TRANSFINITE The essential Van Vogt
TRANSFINITE, correctly called a collection of the essential Van Vogt stories has been published by NESFA Press, publishing division of the New England Science Fiction Association, Inc. All the science fiction reading world should bow and thank them for this peerless edition. They have selected the Van Vogt stories that were and are essential to understanding the grandest of the Grand Dreamers of SF, and which give the lucky reader unfamiliar with this giant’s work a perfect grasp of how great an impact Van Vogt had on the field, now lamentably unrecognized.
Readers! If there is a great idea in SF, and it was not invented by Wells or Verne, Heinlein or Asimov, Bradbury or Clarke, chances are that Van Vogt was the first person to put the thought in print.
I am very well read when it comes to Van Vogt. I think the only things of his I have not read are his nonfiction work on Hypnosis, his true confession stories he wrote in the early days for magazines, and his one chapter contribution to a Howard pastiche. I also recognize short stories I originally read as chapters of his ‘fix-up’ novels. Van Vogt is the only author who can pull off writing a fix-up, a term he invented to describe taking three short stories and adding linking material: and this is because his tales have a dreamlike, half-illogical wildness to them—he was found of paranoia conspiracy type books where the hero turns out to be the villain with amnesia or something—so practically any plot could be linked into practically any other plot without any gain or loss. His characters were interchangeable enough that one could turn into another with no loss. While this does not speak well of his talents as a plot-weaver or character developer, it speaks volumes about the narrative power of his headlong flow of astonishing, phenomenal, glittering ideas.
Here is a mini-review of the tales of wonder appearing in this volume. Since each Van Vogt story consists of little more than Hitchcockian plot-twists, no story can be discussed without giving away at least some surprises. WARNING SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT!
• Black Destroyer—”On and on the Coeurl prowled!” This is the first and most gripping of Van Vogt’s ‘monster’ stories, where some alien life with superior control over matter and energy would threaten the valiant crew of the Space Beagle. The theme SF will see again in FORBIDDEN PLANET and countless STAR TREK episode began right here. The crew discovers a single remaining occupant of a long-dead world, stalking the myriad ruins. Its superintelligence is compromised by its hunger for the particular chemical compounds in their cells; and so it pretends to be a beast in order to allow the foolish humans to bring it aboard. A game of cat-and-mouse between the deadly predator and the horrified humans begins. The Coeurl, valiant and ruthless and powerful as it is, nonetheless cannot overcome the limits of its psychology, the trap of history into which its once-great world fell. Even after all these years, I still feel a little sorry for the superbeast.
• The Monster—Without doubt my favorite of Van Vogt’s shorts, perhaps his best example of putting across a new and dazzling big idea every 800 words or so. A ship of ruthless, alien conquerors comes across the long-dead planet, Earth. “The absence of children’s skeletons indicates this race discovered personal immortality. Should we use our method of reviving the long dead?” They restore some corpses found in a museum: an ancient Egyptian, an American, a near-future man, a far-future superman who dates from a time when mankind had discovered all the secrets of the human nervous system. This lone superbeing uses his control over timespace and energy to defy the space-battleship, and, like the crew of the Space Beagle, discovers the weakness in their psychology which must lead them to self-destruction. It is told like one more of Van Vogt’s ‘monster’ stories, this time with a human in the starring role as the dangerous lonely super-creature, but unintentionally it becomes a soaring paean to the triumph of the human spirit.
• Film Library—A minor effort, sort of a ‘Twilight Zone’ type tale about a breach in time allowing information to trickle back into the present day from a defective library. One of the three shorts fixed-up into QUEST FOR THE FUTURE.
• Enchanted Village—A typical stranded-astronaut type story about a man who must discover the secret of the hidden mechanisms of a Martian ruin in order to survive, but with a non-typical ending.
• Asylum—Reporter meets neurotic girl genius fighting space vampires being hunted by super galactic beings of nigh-infinite IQ. Reporter turns out not to be who or what he thinks he is. A brilliant gem of a work, all on themes typical of Van Vogt at his best. Don’t miss this one.
• Vault of the Beast—There is more here at first than meets the eye. Told from the point of view of the mind-reading shape-changer sent out by a trapped devil-alien to seek its master’s release, for a moment this seems like a ‘Big Dumb Object’ story: which includes any tale where the humans try to puzzle out the gigantic, mysteriously still-active, monument of some ancient super-race. One of the kookier conceits here is to have the human mathematician calculate the Ultimate Prime number—if you cannot swallow this kind of off-the-edge technobabble, you are too sober to read Van Vogt. But the hero of the story turns out to be not who we think it will be, and the tragic death involved is a solemn affirmation of the value of humanity.
• The Ghost—a clever puzzle story, involving a murder and a mystery, time-paradox, and a psychological gimmick. Not great, but not ordinary.
• The Rull—My second favorite of all Van Vogt’s shorts. Stranded on a remote mesa in no-man’s-land between warring stars is one human super-psychologist, one remorseless super-alien of the type that Van Vogt does so well. The miniature war is fought by means of tools meant to dominate the nervous system of the enemy. The secret of the aliens, and their startling weakness, is handled well, and the ending is surprising and satisfactory. This short was later retconned into one of Van Vogt’s famous ‘fix-up’ novels, WAR OF THE RULL where he would take groups of unconnected short stories and string them together in plotless wonder, often to startling effect. In this particular case, however, he removed the surprise ending of the short story, marring the episode. Avoid the novel version and read the short.
• Recruiting Station—Another particular favorite of mine, also released under the name MASTERS OF TIME. The ruthless Dr. Lell, superhuman from the race called ‘The Glorious’ operates a recruiting station for the ultimate war in the far future. How can a mousy and lonely young woman named Norma alone defeat the war-machine that spans all eternity? How did her nervous system become charged with Insel Mind Rays of power 100?
• A Can of Paint—A weak offering. This is a puzzle story, where the first man on Venus must discover how to remove the perfect paint from his body before it kills him. The solution of the puzzle still makes no sense to me: maybe I need a lesson in basic chemistry or something.
• The Search—Amnesiac seeks to discover his missing two weeks of this life, and finds Time Travel paradoxes, the Palace of the Possessors, the Mad Scientist’s beautiful daughter, and true love. I think this was the first appearance in science fiction of a benevolent organization of time-traveling history-editors. Fixed-up into QUEST FOR THE FUTURE.
• Dear Pen Pal—Not up to Van Vogt’s normal standard: ends in a predictable plot twist.
• The Harmonizer—Creepy little story about a psychic plant. Classify this as a monster story, with the monster as a vegetable.
• The Great Judge—Not up to Van Vogt’s normal standard. Dystopia undone by brain-switching gimmick. Fixed-up into TYRANNOPOLIS, which is actually a better story.
• Far Centaurus—Two startling and original ideas here: first, that the slower-than-light ships sent out by early star pioneers will be overtaken by later faster-than-light vessels; second, that our remote descendants might not like our smell. Ends in a time-paradox. Fixed-up into QUEST FOR THE FUTURE.
• Secret Unattainable—Nazi investigations into space-warp travel thwarted because mathematical abstractions turn out to have a reactions based on the psychology of the scientists contemplating them: this theme of man and the cosmos sharing an eerie intimate link is one we’ve seen in other Van Vogt works. The scene where the space-warp-traveling scientist appears in a dark room, frantic to explain the nature of his discovery before he is whisked away by forces he has already set in motion to outer dimensions is memorable.
• Future Perfect—Let us call any story where one man overthrows, or even outwits, a dystopia a ‘dystopia hunter tale.’ This is a police procedural of such a tale, showing the maneuvers of the protagonist and the government. The surprise ending is remarkably satisfactory.
• The Great Engine—Another personal favorite. Lonely cripple finds a futuristic force-field engine on an empty hillside. He investigates is nature and attempts to locate the scientist who built it. The tale ends on a surprisingly optimistic note: only in the Campbellian Golden Age of SF could you seriously have an international group of peaceful scientists deciding to colonize the garden world of Venus. The tale also got fixed-up into the tangled and strange THE BEAST, which is again a favorite of mine.
• Dormant—This was the only Van Vogt short I had not read before in other anthologies. The reason is because it deserved not being known. Basically a monster story, this time with a radioactive rock as the monster, and the incompetent Navy accidentally trigger its superdestructive powers and blow up the earth. I am not sure what he point of a story is where a disaster overwhelms people who are not trying that hard to avoid it.
• The Sound—Another personal favorite. Young boy is searching for the source of a mysterious vibration he has heard his whole life, raised in the Yards of a metropolis whose tremendous efforts are bent, for a whole generation, in constructing one titanic super-ship that towers a mile into the air above the factories and workhouses. Ruthless aliens with the power of light-illusions have infiltrated everywhere, and the boy becomes meshed in their plans to sabotage the Great Ship. Here we have the reverse of the case in ‘The Rull’. This short was also fix-upped into WAR AGAINST THE RULL, but in this case, an ending was added that made the idea of the Great Ship both staggering and logical: it is to be used to migrate the whole human race out of the galaxy, which the Rull cannot be stopped from taking over. I was disappointed to find that idea missing from the short.
• The Rulers—Superpsychiatrist discovers mind-controlling illuminati, who have been secretly governing mankind for ages, and he must escape through a city where, at any moment, any person, even his best friend, can be hypo-controlling into assassinating him. A weak ending mars an otherwise tense, paranoid thrill-ride.
• Final Command—Rather clever meditation the nature of human and artificial intelligence, told from the point of view of a leader who must decide what is to be done about the intollerable human-robot problem. The leader is not who we think, and the final command is horrifying. But he has overlooked one importent fact. The impact of this story was a little lost on me, only because I saw the surprise ending coming from a mile away. Still, not bad.
• War of Nerves—This time the Space Beagle crew is hypnotized by a planet light-years away, a world whose psionic tyranny is so deeply ingrained, that the mere existence of another race is an affront to them. Grosnover the Nexiallist (a Vogtian super-science that studies the nexus, or connections, between unrelated branches of science) attempts to contract the deadly minds with a mechanical amplifier. He nullifies the threat by teaching them the basics of Non-Aristotelian General Semantics. The aliens are jarred out of their eons-old complacency by the impact of new ideas, new doubts.
• Don’t Hold Your Breath—Perhaps the weakest offering in the book. The earth is undergoing a ecological change to a fluorine atmosphere, and pantropy is being used to bioegineer mankind into becoming fluorine-breathers. The tale concerns the scheming crimes of a violent wife-beating bigamist, who is also a saboteur, blackmailer, and contractor who defrauds the government of millions. This story reads like Van Vogt’s post-Dianetics novels MAN WITH 1000 NAMES and THE VIOLENT MAN and so on, where his main concern was no longer with portraying superhumans who had discovered all the secrets of their nervous systems, but, rather, his portraying subhumans who did not have as much control of their wits as an ordinary sane man. The point of the story (telegraphed in the title) is that utopia, or even sanity, is never going to arrive: the cruelty and stupidity will be with us always. Unless your taste runs to depictions of moral wretchedness, skip this one.
• Discord in Scarlet—Back aboard the Space Beagle, which never drops anchor at a port of call without running into a super-monster. This one is a particularly nasty bit of work the Itxzl, which uses its powers of walking through walls to implant eggs of flesh-eating larvae in paralyzed human hosts. Again, an analysis of the psychological weakness of the beastie, based on a theory of cyclical history, is the gimmick to save the day. This short won a brief fifteen minutes of fame when Van Vogt sued Ridley Scott, claiming the movie ALIEN was a plagiarism. Frankly, in my legal opinion, the claim is utterly without merit: the resemblances are superficial: the plots, character, theme and resolution are utterly different. One might as well sue a digger-wasp, who uses the same mechanism for feeding its young. As a short story, it is engaging, sometimes gripping, and makes a fine bookend for the monster tale that began the collection.
Closing thoughts about the volume as a whole:
Too many monster stories. Sorry, much as I like them, they are product of Van Vogt’s earlier and immature work. The gimmick of telling a monster story from the point of view of the monster is rare, and Van Vogt handles it well, but … Here is what NESFA missed, and could have taken away some of the weaker offerings to make room for:
• The Weapon Shop. Honestly, you cannot claim to have ‘the essentials’ of van Vogt without at least one Weapon Shop short story. The right to buy weapons is the right to be free.
• The Ultra Man. His most gripping of his superman tales, perhaps his most eerie. It begins with a scientist practicing what he thinks is a new art of reading body-language, which gives him an almost telepathic insight into the personality of the people he is watching. He is on a balcony of a lunar city with binoculars, explaining this new science to a companion (who knows the man, unbeknowst to himself is suffering a strange psychic development). When he turns his glasses to look at some random stranger in the distant crowd, he stiffens. “My god! That man in the headdress! He-he’s not a human being. He’s just become aware of me—” and the whole balcony is blasted with white fire.
• Silkies in Space. Perhaps the best Van Vogt short of all time. Instead of his normal cramming one new idea per each 800 words, here he ramps up the sense-of-wonder density and blows the reader’s mind once every 80 words or so. Artificial superbeings may turn out to be primordial space-slaves of a time-collapsed intelligent star. Can Ned Cemp use the Logic of Levels to trigger the ancient space-control patterns of the superbeing who has stolen the Earth?
• The Expendables. Not his best story, but better than some of what was included here. Political intrigue and telepathic robots during a multigeneration ship’s first contact.
• The Witch. I notice Van Vogt’s fantasy is unrepresented. Not that he wrote that many—but this was one. Fans of Granny from SLAN will reconize one character here.
• Cooperate Or Else! Space scientist Jaimeson with an energy gun in one fist parachutes from the shot-down spaceship but the hostile telepathic superbeast Ezwal has jumped atop the antigravity plate to which Jaimeson is chained, and has vowed to destroy him. Meanwhile the evil Rull are patrolling the man-eating super-death-jungle for survivors. Come on, gang. SF does not come in flavors more Campbellian than this.
• The Storm. If you are collecting the essential Van Vogt, how could you leave out the Dellian robots of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud or their half-human descendants the hypno-psychic double-brained Mixed Men? Merely seeing the superstarship Star Cluster from Imperial Earth is warrant enough to include this gem.
But these are minor quibbles.
All in all a beautifully bound book, with an excellent selection of the best of the best of A.E. van Vogt. You cannot call yourself a SF fanboy unless you have read at least some of these gems of scientifiction. Go forth and read, and you shall become the race that will rule the sevagram.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
