I'm on a
mission to read all of the science fiction stories that were published by
Jack Vance in 1951. In the
March 1951 issue of
Startling Stories was a short story by Vance called "
Men of the Ten Books". The setting for this story is a "
lost world" of the
Beyond.
Last year when I was reading Vance's Magnus Ridolph stories, I could not resist imagining how some of his stories might have moved in different directions had they been written in an alternate Reality where women dominated the golden age of science fiction. "Men of the Ten Books" starts out with Elizabeth "Betty" Welstead who is working with her husband Ralph as prospectors, searching the depths of galactic space far from Earth for rich loads of platinum or uranium. In the far Beyond, they stumble upon an Earth-like planet in orbit around the star Eridanus 2932. Ralph offers to name the planet "Elizabeth", but Betty tells him to not be ridiculous.
From the ridiculous to the... Then they move closer to the newly-discovered planet and find that it is already inhabited by 300,000,000 human beings who all speak perfect English: these are the titular "
Men of the Ten Books". They call their world "
Haven".
I like the Earle Bergey cover art for the March 1951 Startling. However, you can see that Leigh Brackett could not avoid using "Starmen" in the title of her story and Ed Hamilton had "Earthmen". Vance tells us that the 300,000,000 people of planet Haven all arose as the descendants of 34 men, 25 women and 4 children who arrived from Earth 271 years before the time of the events in the story. Betty and Ralph become friends with a man named Clay who introduces them to his wife and the four youngest of his nine children. The people of Haven have big families. Apparently the women of Haven are too busy taking care of all their children to have any lines of dialog in the story.
In the Hi Tek™ future of interstellar travel that is the setting for Vance's story, the only source of information about Earth brought to Haven by the colonists was the ten volume
Encyclopedia of Human Achievement. Those ten encyclopedia volumes are the titular "Ten Books". The plot of "Men of the Ten Books" reminds me of the
Star Trek episode "
A Piece of the Action". On Haven, the entire population mistakenly believes that Earth is populated by nothing but artistic and scientific geniuses such as those described in the encyclopedia. Shaping their world according to that absurd belief, the people of Haven have created a culture where everything is beautifully constructed and decorated, striving to match the glorious conditions of their imagined Earth.
Deela, the fast woman. The folks responsible for writing and producing
Star Trek mined old science fiction stories for ideas. "
Wink of an Eye" used as a plot device the idea that it might be possible to find a chemical substance that would "accelerate" human physiology. I've previously mentioned a story from the 1930s that was called "
The Hormone" and featured the magical hormone "cortin" that could accelerate people. In
1926, the very first issue of
Amazing Stories reprinted the story "
The New Accelerator", originally published in 1901 by
H. G. Wells.
I despise stories that feature the "brilliant scientist" who makes an amazing technological break-through in his basement that nobody else can ever replicate. In the case of "Men of the Ten Books", the singular technological break-through is the interstellar space-drive. Clay explains to Betty and Ralph that Haven has a pleasant utopian society because they started out with all the knowledge and experience that had previously been accumulated by Earth.
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Schwartz achieves telepathic superpowers
after one session with the synapsifier. |
Yes, everything is idyllic on Haven, except that during the past 271 years they have never been able to re-invent the interstellar space drive technology that brought the colonists to Haven in the first place.
In the case of "The New Accelerator", we might ask, what happened to the old accelerator? A realistic depiction of technological advance would feature an earlier invention being improved upon and modified. However, rather than provide readers with some imaginary science, Wells instead spends much effort assuring us that Professor Gibberne is unequaled in his understanding of drugs that can alter the function of the nervous system. No mere neurophysiologist, Gibberne is also an expert chemist who in his spare time does cutting edge research in the local hospital's laboratory. Of particular note on Gibberne's illustrious résumé is Gibberne's B Syrup, a famous stimulant which Wells assures readers has "saved more lives than any lifeboat".
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interior art for "The New Accelerator"
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Isaac Asimov (who was a fan of the science fiction romance stories of H. G. Wells) could not avoid jumping on the accelerator bandwagon. In his 1950 novel,
Pebble in the Sky, Asimov introduced the fantastic future technology of the synapsifier. Upon being exposed to the magical synapsifier, the synapses in the brains of people are sped up, converting them into super geniuses. A lucky few, like the hero of the story, develop telepathic powers.
Professor Gibberne was not satisfied with first generation drugs like Gibberne's B Syrup because all of his first generation stimulants only altered the behavior of part of the human body. Thus, he worked on, tirelessly searching for a UNIVERSAL stimulant that would make a man think twice as fast as usual.
The skeptical reader might ask: but is such a thing really possible? Wells reminds his British readers the "Jews and Orientals are quicker in thought than we are", so if Nature™ has accomplished that, why not a drug that goes one step further? Wells was not even attempting to write science fiction, a genre that would not arrive for another 30 years, so just sit back and try to enjoy the fantasy ride...
Of course, after a year of further fictional scientific effort, Professor Gibberne has successfully crafted his magical super-accelerator potion. Rather than simply accelerate people two-fold, this newly-crafted magic potion speeds up every aspect of the human body to rates a thousand times faster than usual. Imagine the human heart beating once every millisecond and the brain processing complex sensory inputs like vision 1000 times faster than usual! Gee whiz.
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| fantasy |
Anti-science Fantasy. Wells made a big deal over the idea that by moving 1000 times faster than usual, an accelerated human was in danger of burning up from the friction of rubbing against the air. In writing his silly story about the world's greatest physiologist, and not being in the least concerned about biology, Wells ignored the fact that an accelerated human body would produce waste heat at 1000 times the normal rate simply through its on-going metabolic processes. However, the two accelerated characters in the story have no problem defying physics and magically dissipating all their self-generated body heat. Their hearts have no problem pumping 100 liters of blood every second and their lungs exchange 100 liters of fresh air every second. The whole super-accelerator idea is absurd fantasy. It is hard to imagine why the idea caught on and has been used as a plot element in countless other stories.
I was first exposed to a silly story about "accelerated" people in the
Outer Limits episode called "
The Premonition". In that case, it was not a magic drug that caused the acceleration, but rather some magical effect of having been involved with the new-fangled X-15 rocket-powered aircraft. Lucky for Jim and Linda Darcy, after being caught in the magical wake of the X-15, they eventually returned to the normal rate of flow through time. Actually, who knows what is going on here? Are Jim and Linda actually moving a thousand time faster than everyone else in the world, or maybe the world has slowed down and they are going at the normal rate. When presented with such fantasies, we are not expected to think too deeply or ask any questions.
A Lost World. In "Men of the Ten Books", Ralph decides that Haven is such a wonderful place that he can't allow any contact between Earth and Haven. Ralph puts it this way: if Earth learned about the existence of Haven, millions of tourists would ravish Haven in the same way that a "platoon of invading soldiers would treat a pretty girl".
For Vance's contorted plot, he concocted an accident that sent the original colonists to distant Haven rather than their intended destination, the Rigel star system. Because of that accident, their out-of control spaceship had to be abandoned, and the colonists landed on Haven in lifeboats. The malfunctioning spaceship kept going on, traveling across the galaxy. In "Men of the Ten Books", after 271 years of trying (and failing) to re-invent the interstellar space-drive, apparently the people of Haven don't even think to look inside the spaceship that brought Betty and Ralph to their world. That spaceship just sits in a city park until Betty and Ralph try to sneak away from Haven in the middle of the night.
However, when Ralph tries to secretly depart from Haven, he discovers that Clay has stowed away inside the departing spaceship. We learn that all the folks of Haven needed was some loose talk by Ralph that led them to try a new angle of space-drive research that quickly (in three days) led them to discover the needed dodecahedron structure. Ralph had previously said nothing
specific about using a dodecahedron of quartz to complete the space-drive, but simply by mentioning the need for a "special environment" the scientists of Haven almost instantly solved the puzzle of space-drive. Betty also had loose lips and warned Clay that she and Ralph were departing from Haven. I'm glad I read this story, even though it is contrived and silly. It is interesting to see an early version of the "lost world" theme that Vance used again and again in his later stories.
I'm not going to comment extensively on Vance's story "Brain of the Galaxy" (A.K.A. "
The New Prime") that was published in the
February 1951 issue of
Worlds Beyond. This is the sort of Vance fantasy that I feel falls outside of science fiction. I'll label it
Galactic Fantasy and move on to more interesting topics. Vance grew up reading
Weird Tales and he did not like being called a science fiction writer. It is easy to understand why Vance was quick to submit stories to
Worlds Beyond.
There was another Vance story ("The Loom of Darkness") in the December 1950 issue of Worlds Beyond. It was in that first issue of Worlds Beyond that the editor provided a description of science-fantasy as a new literary genre:
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| DIANETICS |
Given my preference for science fiction, I would not normally read a science-fantasy magazine such as
Worlds Beyond, but the first issue of the magazine had a "review" of
Dianetics. It seems appropriate that a science-fantasy magazine would review Hubbard's book about an invented, fantasy science. We might wonder if the fans of a fiction magazine that was taking a step away from hard science fiction might enjoy a rollicking fantasy like
Dianetics. Here is the review by Damon Knight:
In an alternate Reality, "Brains of the Galaxy" might have become a science fiction story about the advanced computer technology that allowed all of the worlds of the galaxy to be linked to a central brain. Vance could have fleshed out his thinking about virtual reality and made a useful contribution to the science fiction genre. In his later works, Vance would only occasionally mention
computers and
robots, but he extensively developed the idea of the "
Beyond": the portion of the galaxy that was being actively explored by humans, but had not yet become part of the organized core worlds of human civilization.
One of the joys of looking through old science fiction magazines is discovering folks who you never knew existed. The cover art for the
first issue of
Worlds Beyond was
Paul Callé. Seeing that cover art led me to "
The Warriors of Day" which
James Blish published in 1953 (originally "
Sword of Xota" in 1951). You can download the story
here. There is a rather odd "review" of Blish's book
here that claims the "Elron" character in the novel is supposed to be L. Ron Hubbard. What about Blish's explicit published comments on Dianetics?
In the November 1950 issue of Planet Stories, Blish had an essay called "Dianetics: A Door to the Future" in which Blish repeats the absurd claim (first printed in a science fiction magazine by Campbell) that L. Ron Hubbard was an engineer. Blish informs readers that Planet Stories editor Jerome Bixby had also been investigating Hubbard's grandiose claims about Dianetics. Blish wrote this about Dianetics: "it may well be the most important discovery of this or any other century".
The January 1951 issue of Planet Stories had a letter from magazine reader Al Wickham complaining that Dianetics is not a science, that Hubbard shows no evidence of knowing what science is and suggesting that Blish and everyone else be highly skeptical of Hubbard's unsupported claims for Dianetics.
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In the Ekcolir Reality.
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Immediately after the letter from Wickham was a response from Blish in which he admitted that Dianetics is not a science and that its claims were unproven. Blish advised science fiction fans to be skeptical.
I have to wonder if there is a boundary between science fiction fans who know how to be skeptical and science-fantasy fans who revel in the act of accepting absurdities so that they can enjoy a story like "The New Accelerator". I've previously categorized the fiction of H. G. Wells as "scientific romance" and I'd be willing to label Vance's "Brain of the Galaxy" as "galactic fantasy" or "galactic romance".
Related Reading: Frank Scully on UFOs and Wilhelm Reich's orgone accumulators
See also: Chapter 11 of "Meet the Phari".
Next: "Winner Lose All" by Jack Vance
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