Fiction Reviews

Slan

(1946) A. E. van Vogt, Arkham House, 272pp.

(1946/1968) A. E. van Vogt, Panther, Ł0.25p / Aus$0.80 / NZ$0.60, pbk, 156pp.

(1946/1978) A. E. van Vogt, Panther - Granada, Ł0.75p / Aus$2.50 / NZ$2.50,
pbk, 156pp, ISBN 0-586-02438-7.

(1946/1998) A. E. van Vogt, Orb Books, Ł12, pbk, 272pp, ISBN 978-0-312-85236-8

van Vogt's Slan is his first novel and something of a minor SF classic. Minor, because it has not really stood the test of time despite winning the Retro-Hugo for 1941 in 2016 at the MidAmeriCon II Worldcon in Kansas City. 'The Retro for 1941' I hear you cry? Well, yes, because the novel was originally serialised in the Astounding Science Fiction over their September–December editions in 1940. But is it any good? Well, truth be told, opinion is divided. First, the story…

It is 1,500 years in the future. Young, nine-year old, Jommy Cross is out with his mother in the capital Centropolis, both are telepathic being 'slans' and as such they are being hunted. They are spotted and the authorities are closing in. They decide to split up and while his mother is captured, Jommy escapes by riding on the rear bumper of a car. He escapes but is caught by an impoverished, old, drunken woman, Granny, who recognises that by having a pet telepath she could make a living out of petty crime. And so Tommy embarks on an uneasy relationship with Granny who gives Jommy a place to live.

Slans are 'mutants' purportedly created using a device created by Samuel Lann, hence slan. In this future world there are some 3.5 billion humans and just 5 million slans. (It is worth noting that in the real world of 1940, the world's population was around two billion, so van Vogt imagines a world with just 75% more than it was at the time of the story's writing – it is eight billion today in 2025. Having said that, van Vogt notes that there were intervening wars so that may have reduced the population.) Slans had telepathic abilities due to braids of 'hair' or 'tendrils'. These have to be disguised to avoid detection by normal humans. Slans also have tremendous strength, though in recovering from heavy exertion they go into a near-coma state.

Jommy is content to stay with Granny until he is old enough to retrieve his dead father's invention that holds the promise of saving the slans from being ethinically cleansed. However, one day along the way Tommy makes a discovery, some people who have mind shields just like slans but they do not have tendrils. These tendriless slans spot Tommy who escapes only to discover that the tendriless slans have a spaceship…

Meanwhile, John Petty and the dictator Kier Gray Kier Gray of the human ruling council continue their hunt of (true –tendrilled) slans…

It is impossible to read Slan without being aware of when it was written. The early, pre-World War II, 20th century was now (2025) the best part of a century ago. Space flight, let alone computers, television and so forth, were either embryonic or yet to be invented, and so largely unknown concepts to the general public. Things like DNA, let alone genetic engineering or genetic modification, were simply not on people's radar. In this sense, Slan was packed with ideas that we today would take in our stride but back then were purely SFnal concepts and it is here – in this historic context – that Slan scores. Along the way we do encounter something that is like a guided missile (though that transpires to be a magnetic space mine), an airplane's autopilot, a radio phone and atomic power. With this last we, again, must remember when this was written: it was before the dropping of the first atomic bomb and even longer before the first nuclear power station. We also have something that is in effect a disintegrator gun: an SF concept that appeared as a 'blaster' only a few years earlier in 1925, though the idea of a ray gun did briefly appear in 1916 and of course there was Wells' War of the Worlds and its heat rays. Slan therefore was somewhat a groundbreaking package of sense-of-wonder for its time.

The other thing is that though this was just before World War II, people in the west were aware of the persecution going on in late 1930s Germany. In this light, the persecution of the slans might be considered analogous of the persecution of the Jews and that the slan 'tendrils' were akin to payots but given that not all Jews sport these, there is also an analogy with non-traditional Jewish presentation. In this sense, Slan can be considered as a liberal, progressive novel. That van Vogt would be aware of what was going on in Germany is in little doubt as he grew up among German immigrant communities in N. America and, when young, spoke Plautdietsch (a variation of low/common German) at home.

The novels core, SF conceit, is the idea of mutant humans with super-intelligence and telepathic abilities. These have appeared in SF a number of times and so can be considered a firm SFnal trope. Perhaps one most famous uses of this trope was John Wyndham's The Chrysalids (1955) in which fallout from a past nuclear war creates telepathic mutants who are persecuted. John Brunner also had a deformed mutant with telepathic abilities in The Telepathist (a.k.a The Whole Man (1966). Here, the 'mutation' was a curse as a deformity but simultaneously a gift with the telepathy. In more recent times in the "2000AD's premiere strip Judge Dredd we also have nuclear fallout induced mutations with deformed muties persecuted while some other gain psychic abilities, notable Judge Anderson of Psi Division. While van Vogt cannot be credited with the creation of this trope, he was among some of the first to employ it. Indeed, the many of tropes in van Vogt's stories are core SF and continue to be explored today.

And so we come to the novel and A. E. van Vogt's reception. Now, while the author had some early success, he was seriously criticised by an SF giant of the time, Damon Knight, who wrote an 1945 essay reprinted in In Search of Wonder (1967) 'Cosmic Jerrybuilder: A. E. van Vogt' that severely criticised van Vogt's abilities. He said:

In general van Vogt seems to me to fail consistently as a writer in these elementary ways: 1. His plots do not bear examination. 2. His choice of words and his sentence-structure are fumbling and insensitive. 3. He is unable either to visualize a scene or to make a character seem real.

Knight's damming comments apparently hurt van Vogt's standing and career. However in 1974 Philip K. Dick cited van Vogt as one of the writers that influenced him most. Further, Dick condemned Knight's criticisms.

van Vogt had other supporters such as editor and writer John W. Campbell, Harlan Ellison and editor David Hartwell. Certainly van Vogt had the last laugh with a number of accolades including in 1996 belatedly becoming an SFWA Grand Master (belatedly because the SFWA's founder was Damon Knight and, it is said, it was felt that Knight should be made a grandmaster first with some time passing before Vogt received the same honour. However, they almost left it too late as he showed the signs of Alzheimer's. He died just three and a half years later in 2000AD.)

Having said all that, my own personal feeling is that, whether or not you like van Vogt's writing, it is not a binary decision. Slan exhibits much SFnal sense-of-wonder and has a lot going on. On the other hand I found the writing in Slan somewhat clunky, and the plot's unfolding uneven to the point where I wished that someone would give it a good copy edit, though a re-write would be more in order. For example, at the bottom of Chapter 9's second page our protagonist is contemplating a possible plan of action and then the paragraph abruptly ends with "…". The next paragraph begins with a different location and with time passed and the aforesaid plan completed, so giving the reader a hang-on-what-happened-there moment! That ellipsis does a lot of heavy lifting. And then there is the treatment of women in the story, and that is they are treated rather badly.

Slan, though, was van Vogt's first novel based on a series of stories he wrote in his 20s and so it was something of a debut outing even if he had written short stories before. Readers, therefore, might want to come to it in a somewhat forgiving way, though I doubt if the manuscript crossed an editor's desk today it would get accepted by any half-decent SF/F imprint.

Certainly, van Vogt wrote some influential novels. Perhaps best known is The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950) and, earlier, the short stories 'Destroyer' and 'Discord in Scarlet' (both 1939) all of which helped inspire the film Alien (though that film has other roots too). Alien must have been sufficiently similar to aspects of these stories as 20 Century Fox paid van Vogt an out of court settlement.

Van Vogt went on, in a near four-decade long career, to give us over 30 novels, the last being in 1984, and a dozen short story collections. His work in the 1950s was probably his best. Certainly, no discussion of N. American Golden Age SF would be complete without reference to van Vogt and some of his works.

Slan itself had an impact on N. American book SF fandom of the 1940's to '60s as fans (considering themselves more intelligent than average and feeling persecuted – SF was a ghetto genre until the early 2000s) identified with the idea of slans with the saying 'Fans are slans'. Additionally, houses where a few N. American SF fans lived together became known as 'slan shacks'. Meanwhile, over here in Brit Cit, I recall the SF conventions of the late 1970s and older fans talking of van Vogt: his reputation was international.

Now long out of print, the novel Slan, while not a major classic of SF, did have a sufficient impact, and van Vogt himself garnering a respectably sized readership, can – as I said at this critique's beginning – be considered as something of a minor classic. If are an SF book collector, especially if you are into the history of western SF, and you see it out in the wild, in some second-hand bookshop, then grab it; there aren't many left.

Jonathan Cowie

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