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

by Alexei Panshin

  “ ‘Jommy Cross, I want you to meet Kathleen Layton—my daughter!’ ”665

  And so the story ends, leaving us all aglow. But also with a thousand rational questions that we might ask if we were of a mind to:

  If Kathleen Layton really is Kier Gray’s daughter, why should he have endangered both her and himself by keeping her near him as she grows up? And if Gray is such a sentimentalist that he must have her close by, why is it that when Kathleen first meets Jommy, she doesn’t yet have the slightest suspicion that Kier Gray might really be a slan, let alone her own father?

  It only takes Jommy a matter of moments to find out from the tendrilless slans’ electric filing cabinets that there never was a mutation machine. Why is it that the tendrilless slans don’t know this fundamental fact? And if the tendrilless slans suspect him of being their most feared adversary, Jommy Cross, why do they so casually allow him free access to their data banks without anyone even bothering to take a peek over his shoulder just to see what he might be up to?

  And, in its own way, perhaps the greatest oddity of all: What in the world is a Studebaker car with a protruding rear bumper in the style of the 1930s doing on the streets six hundred and thirty, or eight hundred, or fifteen hundred years in the future? (The figures for how much time has passed between now and then keep shifting, like so much else in this story.)

  Of the thousand questions that might be asked about the novel, van Vogt himself would attempt to address perhaps fifty or a hundred in the revised second hardcover edition of Slan—but with mixed results. Some matters for doubt, like that anomalous Studebaker, could be tidied up easily enough with the help of an eraser. But the effect of some of the other changes that van Vogt made would just be to swap one question for another.

  The truth is that the essence of Slan did not lie in logic and reason, and no amount of tidying could ever be enough to make this story add up neatly and consistently. It might even be argued that the unintended result of those 1951 revisions aiming to make Slan more reasonable was actually to diminish some of the irrational power of the original serial novel.

  In either version, however, the fundamental non-rationality of this story can’t be emphasized strongly enough. In fact, if there is any obvious defect in our brief account of Slan, it is that by the very act of compressing and summarizing the story line, we have necessarily made the novel appear a good deal more transparent and coherent than the unsuspecting reader is likely to find it.

  In Slan, things operate according to the dictates of dream logic. Characters gifted with unaccountable knowledge, and equally unaccountable ignorance, suddenly loom into view, only to disappear again just as abruptly. Anything that seems fixed—like a date, or an attitude, or an identity—may alter without warning and become something other than it was before. In this story, coincidences, unlikelihoods and radical transitions abound—but as within a dream, this just seems the way that things naturally ought to happen.

  Far more even than we’ve managed to indicate, van Vogt’s future world is filled with secret passageways, underground hideouts, caves, catacombs and tunnels. Here it seems perfectly normal for a spaceship to be parked within a building or underneath a flowing river, or for someone to leap down a rabbit hole two miles deep, and then rise again. The world of tomorrow and the labyrinths of the mind become one and the same place in Slan.

  The Golden Age Astounding had plenty of writers who were prepared to be rational, plausible and responsible in what they imagined. But it had only one A.E. van Vogt, a writer convinced that he could be most true to the real underlying actualities of existence if he gave control of what he wrote to his non-rational mind and allowed it to go wherever it wished to go and say whatever it pleased to say.

  In placing his unconscious in charge of his storytelling this way, van Vogt took the risk that it might blurt out something outrageous or paranoid or sexual or stupid. And, indeed, his stories were capable of being any or all of these things. However, there was one great redeeming virtue to his method, and this was that again and again van Vogt was able to evoke vistas of transcendent possibility and human becoming in his stories such as no other SF writer of his era could begin to equal.

  To be sure, among the readers of the Campbell Astounding there would be some who were too rational-minded to swallow van Vogt. They couldn’t bring themselves to cast aside all logic and common sense to read him in the uncritical fashion in which he had to be read in order to be effective. Not only would the cheering that greeted Slan be baffling and annoying to these logicians, but the exasperation they felt would only increase as time passed and van Vogt just continued to persist in his perversely left-handed approach to science fiction writing.

  When Slan was serialized in the fall of 1940, however, most of the readers of Astounding found themselves swept up by the hurtling power of van Vogt’s narrative. And so exhilarating would they find the breathless motion of the story and the constant changes they were given to experience that they wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to stop and worry about whether or not it all happened to be making strict logical sense.

  After the roller coaster ride was over and the concluding emotional glow of Jommy and Kathleen rediscovering each other had faded, these wide-eyed readers might not be able to say where they had been, or how it was that van Vogt had worked his special magic. But they would be certain that Slan had somehow managed to reach right into their minds and stir their imagination in ways they couldn’t begin to utter or explain.

  We might recall that John Campbell had told van Vogt at the outset that it would take a superman to write a story from the viewpoint of a superman. And, of course, A.E. van Vogt himself was no superman—at least, not in the old absolute Techno Age sense of the word. But then, it wasn’t actually necessary that he should be a perfected being. It was enough that he had a grasp of emerging post-materialistic thinking at a time when others did not.

  In something of the same way in which Jommy Cross was a relatively superior human being, able to do what the ordinary person could not do, so may we see van Vogt as a relatively superior SF writer, able to imagine what the ordinary science fiction writer of 1940 could not imagine.

  Throughout the modern scientific era, as we have taken some pains to notice, existence had been divided into two parts—an area of securely known things and another area of unknownness. But van Vogt no longer observed this distinction between here and out there, between the Village and the World Beyond the Hill. To his way of thinking, knowledge and mystery were inextricably intertwined in all times and places.

  As van Vogt saw it, so great was the imperfection of our perception and thought that even the here-and-now was all but a total mystery to us. At the same time, however, the farthest star and the most remote moment were part of the same ultimate Unity as we, and consequently in some sense might be knowable by us.

  This new construction of things allowed van Vogt to operate freely and easily in mental and physical territory that was too far out for his more conventional colleagues. And it also allowed him to imagine utter strangeness close at hand where ordinary perception would never expect to find it.

  To an audience that was still struggling to come to terms with materialism and the apparently accidental and meaningless nature of existence, van Vogt’s new perspective seemed mysterious and elusive. It permitted him to come at his readers from impossible directions and to show them marvels completely beyond their ability to anticipate.

  Even John Campbell was captivated, charmed and awed by the sheer inexplicability of A.E. van Vogt. Shaking his head in wonder, Campbell would say, “That son of a gun is about one-half mystic, and like many another mystic, hits on ideas that are sound, without having any rational method of arriving at them or defending them.”666

  However, nearly fifty years after the original serialization of Slan, with the advantages lent to us by hindsight, by the changes that have taken place in thinking patterns during the intervening time, and by van Vogt’s own self-explan
ations, we don’t need to be quite as baffled or as hypnotized by the story as readers were in 1940. We can see that what was present in Slan to be taken away by a reader—whether consciously or not—was precisely those elements that van Vogt had labored so long and so hard to put into his story in the first place: Names of significance. A sense of the mutability of things. Sudden emotional and intellectual recognitions. Patterns and relationships. Awareness of the whole.

  In Slan, far more explicitly than in van Vogt’s subsequent stories, the names chosen for key characters were emblematic of their roles. The slan-hating secret police chief was Petty. The ambiguously regarded dictator of Earth was Gray. And the name of the young protagonist—J.C./Cross—was a sign to the reader that this particular superman, at least, was no cold, ruthless amoralist, but someone striving to be decent and noble and good.

  As we’ve seen, a sense that things move and change was central to Slan. Perhaps as much as Robert Heinlein, another SF writer who had been brought in childhood from a small town to the big city, van Vogt was convinced that things must change and do change. But van Vogt’s mode of expression of this crucial insight was completely different from Heinlein’s, and, in its way, was far more subtle.

  Heinlein, the engineer, student of math, and compulsive keeper of clipping files, envisioned change in terms of permutations and combinations of existing and potential factors. Through his keen powers of analysis, his encyclopedic knowledge, and his ability to combine and permute elements in an almost algebraic way, Heinlein was able to imagine modes of thinking and states of social possibility that were not the same as our own: future societies variously organized around a charismatic religious dictator, or moving roadways, or even the laws of magic.

  But A.E. van Vogt, the systematic intuitionist, had little or none of Heinlein’s special gift for observing change, considering it intellectually, and then portraying it in objectified terms. Instead, he sensed change as a kind of kinetic force, and that would be the way in which he would represent it.

  By making his stories up as he went along, by constructing them as a series of individual scenes, each of which had its own purpose, and by allowing dream flashes to constantly alter the direction of his narrative, van Vogt wove change into the very fabric of what he wrote. A story like Slan didn’t discuss the dynamics of change. It didn’t depict the effects of change. It just kept changing and changing.

  The result of this variance in expression was that from Heinlein’s 1940 stories like “ ‘If This Goes On—’ ” and “The Roads Must Roll,” a reader could anticipate the intellectual convictions that Heinlein would express directly in his 1941 guest-of-honor speech, “The Discovery of the Future.” Heinlein’s stories said quite clearly that the society of tomorrow would necessarily be different from the society of today, and that consequently the man of knowledge and competence would be well-advised to make himself ready for change to come.

  But the reader of van Vogt wouldn’t be invited to think about change so much as to experience it. And he would put Slan down not just intellectually convinced that change was a potential of the future, but with a gut feeling that change was an immanent aspect of existence, something that might occur within the context of any given instant.

  Likewise embedded in the structure of van Vogt’s novel would be his conviction—based upon his own experience—that understanding comes as the result of sudden accesses of insight. Not only would there be recognition scene upon recognition scene in Slan, but also instance after instance where Jommy suddenly arrives at some answer or conclusion on the basis of what would seem to be insufficient evidence or no evidence at all, but then proves to be correct.

  There would be no discussion of this in the novel, and no lingering upon it when it occurs. Rather, Jommy just knows something, the story moves on, and yes, indeed, what Jommy thinks he knows is actually the way things turn out to be.

  We can, of course, recognize this as exactly the same ability that van Vogt himself had for hitting upon sound ideas without having any rational method of arriving at them or defending them. To Campbell, this talent in van Vogt would appear half-mystical—but that would not be the way the writer would see it. For him, as for many others in his generation, “mystic” was something of a dirty word, an epithet indicating spiritualistic woolly-mindedness. And, most definitely, van Vogt was not a spiritualist of any kind.

  A more acceptable explanation would be that van Vogt was an organic holist, a pattern-perceiver, and so was his character, Jommy Cross. And it was their respective abilities to read patterns as wholes that would allow each of them to arrive at sound conclusions that could not be logically demonstrated or defended.

  Here is van Vogt on his own thinking processes:

  For years I may mentally stare at something that has aroused my interest, and, in a manner of speaking shake my head the entire time. This means that, for me, the pieces do not seem to be falling into a coherent shape. Years later, I’m still looking, still patiently waiting for the insight that will bring it into focus. Suddenly—and I do mean suddenly—the pattern flashes into view.667

  Similarly, within Slan, the achievement of holistic perception would be Jommy’s most important mental attainment during the seven years from age 19 to age 26. In this new state, he is able to be aware of his surroundings as a whole. Nothing significant escapes him. As van Vogt-the-narrator describes Jommy’s new condition of mind: “Details penetrated, a hard, bright pattern formed where a few years before there would have been, even for himself, a blur.”668

  One example of such a pattern falling into place in Slan might be Jommy’s sudden realization that Kier Gray, leader of the humans of Earth and the archenemy of all tendrilled slans, is in actuality himself a true slan. Here, to be sure, is an unusual relationship: what at first seem to be separate contending parties, which ultimately prove to have common leadership.

  What is more, variations upon this situation would appear in one early van Vogt novel after another. What ever should we make of that?

  Van Vogt’s first serious critic—a young fan named Damon Knight, who in time would himself become an SF writer and editor of note—would single out this recurrent relationship as a major flaw in van Vogt’s work. He would characterize the situation as “the leader of the Left is also the leader of the Right”669 and condemn it as a plot device of “utter and imbecilic pointlessness.”670

  And, admittedly, so it might very well seem to a sober, rational, rule-abiding person of democratic convictions, certain that in any contention between parties the apparent issues must in fact be the real issues and one side more correct than the other.

  As we cannot help being aware, however, Twentieth Century history has not been altogether devoid of examples of political parties which were infiltrated and subverted by their rivals, or of revolutionary leaders who turned out to be secret police agents as well. To a person of this cast of mind—authoritarian and conspiratorial, contemptuous of rules and hungry for the exercise of power—the situation presented by van Vogt might not appear quite so stupid or pointless as it did to young Damon Knight writing his criticism in 1945.

  And certainly there are some grounds for thinking that Kier Gray might be just this kind of man. He is a dictator over ordinary human beings. His arrival to power came via devious means, and to retain his grip he shows himself perfectly ready to plot, conspire, misrepresent, threaten and even kill. And there is no doubt that he does anticipate a coming day when ordinary men are gone from the face of the Earth and true slans are all that exist. Given a person this ruthless and cunning, it seems possible that he might not care particularly about nominal distinctions like Left and Right, or trouble himself overly about the illusory issues pursued by people who know less than he does. To someone like Kier Gray, it might very well be the separate contending parties that seem stupid and pointless, and not his ultimate power over both.

  Now, admittedly, a Kier Gray who was this kind of man would be a megalomaniac, fully as crazy, suspicio
us and dangerous as the Adolf Hitler with whom van Vogt’s country was currently at war. Nonetheless, there would be sufficient basis for this kind of reading of van Vogt’s stories that the writer himself would develop his own measure of concern with the question. He would wonder about the compulsion he felt to write again and again about the emergent superman, and say, “I had become aware of all the things I’d done that were somewhat on the paranoid, the schizophrenic side.”671

  To make completely certain that he had a clear grasp of the difference between a genuinely superior man and the kind of unbalanced, self-justifying, and violent human male who becomes a Hitler or Stalin, van Vogt would undertake a systematic study of this aberrated type of person and eventually write a realistic contemporary novel, The Violent Man (1962), on the subject.

  However, it isn’t necessary for us to take Kier Gray as a player of pointless games. And neither do we have to interpret him as a power-seeker with a twisted psyche. A third and better reading of him and his dual leadership of man and slan is possible. And this is that Kier Gray is a genuine caretaker with a concern for things as a whole.

  There is no doubt that Kier Gray can be coolly pragmatic and even sometimes outright ruthless. In the interest of making the transition from man to slan as untraumatic as possible, Gray shows himself ready to pamper and soothe failing mankind, to intimidate and bamboozle tendrilless slans, and to treat true slans coldly and roughly. He is even capable of raising his own daughter Kathleen as a kind of zoo exhibit in order to test contemporary reaction to the presence of a revealed tendrilled slan.

  Nonetheless, Kier Gray—as van Vogt suggests in describing him—is a noble man. Despite the unique degree of power he wields, we never see him being greedy, lustful, vicious, vengeful or self-aggrandizing. When Jommy suddenly appears in his private study bearing the gifts of controlled atomic energy, ten-point steel, and hypnotism crystals, Gray doesn’t pause for an instant to consider how these might be used for his own personal advantage. Instead, he immediately begins to plan how they may be applied to the problems of the ongoing transition.