”Alone in a world of lesser beings, he found he could read their minds… but all he could see there was hate.”
The Novel That Spawned a Slogan
“I have nothing against the book itself,” mused Cheryl Morgan after it won a retro Hugo “but ’Slan' has become a byword for fannish elitism.”
…and hers is a not uncommon view. Except in my case I only knew the second part. My SF-reading youth was as avid as yours, but somehow I skipped over not just this but the entire output of AE Van Vogt. But then, as my Mutants Our Our Future series shows, I grew curious about the trope of Pariah Elites.
And ’Slan’ (1940), his first novel, could well be where it was begat. That cover blurb (reproduced in the opening quote) will be by some since-forgotten sub-ed, but isn’t an inaccurate summary. Fans certainly took to it. It was a hit from the off, serialised in ’Astounding’ in 1940, in 1946 becoming one of the first pulp novels to actually be published as a novel, then bagging that retro-Hugo in 2016.
But, more pointedly, this was the book which generated the infamous revenge-of-the-nerds mantra “fans are slans”. So here I am, after many years living clean, holding in my hand a paperback with a giant airbrushed Chris Foss spaceship on the cover.
It’s not by any measure well written. It’s much like a sports commentator has been asked to write a novel. Naturally, they use short sentences, exclamation marks! There’s the odd yet familiar combination of rapid-fire action intercut with pages of stilted debate. Debate comprised of phrases no-one has ever said out loud, or could possibly ever say without dislocating their tongue. And it’s at its worst when called upon to provide evocative descriptions, something sports commentators don’t do that much…
“The whole great mass had donned its night time splendour with a billion lights twinkling in far-flung panorama. Wonder city now, it spread before her, a vast, sparkling jewel, an incredible fairyland of buildings that reared grandly toward the heavens and blazed a dream picture of refulgent magnificence.”
It's almost appealing that the bog-standard word ‘buildings’ appears in the middle of that incredible fairyland, like the thesaurus was somehow missing ‘B’. But ‘buildings’ at least creates some kind of mental image, if a bog-standard one. ‘Refulgent magnificence’ is mere flim-flam.
Yet pulp novels are rarely well-written. Serviceable is all we really need. Does the prose get over the information required, without any fuss, or does its limitations get in the way? And this book isn’t stodgy or leaden, it rattles by at a pace, keeps you on board. Perhaps more sports commentators should have written more pulp novels. And AE can have his moments of rhetorical flourish:
“The light that forced its way through fell across the end of the iron bedstead in a little pool and lay there as if exhausted.”
Overall, it’s relentlessly breathless outpouring made me think of Jack Kirby’s comics, where a cavalcade of crazy concepts and events seems to teem out of the creator’s brain, barely corralled into a narrative. (Perhaps notably, both were originally writing for serialisation.)
Why Must I Be a Teenager And Slan?
The standard theory of ’Slan’, that it was based on the Nazi persecution of the Jews, is as widespread as it is absurd. In 1940, American calls for war were much more a reaction to Nazi expansionism than their anti-semitism. In fact, the guilty secret of the time was how widely those views were shared.
And we should be glad this theory falls, for the trope would more lend itself to anti-semitism than anti-racism. (“What more natural than we should insinuate our way into control of the human government? Are we not the most intelligent beings on the face of the Earth?”) The scenario seems to be that the humans are so convinced the slans are trying to take over the world, their only recourse becomes to take over the world. Not sure that helps much…
Yet can ours be said to fare better? That it’s all a metaphor for teenage travails? If the equation underlying this particular trope truly is ‘puberty equals powers’, 1940 is some way before what’s normally considered the rise of the teenager. This question is pretty much what made me read this book. Let’s sneak up on it…
As you might expect in this sort of thing, the scale is simultaneously epic and intimate. There’s a general conflict of kind, human against slan, yet everything is individualised. We travel between planets, while our cast is absurdly small. Jommy, our hero, escapes a raging mob by attaching himself to the back of a car, which happens to have seated in it another major character.
And age similarly ramps up and down, with ‘slan’ used as a permissive handwave for this. Jommy is told on the first page “you may be only nine years old, but you’re as intelligent as any fifteen-year-old human being.” We’re told our heroine Kathleen has a “child’s voice.. yet immensely unchildlike”.
And you can see the effect this would have on the target audience. No self-respecting twelve-year-old wants to read about some kid who’s nine. The device allows the reader to pick the age they most want from the range on offer, which will doubtless be their own. Further, there’s a way in which it’s accurate. In those formative years we do tend to flit between ages in our behaviour, acting younger and older at apparent random.
And more… As we saw, ’Scanners’ started with a recognisable location and two human characters discussing what turns out to be our lead Scanner. Whereas from its first sentence, ’Slan’ starts with our lead character, Jommy. Slan powers and differences are therefore assumed, and divulged to the reader by seemingly casual remarks. (Hearts being used in the plural, the hair-like tendrils which grant slan powers not mentioned until the second chapter, and so on.) This plunges us straight into the action, pulp style. But it also keys us in to identify ourselves with the slan, not the mere humans. What it is to be a slan, of course you get it, dear reader. You’re not like the lesser beings.
Yet at the same time Jommy and Kathleen orient themselves around adult characters. Jommy’s mother is killed, off-stage, in the first few pages. After which all the adult figures are essentially adversaries, anti-parents. The rule is absent parents good, present parents bad. The woman who goes on to kidnap him is even called Granny. When we’re first introduced to Kathleen, she’s being nyah-nyah teased by a human boy, but is soon in the company and quasi-protection of world dictator Kier Grey.
We discover slans to be the creation of biological scientist Samuel Lann, S. Lann morphing into slan. (Well, sort of. Evolution, in response to modernity, was slowly making slans of us anyway, but he sped this up with a selective breeding programme. There’s more than a whiff of eugenics to this, then still not regarded as a dirty word.) They’re referred to as his “children’, and the first few literally were.
Nine to fifteen, it’s a range which straddles and blurs the distinction between Tween and Teen. But this collapsing of everything into familial relations seems more Tween. Teen Lit tends to be about leaving the nest, young adults making their own way in the world. While a Tween’s world still orbits their parents, with fantasies taking the form of ‘real’ fathers suddenly appearing, lost lineages discovered and the like. (Think of the difference between ’His Dark Materials’ and ’The Hunger Games.’)
Yet fairly swiftly the book turns into the Teen territory of a rite of passage story. (Very much unlike ’X-Men’, ‘Tomorrow People’ and ‘Codename Icarus’, which stuck to the puberty years. In its first third, Jommy is already making mental plans for what to do in six years time.
After which we reach the ‘montage’ chapter where he builds up his knowledge for his mission, just as Rocky did his biceps. Closely followed by him picking up a weapon his father left him, a metal rod. In other words, his passage into adulthood is marked by his getting a magic wand off his dad. Dr. Freud, you look like you are about to speak…
After which even his name shifts, from Jommy to Jommy Cross. Then, after another fast-forward, just Cross. (Though at the same time even this doesn’t fully shift from Tween to Teen. Granny hangs around in the story after what seems her obvious exit point. It’s like leaving home but for some reason your grandparents come too. Van Vogt keeps hold of his age range.)
With ’The Tomorrow People’, as we saw, the plural was significant - it was about joining a group. Here the title is singular. The two slans don’t meet for much of the book. The lone slan, then, of course becomes a hyperbolic metaphor for the lone fan, desperately searching among the small-minded humans for others of his kind. And lurking close to the surface of the definition of teenager is someone who defines themselves against society rather than as part of it, who has to find his tribe. “I’m an SF fan” and “I’m an Accountant” are both self-descriptions, but not of the same kind.
Further, of their three Ts only one shows up here, there’s no telekinesis or teleportation. (Further evidence, perhaps, that they’re concepts of the microchip era.) The assumption is that mind powers can only affect other minds. Though slans do have enhanced physical strength, in this sense more X-Men than TPs or Scanners.
And those mind powers differ. ’Tomorrow People’ telepathy is essentially “mind talk”. (Maybe they can read minds, but don’t consider it polite.) While, with slans such solitary creatures, here it really means mental eavesdropping. To the point van Vogt concocts another ‘race’ (his term), a type of slan whose special power is “mind shields”, the ability to block the mind reading of the slans. (Referred to as tendriless slans, but essentially anti-slans.)
Telepaths would surely also be empaths, almost by definition, for thoughts cannot be entirely disentangled from feelings. A telepath would get to see the world the way others see it, feel it the way they felt it, not just read the invisible thought balloons above their heads. Something like the witnessing Angels of the film ‘Wings Of Desire’.
Here it’s effectively the opposite. ’Slan’ feeds the familiar SF phobia of the common herd. Crowds (“this vast ignorant mass of people”) give off collective readings which are lowest-common-denominator - “excitement, tension, dismay and uncertainty - an enormous dark spray of fear.”
“What you have to realize”, one character tells us, “is that men as a mass always play somebody else’s game - not their own. They’re caught in traps from which they cannot escape. They belong to groups; they’re members of organizations; they’re loyal to ideas, individuals, geographical areas.”
In fact not far below the surface is the suggestion that slans don’t really have an extra sense, it’s all a metaphor even within the story. Regular humans have their minds read simply because they make for such easy reading. Like road signs or billboards, you’ve parsed them before you’ve even thought to. It’s a bit like in ’Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ where Marvin reads Arthur’s human mind, only to comment “it amazes me how you manage to live in something so small.”
Jommy controls their simple minds with as much impunity as Professor X in 'The X-Men’. Van Vogt goes out of his way to demonstrate how moral his lead is, avoiding killing wherever possible. But this is not considered an issue worth worrying about. They’re not players, they’re born supporting cast. (However, not just the other slans but a few humans manage to keep their minds concealed. Usually the special ones, who are important to the plot. It isn’t quite on the level of those who have plans get to hide them, but it’s close.)
While the slan-built palace would be a synecdoche for the slan mind:
“Human beings will never know all the secrets of that building. There are mysteries there, forgotten rooms and passages, hidden wonders that even the slans no longer know about except in a vague way… all the weapons and machines the human beings have searched for so desperately are buried right in that building.”
Human beings could even occupy the building and not be able to penetrate these secrets, and we know because that’s precisely what’s happened.
Unsurprisingly, the SF elements of the story are haphazardly applied. While buildings are made from plastic and have “refulgent magnificence”, characters sport revolvers, shop with cash in department stores and get around by what seem to be regular automobiles. (Favourite barmy pulp notion; either that minefields would be effective in space, or the electrified filing cabinets “that yielded their information at the touch of a button.”) But it’s noticeable how so many of the SF elements come from the slans, while the humans seem to inhabit a more workaday world. So, when a spaceship first appears it’s about as much a rupture as if it had shown up in a regular adventure tale. And it’s a sign of slan.
But then the twist. When human hate is based on the belief slans had first waged war on them, like Jommy we assume this is all black propaganda. But later he, and us, are given reason to fear they fought against both the humans and the other slans. In this way van Vogt plays with reader expectations. And this game is based upon a tacit acceptance of the concept’s more dodgy notions, for its all stuff the slans could credibly have done. He takes the problem and manages to turn it inward, into a source of narrative tension.
Except that device ultimately only defers the problem until his final chapter. Cross makes his mission to kill global dictator Kier Gray. Who is discovered to also be a slan, at which point his murderous Machiavellianism is immediately relabelled Not a Problem. And the humans? Turns out they’ll all be dying out soon, a discontinued line now nature no longer has need of them. Everybody will live happily ever after, apart from those who don’t. But those who don’t, they don’t don’t really count.
Slan Boy, Slan Girl
The Wikipedia entry on SF fandom gives its first appearance as New York in 1929, commenting “almost all the members were adolescent boys.” And it’s unlikely that had changed much in the next decade.
But if fans normally were young, being young wasn’t a core part of their identity. They weren’t a youth cult. Their slogan is “fans are slans” not “kids are slans”. Their cult was just dominated by youth, those with enough excess energy to turn the mimeograph machines. And this is just the way it works in the book. There’s no equivalent to ‘breaking out’ here, slans are born as slans. The ones we meet just happen to be young, that’s all.
Further, teenagers didn’t erupt out of a box and leap into the audience of the Ed Sullivan Show, when Elvis first appeared in 1956. Even if that’s the way it’s shown on TV documentaries. Like all social phenomenon, their development was slow and – at least in the early stages – largely subterranean.
And essential to the development of the teenager was youth purchasing power. Teens needed to be buying, and buying different things to both children and adults, and identify themselves by those purchases. Which meant those things needed to be not just produced but marketed towards them. Inevitably, this had a more rapid growth in affluent America than elsewhere. (John Lennon, born the year this was written, once recalled that in his youth “America had teenagers and everywhere else just had people.”)
But don’t just take my word for it. In ’Teenage: The Creation of Youth’ (2007), Jon Savage dates common coinage of teenager to 1945, already earlier than commonly thought. But then goes on to establish a “pre-history”, dating back to 1875. And, as he considers himself, even this date may be too late, and we should really be looking back to the Romantics.
And pulp magazines provided useful for this. Like singles to LPs, they were more affordable than books. But at the same time, for the longest period our society assumed there to be some inherent virtue to the written word. There were of course moral panics about pulps. But a youth reading ‘trash’ might be on the path to reading proper books, whatever the perceived quality of what they were holding right now, while a youth listening to rock ‘n’ roll was not seen as possibly progressing to Mozart. This made it easier for teen lit as a genre to grow. And science fiction proved to be one of the branches it could grow along. Heinlein’s series of novels written specifically for young adults began in 1947. Later, but no much later.
We shouldn’t be too schematic, however. Take the tendriless slans. Humans alone would be ineffective antagonists, their minds blurting out their plans all over the place. The anti-slans become the necessary supervillains of the story, Lex Luthor and kryptonite in one package. But if slans are fans, what are they? They don’t fit the schema. They’re needed for the narrative, not the metaphor.
Star-crossed Slans
Let’s focus now on another word from the quote above, as well as teens the first SF group were predominantly boys. And even by 1948 ‘Astounding’ still had a female readership of under 7%.
In ’The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction’, Paul A Carter comments: “The old science fiction pulps have a reputation for gaudy cover paintings that featured attractive young women struggling in the clutches of bug-eyed monsters. Actually, for the first four or five years, the magazines’ covers all but ignored women as a possible subject.”
True, it was ’Astounding’, in December 1930 which “introduced what was to become science fiction’s version of the Eternal triangle: the man, the woman and the monster all sharing space on the cover more or less equally.” But when John W Campbell took over editorship in 1937, the gals got booted off again.
This shouldn’t be seen as non-sexist so much as pre-sexist. Had a babe in the improbable yet common combination of silver bikini and space helmet strode onto a cover, the young male readers would have probably shooed her off again to get a better view of that enticing circuitry. They were still effectively at the “girls spoil it” level of development.
Yet amid all of this we have a boy-meets-girl story, it’s impact emphasised by alternating chapters between Jommy and Kathleen. Was van Vogt being unusually progressive here?
Not really, no. This same alternation device delays their actual meeting till two-thirds through. So, more accurately, is this a boy-discovers-girls story. In fact, he literally discovers interplanetary travel before he does women his own age. Again, Jommy’s discovery not just of a girl but girls is again something which mirrors the reader’s world.
And boy-meets-girl is of course primarily a boy story. If ostensibly a two-hander, in practice more time is devoted to Jommy. And, while Kathleen’s no shrinking violet, most of her chapters are effectively oriented around her second-guessing what dictator Kier Gray might decide to do, decisions on which her life depends.
But meet they do.
“And she was a slan!
“And he was a slan!”
… is of course a science-fictionalised way of saying “and he was a boy, and she was a girl.” You may be glad to hear that things improve from that moment.
In fact the following sequence, which slides between one’s thoughts and the others without identifying which, is the book’s most serious attempt to think through what being a telepath might entail. And it’s managed by making a connection between telepathic communication and love.
“A queer, glad thought welled up from deep inside him. It was wonderful to have found another slan at last, such a gorgeously beautiful girl.
“And such a fine-looking young man.
“Was that his thought, or hers, he wondered sleepily?
“It was mine, Jommy.
“What a rich joy it was to be able to entwine your mind with another sympathetic brain so intimately that the two streams of thought seemed one, and question and answer and all discussion included instantly all the subtle overtones that the cold medium of words could never transmit.”
And, as at this point they’re still the only two slans in the story, it’s effectively the literary device of the lovers against the world, which seeks to pull them apart. The 1968 Book Club edition seems to focus this moment, demonstrated by their tendrilled locks becoming entwined.
But almost as soon as the star-crossed lovers meet van Vogt kills one of them off. And… no spoiler at all… it’s Kathleen. He later reveals her to have only been Marvel dead, but only at the very end. In other words ’Slan’ tiptoes up to the moment boy meets girl, then freeze-frames. Twice over.
But wait! Of course this novel doesn’t have just one girl character in it. That would be a ludicrously low number. No, in fact there’s two. While Kathleen is the effective blonde of the story, anti-slan Joanna Hillory is the brunette, as sharp-witted and distrustful as Kathleen is open and loving.
’Slan’ has a production history about as tangled as the plot, you can Google-image a myriad of covers from multiple editions. Numerous are those where the artist seems to have not encumbered his vision by referring to the contents of the book. (Chris Foss, as we’ve seen, was doubtless struck by inspiration to airbrush another great big spaceship!)
And those which do bother with such a thing focus heavily on Jommy. Sometimes throwing a generic-looking woman under his protection. The Book Club edition is rare not only for showing Kathleen, but giving her equal weight. And I could find one, precisely one, which featured what could be called a pin-up girl, the Dell edition of 1953. Who is given the cover all to herself. And I’m pretty sure we can assume this gun-totin’ brunette is Joanna.
At the same time as offering a narrow range of women characters (not even a redhead), this shows something of the appeal of the novel. Dell were an early pusher of cheap paperbacks, alongside pulp magazines and comics. As the two covers suggest, they were something of a world away from Book Club editions.
In brief, then, Jommy’s quest to find his destiny mirrors the proto-teens’ to find their identity, against what they perceive as a lesser but thwarting world. There’s no real way of knowing how much van Vogt intended his readers to see themselves in slans, and ultimately it doesn’t matter. The upshot is that they did. And invented a slogan to confirm it.
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