Reverse Engineering A.E. van Vogt

Slan by A.E. van Vogt

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I just finished listening to an audio book of A.E. van Vogt's first novel, Slan. This was a talking book for the blind that someone had uploaded to You Tube. A.E. van Vogt had updated the book since it was originally published in 1940, so I found myself comparing what I had just heard with the text of the original (using a collection of his novels called "Triad" which is in my personal library).

In my opinion this is van Vogt's best novel. He was a very talented author of short stories, but this is the only novel of his I could honestly recommend to anyone. I understand that the book started out as a series of short stories that was turned into a novel. Ray Bradbury did something similar when he wrote The Martian Chronicles, but with better results.

In my opinion the later rewrites didn't help the book all that much. I wouldn't go so far as to say they made the book worse, but they didn't improve it either.

Slan is about a young boy who is a member of a mutant super race of humans called Slans.

Every science book for children has the same drawing of the evolution of Man, progressing through Neanderthal, Cro Magnon, and modern Homo Sapiens. Every boy who sees that picture thinks two things:

1. What comes after Homo Sapiens?

2. What is the difference between Cro Magnon and Homo Sapiens? They don't look all that much different.

Evolution is a gradual, continuous process, so you don't have a Neanderthal woman giving birth to a Cro Magnon. I didn't know that as a kid, so when I read this book in high school I accepted the idea that the next stage in human evolution might have two hearts, super strength and endurance, super high IQ, the ability to read minds, and be born of a human woman.

Jommy Cross, the hero, has all of these attributes. As a result of these advantages he and his race are persecuted by normal humans, who believe that Slans were created by a mutation machine invented by one Samuel Lann (hence their name) and that hundreds of years later Slans are using this machine on human babies to create more Slans, but most of the time they just create deformed monstrosities. Jommy Cross doesn't believe that, but he really doesn't know what to believe. The only Slans he knew were his parents, both dead shortly after the novel begins.

Jommy is on the run from the humans after his mother is killed. He escapes by hanging on to the bumper of a passing car. (Hundreds of years in the future, cars have bumpers children can hang on to). He hides out with an old woman who protects him while he uses his super powers to steal things for her. His ultimate goal is to find the super weapon invented by his father and use it to defeat Kier Gray, the leader of the humans.

While Jommy is doing this, a Slan girl is growing up in a palace which was built by Slans but has been taken over by humans. Their leader, Kier Gray, is keeping this Slan girl for observation. His political enemies want her killed on her eleventh birthday. He prevents this, and thus becomes a sympathetic character.

Then the story goes back to Jommy, who has discovered that there is a race of tendrilless Slans who can pass for human and who are secretly controlling all air travel and building spaceships which can go to Mars. To his surprise, these tendrilless Slans hate true Slans just as much as humans do, and for similar reasons. They want to kill Jommy because he knows of their existence and of their space ships. They need to keep this information from both the humans and the true Slans.

After that, lots of stuff happens, secrets are revealed, etc.

I thought the concept of a mutant being a hero with human beings as villains was pretty neat when I first read it. That idea has been used many times since, but it was new when Slan came out. The book has a lot of super science, breathless adventure, and romance. It was everything I wanted it to be when I read it in high school. Mostly, it holds up.

I have been reading and listening to audio books of classic science fiction, trying to learn what makes them work so I can hopefully give similar virtues to my own writing. So what can I learn from van Vogt?

I like how his two best novels are about characters who need to learn the truth about themselves. This works better in Slan than it does in The World Of Null A because the answers are more satisfying, but Null A introduces the wrinkle of a man who thinks he knows the truth about himself, only to find in the first chapter that he has been given false memories and that nothing he believes about himself is true.

I like how the villains in the stories are not really villains, but just men pursuing their own interests. This is very effective in Slan. In the first chapter we learn about Kier Gray, the enemy of the Slans, and are ready to hate him. In the second chapter he is introduced and becomes an appealing character. We know that Jommy Cross and Kier Gray must meet, but we cannot predict what will happen when they do.

I like how van Vogt piles mystery on top of mystery, although at times he overdoes it.

I like that the Slans have secret hideouts and that the Slan-built palace has secret passageways the humans who live there don't know about. I like that Jommy Cross can build gadgets with the most amazing technology in a workshop in his ranch, all by himself, just because he's super-smart.

As a young man I probably liked how the Slan boy and Slan girl meet and instantly fall in love, but the Slan girls gets murdered before things get too mushy. I may still like that. I don't know what that says about me.

The events in this book inspired certain events in my own novel Shree Krishna and the Singularity, but I handle them very differently. That may make van Vogt a counter influence. I wanted to go in a different direction than Slan did, but to do that I first needed to read Slan.

Having said that, I don't think I'd ever deliberately imitate van Vogt. There are several authors who have been praised for being like Heinlein (John Scalzi, Alexi Panshin, etc.) but nobody I know of has been called "the next van Vogt". There may be a good reason for that.

But A.E. van Vogt may live on indirectly in Hollywood's adaptions of Philip K. Dick stories. Dick was an admirer of van Vogt, but was a much better writer. Dick had cool ideas like van Vogt, but he knew what to do with them. When Hollywood adapts a Dick story they tend to take the cool idea, remove everything Dick does to develop it, and insert a long chase. A cool idea with a long chase is a good description of an A.E. van Vogt novel.





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