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Wordful Wednesday: Slan

I’ve written lately a couple of times about my quest to read “real” science fiction, chiefly as propounded by Mr. Harlan Ellison.  He held up A.E. Van Vogt as an example of a “real” science fiction author.

So, I looked him up.  And I found one of his classic works, Slan, and gave it a read.  Unfortunately, it just didn’t really live up to the hype.

Oh, it started off well enough, I suppose, and the world of Slan was fascinating to some extent.  But the ending really left much to be desired.

The action follows two main characters for most of the book, and they’re both slans, which are basically humans with enhanced abilities.  Tougher, faster, stronger, longer-lived, and with the ability to read minds.

The mindreading ability comes from the distinctive tendrils that grow alongside normal human hair, making a slan pretty easy to spot.  And, as the book opens, being spotted means being bagged and tagged.  And the bag is a body bag.

Yep, it’s open season on slans, with the sponsorship of the government.  We get a vague idea of the heavy anti-slan propaganda used to beat the proles into a feeding frenzy.  If you tell normal humans that these freaks are experimenting on their children, it raises their ire somewhat.

In the first few pages, young Jommy Cross (nine years old, I believe) has to run from the police with his mother, who is soon caught and killed.  Jommy escapes only due to cooperating with a very unsavory character who looks to use him as a tool to gain wealth.

Jommy realizes he needs the protection of this loathesome person (“Granny,” and yes, she’s an old, nasty lady), so he goes along, thinking that he’ll mature in secret, then try to fulfill his mission later.

His mission?  Something about finding the other slans hidden throughout the world, bringing them the secrets Jommy’s father left to him to develop, and freeing the world of human tyranny (personified in the dictator Kier Gray).

Meanwhile, another slan named Kathleen is being held as a semi-free prisoner at the Palace, where Kier Gray rules.  And he jumps through hoop after hoop to protect her from the head of the anti-slan police.  But Kathleen is always seemingly just a few hours from being executed.  That would have to wear on a person, I’d think.

While Jommy is taking shelter with Granny, he discovers another class of slans:  The Tendriless Slans, who naturally can’t read minds.  Oh, and they’re not big fans of the mindreading ones.  So Jommy’s got a two-front war he knows he’ll have to fight eventually.

In an effective scene, Jommy dialogues with one of the non-tendriled types and finds out that much of the anti-slan propaganda might actually be true.  And he learns that slans were created through human experimentation by a certain Dr. Samuel Lann (S. Lann = “slan”).

The first half of the book builds nicely, until all of the sudden, Jommy discovers his father’s secret cache of scientific documents, understands them, and builds indestructible cars and spacecraft and creates world-beating weapons so he’s effectively a one-man-army.  Who, of course, would rather not fight.

It happens so quickly (in one very short chapter) that there’s no sense of Jommy having earned his newfound power.  Add to that the fact that he uses his mind-reading ability to mind-trick humans into helping him.  Which isn’t violence in a murdering-people kind of way, but it’s not exactly a Good Guy thing to do, taking away people’s free will.

The climax of the book was horribly disappointing, and it all ended with a short talky section in which an obvious twist was revealed (you may’ve guessed it already) and a less obvious but still stupid one was also revealed.  And a whole other section of the slan vs. tendriless slan conflict was just completely dropped.

And then it just ended.  I actually checked the library listing to make sure I wasn’t missing a few chapters.  It really just ended.  For all the whining I’ve done about how Michael Crichton never learned how to end a book, this one really took the cake.

Look, I’m okay with an ambiguous ending to a book.  Ender’s Game, one of my favorite books, has Ender heading off into space on a mission that could take him the rest of his life (though if you read Speaker for the Dead, you’ll see it doesn’t).  But first, Orson Scott Card wrapped up the main plotline!!!!!

I may have to find another Van Vogt title to see if this is a systemic problem.

It probably looks like I really hated the book, and that’s just not the case.  I liked Jommy Cross, and I’d have liked to read about him for a little longer.  I liked the way the plot was set up.  I just didn’t like the way it fell apart at the end.

BTW, this book was written over sixty years ago, and it showed in the way Van Vogt predicted atomic energy being used.  Not that he couldn’t be right about it, I suppose, but some of his ideas for technology were just interesting.  For instance, he had Jommy inventing weapons using “directed atomic energy” (no radiation, of course), but the humans couldn’t detect the fact that the tendriless slans had been launching spacecraft for decades.  Atomic-based weapons: yes.  Simple radar: no.

He also had Mars with oceans.  And habitable.  It’s an indicator of Van Vogt’s time, I suppose.

So now I’ve read one of the classic science fiction stories from the Golden Age of Sci-Fi, and I’m pretty much “meh” on it.

By the way, I’d definitely take recommendations on classic sci-fi I should read.  I’ve read H.G. Wells, and a bit of Asimov (not Foundation, though, and I recognize I need to).  Any other suggestions?