A. E. van Vogt: "All the Loving Androids," "Laugh, Clone, Laugh," "Research Alpha" and "Him"

British paperback editions of More Than Superhuman;
the 1980 printing (right) illustrates "The Reflected Men," which we talked about
last time

Today we read the second half of my 1971 Dell printing of the A. E. van Vogt collection More Than Superhuman, striding into the arena to wrestle with four more stories by the Canadian madman, two of them collaborations!  In this tag team match will Forrest J. Ackerman and James Schmitz be on our side, aiding our efforts to grab a hold of our man Van's at times slippery or prickly prose and pin down his unforgettable nova concepts, or will they instead just compound the difficulties faced by those of us bold enough to thrown down with the Slan Man?

"All the Loving Androids" (1971)

It looks like this approximately 35-page story was original to this collection.  "All the Loving Androids" would go on to be included in some European van Vogt collections.

Dan Thaler is a physicist working for the government in the future of visi-phones, aircars, and human-like androids.  He is currently on a secret assignment--the government suspects something odd is going on with the androids, and Dan is discreetly investigating.  As "All the Loving Androids" begins, an opportunity to learn about the cutting edge in grey-market androids falls right into Dan's lap.  Dan's sister Anita is married to busy businessman Peter Copeland, and according to this dude Anita is "the worst neurotic of all time and space"; she calls him up at the office multiple times a day, gives him long lists of errands to run, and if he should hesitate to bow to her every whim, threatens to kill herself.  So, Peter acquired two androids that looked exactly like him to occupy Anita, one running all those errands and the other answering the phone so he had time to get his work done and conduct an extramarital affair.  When Anita takes an overdose of sleeping pills, the cops and Dan meet Peter's android stand-ins and they are amazed by their high quality--most androids are immediately recognizable as robots thanks to their not-quite-lifelike movements, but these two can successfully pass for human!

Dan the man, with the help of a cop, figures out that at the bottom of all this is a conspiracy that reaches into the government bureaucracy and the highest level of the professions--the Establishment is riddled with people who support android civil rights and some of them are willing to commit murder to win equality for androids or even go so far as to actually make the androids our masters!  One such ally of the androids is Anita's shrink--this joker hypnotized Anita into being a terrible wife so the android liberation people could sell three of the new super androids to Peter!  That's right, three androids--the "woman" Peter is conducting an extramarital affair with is a physical duplicate of Anita who is a conscientious homemaker and an eager sex partner!  All proceeds of such superandroid sales go to financing the android uprising!  

Dan gets captured by the android liberation organization; they hypnotize him and he briefly lives an android-like existence, slavishly obedient and unable to do anything for which he has not been programmed.  Luckily the police rescue him and capture the diabolical android-boosting psychiatrist.

The climax of "All the Loving Androids" is not what I expected--I had expected all the androids to be wiped out and humans being forced to get along without them, or, some kind of negotiations which would improve the position of androids in society.  Instead, Van concludes the story with a sort of joke that is perhaps commentary on sexual relationships.  The real Anita, freed from the hypnosis that made her so impossible to get along with, takes the place of the Anita android and has the Anita robot put in the loony bin in her place.  She insists that Dan not tell Peter about the substitutions; presumably Peter and Anita live happily ever after, Anita being such a helpful wife that Peter does not realize she is the human he married and not the robot he recently purchased.  The final punchline is the reflections of the cop who helped Dan--he envies Peter for having an accommodating, even robotic wife because his own wife is such a pain in the neck.  Whether Van's joke is supposed to make a feminist or anti-feminist point here is not clear.  

"All the Loving Androids" is an acceptable filler story, no big deal.  The plot sort of reminds me of the plots we see in Jack Vance stories, but of course van Vogt can't match Vance's superior writing style, which makes Vance's stories founded on such plots so entertaining.

"Laugh, Clone, Laugh" (1969) with Forrest J. Ackerman

Back in late 2021 I read Forrest J. Ackerman's collaboration with C. L. Moore, "Nymph of Darkness," and was astonished and actually angered by how poor it was.  So my hopes of finding "Laugh, Clone, Laugh" palatable are not high.  

This story, five pages, is a sterile waste of time, a lame sort of fairy story punctuated with weak jokes that culminates in a bad pun.  Thumbs down.  It is better than "Nymph of Darkness," because, whereas "Nymph of Darkness" failed to achieve its goals, "Laugh, Clone, Laugh" accomplishes its purpose, having set its sights very very low.

This pointless exercise first saw print in the collection Science Fiction Worlds of Forrest J Ackerman & Friends.  There is a lot of evidence that many members of the SF community found Ackerman to be a fun guy and he seems to have had a boundless enthusiasm for speculative fiction, but in my experience his actual writing is shallow at best, and often quite irritating.

"Research Alpha" (1965) with James H. Schmitz

Schmitz is actually good at writing SF adventure stories with interesting aliens,* so I have been looking forward to reading this one.  "Research Alpha" first appeared in If, and appeared in translation within a year in two different European magazines, including Urania, the Karel Thole cover of which illustrates the opening scene of the story.

Tall and slim Barbara Ellington recently started working as a typist at Research Alpha, one of the world's most important scientific institutions.  She is dating Vincent Strather, a technician in the photo lab, though she seems to have a crush on John Hammond, president of Research Alpha.  Barbara has also caught the eye of the head of the biology department, Dr. Henry Gloge, who selects Barbara and Vincent to be the subjects of his latest experiment!  

My understanding of evolution (and I am admittedly an ignoramus) is that it is an unpredictable process driven by random mutations that, should they not cripple the ability to produce offspring, are passed on to an individual's descendants and will become widespread should they confer some advantage in the struggle to reproduce; over many generations, new species emerge from this process.  But often in SF stories we see evolution portrayed as a predictable process, as if what your descendants will look like is already mapped out in your genes, and if we bathe you in radiation or shoot you full of drugs you can graduate early, skipping a hundred or a thousand or a million generations and taking on an advanced form.†  "Research Alpha" is one of these stories.  Dr. Gloge has been injecting the giant salamanders known as "hellbenders" with a drug that advances their evolution by hundreds of thousands of years, so that they grow armor and better eyesight and so forth.  He wants to figure out what will happen if he uses the drug on human beings, and so he injects Barbara and Vincent--absolutely without their consent or even knowledge, or that of his boss, president Hammond--and rigs up surveillance in their private off-campus apartments so he can keep tabs on them.

A three-sided conflict featuring shifting alliances and a whole panoply of superpowers and high tech equipment ensues among Barbara, who, as we expect of a van Vogt protagonist, gradually acquires and masters mind-boggling mental abilities; the ruthless Dr. Gloge; and Hammond, who, unsurprisingly to us VV fans, is an extraterrestrial, one of those here on Earth pulling strings behind the scenes to manipulate human civilization.  Will Barbara use her superpowers to become leader of Earth, give all of us superpowers, and throw off the influence of the aliens?  Or will she recognize the wisdom of the aliens and leave Earth behind to join the god-like galactics who are Hammond's superiors?

This is a pretty good thriller with a sense-of-wonder ending as Barbara achieves "Point Omega:" "when man becomes one with the ultimate."  I like it.    

*Here are links to my comments on some Schmitz productions I liked: "Planet of Forgetting," "Greenface," "Grandpa," and The Demon Breed.

†My go-to example is Edmond Hamilton's "The Man Who Evolved," but see also Henry Kuttner's "What Hath Me?"  

"Him" (1969)

"Research Alpha" takes up like 60 pages, but "Him" is a short one, just five pages of text.  It debuted in Spaceway, a magazine that, at that time, consisted mostly of reprints of 1950s material; among this issue's new material is a long wordplay-filled letter from Forrest J. Ackerman in which he, among other things, suggests if a movie were to be made of Sibyl Sue Blue, which we read back in November, the lead role should go to Nancy Sinatra.            

"Him" is a merely acceptable filler story.  Most of the Earth is under the control of dictator Josiah Him, but considerable portions of Western North America resist his rule, even repelling a full scale invasion.  One of Him's screwy policies is to have educated people--college professors, scientists, and the like--ground up and fed to students; this is called the "planarian education plan," it being ostensibly based on that famous(ly controversial) scientific finding that planarian worms can acquire memories of their fellows whom they eat.  The plot of this story follows the dictator's top brewer as he is chosen to be ground up and fed to aspiring brewers, and discovers that his death sentence is in fact part of a rebel plot to overthrow Him.

Slight; an unfortunate way to conclude the collection.

"Him" would reappear in the program book of the 1992 MagiCon held in Orlando.

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Another adventure successfully concluded.  Stay tuned for more explorations of mid-century SF here at MPorcius Fiction Log.