A. E. van Vogt: "Humans, Go Home!" and "The Reflected Men"

Let's take a break from reading scans of old magazines found at the internet archive off a screen and read an actual physical book that can be found on one of the overstuffed shelves of the MPorcius Library.  The topic of this and the next transmission from MPorcius HQ will be the 1971 Dell paperback printing of A. E. van Vogt's More Than Superhuman, a collection of five reprinted 1960s stories and one new story.  My copy has an awesome moody cover featuring an heroic muscleman--no doubt a symbol of man's ability to contend with anything the universe can throw at him--over whom looms a more mysterious and abstract figure, one whose face strongly resembles a Pre-Columbian Mexican mask.  (What savant fashioned this terrific illustration is also a mystery.)  More Than Superhuman is a little over 200 pages long, and today we'll handle its first two pieces, novellas from Galaxy which together occupy half the book.

"Humans, Go Home!" (1969)

A. E. van Vogt's bibliography is a labyrinth full of confusion.  Many of his stories have been published under multiple names, many have been revised for integration into novels, and some of those altered versions have then seen reprint as if they are independent stories.  The odd bibliographic fact about "Humans, Go Home!" is that when it debuted in Galaxy it was accompanied by a sort of appendix or introduction that in plain English explained the background and setting of the story, but this valuable text was not included in More Than Superhuman, making the book publication of  "Humans, Go Home!" somewhat harder to understand than the magazine printing.  (It is not as easy as I thought it would be to take a break from reading scans of old magazines.)

That background text (it takes up one page of Galaxy) tells us that four centuries ago the inhabitants of planet Jana consisted of many primitive warring tribes, and then two humans, husband Dav and wife Miliss, arrived and set about civilizing these natives.  Today the Janae have a single world government with an hereditary monarch and a civilization at a more or less 20th-century technological level (we see widespread use of helicopters, motorcycles, and electronics.)  Dav and Miliss's miraculous feat of benignant imperialism is made possible by the fact that by the time of the story mankind has achieved what amounts to immortality through drugs and also mastered puissant mental powers--the Symbols.  How exactly these Symbols work is not clear to me, but it seems that Symbols represent abstract ideas--a prominent example in the main text of the story is the idea of constitutional monarchy--and as these ideas are more widely accepted, the Symbol grows in power, to the point that people are reluctant to oppose the idea, and those who support the idea are protected from its opponents as if by a forcefield.   

The text of the story, about 38 pages in Galaxy, covers a wide array of topics--sexual dimorphism and sexual relationships, gender roles, imperialism, social class, the passage of civilization from a feudal era characterized by the violent and arbitrary rule of men to a period of bourgeois liberalism characterized by the rule of law.  An underlying plot element, as in so many van Vogt stories, is the revelation that superior people are secretly behind the scenes manipulating society.  

As the story begins, Miliss becomes determined to leave Dav, her husband of hundreds and hundreds of years.  Dav believes that this is just her female hormones acting up, but he can't convince Miliss to take the drugs necessary to put her back on an even keel.  The galactic human civilization in the story seems to have drugs as its foundation, and this civilization is, apparently, teetering on the brink of extinction--Dav and Miliss understand that most humans have stopped taking their immortality drugs and started dying; this death wish is contagious, and those who try to help those suffering it catch it themselves, so that only humans who are contemptuous of the sick seem likely to be able to survive the crisis.  So, when, Dav comes to believe that Miliss has caught the death wish, instead of badgering her into taking her drugs, he avoids her. 

Perhaps even more bizarre is native Jana culture.  Jana women are cold and callous, and have no interest in love, sex or children, and for the Jana race to endure, Jana females have to be dominated by men, essentially forced to procreate and raise children.  For their part, Jana men, at least the aristocrats who run society, are arrogant and relish danger and violence--we witness them riding their motorcycles around recklessly and gambling with each other for the right to execute criminals by beheading them with swords.  Jana law is very class-conscious, with nobles able to get away with all manner of crimes if inflicted on inferiors, and the middle classes ranked so that a top engineer can legally murder a working-class person but might suffer a fine for murdering a fellow engineer, the fine scaled to how many more advanced degrees he had than his victim--murdering an engineer of the same academic accomplishment will be punished by death.

The plot of "Humans, Go Home!" involves the current king of the planet and the second most preeminent of the natives.  The king has been away on some mysterious mission for about a year, and when Miliss leaves Dav, native Number 2 seizes her, charging her with being an alien spy who is dominating his race; this charge is more or less the truth, and has been open knowledge for centuries--all social, political and technological developments on Jana have been the work of Dav and Miliss slowly doling out information to the natives of the planet.  Number 2 is easily able to whip up hostility among the common people against their benefactors, who have been treating the Janae as inferiors and refusing to give to the Janae the full benefit of human knowledge on the theory that they are not ready for it yet.  One of the ambiguities of the plot is the extent to which Number 2 is doing all this because he seeks power--to become king himself, or, in a new system of constitutional monarchy, prime minister--and to what extent he just wants to have Miliss in his custody so he can rape her.    

The legitimate king returns, and as the plot proceeds he is in conflict with Number 2 over the fate of the planet, as well that of Miliss and then Dav; clues begin to pile up that during his absence the king was being programmed by other humans, and he gradually learns the nature and extent of the powers he has been given by those humans (van Vogt stories often feature a person who gains mastery over amazing mental powers over the course of the tale.)  Dav seems to catch the death wish he fears his wife is suffering from, Miliss accuses Dav of becoming as arrogant and sexist as the native males and, parallel to our learning about the king's programming, it becomes evident that Dav and Miliss themselves were hypnotically programmed 400 years ago to perform certain duties and believe certain things which may not be true--maybe the human race really isn't nearly extinct because of a death wish!

We expect van Vogt stories to be strange and to fail to provide--to not even try to provide--ordinary literary and entertainment values like well-drawn characters and a strong plot that travels clearly from point A to point B in an easily digestible way, and "Humans, Go Home!" lives up to those expectations.  The story is full of crazy ideas and surprises and by the end of it you have to doubt half the stuff that has been presented to you.  "Humans, Go Home!" is one of numerous pieces by our favorite Canadian that I personally am glad to have wrestled with but which I don't feel comfortable recommending to people who aren't already on Team VV. 

In Galaxy, "Humans, Go Home!" is illustrated by Jack Gaughan, who provides six drawings.  The faces and attire of the Janoe people seem to be based upon Pre-Columbian art, which perhaps explains why the cover illo of my paperback edition prominently features that Mexican mask.

Besides the various printings of More Than Superhuman, "Humans, Go Home!" can be found in the collection The Gryb and some collections in European translation.

"The Reflected Men" (1971)   

Another long piece from Galaxy--45 pages in the magazine.  There are actually multiple books in the MPorcius Library that contain this story, my two copies of More Than Superhuman (I bought a second copy one day because the cover painting was more clearly printed) and my copy of 1974's The Worlds of A. E. van Vogt, a paperback of over 300 pages with a wraparound cover by Bart Forbes.  You can also find "The Reflected Men" in Futures Past: The Best Short Fiction of A. E. van Vogt, a 1999 collection with an introduction by Harlan Ellison; Ellison was a vigorous champion of van Vogt's, which is significant because so many members of the SF community, apparently following the lead of the powerful Damon Knight, were so down on van Vogt.  (Knight may have been right about The Tomorrow People, but he was not infallible!)

"The Reflected Men" is much better and I believe holds more appeal for normies than "Humans, Go Home!," with more human feeling, a triumphant ending, and slightly more conventional SF concepts.

Twenty-five years ago the public library of a small resort town on a lake within driving distance of New York City invited the local kids to donate interesting rocks they found for display in the library's little museum.  Twelve-year-olds Seth Mitchell and Billy Bingham found a particularly impressive specimen, and on a cliff over the lake the boys wrestled over the brilliant crystal, contesting who would have the honor of donating it--Billy vanished, presumably falling off the cliff into the lake, but his body was never found.  Today, twenty-five years later, sad unmarried librarian Edith Price, a woman who left the Big Apple after sort of botching her life by screwing up her relationships (dumping a dependable boyfriend and getting involved with a guy who didn't want to marry her, all the result of her coming under the influence of student radicals who declared that God was dead and all rules and traditions were to be jettisoned), is approached by a man claiming to be Seth Mitchell and asking for the crystal back.  The museum is under renovation, so she can't give it to him, but then on a whim she takes the now dull and drab crystal herself with the idea of mailing it to Mitchell.  

Over the course of the story we learn that the crystal is an artifact from the future, a device of astonishing power that has been dormant in the museum, but which Edith Price unwittingly reactivates.  The device becomes "oriented" on her, giving her access to mind-boggling powers she only slowly begins to understand.  One of these powers is the ability to duplicate people to whom the crystal is oriented--rather than exact duplicates, the copies are variants or alternatives, versions of the oriented person who have slightly different personality traits or have made different life decisions. When the crystal was oriented to 12-year-old Seth he accidentally triggered the creation of scores of alternative Seths, and today all over the world live Seth Mitchells who are pursuing different courses of life--among these Seths are a poor farmer, a tax accountant, a big businessman worth 10 million bucks, and a private detective (this is genre fiction, after all.)  Similarly, Edith, to whom the crystal is now oriented, when she considers all the different things she could have done with her life, unintentionally creates a bunch of alternate versions of herself.  Neither Seth, Edith, nor us readers realize what is happening while it is happening; instead we all have to figure it out after the fact--"The Reflected Men" is one of those stories in which we learn what is going on all out of chronological order, van Vogt offering us lots of twists and surprises as he reveals things.

"The Reflected Men" is also one of those stories in which a bunch of people are all chasing after the same item, and the story has many of the elements of detective fiction--rooms are ransacked, people conduct stakeouts, people are murdered, people are held at gunpoint and made to do things they don't want to do, etc.  A criminal scientist from the future comes to the 20th century to try to seize the crystal so he can become the dictator of the 35th century, and then a super scientist from further in the future appears and explains why the crystal was sent to the 1900s from his own time--the 93rd century--and pursues his own people's goals, at the expense of the Ediths, Seths, and their loved ones.  Edith and Seth, however, prove equal to the challenge of the cold sexless super brains, figuring out how ways to use the crystal and how to take advantage of blind spots in the knowledge of the asexually reproduced men of the 93rd century.  Not only does Edith secure for herself a happy ending (she marries the rich Seth and they start a family, which is what Edith really wanted all along) but provides solutions to all the other characters who deserve a decent life, including little Billy whom Seth accidentally "uncreated" all those years ago and even the scientists of the year 92-whatever.

There is plenty of psychology and human drama in "The Reflected Men," van Vogt depicting people experiencing profound grief, guilt and regret, and exploring people's views of themselves (offering an alternative meaning for the title, at one point Edith looks in the mirror and is disappointed in what she sees) and anxious speculations on how they might better themselves.  The super scientists of the 93rd century are suffering a physical degradation, perhaps because they are not natural beings but carefully crafted artificial men, and so they sent the crystal back in time with the idea it would create ideal 100%-all-natural human specimens for study--the crystal has been creating so many versions of Seth Mitchell and Edith Price in order to develop a "best possible" man and woman, but how do we judge what personality and what life-course is "the best?"  Edith strives to become a better person, and wrestles with the question of what behaviors a good person engages in, and how she should define what a good person is, and how the crystal might define such a person.  (It is a fun scene when Edith, who has been trying to become the "best-possible Edith" out of fear that the inferior Ediths will be "uncreated," suddenly realizes that the best-possible Edith is going to be a guinea pig for cold-hearted scientists.)  Van Vogt also speculates on the role of God--or at least the idea of God--in society and in the universe.

(I don't have to tell you how feminists will respond to the fact that Edith, after achieving god-like power, uses it to get married and start a family!)

I like it, and I think I can recommend "The Reflected Men" to normies, not just to those like myself who have already signed up for lifetime passes on the sevagram steam train.

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Next time we'll read the second half of More Than Superhuman, four shorter stories, including two collaborations.  Stick around!