Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth (31 page)

As a side-note, it must be observed that Van Vogt held memory to be identity—that a man was only what he consciously and subconsciously recalled himself to be, and that this forms the main point of
The World Of Null-A
and its sequel
The Pawns Of Null-A
, (also called
Players Of Null-A
). But if identity is memory, and memory can be molded, so too can Man.

Second, the characters are remarkably similar men. All these protagonists triumph, when they triumph, through their intellect and their correctly set moral compass. They are not action heroes like the Gray Lensman or Northwest Smith, nor are they mere passive observers like the Time Traveler of H.G. Wells, or the forgotten viewpoint characters who observed the Martian invasion or the death of Dr. Moreau. They are men who solve problems, from how to stop a tunnel leak on the Moon to how to stop the downfall of a Galactic Empire to how to solve the riddle of life and identity and immortality.

The point of Asimov Robot stories, for example, which may be hard for a modern reader to understand, was that robots were neither Frankenstein monsters nor humans made of metal. They were tools which, when they malfunctioned, could be fixed. All these stories are about fixing problems, which a Frankenstein monster story cannot be. In the background of all the Robot Stories and all the Foundation stories is the ideal of man as problem solver.

Finally, the theme was an optimistic one, which said that men were moral creatures who were, or could become, large enough in their time to conquer the stars.

Asimov, who was a Liberal, had no understanding of what morality was or what it was for, so it never appears in his stories, but he clearly thought it was man’s duty to think clearly and to abide by what his reason taught him. Only the cleverness of science would save the Galactic Empire from eternal darkness.

In Heinlein, morality was always voluntary and always based on a firm sense of personal honor and duty: Honor that keeps a blind poet at his duty station even unto death.

Heinlein’s sexual neuroses, thankfully absent from his juveniles and Future History stories might seem to be at odds with this sense of honor, but the libertarian conceit in his philosophy pretended that such vices could be indulged without harm if done by sufficiently mature and virtuous men. Given this false-to-facts conceit, it becomes at least self-consistent for a man to preach that personal independence both required patriotic defense of self and home and laws and race, and permitted any vice or self-indulgence as the self-sovereign individual or self-apotheosized god might please himself to do.

A.E. van Vogt, the least well remembered of the three, rejected, and rightly so, the shallow philosophical concepts of the European intellectuals as to what would constitute the superman, the next evolutionary step beyond man. The Europeans assumed the next stage of morality was to shed all moral scruples, and to become as cold and hard as a machine.

Do not be deceived, O reader, by such external and extraneous frippery as the mind reading tendrils of Jommy Cross, or the teleportation of Gilbert Gosseyn, or the immortality of Walter S. DeLany, founder of the Weapon Shops. These supermen were superior, precisely because the moral conscience and altruism of the supermen was superior. The superpowered Coeurl and the Rull and other monsters from his early stories were inferior because of their inflexibility, their moral retardation. For Van Vogt, the larger brain of the Martians of H.G. Wells, or the cold remorselessness of the superman imagined by Nietzsche were of no account if not also wedded to a greater moral sense.

The philosophy of all three, and indeed of Campbell himself, as we can see in the types of stories he wrote and bought, agreed on its prime axiom: Man is the measure of all things, and if he measures himself against the infinite hostility of the infinite cosmos, he must grow in his soul and reason, and be large enough to encompass that cosmos.

This was not Arthur C. Clarke’s view. His was more similar to H.G. Wells’s view, namely, that man would eventually evolve into something glorious in its own way but ultimately inhuman. His was certainly not Ray Bradbury’s view, which was not so impressed with vast vistas and boastful futures, and more interested in the joys of home and hearth and the mysteries of the woods beyond the backyard, and the deeper mysteries of the human heart.

In the Hard SF view Campbell spread, we men are Homo Instrumenta, the Tool-Using Man, the Problem-Solving Man. Behind us is the ape-man and before us is the interstellar man, the cosmic man.

This is perhaps the inevitable outgrowth of the Enlightenment philosophy which informs the American character. These are typical or even archetypical American stories, as much as anything by Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce.

The cynicism met in the stories is similar to the unromantic view of man, ambitious, easily tempted man, which underpins so much of the American character. It is why we mistrust Big Business and Big Government and credentialed yammerheads without a lick of common sense.

But the optimism, the belief that a clever man with a clever system can solve things, fix things, correct things, also underpins so much of the American character. That is why we trust the brain trusts and experts from City Hall and concerned activists from the college campuses to organize and solve public matters, and why we trust free enterprise.

If any man can explain why Americans mistrust Big Business and trust Free Enterprise, trust academicians and mistrust yammerheads, trust City Hall and mistrust Big Government, that man can explain the American character.

And that man, furthermore, will understand that Hard SF is not just any story that puts technology at its heart. The heart of Hard SF is this cynical optimism, the paradox of men whose feet are firmly planted on the ground, and yet whose hands reach for the stars.

During the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the Big Three Names were the three authors with the greatest prestige in the John W. Campbell, Jr. stable of authors: Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and one now is unfairly unrecognized, A.E. van Vogt. His obscurity may be due in part to a malign attempt by Damon Knight to undermine his career.

These days, the term “The Big Three” is still sometimes used, but the third name is given as Ray Bradbury or Arthur C. Clarke. Why this should be is also unclear, since no one linked the names at the time, but, again, it may be due to Damon Knight, who for all I know is also responsible for the hole in the ozone layer.

Arthur C. Clarke is a fairly convincing stand-in for a Campbell-style writer, and indeed he sold his first story to Campbell, (“Loophole”, which appeareed in
Astounding
in 1946), so this may be why he is often photo-shopped into the position A.E. van Vogt was airbrushed out of. But I would argue that there was a theme, or even a philosophy, to Campbellian fiction, and that Clarke represents an older, and perhaps more literate, style of science fiction harkening back to H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon.

I submit to your candid judgment that Arthur C. Clarke has a particular sense of a broader vision, and yet it is a darker vision, of man and his ultimate fate in the universe which is in keeping with H.G. Wells and alien to Campbell.

Asimov, Heinlein, Van Vogt and other regular contributors to
Astounding
betrayed a heady optimism typical of America at that period. The tales regularly involved heroes who solved their problems by reason, by the power of science, and they were, in effect, something like the hero in detective stories who always gets his man before the end.

Even stories that seem quite grim about their view of the littleness of man in the universe—Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall” springs to mind as an example—are based on an optimistic idea. “Nightfall” assumes that men of a world where the sunset came only once every thousand years would go mad at the sight of stars. This at first seems a pessimistic view of man, that we are like the ninnies in Lovecraft stories, who go insane upon learning the truths of the universe, rather than being fascinated. But in fact the idea is a typically modern one, full of the optimism and hence the folly of modernity. The idea here is that men are plastic and pliant in our souls, and that evolution can adapt us eventually to any environment, or propel us eventually to superhuman heights.

Science Fiction differs from all other genres. Membership in another genre is based on elements that appear in all stories. To be a detective story means to have the mystery plot. To be a pirate story means to have a pirate character. To be a Western means to have a frontier setting. To be a horror story or a romance means to have a theme or mood of fear or love. All stories, (except modern mainstream ones), have plot, character, setting, theme, mood. But Science Fiction has one thing more. It has world building. To be Science Fiction the natural laws of the story-world, which include the science and technology, must differ from the laws of the real world we know, and the expectations of the reader must be flexible enough to adapt to the new rules.

This flexibility is why imagination is paramount in the Science Fiction field, and, for hard or realistic Science Fiction, it is a disciplined imagination.

Readers are simply cheated if the story-world has laws and technologies and therefore expectations of what is possible or not altar and warp and change according to the storyteller’s convenience. Readers are simply cheated if the story does not explore any logical yet unexpected side-effect of the hypothetical situation.

(If the supernatural laws differ, and include witches and magicians, dragons and elves, or anything redolent of the period before modernity, this is Fantasy, which is a sister empire to science fiction, overlapping in some places, and which these days bids fair to replace her, but the two are nonetheless distinct.)

I would go so far as to say that Science Fiction is the essential and archetypal literature of the modern age, because it is the only literature which confronts and incorporates the central idea that separates modernity from all past philosophies and worldviews: namely, change and evolution. Science Fiction is more popular during eras when technological change is faster or more profound.

To be sure, men of the Enlightenment, and Renaissance, and Middle Ages, and the Ancient world were aware of technological changes in history: But these occurred at a slow enough rate and small enough scale that it was not the central pillar of their worldview. The essential note of their worldview was one of stability and centrality. Even after the Roman Empire was long fallen, the European mind continued to use the Empire as the basis of reference and comparison and as the source of legal legitimacy—up through the Napoleonic Era, which was the era of revolutions, and arguably the beginning of the modern world.

So I submit that Science Fiction, no matter what it seems to be about, is always about progress, and even when it is a cautionary tale, is a caution about progress gone wrong.

I would also suggest—for the point is too broad to be argued here—that Jules Verne wrote the type of fiction that Campbell would later expand upon, the hard and technophilic SF set either in a today or a nearby tomorrow of a world not much changed. Asimov, Van Vogt and Heinlein tended to set their stories no farther in the future than the launch of the Wright Brothers was in the past, or the American Revolution. When tales were set in the farther future, as
Slan
or
Foundation
, the cultures were immediately recognizable:
Slan
is set in a totalitarian fascist-state, complete with secret police, and
Foundation
is set in a Roman Empire, complete with Emperor and Senate.

In each case, the fundamental benevolence of the fate in store for man is on display in the imaginings of these and other Golden Age authors. Before the Gold Age, the pulp field was famous for stories of apocalypse and scientific Götterdämmerung. One can grow weary counting the planets destroyed by Edmond "World-Wrecker" Hamilton or E.E. “Doc” Smith. But the Age of Campbell was different.

The Future History of Heinlein ended in an era called the Maturity of Man, when, thanks to advances in General Semantics and psychology, insanity and therefore war and therefore the need for government is left behind on Earth and the stars are ours; the
Foundation
stories of Asimov promised a Second Empire ruled by a benevolent technological elite, mind-reading psycho-historians who had mathematical control over the future, and could obviate wars before they began; the Slans of Van Vogt, and the Null-A men likewise were creatures more wise, more sane, more benevolent than man, and were secretly or openly ruling them for the good of mankind and their own.

Please note the recurring theme. Politically speaking, no matter where a Campbell author falls on the spectrum, he regards the human condition, the political nature of man, the questions of war and government, as a problem that can be solved.

There is no Greek Tragedy for the Big Three, no Twilight of the Gods which Odin foretells and cannot forestall. But then again, the Campbell authors rarely fixed their eyes on the farther horizons, or told us what would happen after the golden age of nudist telepaths on new world the near future promised.

On the other hand, Arthur C. Clarke and H.G. Wells are haunted by a sense of the true magnitude of time, and while some of their stories, (
A Fall Of Moondust
or
The Isle Of Dr. Moreau
), are near-future tales, these authors are most famous for those which go to the end of mankind and beyond.

H.G. Wells, when he has his Martians invade Horsell Common, is putting on display not a truly alien creature of truly alien psychology, such as Tweel from “A Martian Odyssey” by Standley W Weinbaum. Wells is instead showing the dark Darwinian future of man, a creature as feeble compared to modern man as modern man was to, (at least Wells’ Victorian conception of), a Cave Man or Noble Savage, but as developed in those organs of his superiority, his brain and his hands. The Martian is the Wellsian conception of the Man of the Remote Future as sculpted, not by some fatherly supernatural Creator but by the remorseless and bloody chisel-blade of blind Mother Nature.