Seekers of Tomorrow

by Sam Moskowitz

  "I took off my glasses, and started the long uphill fight of training my eyes back to the normal," A. E. van Vogt told an assembly at the Fourth World Science Fiction Convention in 1946. "This had a profound affect on my brain," he contin-ued. "I could no longer write easily. In fact I could no longer write salable material. I determined to fight it through re-gardless of the cost. I reasoned that I had affected my vision centers, and that I must develop a new flow. I decided that it was a good time to take up other trainings. For thirteen years I had typed with two fingers, another bad habit."

  He taught himself to type well with the touch system, "but my writing didn't improve. During the next seven months I did not produce a story that was worth anything as it stood. ... Just before Christmas of 1945 I began to feel a differ-ence. I sat down and wrote—in the shortest time in which I had ever turned out a story— A Son Is Born. Since then I have written approximately 160,000 words in spite of much sickness in the family."

  A Son Is Born appeared in the May, 1946, astounding science-fiction and was the first of a series based on a civilization of the future whose religion was worship of the atom with the scientists established as

  "priests." These stories were eventually published as a book, Empire of the Atom, by Shasta in 1956. The Empire parallels ancient Rome with a backdrop of interplanetary travel. The central character is a radiation-caused mutant of exceptional intelligence. Individ-ually the stories were mediocre, but collectively they made an entertaining book, distinguished by truly superior characteri-zation. A two-part short novel which involved the use of the Bates system of eye exercises appeared as The Chronicler in astounding science-fiction, October, 1946. This novel, woven about a man who had a third eye, is the most deliber-ately allegorical of all of van Vogt's works, with passages like: "I have got rid of all the astigmatism in my right or left eye, yet my center eye persists in being astigmatic, sometimes to the point of blindness." This followed the Bates theory, since discredited, that eyestrain is due to "an abnormal condition of the mind."

  New stories from van Vogt continued to appear with some regularity through 1950. Whereas before they had been pub-lished predominantly in astounding science-fiction, they now began to show up in other magazines. The quality of some, particularly the short stories, was exceptional. The Monster, published in astounding science-fiction, August, 1948, and Enchanted Village, in other worlds, July, 1950, are regarded as among his very best. The first deals with beings who come to earth after all human life has ceased and resurrect four men of different eras, reconstructing them from the skeletal remains. The latter involves a space ex-plorer stranded on Mars who survives by physically turning into a Martian. Both of these were no more than fairy tales with scientific trimmings. The teacher who took the book of fairy tales from the hands of a twelve-year-old van Vogt never removed them from his heart and mind. In maturity, aided by a storyteller's sense of situation and drama and a clear, pleas-ing, stylistic talent, he escaped again and again into a dream-world of his own making. They could take the book of fairy tales from him, but not his ability to create more.

  The 1947 Beowulf Poll conducted by Gerry de la Ree saw van Vogt edge out such formidable competitors as A. Mer-ritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert A. Heinlein, and Henry Kuttner as science fiction's most popular author. When science fiction moved into its greatest boom at the end of 1949, van Vogt was still the leader and stood to profit the most. He might have, except for the appearance of an article which dramati-cally changed the course of his life.

  That article was Dianetics: The Modern Science of Men-tal Healing by L. Ron Hubbard, which appeared in the May, 1950, issue of astounding science fiction. Dianetics was a system of do-it-yourself psychoanalysis. All you needed was a copy of the book, which conveniently appeared one month after the article and swiftly rose to the top of the national best-seller list. Dianetics grew from Hubbard's personal ex-perimental hypnotic treatment of psychosomatic illnesses. It offered the same hope as General Semantics: a means of rationalizing one's self to complete "sanity." A person who accomplished this feat was called a "clear." On the way to being a "clear" a person could be cured, according to Hub-bard, of ailments ranging from cancer to dementia praecox.

  Within the science-fiction field this "science" found early adherents and, inevitably, A. E. van Vogt was among them. John W. Campbell, Jr., as treasurer of the Dianetics Research Foundation, enthusiastically encouraged such interest.

  Hubbard had claimed that the first "clear" was his third wife, 25-year-old Sara Northrup Hubbard, who was therefore the only true sane person on earth. Feature-article writers attributed the breakup of Dianetics to a disagreement in the ranks of the foundation, but it actually was shattered on April 24, 1951, when the United Press reported that Sara Northrup Hubbard, by her husband's admission the only "clear" and completely sane woman on the face of the earth, was asking for a divorce on the grounds that "competent medical advisers" had found her 40-year-old husband "hopelessly insane" and in need of "psychiatric observa-tion."

  This did not discourage van Vogt. He exuberantly set up a Los Angeles headquarters for Dianetics. Practically all of his writing ceased except for revisions of some of his earlier short works which he cobbled together for hardcover publi-cation. In the years that have followed, van Vogt unflagging-ly has dedicated all his energies to the teaching and promotion of a "science" that has been exposed as without foundation in a dozen or more periodicals, and which even Hubbard, its originator, has deserted for a more "advanced concept" he terms "Scientology."

  Why this search?

  Perhaps the answer rests in the fact that A. E. van Vogt is a deeply religious man in the fullest sense of the phrase. As a child he sallied forth to protect his brother from an unfair beating by a bully and was himself beaten. The major reli-gions of the world have taught that "right makes might" Right was on his side but might had triumphed. He could not, therefore, in all conscience accept orthodox religion, for did not this incident obviously prove that one of its basic tenets was false?

  Yet, here is a man, fundamentally good, whose sincere belief holds that man has within himself Godlike powers if he will only work to discover and release them. His own life has been a dedicated striving for self-improvement. General Se-mantics represented a means of cleansing himself of mental conflict through orderly thinking. The Bates system of eye exercises pointed to correction of a physical defect with the hope of concurrently clearing up negative thinking. With Dianetics he moved on to a promise of higher intelligence, elimination of mental conflict and freedom from disease.

  In van Vogt's fiction, his characters follow the same course. They travel in a world of confusion sustained only by the knowledge that within them are undreamed-of powers they will eventually master. Jommy Cross, the mutation of Slan, struggles for survival in a world where all hands are turned against him, knowing that as he matures his mental and physical powers will give him the tools to attain suprem-acy; Gilbert Gosseyn, hero of World of A, undergoes incred-ible ordeals aimed at ultimately revealing to him that he is a superman with a double brain; Clane Linn, mutant of Empire of the Atom, who is almost condemned to death at birth, lives to discover and utilize the near-mystical powers within him; Drake, an amnesiac in The Search (astounding science-fiction, January, 1943), solves the amazing riddle of his background after the baffling series of incidents which add up to the fact that he is a man from the future whose purpose is to alter history so that unjust fates will not over-take the worthy. Though van Vogt honestly adheres to his role as a story-teller, he writes in religious symbols. Jommy Cross, Gilbert Gosseyn, Clane Linn, and many others are Christ images with Christlike motives. His characters undergo symbolic crucifixion and resurrection so frequently as to make it possible clearly to discern a pattern. Gilbert Gosseyn in World of A twice is killed and comes to life in other bodies. Throughout the novel Gosseyn is aware that there is an Unknown Chessplayer involved in his destiny, and the destiny of all men. Eventually Gosseyn learns that he and the Unknow
n Chessplayer are one and the same; theosophically interpreted, he equates himself with "The Son of God." The Monster, which, when anthologized in August Der-leth's The Other Side of the Moon, was even retitled Resur-rection, finds four earthmen brought back from the dead, each possessed of greater powers, until the last is able to revive long-extinct human life on the planet and preserve earthmen immortal forever. It is in the book version of Empire of the Atom that we find a near-final religious coalescence of van Vogt's thinking. Religion in that novel is based on the worship of the atom and the scientists fill the role of priests. Clane Linn, the mutant born into royalty, becomes a figure of Christlike morality. Here van Vogt finally resolves the mysteries that confound him. A tiny floating ball appears at the end of the story which

  "contains the entire sidereal universe... it looked small but that was an illusion of man's senses." Van Vogt had reduced the entire universe to a tiny, glowing, floating sphere. It was now something small enough to grasp. It also consciously or unconsciously suggested Spinoza's philosophy that the entire universe is God and everything that makes it up is part of Him. The story ends with the question: "Did this mean that... man controlled the universe, or that the universe controlled man?" All his life van Vogt has sought for the positive in man and the good in himself. Bewildered and bemused though he has been, his stories usually speak affirmatively: man can attain anything if he really tries. His search for the powers within himself have led van Vogt on many false paths, and may have lost him the great power he always had: power he demonstrated every time he wrote a story like Slan, The Weapon Makers, The Monster or Enchanted Village.

  Dianetics became the "religion" that van Vogt so urgently needed, one in which he could be a high priest and personally dispense knowledge for the betterment of mankind while providing a haven for himself. To a great extent, in so doing he sustained a nameless god of a formless belief at the sacrifice of his literary creativity, for nothing new came from his typewriter for almost the entire decade of the 1950's. Then, in 1962, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy released The Violent Man, a novel of Communist China. The brain washing which had influenced so many young American prisoners of the Korean War to declare themselves for communism provided the inspiration of this work. Twenty-two mature adults of the West are captured by the Red Chinese, with the objective of determining whether they can be readily influ-enced to embrace the Marxist-Leninist philosophy and if the findings of this experiment can be employed against the free world. But one of the members of the group finds a flaw in the psychology of his instructor and turns the tables. The primary value of the book rests in its dialogues, which present the communist and western viewpoints. These have been exhaustively researched and lucidly presented. The creative stasis appeared to have been broken.

  A year later the first new van Vogt science-fiction short story in fourteen years, The Expendables, a duel between a starship and an alien civilization to discover which is further advanced, appeared in if for September, 1963, followed in the same magazine in 1964 by The Silkie and in 1965 by The Replicators. All three of the stories were to a degree a melange of elements van Vogt had used in his more success-ful stories as far as twenty-five years back. They showed a certain hesitancy in style and unsureness in plotting, but older readers hoped that the closing line of The Replicators would prove prophetic: "... the real That stirred, awakened and sat up."

  13 THEODORE STURGEON

  It walked in the woods.

  It was never born. It existed. Under the pine needles the fires burn, deep and smokeless in the mold. In heat and in darkness and decay there is growth. It grew, but it was not alive. It walked unbreathing through the woods, and thought and saw and was hideous and strong, and it was not born and it did not live. It grew and moved about without living.

  Those were the opening paragraphs of one of the most remarkable stories ever to appear in a science-fantasy maga-zine. It was the title of the story, and it appeared in the August, 1940, issue of unknown, a magazine dedicated to stories that were different from conventional weird science fiction. The intonations of the opening passage set the mood for the introduction of a monstrous life form, a mass of putres-cence and slime coating the skeleton of a dead man that had spontaneously become instinct with life:

  It had no mercy, no laughter, no beauty. It had strength and great intelligence. And—perhaps it could not be destroyed.

  Authors had created monsters before, many whose names became synonyms for terror, but none of them had been treated with such objectivity or presented with such incredible mastery of style.

  "Styles" would have been the better term, for the author was a virtuoso, possessing an absolute pitch for the cadence of words, altering the mood and beat of his phraseology with the deliberateness of background music in a moving picture.

  Theodore Sturgeon was not unknown to the science-fiction world. Four stories of his had appeared previously, the first, The Ether Breather in the September, 1939, issue of astounding science-fiction, winning first place in readers' votes over all stories in that number. The Ether Breather was a clever spoof of the television industry, in a year when there was virtually no such industry, involving "etheric" intelligences that humorously altered television transmission. Lightly, almost frothily written, it invited examination of the style to no greater a degree than would a theatrical bedroom farce. The same slick, lightweight prose and superficially bub-bling good humor dominated A God in the Garden, which was published in the November, 1939, unknown, a fan-tasy in which a prehistoric "god" grants a man the handy attribute of having every word he utters come factually true, even if it were not so before he opened his mouth; Derm Fool (unknown, March, 1940) is built about the plight of several people who shed their skin every twenty-four hours as the result of a poisonous snake bite, and He Shuttles (unknown, April, 1940) is a variation of the old tale of a man granted three wishes which ends up with the wishes in such contradiction that the man must back up in time and perpetually repeat his actions. A. E. van Vogt picked up this idea in a spatial superscience story one year later with Not the First. Sturgeon's first four stories had entertained but made no permanent impact. They were written, apparently by a lighthearted, pleasing young man with a facile style who intended to do no more than entertain. It, however, dis-played that an extraordinary talent was at work, capable of producing serious work of a lasting nature. The twenty-two-year old craftsman who had written It, handsome, sensitive, and whimsical of features, with a trim build and a captivating manner, was destined to become a giant of science fiction and fantasy.

  Theodore Sturgeon was born Edward Hamilton Waldo, February 26, 1918, in St. George, Staten Island, New York. His father was in the retail paint business and was of Dutch-French ancestry, a line traced back to 1640 in the New World. His literary and artistic inclinations seem to root in his mother, a Canadian-English woman, a poetess, who taught literature in the schools and who, up to an advanced age, produced amateur plays.

  A Protestant Episcopalian by birth, Sturgeon came from a background heavily weighted with the pressures of the clergy, with eight ministers on his father's side, one of them, the archbishop of the West Indies, a great-uncle; another, the Bishop of Quebec, a great-grandfather; an uncle, priest in Newfoundland—and his mother's sister had married a British minister. Young Edward and brother Peter, fifteen months older, attended church and Sunday School regularly until the age of 12. Since their parents liked to sleep late, the two boys made occasional excep-tions to this routine, ducking church every time they could get their hands on a copy of ballyhoo, a popular humor magazine of the early thirties. On completing their read-ing, they would return home with a vivid and detailed account of the religious services, which effectively reas-sured their parents.

  While the boys' early home life was happy enough, all was not well with the marriage. Sturgeon's father did not live at home after the boy was five years of age, showing up only once a week for Sunday dinner. The parents were divorced in 1927 when Edward had just turned nine,
and his father remarried and went to live in Baltimore, having one daughter from that union, Joan.

  Edward liked his first father, forgiving his rather strait-laced philosophy, but ran into trouble with his stepfather when his mother remarried in 1929. His stepfather, who had been an instructor of English in Scottish schools, was an accomplished scholar and revered anyone who took learning seriously. It was obvious that both his stepsons were highly intelligent, yet they were very poor students, attaching little importance to knowledge. Edward was more than lackadaisi-cal; he was also perverse in high school, requiring constant discipline.

  Though he liked the boys, the stepfather found himself psychologically incapable of excusing this attitude and, while he supported the youths and stood up for them in time of trouble, there were no monetary allowances or special kind-nesses forthcoming.

  He did, however, make possible Theodore Sturgeon's present name. The old Scotsman was named Sturgeon and young Edward had always wanted to be called "Ted," so when he was baptized his name officially became Theodore Hamilton Sturgeon and that is his legal name today. Before high school, Theodore Sturgeon had gone to a private seminary in Staten Island up until the fourth grade, then to a boys' preparatory school in Pennsylvania. When he enrolled in high school, at the age of 12, his family was living in Philadelphia, and young Theodore was an emaciated weakling, a suitable subject for the "before" physical culture advertisements. High school proved a place of horror. His mother forced him to wear short pants and he arrived for registration with golden, fuzzy hair, riding on a scooter. Most of the kids, then, wore knickers and he used to hide from them. Whenever he showed himself he was the target of bullies who pushed him around and hazed him unmercifully, despite his gallant attempts to fight back. To top it off he had virtually no interest in study. Then, one day, he watched an exhibition of gymnastics on the school's parallel bars and the sport thrilled him. He begged for a chance to participate and when it was granted, he drilled with fanatical enthusiasm, getting up at five in the morning and leaving hours after the school day had ended. In twelve months he had gained sixty-five pounds and developed powerful arms and a heavy chest. Within that period his schoolmates' contempt turned to respect. The second year he became captain of the gym team and at the ages of 13 and 14 was permitted to instruct the class.