The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (75 page)

Until the year preceding the publication of
Science and the Modern World,
Alfred North Whitehead’s career had been spent as a mathematician, first for twenty-five years at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then, from 1911, at the University of London. We might recall Whitehead in his role as Bertrand Russell’s collaborator on the
Principia Mathematica
(1910-13), a heroic three-volume attempt to reduce all mathematics to logic. Some thirty years after it was published, Pratt and de Camp would draw upon the opening pages of this work for the symbolic equations which Harold Shea employs to transfer himself from one reality to another.

We might also remember that in his brilliant 1931 metamathematical paper, “On Formally Undecidable Propositions,” the German Kurt Gödel had demonstrated that it was impossible for either the
Principia Mathematica
or any like system to be self-consistent and complete. Certain statements must necessarily be admitted as true that the system itself was incapable of either proving or disproving.

Even before the publication of Gödel’s paper, however, Alfred North Whitehead himself had already come to perceive the inadequacy of his and Russell’s monumental effort. In fact, Whitehead had been led by his understanding of mathematics, of the new quantum physics, and of physiology and psychology to doubt the sufficiency of the entire modern scientific philosophy.

He would object: “We are content with superficial orderings from diverse arbitrary starting points.”
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And, with disarming gentleness, he would further inquire: “Is it not possible that the standardized concepts of science are only valid within narrow limitations, perhaps too narrow for science itself?”
⁵⁹⁸

So it was that in 1924, at the advanced age of 63, Whitehead traveled across the Atlantic to join the faculty of Harvard University as a professor of philosophy. And the first fruit of this new career was
Science and the Modern World,
based in the main on eight Lowell Lectures that he delivered in 1925.

Two complementary lines of argument were to be found intertwined in this remarkable book. In one, Whitehead reviewed the entire history of Western objection and exception to scientific materialism: The philosophical arguments that had been raised against it at the outset of the modern Western scientific adventure, during the Age of Reason. The experiential objections—often phrased in poetic terms—of the Romantic Era. And finally, the problems that had been recently raised for scientific materialism by the strange new science of the later Age of Technology.

And meanwhile, in his other, concurrent line of argument, Whitehead sketched out a basis for an alternative post-materialistic philosophy—“a system of thought basing nature upon the concept of organism and not upon the concept of matter.”
⁵⁹⁹

As Whitehead would draw the distinction:

The materialistic starting point is from independently existing substances, matter and mind. The matter suffers modifications of its external relations of locomotion, and the mind suffers modifications of its contemplated objects. There are, in this materialistic theory, two sorts of independent substances, each qualified by their appropriate passions.

The organic starting point is from the analysis of process as the realisation of events disposed in an interlocked community. The event is the unit of things real.
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Following the arguments that Whitehead was setting forth in
Science and the Modern World
was not at all easy. His presentation was intricate, wide-ranging, dense and elusive, as though Whitehead himself wasn’t always completely sure just what it was he was attempting to say.

In the course of his discussion, Whitehead would draw a contrast between thinkers who are clear, yet limited, and thinkers who are muddled, but fruitful. Beyond question, he himself was a thinker of the second sort. In consequence, following out the nuances and implications of Alfred North Whitehead’s arguments and attempting to determine exactly what they meant would remain something of a challenge even for professional students of philosophy.

It was little wonder, then, that van Vogt’s contemporaries—the other boys who would grow up to write the science fiction of the Golden Age—should largely find
Science and the Modern World
unintelligible. Or that in the places where these earnest young scientists of the basement could comprehend Whitehead—as in his repudiation of scientific materialism—they would not be prepared to accept and follow him.

However, it would be quite otherwise with van Vogt, in large part precisely because he was not a professional student of philosophy, and neither did he have any special allegiance to the given assumptions of Western science. He was just an out-of-step kid from farther Canada who above all things desired to broaden his mental horizons and was ready to take his ideas wherever he could find them.

For van Vogt, reading
Science and the Modern World
provided him with exactly what he was seeking. From out of the general murk of Whitehead’s argumentation, certain key remarks leaped forth to speak directly to him.

As one example, there was this:

My theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.
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What a mind-boggling suggestion this was—that everything is everywhere at all times, so that each and every standpoint to some extent mirrors all that exists! Now that was food for thought.

So was this:

“If organisms are to survive, they must work together. Any physical object which by its influence deteriorates its environment, commits suicide.”
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And this:

“Successful organisms modify their environment. Those organisms are successful which modify their environments so as to assist each other.”
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It mattered little to van Vogt that he might not be picking up every last detail of Whitehead’s reasoning. What did matter was that he grasped the whole: In place of a universe of constantly competing particles effectively going nowhere, Whitehead was offering the alternative vision of an organic and interconnected universe evolving through creativeness and cooperation.

Thinking such as this—neither spiritual nor materialistic, but holistic, organic, environmental and evolutionary—was a genuine rarity in the Twenties. But the young Alfred van Vogt found it highly appealing and took to it eagerly.

The extraordinary ideas that he stumbled upon in
Science and the Modern World
would linger in the back of his mind. Eventually, after they had incubated long enough and become his own, they would emerge again as the philosophical basis for the science fiction van Vogt would write for John Campbell’s
Astounding.
And the fundamental difference distinguishing his stories from the Golden Age SF produced by all the writers who still remained card-carrying scientific materialists would be van Vogt’s Whitehead-inspired post-materialistic sense of a universe of interconnected organisms evolving together.

As the months that followed high school wore on, it became clear that there was a limit to the length of time that young Alfred could go on burying himself in his books and insisting to everyone that he was a writer even though he had never written anything. Early in 1931, van Vogt took a Civil Service examination, was offered a temporary government job, and accepted it. He traveled east to Ottawa, the capital city of Canada, where he would spend ten highly formative months as a clerk tabulating the Canadian census.

Van Vogt’s imagination was captured by the holistic quality of the census, with its populations of information to be examined first from this angle and then from that. One result of this fascination would be that in years to come, when a Doc Smith was still describing the thinking machine of tomorrow as no more than a gigantic card sorter, and a Robert Heinlein had gotten no further than to conceive of a ponderous and unreliable “ballistic calculator”
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used for the single specialized purpose of working out spaceship rocket burn requirements, A.E. van Vogt would be envisioning the computer of the future as an information machine capable of containing a quadrillion facts all cross-referenced by names, dates and key words, and available to an inquirer at the touch of a button.

Another thing that would stick in van Vogt’s imagination from his sojourn in Ottawa—and eventually find expression in his SF stories—would be a powerful secret that he was let in on by his boardinghouse roommate, a young man who had recently been brought over to Canada from Scotland. He informed Alfred that his flag-waving neighbors back in Morden, Manitoba had had it all wrong: the English didn’t rule the British Empire at all; they only thought they did. The actual covert masters of empire were the Scotch, taking their revenge for the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden. And just as soon as the roommate had earned his college degree, he expected to assume the place that was being held for him behind the scenes in the Canadian government.

Since van Vogt enjoyed no comparable secret support from well-placed Dutch-Canadian cabalists, he had no alternative but to catch a freight train back to Winnipeg when the work of compiling the 1931 census was over. But during his time in Ottawa, he’d made a serious start toward learning how to become the writer he was already claiming to be. From the Palmer Institute of Authorship, he took a correspondence course in “English and Self-Expression.” The long-term consequence of this course would be to set him thinking about the possible subliminal effects of particular sounds and unorthodox word selections.

Then, back home in Winnipeg, he took out of the library Thomas Uzzell’s
Narrative Technique
and two highly useful books by John Gallishaw,
The Only Two Ways to Write a Story
and
Twenty Problems of the Short-Story Writer
—precisely the manuals of instruction that a young Jack Williamson, newly dropped out of college to become a full-time writer, was choosing to study at about this same time. From Gallishaw, van Vogt learned the necessity of writing sentences that conveyed either emotion, imagery or suspense, and how to break a story down into a series of short scenes, each with its own distinct purpose. From Uzzell, he took the idea that a story should make a unified impact upon the reader.

At last, after all this study, the 20-year-old van Vogt felt ready to try writing a story of his own. But what kind of story should it be?

He didn’t read confession magazines himself, but van Vogt had noticed that
True Story,
the top such magazine, had a prize contest in every issue. So he decided to be audacious and take a shot at that. He went off to the library, and with Uzzell and Gallishaw backing him at either elbow, he managed to write the first scene of a story.

What he was attempting seemed chancy to van Vogt. All the time he was working, he kept waking in the night and going round and round about what was to come next. But after turning out one scene each day for nine days, he managed to finish a story which he called “I Live in the Streets.” This was about a girl who had run into hard times in the Depression and been thrown out of her rooming house. It didn’t win any prizes, but
True Story
did buy and publish it.

During the next three years, from 1932 to 1935, van Vogt had regular success selling simple, emotional, anonymous little stories to the confession magazines, and even won a thousand dollar prize with one. But then—as though his inner being had come to the sudden conclusion that if practice was what he had been after in writing these stories, he had had practice enough—in the middle of another true confession he felt disgusted with himself, threw down his pen, and wrote no more of them.

But if it was not sufficient to write whatever was easiest to sell, then what was his writing for? Van Vogt wasn’t altogether sure. In the middle Thirties, he would write trade newspaper interviews, short radio plays, and an occasional short story for a newspaper supplement or a pulp magazine. He learned from this work, but none of it was completely satisfying. At the same time, he had been told that he had the ability to write for the slick magazines, but he felt a strong aversion to attempting this which he couldn’t altogether explain.

Because he was a reader, a writer, and a thinker, van Vogt regarded himself as an intellectual. But if he was an intellectual, it was not of the usual sort. He wasn’t silver-tongued or swift-witted. He had very little ability to remember a precise fact or an exact niggle, and no talent at all for linear thought and logical analysis. He was not a conventional man of reason.

Rather, van Vogt’s usual method was to fix on some question or subject in a highly single-minded way—to surround it and dwell upon it and absorb it. He might get nowhere with a problem for the longest time, but then at last the penny would drop and some insight would pop into his mind.

When van Vogt had enough insights accumulated on a topic, they would assemble themselves into what he would come to think of as a system—a methodology or mode of approach that had its own consistency, if only in the manner in which it was applied by him. In later days, van Vogt would even take pride in describing himself as “Mr. System.”
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The insight that he might write science fiction, and that he
should
write science fiction, dawned on him in the summer of 1938. It came with typical suddenness and indirection. After eight years in which he had not read any science fiction, one day when he was in McKnight’s Drug Store in Winnipeg, van Vogt casually picked up the latest issue of
Astounding,
a magazine he had never paid any attention to before. He flipped on through to the middle pages, and began to read a story.

But not just any story: Amazingly . . . coincidentally . . . significantly . . . perhaps even inevitably . . . the story that he singled out in this apparently completely random fashion was “Who Goes There?” by Don A. Stuart—the prototypical example of modern science fiction.