This month I'm celebrating the fiction of
Jack Vance by reading all the stories that he published
in 1951. Last Year I read his 1950 story "
The Potters of Firsk". Here in this blog post I'll comment on "Winner Lose All" which was published in the
December 1951 issue of
Galaxy Science Fiction. Vance's short story "
Men of the Ten Books" (also published in 1951) briefly mentioned
uranium, but both "The Potters of Firsk" and "Winner Lose All" made uranium central to their plots. Yes, I'm trying to celebrate Vance, however, while exploring Vance's fiction from 1951, I'm allowing myself to be distracted by issues like his obsession with
uranium.
Isaac Asimov described 1938 - 1950 as the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Other commentators have given other definitions of "the" golden age and Joshua Glenn described 1904 - 1933 as the "radium age" of science fiction.
I don't feel that
science fiction existed as a distinct literary genre until the late 1920s when science fiction magazines began trying to define a new fantasy genre that would satisfy a new generation of technologically savvy and scientifically literate readers. Just for fun, and in honor of Vance's interest in
uranium, I'm going proclaim 1950 - 1983 as the "
Uranium Age" of science fiction which brought us stories like
Level 7 (1959) and
The China Syndrome (1979).
Distracted Reading. While looking through old science fiction magazines in an attempt to find Vance's stories from the early 1950s, it is impossible to avoid the subject of Dianetics. How far off the beaten path was Dianetics? Not very far at all. I've never read any of the books written by Claude M. Bristol (see the image below this paragraph), so all I know about him is from blurbs on the interwebs. However, it seems to me that when confronted with competition like The Magic of Believing, science fiction story tellers had to go very far out to compete with folks like Bristol and Hubbard who proclaimed their money-making "$ystems" to be based on "$cience".
The old Sci Fi magazines had advertisements such as the one shown to the left on this page. One reaction to Bristol: "
You have caught from the ether something that has a mystical quality -- a something that explains the magic of coincidence, the mystery of what makes men lucky."
Bristol's own words: "The science of thought is as old as man himself.... there is something to this 'mind-stuff' after all." How could a huckster like Hubbard simply stand by and watch Bristol at work without jumping into the circu$ ring?
The image to the right shows another common type of advertisement from the old Sci Fi magazines.
Harvey Spencer Lewis had been running his AMORC scam for decades by the time Hubbard created Dianetics.
According to this web page, Lewis tried to sucker people into believing that the Rosicruians had the secret of "the ability to transform into material expression one’s mental images".
Some of these advertisements in the old science fiction magazines seem like distracting silliness, but what might they distract readers from? Looking down the tables of contents for those magazines we observe that there was no shortage of fiction in the Sci Fi magazines built on the same "mind over matter" theme that was then being proclaimed as "truth" and "science" by the advertisements.
I also need to mention that while Astounding magazine editor John Campbell was promoting Dianetics, Galaxy ran a UFO contest in its first issue.
I'll give Galaxy credit for kicking off their UFO contest with a level-headed essay by Willy Ley. In my case, I've had two UFO experiences. One lasted an entire second. In 1995 caught a glimpse of a stealth fighter, seeing it from an angle that made it look like a classical UFO. One second later, the airplane turned slightly and I could properly identify it. Recently I heard a UFO, but could not see it. A week later, I discovered that the loud sound from above was due to conventional jet fighters. Lesson: Sci Fi fan's should not allow their interest in aliens to run out of control.
"Winner Lose All" (download
here) presents readers with a type of "
First Contact" story that explores the implications of an alien life-form that is very different from we humans. Just how different? So different that people do not even figure out how to communicate with the alien life-form before running away from it.
Macroid Space. For this story Vance invented "macroid" space, the basis of the interstellar travel used by Earthlings in the imagined setting of "Winner Lose All". Vance had this to say about what happens when a spaceship enters into macroid space: "The universe shrinks, or we and the ship get cosmically big. The main thing is, we get there". Hey, if you can accelerate people to 1000x normal speed in your fantasy story, why not expand them to the size of a solar system while you are at it?
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advertisement in Galaxy magazine
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Worlds Beyond. In his first published story ("
The World-Thinker") Vance imagined an alien being who could think entire worlds into existence. When first given a chance to view such a thought-world, Lieutenant Lanarck of the Tellurian space navy reaches out and casually destroys a forest and a village with the touch of his hand. When the alien "world-thinker" has occasional seizures, his imagined worlds are thrown into states of chaos. Vance, like many other science fiction story tellers, was always teetering on the knife edge of tossing off all scientific restraints and slipping into pure silly fantasy.
In the 1951 issue of Galaxy that contained "Winner Lose All" there was a full page ad for the film "When Worlds Collide". That film was based on a 1932 novel by Philip Wylie. The discovery of Pluto was BIG news in 1930. Simak's "Cosmic Engineers" was published in 1939 and for that story we are asked to imagine that Pluto was at one time a habitable planet. Also in 1939, "Thundering Peace" by Kent Casey depicted Uranus as a world worthy of human colonization.
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| Uranus |
New nation, new planet.
Uranus was discovered in 1781 and was first named by its discoverer "George's Planet" after his patron, King George III. With time, the planet became known as Uranus and soon the chemical element
uranium was named in its honor. In 1896, more than a hundred years had passed before it was discovered that
uranium is
radioactive. Two years later the radioactive element
radium was discovered.
In "Winner Lose All", Vance depicted the crew of a spaceship from Earth discovering an exoplanet with a lode of uranium. At almost the same moment, in a cosmic coincidence, an alien lifeform that Vance calls the "unigen", also discovers the same lode of uranium. Vance imagined that the unigen was neither matter nor energy and that it could moved through outer space at the speed of light. To survive, the unigen needed energy and since this was 1951, what better source of energy for an imaginary hungry alien than a lode of uranium?
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In the Ekcolir Reality
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Vance's atmosphere report for the newly discovered exoplanet: 31% oxygen, 40% nitrogen, 11% helium, 10% argon, 4% carbon dioxide and 4% other inert gases. Also detected from orbit using the spaceship's handy x-screen is a big deposit of radioactive
uranium. Vance did not bother to discuss either the danger of breathing in so much carbon dioxide or the danger of ionizing radiation.
Upon landing near the uranium deposit, the Earthlings observe that this planet's ocean is covered by a solid green layer of plant life that apparently blocks most evaporation, so the continents are pretty dry and show little signs of erosion. They don't find evidence of animal life and there are only a few scraggly land plants. The Earthlings can see sparkling lights (these are the unigen) over the uranium deposit which they casually dismiss as insects... possibly something like an alien firefly. Vance then amplifies the cosmic coincidence to comic proportions by adding a third alien life-form to the mix of beings who are simultaneously attracted to the uranium deposit.
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Vance makes a distinction between biological life ("living creatures" on planets) and the non-biological unigens whose natural environment seems to be outer space. At first, humans appear to be harmless. Interior art by "Thorn".
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In "Winner Lose All", the spaceship's biologist captures one of the
unigen "nodes" that is obtaining energy from the
uranium and while studying it, the node explodes and kills the bumbling Earthling.
The unigens then kill two more of the Earthlings who move too close to the prized uranium deposit. The Earthlings retaliate and destroy several dozen more of the nodes. Eventually, both the humans and the unigens decide that this planet is too dangerous and they depart, never realizing that they had been interacting with another intelligent life-form.
Meanwhile, a
third life-form continues to quietly extract
uranium from the lode and at the end of the story, this plant-like creature makes use of energy from the
uranium to launch its spores into outer space, the implication being that this methodical and mindless plant-like creature is slowly spreading through the universe, consuming all
uranium deposits that it encounters.
When "Winner Lose All" was published in 1951, Earth was still two years away from the discovery of the DNA double helix. The molecular basis of Earthly life was still a mystery, and under those conditions of profound ignorance, wild speculation abounded concerning just how bizarre alien life-forms might be. Even now, 70 years later, in the era of whole genome sequencing, it is still fun to imagine that there could be alternative forms of life that are quite different from the biological organisms of Earth.
Science fiction story tellers seldom hesitate to invent imaginary ways to move quickly across vast interstellar distances. For "Winner Lose All", Vance introduced "macroid" space-drive. But what if we accept the fact that there is apparently no way to travel faster than the speed of light? There has long been speculation about "
panspermia", the idea that living organisms or molecular fragments of living organisms might be able to move slowly through space, perhaps riding on asteroid-like space debris that gets blasted blasted off of the surface of Earth-like planets.
Wonders of the Radium Age. For example, in Worlds in the Making (1908), the physicist Svante Arrhenius speculated about the possibility that "life-giving seeds are drifting about in space".
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the thrilling conclusion and final chapter of Worlds in the Making
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Arrhenius attributed to
Lord Kelvin the idea that fragments of one planet with living organisms might be blasted into outer space and carry living organisms to another habitable world. Arrhenius liked the idea that tiny spores drifting in the upper atmosphere could depart from a planet like Earth and use the
radiation pressure of sunlight to move out of our solar system and reach distant exoplanets after thousands of years of travel through outer space. In "Winner Lose All" Vance took this idea a step further and fantasized that a plant-like organism could use energy from
uranium to efficiently send its spores into outer space. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that any living spore could survive thousands of years of exposure to cosmic radiation during a trip through outer space.
I have no idea what inspired Vance to write his story about
uranium-powered panspermia. A great dream that found its way into the plot of many science fiction stories published in the 1940s was that nuclear energy could power spaceships and maybe allow for interstellar travel by humans. It was rather audacious for Vance to imagine a "low tech" way of using
uranium for space travel that did not involve a spaceship. The plant-like aliens in "Winner Lose All" that extract
uranium from ore, purify it and concentrate it and tap its energy are not described in much detail. Vance can only offer readers a magical wave of the hand: wouldn't it be cool if.....
The other two types of alien creatures in "Winner Lose All" are also not described in any detail by Vance. The seamless green covering on the ocean might be a planet-wide organism, similar in some ways to that depicted in Lem's Solaris.
Of most interest to me are the mysterious
unigens. If they are not composed of conventional matter and also not conventional energy then what are they? For my stories set in the
Exodemic Fictional Universe, I imagine that there are additional domains of the physical universe that "hold" non-conventional matter: the
Hierion Domain and the
Sedron Domain. The hierions and sedrons can assemble to form matter, but at a much smaller scale than the atoms we are familiar with here in the
Hadron Domain.
Reading "between the lines" of "Winner Lose All", I suspect that Vance was toying with the idea that Earthlings discovered a technological means of slipping into and out of "macroid space", thus making interstellar travel possible. This is basically my thinking for how hierions and sedrons could be used for fast-than-light space travel. Perhaps Vance imagined that the unigens were natives of "macroid space" that came into the Hadron Domain in search of high energy food such as uranium deposits.
Simply Marvel. Since Vance never seriously set out to be a science fiction writer, he was often able to follow his imagination in directions that a scientist would be reluctant to go. For "Winner Lose All", his imaginary plants that can extract and concentrate
uranium seem to defy biological reality. Readers of science fiction are often asked to ignore scientific reality and simply enjoy a fun story. I suspect this is why the old science fiction magazines were full of advertisements from hucksters like Ron Hubbard and Harvey Lewis who asked Sci Fi fans to simply believe their fake claims without the need for any supporting evidence.
If Vance flourished in the "uranium age" of science fiction, what came next? We might say that after 1983, the science fiction genre was in the silicon age.
With the arrival of cheap computers in people's homes, science fiction story tellers could no longer ignore topics like artificial intelligence and virtual realities. As shown by Vance's 1945 story about an alien being who could think new worlds into existence ("The World-Thinker"), there was an old tradition in fantasy stories of magical "creators" who could play around with "daughter" universes or "toy universes" that exist within another universe.
Recently, while investigating Vance's 1951 story "Golden Girl" I discovered that there was a short-lived, minor magazine called Marvel Tales of Science and Fantasy where, in 1935, Clifford D. Simak published a story called "The Creator". I have no idea if Jack Vance ever read "The Creator", but it is a story that covers much of the same ground as does Vance's 1945 story "The World-Thinker".
"The Creator" was later republished for a wider audience in the
July 1961 issue of
Fantastic Stories of Imagination and that is the version that I read. "The Creator" depicts two young men who, after years of investigation, discover that our universe was made by an entity called the Creator. With the help of a super-duper machine that they build in their basement, Pete and Scott transcend the confines of our universe ("...
I was a detached thought speeding along a directional line..") and visit the laboratory of the Creator. Pete and Scott find that the creator of our universe appears to be a telepathic cone of light.
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Pete angers the Creator and is punished.
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On a table top in the Creator's laboratory rests our universe: "...
a thin oval receptacle filled with a grayish substance...". Trying to explain everything to Pete and Scott, the Creator says, "
You are in an ultra-universe. The electrons and protons making up your body have grown to billions and billions of times their former size..."
The Creator was curious about what types of "artificial life" might have developed in the toy universe (our universe) so the Creator had sent out "thought vibrations" that helped Pete and Scott figure out how to reach the ultra-universe.
Pete realizes that having first created our universe, the Creator is now developing a method that will allow for the total destruction of our universe. In "The Creator", Pete and Scott eventually destroy the Creator, making it possible for our universe to continue existing rather than be casually "erased" by the Creator. I have no idea if Vance ever read "The Creator", but Vance ended up at the same destination in
1945 with our heroic Earthling Lieutenant Lanarck killing the alien "
world-thinker".
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no god needed
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I'm impressed by how much effort Simak put into "The Creator" trying to turn this fantasy story into science fiction. There are many pages of mumbo-jumbo aimed at devising and "explaining" the fantasy science methods used by Pete an Scott to reach the ultra-universe. In contrast, in Simak's 1952 story "
Ring Around the Sun", Simak made only minimal effort to explain the alternate universes that are featured in the story. I like "Ring Around the Sun" for how it instantiates human minds inside robot bodies, but Simak seems to suggest that in order to move between alternate universe all you need to do is believe that you can visit an alternate universe. I suspect that by the 1950s Simak had learned that it is not really important to invest much time inventing fantasy science for stories. There were plenty of magazines that would promote Hubbard's fake science of Dianetics, run advertisements for "just believe" schemes like that of Harvey Lewis or publish fantasy stories that made no scientific sense.
See also: Chapter 11 of "Meet the Phari"
Next: Jack Vance and telepathy in 1951
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