaps as a result of collaborations just like these, the universe is created and destroyed at every instant.

  Just this would be the case in van Vogt’s very next story, “Recruiting Station” (Astounding, Mar. 1942). Here it is said, “Every unfolding instant the Earth and its life, the universe and all its galaxies are re-created by the titanic energy that is time. . . . The rate of reproduction is approximately ten billion a second.”684

  In any case, it is clear that van Vogt had accomplished something quite significant in “The Seesaw.” In place of the old Village-centered orientation held for so long by the Western world, with its arrogant assumptions of self-importance alternating with tremulous fears of cosmic insignificance, van Vogt offered a universe in which man and the present moment were completely essential—but were not sufficient.

  Shortly after van Vogt finished this potent little story, the conditions under which he was attempting to live and to write finally became too much for him. His wife Edna had needed operations in both 1939 and 1940. His monthly expenses continued to exceed his monthly income. The money the sale of Slan had brought in was all but gone. And the Canadian Department of National Defence wanted still more hours of work from him.

  He says: “By April, 1941, they had me working my full day plus four evenings a week plus all day Saturday and every other Sunday, all without a raise in salary. And so, since I could no longer support the job by part-time writing (no part-time being available), I resigned.”685