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

by Alexei Panshin

  And the city, that unique educational device, then returns to waiting for the next set of inquisitive humanoids to come along and receive instruction.

  In the new consciousness-based universe, it would seem, how you think and what you are capable of learning would be much more important than where you happen to come from or what you might look like. Starting from very different initial conditions, we might all become Lopers together, or crystalline beings tinkling in the air, or some further state even more exalted.

  Of all the writers of the wartime Astounding, it was A.E. van Vogt who was most insistent that in a universe of holistic consciousness the human way forward lay in higher education.

  Back in 1940, in his first novel, Slan, van Vogt had imagined that it would be necessary to have an evolutionary mutation and a whole new breed of man to replace man-as-he-presently-is before humanity could begin to think holistically. But implicit in Slan were hints of Techno Age elitism, racism and genocide that van Vogt couldn’t be completely comfortable with. Ultimately, those were the very issues that World War II was being fought to settle.

  During the involuntary hiatus in his SF writing which followed Slan, van Vogt was given a space of time in which to think carefully about the question of human mental and moral advancement. And while he didn’t manage to resolve all problems at once, he did begin to view mutation as a less-than-fully-satisfactory answer to the question and to look for alternatives.

  This may be seen in “Recruiting Station,” his first published story after his return. Here, van Vogt had pitted a genetic superman against an ordinary Twentieth Century woman, and made the superman and his kind a danger to all existence and the woman humanity’s savior.

  In this story, van Vogt envisioned one kind of superior man after another, as though to say that no one fixed form of man could ever be final and sufficient. But the superman we are shown at closest range is immortal, telepathic Dr. Lell of the Glorious, an arrogant, exploitative race who are prepared to sacrifice the entire universe if they are not allowed to have things their own way.

  Set in opposition to him is Norma Matheson, whose first name may be taken as an indication of her normal human nature. Through mental contact with post-humans of the remote future and specific training by them, she has her latent powers of mind awakened to the point where she is easily able to fool, manipulate and forestall that poor, unsuspecting superman, Dr. Lell.

  The same relative order of value, in which education is seen as superior to mutation, would be presented in van Vogt’s second novel, The Weapon Makers, at the beginning of 1943, in the two friends, Edward Gonish and Robert Hedrock. Gonish, the No-man, is not a mutant, but he has been enabled by special Weapon Shop training to become a master of holistic perception. Hedrock, the immortal man, is a unique sport of nature, but for all his advantages of longevity and his concern for the welfare of the entirety of mankind, he also has distinct limitations of mind.

  Hedrock thinks about this just prior to his arrival at a crucial meeting with the Weapon Shop Council:

  Despite all his years of experience, these Weapon Shop supermen with their specialized training had inexorably forged ahead of him in a dozen fields.

  He could not even plan for his own protection because the techniques of education that had molded their brains from childhood were useless applied to his mind, which had been cluttered with confused, unplanned integrations ages before the techniques now so dangerous to him were invented.870

  If our minds weren’t already cluttered with prejudices, with errors of perception and understanding, with outmoded and inadequate information, and with confused, unplanned integrations, could any of us and every one of us learn to be a superman like the members of the Weapon Shop Council?

  If a natural man-beyond-man like Hedrock were deprived of all special education, would he ever be able to put his superior qualities to use?

  Is it possible that appropriate mental training could produce a whole society of superior men who were more sane, more adaptable, and more able than that random accident, the untutored genetic superman?

  Van Vogt would give questions like these considerable thought. And writing in a later day, he would have these speculations to offer about the relationship between human potential, society and education:

  —God made man in his own image (meaning perfect).

  (Man loused it up.)

  —A complex computer, even when it’s a neural one—the human brain—has the capacity to reason perfectly.

  Early training and conditioning loused it up.

  —Under hypnosis, it has been established that the human memory has stored everything seen, heard, felt, touched and tasted, since at least early childhood.

  Also loused up.

  Of course, in this middle period of history, lousing up doesn’t take long in any single individual’s life, because of the haphazard way the person is brought up, which all too quickly turns him into the average type we see around.

  We are entitled to speculate that every human being is at some bottom of his being endowed with total memory, total creativity, total intelligence; in short, down in there somewhere is a perfect brain.

  We have beautiful glimpses of what is potential. One person has an open line to writing poetry. Another can draw with marvelous accuracy. A third has musical ability. Others masterfully design carpets, build cabinets, conceive vast architectural marvels; and so on, through all the arts, and sciences, and crafts, that the world, and the individual, has produced.

  But the time for the brain to be handled correctly by schools and parents, and to operate freely, is not yet.871

  In his third serial novel, The World of Null-A (Astounding, Aug.-Oct. 1945), van Vogt would try to envision that better time. He would present a future society whose first priority is to educate men and women to be more able and clear-thinking than they are today. And, by way of contrast, he would also imagine an immortal superman with a second brain, like the Mixed Men, who for lack of self-knowledge and training is hopelessly bewildered and ineffective.

  The mental training presented in The World of Null-A would differ from that offered in van Vogt’s previous stories in having a plausible contemporary referent—Alfred Korzybski’s psycholinguistic system, General Semantics.

  Count Alfred Korzybski was another of the pioneer holists of the Thirties. Born in Poland in 1879, he was trained as an engineer, and later taught physics, mathematics and foreign languages in Warsaw. During World War I, Korzybski was a member of a Russian military mission to America. When the Russian Revolution occurred in 1917 and Russia withdrew from the war, he took up permanent residence in the United States.

  The aim behind Korzybski’s original work was to engineer a closer fit between human thought and behavior and the actual facts of the surrounding environment. He wanted to make human thinking both more exact and more flexible.

  Korzybski’s central statement was a 1933 book entitled Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. In his analysis, our modern problems in thinking could all be traced back to the logic of Aristotle, with its either-or, black-white, this-and-therefore-not-that approach to the world. The effect of the radical science of the Twentieth Century was to reveal the inadequacy of such over-simple methods. The times demanded new, more effective, multivalued, non-Aristotelian (or null-A) systems of thought.

  General Semantics was an example of such a system. In linguistics, semantics is the study of the relationship between symbols and the things they refer to. General Semantics was an extension of this—a study of the relationship between the limited ways in which human beings ordinarily think and the real world in which they must act.

  Again and again, Korzybski pointed out that the map is not the territory. One moment in time is not the same as another. And if events are to be understood, it is necessary for them to be interpreted within a total context.

  Korzybski’s work had first been used as background in science fiction in 1940
when Robert Heinlein had made it the plausible basis for the persuasive psychology at the heart of his short novel, “ ‘If This Goes On—.’ ” But it took three years after that before van Vogt was able to catch up with a copy of Science and Sanity and read Korzybski for himself.

  As it happened, during World War II, Canada saw fit to protect the tender sensibilities of its citizens by banning all American science fiction magazines. A partial exception was made for van Vogt, who needed to read Astounding for professional reasons, and he continued to receive his copies forwarded to him through the Canadian censor’s office.

  In the course of 1943, a science fiction reader named O.C. Wilson got in touch with van Vogt. He worked for the Canadian Broadcasting System, and his job had taken him to the censor’s office, where he had happened to notice a science fiction magazine addressed to van Vogt. Was it possible that he might borrow back copies of Astounding and Unknown? Van Vogt let him have the magazines, and in return Wilson lent van Vogt his copy of Science and Sanity.

  Korzybski’s work was exactly what van Vogt the systematician was most eager to see—a system for the development of clearer human thought. Heinlein, in his story, had used Korzybski’s studies as the basis by which those in society who do think with clarity could manipulate and direct that part of the populace still a slave to limited thinking. But what van Vogt perceived in General Semantics was the means by which all mankind might set itself free.

  In van Vogt’s novel, The World of Null-A, it is the year 2560, and everyone on Earth has the opportunity to absorb education in the super-General Semantics of his imagination. The result is an egalitarian society: “There simply weren’t any special people in the null-A universe. . . . People were people, normally born equal, requiring the simple, straightforward null-A training to integrate their intelligence. There were no kings, no archdukes, no supermen, traveling incognito.”872

  Every year, during a special month, people who wish to advance themselves come to the capital city from all over the world to be tested by a great Games Machine. Those who do well are honored and placed in positions of social authority. And the few who do well enough—those who can demonstrate that they are completely functional human beings—graduate to another society on Venus where people live in peace and harmony without any need for the coercions of government and law.

  In the course of the story, human beings from an ongoing galactic civilization who are powerfully armed, but mentally are still “unintegrated men,”873 invade this superior civilization. But the null-A men of Venus meet this threat with such clarity of mind, tenacity of purpose and uncompromising resistance that a galactic observer is soon saying to the leader of the invasion, “ ‘Haven’t you realized that null-A cannot be destroyed?’ ”874

  In this society in which supermen traveling incognito have no place, van Vogt’s natural superman, Gilbert Gosseyn, would be far less effective.

  At the outset of the story, Gosseyn has just arrived in the capital city from his small hometown in California to be tested by the Games Machine. But it is very quickly revealed to him that everything he thinks he knows about himself and his background is false or inadequate. The identity he has accepted as sufficient is not his true self.

  Reflecting on the situation of this character, van Vogt would come to remark: “Analogically, this is true of all of us. Only, we are so far gone into falseness, so acceptant of our limited role, that we never question it at all.”875

  In his search for who he really is, and for what he can really do, Gosseyn (whose name can be pronounced “go-sane”876—van Vogt’s own personal preference once his literary agent had pointed this out to him) would consult a psychiatrist, Dr. Kair. The doctor examines his “extra-brain”877 and reports in awe:

  “The evidence shows, Gosseyn, that what you have resembles not so much a brain as the great control systems in the solar plexus and the spine. Only it is the most compact set-up of controls that I have ever seen. The number of cells involved is equal to about a third of the total now in your brain. You’ve got enough control apparatus in your head to direct atomic and electronic operations in the microcosm, and there just aren’t enough objects in the macrocosm to ever engage the full potential control power of the automatic switches and relays now in your brain.”878

  But when Gosseyn asks for aid in actualizing this potential, Dr. Kair can be of no help. He likens Gosseyn’s case to that of a boy named George who was raised by a pack of wild dogs from the age of two to eleven. After his capture, George proved beyond socialization, never learning to walk and talk and take part in normal human society:

  “He died at twenty-three, still an animal; a wizened up creature-boy looking hardly human in the bed of his padded cell. A post-mortem revealed that his cortex had not fully developed, but that it existed in sufficient size to have justified belief that it might be made to function.”879

  This—or something like it—is Gosseyn’s situation. For all his incredible potential, in actual practice he is pitifully underdeveloped.

  The best that Gosseyn can do is attempt to remember himself—to discover who he really is. And, indeed, at the conclusion of the story, he does learn that he is nothing less than the latest clone of the immortal superman who long ago was originally responsible for setting up null-A society.

  (In the 1948 book version of the story, it is explained that because of an accident suffered by the eldest current Gosseyn, it has proved impossible for him to transfer to his younger clone the cumulative memory that is the true immortality of the line. And this is the reason why this latent superman has been condemned to wander about so aimlessly from Earth to Venus—as he himself puts it, “ ‘like a bewildered child.’ ”880)

  This elder Gosseyn is killed, but as he dies he indicates to his younger clone-successor that the best thing he/they have been able to accomplish was to take the obscure system of null-A and make it into the basis for a society:

  “ ‘I nourished null-A, which was then like a tiny flowering plant in a wilderness of weeds.’ ”881

  (In the second revision of the book in 1970, the dying elder superman adds this indication that his/their immortality in itself is meaningless in comparison to the sanity of null-A man: “I was looking for a place to settle, and for something to be that was more than mere continuity; and it seemed to me that Non-Aristotelian Man was it. . . .’ ”882)

  If van Vogt was correct in his stories of the later Golden Age, the human way forward lay not merely in being dominant, or in having greater firepower, or conquering more and more territory, and neither did it depend on mankind changing in form and developing special powers like telepathy or immortality. What was actually required was for men and women of our own kind to learn how to actualize their present untapped potential and become beings who were completely sane and fully effective.

  We should recognize that the various stories of 1943 to 1945 which we’ve been looking at were not in the majority in Astounding. They were only one element in a mix which included old-fashioned stories of scientific invention, time-travel paradoxes, stories in which technical problems were posed and solved, and even a line of patriotic SF in which various dire fates were imagined for the Axis powers, in particular the Nazis and their leaders.

  At the same time, however, there can be no doubt that these stories were far and away the most original and visionary work published by Campbell during the war—the model for SF written throughout the rest of the Atomic Age. Here, transcendence, like a snake that has been struggling to shed its old skin, cast off the appearance of science-beyond-science which had served it through the modern scientific era, and presented itself in the shining new raiment of consciousness-beyond-consciousness.

  The shift in the perceived locus of transcendence that took place in these wartime stories was every bit as significant as the earlier shift from transcendent spirit to transcendent science with which our story began. We may understand it as the sign of the start of a whole new era in the social and psychic developm
ent of the Western world, which, as it unfolds, will necessarily be as different from the modern scientific era as that was from the preceding era of spirit-based religion.

  It is possible to catch this shift in the very act of taking place in the SF stories that were written during World War II by John Campbell’s most diligent pupil, Isaac Asimov—even though Asimov was someone who was scientifically educated and scientifically employed, and consciously dedicated to the proposition that science fiction was fiction about imaginary science and its possible effects upon human beings.

  For a time, Asimov wasn’t writing science fiction of any kind. He stopped in the spring of 1942 when he left his parents’ candy store and suspended work on his Ph.D. at Columbia in order to go off to Philadelphia to serve as a chemist in the Navy Yard. He was fully occupied in learning to live on his own, adjusting to his new job, and preparing to be married in July to a girl he had begun dating in February.

  Asimov had always looked upon his science fiction writing as a convenient and enjoyable means of earning money to support his studies in college and graduate school. But he didn’t need to do that anymore. Now that the Navy was paying him to be a chemist, he was bringing in more money more regularly than ever before in his life.

  It went further than this, however. Now that he wasn’t spending those long hours behind the counter of the candy store in Brooklyn, he no longer had the inclination to go on reading the science fiction pulp magazines that had been so important to him for so many years. He did continue to buy Astounding each month, but he got farther and farther behind in reading that, too. It was almost as though science fiction were part of some other life which he had now left behind.