Five early 1970s stories by A. E. van Vogt

It feels like a long time since we read anything by one of the Great White North's greatest exports, A. E. van Vogt.  Luckily, I have a 1972 printing of DAW's The Book of van Vogt handy!  This volume, DAW Collectors No. 4, has a great Karel Thole cover depicting a future city and some of its oh so charming inhabitants; a later DAW edition, retitled Lost: Fifty Suns, has a cover depicting three odd characters, one supposes a potentate and two of his advisers.

The first few books printed by DAW included on their very first page "A Statement to Science Fiction Readers" explaining what DAW was all about and bragging about how awesome Donald A. Wollheim was, and my copy of The Book of van Vogt has just such a first page.  Among other things, Wollheim promises that every DAW book is one which never before appeared in paperback.  "Thus, you can be assured that, besides being the selection of an expert, the DAW Book you buy will not be something you may have bought once before with a different cover."  You have to wonder if perhaps Wollheim, in the very first year of DAW's existence, was already testing SF readers' trust when you realize that two of the seven stories in The Book of van Vogt, "The Barbarian" and "Lost: Fifty Sons," are excerpts from fix-up novels printed in paperback in the 1960s (the former as part of Empire of the Atom and the latter as part of Mission to the Stars, an alternate title for the novel The Mixed Men.)  Presumably by 1979, when Lost: Fifty Sons was printed, this promise was long forgotten.

(Isaac Walwyn's very cool van Vogt site Sevagram is helpful for figuring out these confusing van Vogt bibliography issues.)

Today we'll be talking about the five stories in The Book of van Vogt that were first published in 1971 and 1972; four of these stories were original to The Book of van Vogt.

"The Rat and the Snake" (1971)

This is one of those switcheroo stories, like the Twilight Zone episodes in which a Nazi ends up in a death camp or a U-Boat captain ends up on a torpedoed freighter, or those EC comics in which a guy kills a spider and then gets caught in a giant spider web.  A dude loves feeding rats to his pet python.  Then Word War III breaks out and the resulting economic slowdown means there is a shortage of rats for sale! The python-lover tries to steal rats from a laboratory nearby, and the scientists there punish him by testing their new war gas on him.  This gas shrinks you to the size of a rat.  The python-lover is then eaten by his own pet.

I am going to give this one a marginal thumbs up, even though I find the switcheroo gimmick irritating, because I think my man Van is playing the whole thing for laughs rather than trying to make some banal philosophical point or indulging in some kind of fantasy of punishing his enemies.  And the following lines did make me laugh:

Until those words were spoken, Mark hadn't really thought about becoming a rat-stealing criminal.  Except for his peculiar love for his python, he was a law-abiding, tax-paying nobody.  

Also, this story is just three pages long--short and to the point.  And it reminded me of the scene in The Weapon Makers in which the protagonist has to fight a twenty-foot rat, and the scene in which he turns himself into a giant.  Good memories!

"The Rat and the Snake" was first published in Witchcraft and Sorcery, a periodical billed as "The MODERN Magazine of Weird Tales."  Since 1972 "The Rat and the Snake" has appeared in a few collections and anthologies, including two Continental European volumes with Chris Foss covers.

"The Timed Clock" (1972)

This is one of those time travel stories in which a guy goes back in time and becomes (or realizes he is) his own grandfather.  This is also one of those stories with an elaborate frame story in which a guy is hosting a party and tells his friends a wacky story and they have to decide if they believe it (hmmm..doesn't H. G. Wells' Time Machine also feature the time traveller describing his time travel to his buddies at a get together at his digs?)  I guess this story is a little off the beaten track because the main character's grandmother accompanies him to the present day to live with him as his wife.

Competent, so acceptable, but no big deal.

"The Timed Clock" has not appeared again in English, but our French, Dutch and Italian friends all have the opportunity to read it in their native jibber jabber in SF magazines and van Vogt collections.

"The Confession" (1972)

This is more like what we expect from van Vogt; "The Confession" is a story which is hard to understand and is full of psychology, hypnosis, ruthless superpowerful beings from another time or dimension, sexual relationships and class conflict.

Paul Marriott is the last of the Marriotts, the family that was once the richest and most important in town but which has fallen on hard times; not only is the big and once beautiful Marriott house mostly bare of furniture, but Paul is working at another man's shop, sweeping the floors!  Paul has started having strange hallucinations, or maybe they are vivid dreams, of the house being furnished, and of seeing himself, twenty years older, living with Judith, his girlfriend.  People in the town remind him that he was recently hypnotized by a travelling showman, and imply that Judith is no longer around.  Paul's hallucinations continue, he actually experiencing life married to Judith in an atomic-powered future of glittering lights and towering translucent buildings--in this future world Judith's business acumen has made them financially comfortable, reversing the decline of the Marriott family.  Is Paul getting glimpses of a potential happy future?  Is his psyche actually travelling back and forth between the dreadful present and a happy future?  Can he do anything to make sure that happy future comes to pass?  But where is Judith in the present day--what happened to her?

Paul tracks down the travelling hypnotist to get further clues, and then meets an even more eldritch character.  This figure suddenly appears on the penultimate page of the 15-page story, and his motives and actions are alien and somewhat opaque, but I think he is a time-travelling rogue who seduces (or rapes) women from different time periods.  It appears that after he had his way with Judith that she, fearing she was no longer good enough to be part of the exalted Marriott clan, committed suicide Lucrece-style.  Judith lays dead, a futuristic implement buried in her chest, but, somehow, as Paul and the future man wrestle, their actions, by accident or design, shift Paul and Judith onto another time stream and twenty years later, into that peaceful and comfortable atomic future.

This is the genuine van Vogt article; I like it.  "The Confession," like all the stories we are talking about today, appeared in translation in multiple non-English publications.

"Ersatz Eternal" (1972)

This is a trifling sort of thing, just four pages, that I cannot endorse.  Three Earthmen land on a barren planet; one by one they leave the vessel to look for fuel.  Each astronaut finds a simulacrum Earth complete with his friends and family and childhood home, etc.  Each lives for centuries--they do not age, and are immune from injury. Then, by chance, in New York City, two of the astronauts meet.  They speculate that some life force created this imitation Earth and they are "being held in reserve...possible substitutes if anything goes wrong."

This story feels like a waste of time, it is just too mysterious, amounts to nothing.  I may be missing its significance...there is a hint that the astronauts are from a different, happier, dimension, that the  imitation Earth is our own Earth, and that it is the product of the mind of the third astronaut, who is violently insane--if so, van Vogt is saying that you and I live in a nightmare world, a twisted caricature of the real happy universe!

Forrest J. Ackerman, who was van Vogt's literary agent (among others, Ackerman also represented Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury) included "Ersatz Eternal" in Best Science Fiction for 1973.  The story also saw print in foreign venues, including in an issue of the Polish SF magazine Fantastyka, which you can read at the internet archive.

"The Sound of Wild Laughter" (1972)

This is a substantial piece, like 50 pages long, a convoluted story with a plot like a soap opera's! Remember when we read Earth Factor X (AKA The Secret Galactics) two-and-a-half years ago?  Well, "The Sound of Wild Laughter" stars the same main characters, Nobel-prize-winning physicists Dr. Carl and Dr. Marie Hazzard, and some of the same supporting players!  It takes place earlier than the novel.

Carl and Marie's marriage is in bad shape, because Carl keeps cheating on Marie, so she refuses to sleep with him, and he hypocritically and irrationally flies into jealous rages, accusing her (unjustly) of cheating on him.  This has been going on for fourteen years!  It doesn't help that Carl, whose work doing Nobel-worthy research, managing Hazzard Laboratories--a successful firm that creates and sells scientific equipment--and acting as president of the Non-Pareil Corporation, as well as juggling two or three mistresses at any one time, is also an amateur expert on psychology!  He has a bunch of aphorisms about female behavior that he has inscribed in a journal he has entitled Women Are Doomed, and is always working them into conversation.  His aphorisms aren't like the ones we hear all the time, like "Girls rule, boys drool," or "A woman has to be twice as good as a man to get half as far," or "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."  No, Carl's aphorisms are more like:

"A perfect marriage exists when a wife is bound to her husband by emotional ties that she does not even try to understand."

and

"It takes a lot of energy for a man to get a frigid female into bed and progressively more energy for him to keep her there."

I guess Carl long ago wrote off any ambitions of working for the Google people.

Anyway, as the story opens, Carl has been hit by a truck and practically killed, but the world's finest brain surgeon, Dr. Angus MacKerrie, in a pioneering operation, has managed to save Carl's brain and preserve it in a nutrient fluid!  Mac hooks the brain up to machines so Carl, still conscious as what he calls "a nothing, a mind suspended in a great night" can talk to people.  Marie is our main character, and we follow her as she deals with the aftermath of these startling events:

• Mac the brain surgeon is in love with Marie and endeavors to seduce her (his seduction methods will look like rape to many 2017 readers.)

• Carl in his neurotically jealous way has long suspected that one of his and Marie's top employees, fellow physicist Dr. Walter Drexel, is having an affair with Marie, and now he thinks Walter was the one who ran him over.  Walter pressures Marie to limit Carl's opportunities to talk to the press and other people, as he fears his career (and Marie's) will be ruined if Carl's accusations become public.  Now that Carl is out of the way Walter also tries to get in Marie's pants--he is no more concerned with getting affirmative consent than is Mac, but he has his own neuroses that hamper his efforts.   

• Marie and Carl's lawyer helps her with the legal shenanigans revolving around Carl's will (he left money to several mistresses) and the decision of whether to petition the court to declare Carl, a disembodied but living brain, legally alive or legally dead.  The lawyer tries to blackmail Marie, seduce her, or maybe both--his dialogue is a little oblique and unclear.  Van Vogt stories are full of sentences and passages which are hard to understand, and this is at least partly intentional--Marie spends the whole story confused and disoriented (sample passage: "For Marie, resentment yielded to puzzlement...She couldn't quite decide what he was trying to say") and Van aims to make us readers feel the same way.

• As the story progresses we learn more about Carl and Marie's marriage--for example, over the years Carl has suggested multiple times that they jointly commit suicide, so they can be "together in some other plane, true lovers for all time."  Carl, from his perch inside a glass dome full of nutrient liquid, suggests such a suicide pact yet again, and tells Marie, and then demonstrates, that he has rigged up a way to detonate a bomb in his quarters that, he says, will kill them both!  BOOM!  Marie is clever enough to escape the explosion, but the fact that Carl also survives suggests that Carl's suicide talk all along has been nothing more than a ruse to provide him the opportunity to murder his wife!  Carl then convinces Mac and Walter that Marie triggered the explosion, that she was trying to murder him!  Now all the men can blackmail Marie!

In the end, Marie is under the thumb of the three men, in a position she compares to that of a slave.

This is a crazy story, and challenging to interpret.  Carl's theories, which Marie is always thinking about and talking about, and the story's last few lines, indicate that "The Sound of Wild Laughter" is about free will and determinism.  Carl comes down hard on the side of determinism--the courses of our lives are just as determined by physical laws (Carl argues that factors like "chemistry of their internal structure" and "electromagnetic flows in the body and brain" control people so that we are "like so many puppets") as are the orbits of Mars and the Earth around the sun.  It is even implied that we all live in a "great night," just like Carl, even though we may still have our eyes and bodies.  Van Vogt seems to agree with these theories, but at the same time we have to wonder because he puts them in the mouth of a neurotic liar and would-be murderer--is this the kind of guy whose theories we should wholeheartedly embrace?

"The Sound of Wild Laughter" depicts a sexist society in which men crush an intelligent woman (she's a Nobel-winner herself, remember), but if we are supposed to accept Carl's theories, are we then supposed to see such sexism as merely an inevitable tragedy we must learn to accept?  Does determinism mean we should absolve the men of their crimes against Marie and each other?  Or are Carl's theories just a rationalization, an excuse for the terrible things he does?  Is van Vogt portraying evil or mentally ill men with a focus on the way they justify their oppressive actions, perhaps even suggesting that we question to what extent theories about human life like Carl's simply describe reality, and to what extent such theories actually help create the sexist and otherwise callous or unjust world we live in?

"The Sound of Wild Laughter" is not necessarily conventionally entertaining, and heaven knows how people nowadays will react to a morally ambiguous story in which an innocent woman is successfully manipulated by neurotic and murderous men who, in a just world, would be in a prison, but it is a thought-provoking puzzle, and I like it.  This is the real van Vogt stuff.  "The Sound of Wild Laughter" was translated into Italian and German, but only ever appeared in English in DAW's various printings of The Book of van Vogt.

**********

The Book of van Vogt is a solid collection that every van Vogt fan will want to own because it includes these five otherwise difficult to acquire stories, and the Karel Thole cover is a nice bonus.  

More from our man Van in our next episode!

Quest for the Future by A. E. Van Vogt

Caxton was parting his lips to continue with another association of his own, when it occurred to him:  What this guy just said makes no sense. In fact, for several minutes I haven't understood anything he said.

Recently, to commemorate the birthday of John Schoenherr, I dug out from my totally disorganized shelves some of my Ace A. E. Van Vogt paperbacks with covers by Schoenherr.  The particularly good cover of 1970's Quest for the Future inspired me to keep the novel easily accessible, and last week I read it.

The back cover (which invokes the name of Forrest Ackerman, Van Vogt's literary agent, among other things) and the ad copy on the first page repeatedly declare Quest for the Future to be a "new novel," but the very first page of Chapter I felt mighhhhhhhty familiar.  Quest for the Future is, in fact, a fix-up of three stories which first appeared in Astounding in the 1940s: "Film Library," "The Search" and "Far Centaurus."  I had already read all three of the stories, two in my Berkley paperback copy of the collection Destination: Universe! and the third in a copy of Transfinite: The Essential A. E. van Vogt which I had borrowed from the Des Moines Public Library, but since I had read them so long ago, and I remembered them being pretty good, I decided to go through with reading Quest for the Future anyway.

Our protagonist, Peter Caxton, is a man in his early forties living in the late 1970s, and he is a real jerk!  Caxton is an ambitious high school teacher, and you and I both know those are the worst kind!  His current aspiration: to replace the principal, Mr. Varney, whom he derisively calls "Old Varnish" behind his back!  Caxton is also cheating on his wife with one of the female teachers, Miss Gregg, an act of knavery which Caxton finds all the more amusing because his rival for Old Varnish's job, Mr. Dorritt, has a crush on Gregg.  Caxton finds it satisfying to have stolen some heartsick puppy's dream girl!

Don't worry, this isn't a soap opera--here comes the SF content.  Every day Caxton shows films to his classes.  (Being a teacher is very hard work, as we've all been told a thousand times.)  One week he finds that his boring educational films have been replaced by weird shorts with high-production values and amazing special effects, like a nature film about the aquatic life of Venus (that's a Venusian squid on the cover of Quest For the Future) and a guide to how to repair your atomic ray pistol.  Caxton, who is quick-tempered and paranoid, is furious, thinking the kids have replaced the school's films with gag reels, but when he can't pin the substitution on any of the students he figures it must be Dorritt who is sabotaging him.  So then he tries to get his revenge by going to Old Varnish and accusing Dorritt of meddling with the films, and, for good measure, accusing Dorritt of carrying on an affair with Gregg!

This idiotic scheme backfires and Caxton is terminated from his teaching position and divorced by his wife.  Caxton does a little extracurricular experimenting and discovers that the school's mundane films are being transformed by the projector into films from the future.  He steals the queer projector and all the films it has affected and begins a search of the United States for the origins of the unique device.

The next part of the novel, drawing from "The Search," is a convoluted thing involving amnesia and Caxton's career as a travelling salesman for Quik-Photo Supply Corporation, from whom the school got the weird projector. On the train he encounters a salesgirl named Selanie Johns whose wares seem as futuristic as those bizarre films.  When she disappears, Caxton investigates, and learns Selanie is pursued by an old man, Kameel Bustaman, who uses hypnotic powers to divest people of the gadgets they have bought from Selanie.  This guy leads Caxton to another dimension, the vast Palace of Immortality, headquarters of the immortal Possessors, who travel back and forth through time, manipulating people and events to create new dimensions ("probability worlds") which are better than the original violent and unhealthy course of history on Earth. Eventually they hope to create a peaceful universe and to shift to it every person who has ever lived (violent people having been manipulated in such a way that they will be "transformed" into "peaceful types.")  Selanie's father is a leader of this beneficent group, while Kameel Bustaman is some kind of rebel who is trying to gum up the works.  Besides suffering amnesia during this adventure, Caxton also makes his way from the Palace to a metropolis of the year 2083 and back.

Caxton is eager to join the Possessors in order to become immortal himself, but the Possessors give him a personality test which he fails:

"...we were willing for you to become associated with us.  But--" He broke off.  "Tell me, when did you become so worldly wise?  Another word for it would be cynical."          

So Caxton goes back to his work as a salesman in 1979, but bubbling with the determination to figure out a way to get back to the Palace of Immortality and become immortal!

Our man Van Vogt then begins integrating the text of "Far Centaurus" in a way that had me laughing out loud.  A few weeks after being driven out of the Palace of Immortality, Craxton is reading the newspaper and sees that a wealthy playboy is financing the Earth's first interstellar rocket flight.  The playboy is bringing a crew of three along with him to Alpha Centauri, but doesn't yet have anybody to fill the physicist spot--it seems that there are no physicists in the English-speaking world willing to leave their friends and families forever to go on a 500-year trip which they will endure in suspended animation.  Caxton has a masters in physics, and when he calls up to apply, the rich playboy welcomes him with open arms.  He probably wouldn't if he knew Caxton's diabolical plan--to hijack the spaceship and bring it back to Earth, timing his piracy so that he returns to Earth in 2083 to meet himself and help himself sneak back into the Palace of Immortality!

When Caxton tries to put his plan into action, waking up after fifty years of flight to turn the ship around, he discovers that the controls are locked to prevent anybody from doing just such a thing.  So he has to go through with the trip to Alpha Centauri. On their arrival the space crew from 1979 discover that, during their 500-year journey, human technology has advanced to such a point that the system already has long been colonized and space ships exist which can travel between Earth and Alpha Centauri in three hours.  Bummer!

After some time out in Alpha Centauri learning about this future society, Caxton and his fellow astronauts return to Earth, where Caxton meets Bustaman again. Bustaman, using his hypnotic powers and promising to get Caxton into the Palace, convinces Caxton to aid him in sabotaging Selanie and her father.  Caxton agrees and is transported back to 1979, where he infiltrates the Johns' time travelling vehicle (it is disguised as an ordinary trailer) and monkeys things up for those two, and for himself--his interference gets the three of them stuck in the middle of the 17th century in the middle of the American wilderness.  For a few months they think they are stuck there for the rest of their lives, but then the Johns figure out a way to return to the future by merging with some of their selves in other probability worlds.  Caxton can't do this, so the Johns leave him a cryogenics setup; Caxton hides himself and the trailer in a cave and freezes himself until 2476, when he wakes up and rejoins the rich playboy.  (That's right, for 800 years nobody thought to explore that cave.)

The playboy buys a space ship, one of those ones which can fly to Alpha Centauri in three hours, and they explore the universe.  (The extrasolar universe turns out to be boring, with no intelligent life.)  For over a hundred pages astronauts from Earth and psychologists from Alpha Centauri have been suspecting that leaving his cushy 1970s life might drive the playboy insane, and Caxton finds these fears were all too justified when the playboy ties him up and drives the ship right into a dangerous time warp created by a "bachelor star."  He may be crazy, but the playboy can sure use a sliderule--the time warp gets him and Caxton back to 1981, less than two years after they left the Earth!

(What is a bachelor star?  Quest for the Future includes a whole new theory of physics and astronomy based on the idea that atomic particles have a "psychology."  Like half the stuff he is exposed to, this theory is too complicated and counterintuitive for Caxton to understand, and your humble blogger is right there with him.)

Caxton goes right back to the good old USA and his hunt for the Palace and is quickly in the grips of a struggle with the duplicitous Kameel Bustaman!  In the final 30 or so pages of this 253-page saga we learn the shocking origins of the Palace of Immortality, how those films got from 2026 to 1979, and the roles of paranoids Kameel Bustaman and Peter Caxton in these events.  It is Caxton himself who will create the Palace of Immortality and set the entire Possessor effort in motion, redeeming himself and sparking the successful effort to redeem the entire human race. (This circularity will perhaps be no shock to those familiar with other of Van Vogt's works.)

Quest for the Future is a lot of fun.  Besides the wild plot twists there are plenty of crazy scientific speculations about time travel and atomic physics and a bounty of cool SF devices, including several different flying machines and various non-lethal weapons. There is a good horror scene when Caxton discovers that the animation suspension process has failed one astronaut and Caxton has to clean up the mess.  Amusing are the scenes in which, apparently trapped forever in the American wilderness, Caxton hopes to seduce Selanie.  Caxton is what the kids call "a playah" and has always had a lot of success with women ("He was charming with women, and quite a few had loved him, mistaking his selfishness for firmness of character.")  But Selanie is a morally upright individual and a genius with over 400 years of experience behind her, and she doesn't need a man for anything, especially not a man who was the cat's paw of her worst enemy and who smells bad. (The fact that people from the future find 20th-century people to smell repulsive is one of the book's recurring jokes, and a major obstacle to horndog Caxton: "Boy, he thought, there's got to be sex.  Without that I'll kill myself.")

Psychology plays a major role in the book, and part of the book's charm is watching the selfish loner Caxton evolve as a person, acting like a jerk early on, then striving to present excuses for his misbehavior, and then, for the first time in his life, feeling empathy and making friends.

I also liked the book's ultimately hopeful tone, its assertion that people and societies can change for the better, though like so much classic SF, Quest for the Future is thoroughly elitist and anti-democratic: sure, in the end we will all live happily at peace, but only after a tiny secret elite of geniuses manipulates our every move and crafts our minds to suit their selfless agenda!  And then there is the irony that Caxton's paranoia, the very kind of mental problem which the Possessors are trying to extirpate from humanity, is what allows him to actually create the Palace and the peaceful universe that is their goal.

************

In hopes of burnishing my bona fides as a Van Vogt scholar, I decided to crack open my copy of Destination: Universe! and reread "The Search" and "Far Centaurus" and see what our man Van added to those texts to create Quest for the Future.  (I'd have reread "Film Library" as well, but the Columbus Metropolitan Library doesn't have a copy of Transfinite--score one for the hawkeye over the buckeye, I guess.)

Click to enlarge and take in all that
Richard Powers goodness

"The Search," from 1943, includes the basic background features of the 1970 novel--the salesman who meets Selanie Johns and arrives in the Palace, learns of the Possessors and their campaign to create a perfect probability world of peaceful people, and is sent to sabotage the Johns in their trailer.  However, in this short story Selanie's father is opposed to the Possessors rather than being their leader--he thinks they are "acting like God," committing "sacrilege" by altering "the natural course of existence"--and it is the Possessors who enlist the protagonist to attack Johns.  (Selanie herself is a Possessor supporter; this is a dynamic I have seen repeatedly in my own life, children rejecting their parents' political and religious beliefs.)

Reading "The Search" has exposed to me some weaknesses in Quest for the Future.  In this short story it is clearly explained why the Johns are selling the gadgets; I can't recall any reason being given for this activity in Quest.  Also, there is some recognition of the moral dilemma presented by the Possessors; in the 1970 novel opposition to the Possessors and their elaborate campaign to engineer people and societies is presented as irrational paranoia.

"Far Centaurus," from 1944, covers that 500-year trip and has that horror scene I liked and the plot about the leader of the expedition going bonkers and flying a second ship into the time warp, as well as all that jazz about atomic particles with a psychology and how 20th century people smell repulsive to 25th century folks.  Interestingly, it is also written in the first person, which Quest is not.

"The Search" and "Far Centaurus" are pretty short; Van Vogt added a lot of text to build the brief 1940s stories into the long 1970s novel.  Most importantly, he constructed the character of Caxton, who evolves from paranoid amoral creep to world savior, and his relationship with Selanie.  When I realized Quest for the Future was a fix-up, I expected to have to report that the material was better in its original form, that Van Vogt had just added some gunk in order to hold the stories together and sell people a "new" novel.  But I was wrong; the Canadian Grand Master actually did a lot of rewriting and expanding, and I believe added considerable value to the story.  I am happy to recommend Quest for the Future to classic SF fans, even those already familiar with the Astounding tales which are its basis.

"The Earth Killers," "The Cataaaa" & "Automaton" by A. E. Van Vogt

A British hardcover edition.  Groovy!

Let's explore more far-out stories from my paperback edition of The Far-Out Worlds of A. E. Van Vogt.  As in our last episode, we are not only judging these stories on their literary merit and entertainment value, but assessing the veracity of the publishers' advertising: are these stories truly "far-out?"

"The Earth Killers" (1949)

Like "The First Martian," this is an anti-racist story.  Unfortunately it is inferior in every way to that tale.

Morlake is the most physically fit of the American military's test pilots, and he is up in the air, testing the new S29A superplane, on that terrible day in 1979 when atomic bombs blow up the largest U.S. cities, killing forty million people!  Morlake actually sees the bomb that hits Chicago, and notices that it is falling straight down.  A bomb sent from Russia or China or one of America's other rivals would follow a parabolic path, so the bomb must have come from the Moon!

Morlake is the only man with this information, and when he lands he runs into serious resistance to his theory that the devastating attack came from space.  The US government, which now consists of the military and just a handful of senators who were away from D.C. on that day that will live in infamy, scrambles to figure out who launched the attack, but there is no evidence to point to who may have done it.

Morlake gets imprisoned, escapes, steals the S29A (he is the only guy who can pilot it), and travels across America, trying to alert people to the fact that the bombs came from space.  At the end of the 28-page story Morlake (whom we were told hates racism on the second page of the story) reveals that it was racist Southerners, led by one of the few surviving senators, who have (somehow) secretly built a base on the Moon and launched the atomic attack so they could re-institute Jim Crow.  Morlake shoots the unarmed racist senator down in the middle of a government meeting, and the army prepares rocket ships for an assault on the moon base.

Woof!

The plot is just OK (and somewhat reminiscent of 1947's Rocket Ship Galileo by Robert Heinlein), and the story is choppy, switching back and forth between scenes with Morlake, "big historical picture" exposition, and scenes of the military personnel who are leading the pursuit of Morlake.  The racism theme feels superficial; there are no non-white characters and race issues are not discussed. You'd only have to change a few words of the story to make the villains aliens or bankers or Communists or some other group.

It is also a little hard to believe that American dissidents without foreign help could secretly build a moon base and stock its arsenal with atomic bombs.  On the second page of the story we learn that the government rocket program is extremely expensive and was discontinued before any government astronauts got to the moon; this means that the KKK has a better space program than NASA!  Did the racist Southerners build their own rockets and atomic bombs?  If they had a clandestine network of supporters in the military who stole the space ships and bombs Van Vogt does not tell us; in fact, after Morlake kills the bigoted senator, the military leadership is all on Morlake's side.

"The Earth Killers" first appeared in Super Science Stories and was illustrated by Hannes Bok; check out the illos here at icshi.net, the invaluable website for Van Vogt aficionados.

"The Earth Killers" is barely acceptable as a story, and there is nothing crazy or wild or new in it.  Sure, I love warplanes, atom bombs, and space ships, but those are de riguer, not far-out.

"The Earth Killers":         Is it Good?: Not really.          Is it Far-Out?: No.     

"The Cataaaaa" (1937)

That's more "A"s than on a [insert ethnic group here]'s report card!

"The Cataaaaa" first appeared in Fantasy Book, and was reprinted later in Marvel Science Stories and even a men's magazine, according to icshi.net.  It also appears in the British version of Best of A. E. Van Vogt, and so is perhaps one of the works Van Vogt is most proud of.

Cat people are a fixture of SF (though recently it has come to my attention that there is a faction of SF fans and writers who are into raccoon people.)  "The Cataaaaa" is about a five foot tall cat person who comes to Earth and ends up as an exhibit at the carnival freakshow, where he keeps his civilized nature a secret.

The cat person reveals himself to our human first-person narrator, a college professor.  The cat person is a graduate student taking a Grand Tour throughout the galaxy; his kind live for thousands of years and have the ability to travel through space using mental energy alone.

I think this may be one of Van Vogt's favorites of his own stories because of its philosophical nature.  The feline grad student takes from each planet he visits a single item that represents all significant facets of the planet's civilization.  I thought maybe a gladius or a revolver would represent humanity's constant struggle and people's all-too-common will to dominate others and need to resist domination.  Of course I would prefer space aliens to think a Greek vase or a Chinese bowl or maybe a model of the Empire State Building best represents humanity.

When the alien asks the college professor what single object he thinks should represent mankind, the prof argues that humans are essentially religious, that they need faith to survive; even those who eschew traditional religion have faith in some scientific or economic theory.  He suggests a little statue of a man with his arms raised to the skies, its base inscribed with the phrase "I Believe."            

Meow!

I thought that was pretty clever, but the cat person instead says that Earthlings are characterized by their narcissism, exhibitionism, and self-love.  (Ouch!)  When he teleports away he takes with him as his souvenir the man who ran the freak show--by exhibiting freaks, we are led to understand, he was really exhibiting himself!

The college professor loses his job because when he tries to tell people about the cat alien they think he is nuts.  He starts travelling around the country, going into several bars in every town he comes to tell the patrons about the cat alien.  Ostensibly he is trying to spread the word about the dangers of self-love and exhibitionism, but Van Vogt lets us know that by telling his story at every opportunity he is simply showing himself off, proving the feline visitor right.

"Cataaaaa" is OK, I'd give it a passing grade, but I am not enthusiastic about it.  Is it far-out?  A little, I suppose.

"Cataaaaa":          Is it Good?: It's OK.            Is it Far-Out?: Maybe a little?

"Automaton" (1950)

I'm happy to say we are back in far-out territory!

"Automaton" is about a future world in which the artificial people we built go behind our backs and secretly duplicate themselves in vast numbers.  They infiltrate the government, take over the world, and enact a policy outlawing sex!  Are we going to stand for that?  Hell no!  World-wide civil war erupts between human and tobor (the artificial people call themselves "tobors" because that is the reverse of the term "robot," which they find offensive.)  Those sex-hating tobor bastards have a lot of tricks up their sleeves; for example, they have a process whereby they can take a human and turn him into an automaton, a slave ready to fight to the death for the tobors!

John Gregson is one of these poor souls who has been captured by the tobors and "dementalized," turned into an automaton. Before capture he was a brilliant chemist with a beautiful fiance, Juanita Harding; now he is just Number 92, pilot of a reconnaissance plane in the tobor air fleet!

Number 92 gets shot down over a ruined city. He survives, but is surrounded by human forces.  The human intelligence service realizes who 92 once was, and wants to capture him alive, and repair his psyche, thus returning to him his humanity.  Their strategy for doing so is to broadcast propaganda at 92 which will remind him that he is a human being, and set up a movie screen near where 92 is taking cover.  The human forces project upon the screen a film of bathing beauties!  The sight of all that feminine pulchritude undoes the tobor programming, and John Gregson is back!  He is reunited with Juanita Harding and his knowledge of chemistry ends the war--he comes up with a chemical which will make the tobors as horny as the rest of us, ending the tobor prudery which caused the war in the first place.

We've seen Van Vogt tackle the topic of android takeovers before in stories like "Living with Jane." and then there are the computers who seize power over humanity in "The Human Operators" and Computerworld.  And I seem to recall the use of movie screens and broadcast propaganda on the pilot of a downed enemy craft in the classic short story from 1948, "The Rull."

"Automaton" first appeared in Other Worlds with an illustration by Malcolm Smith.  It is a short and fun story; I found it amusing, though I'm not quite sure in what proportion I am laughing with Van and laughing at him.

"Automaton":         Is it Good?: Yes.            Is it Far-Out?: Yes.

**********

My edition of The Far-Out Worlds of A. E. Van Vogt, Ace paperback H-92, includes a silly jokey bio of Van Vogt from Forrest J Ackerman which may be worth reproducing here.  Ackerman was van Vogt's agent and friend.

The final page of the book is an ad for Ace "Classics of Great Science-Fiction."  Of the fifteen listed books I've only read three, Brackett's The Big Jump, Vance's Big Planet, and Simak's City.  I liked all three, and strongly urge you to print out the page, mark the titles, and put it and two singles in an envelope and mail them off to beautiful Manhattan immediately.

My man tarbandu reviewed Laumer's Worlds of the Imperium earlier this year, and couchtomoon tackled Leiber's The Big Time.  Maybe you should put three singles in that envelope.

**********

Not as good as the first three stories (did the publisher purposefully put the strongest material up front?) and not as far-out, but these three are worth reading.  Soon we'll take a look at what else The Far-Out Worlds of A. E. Van Vogt has to offer.