Who Goes There?

It’s not unusual for authors who’ve made it to see their popularity dwindle within their lifetimes, but A. E. van Vogt’s fall from grace is a little weirder and more complicated than average. In the ’40s he was one of the most popular writerss in magazine SFF, easily rivaling Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov—until, almost overnight, he wasn’t. Van Vogt debuted in 1939 and wrote a mile a minute until 1951, whereupon he gave up writing fiction from whole cloth in favor of taking the many stories he had already written and stitching them into fix-up novels. This change in work ethic happened, at least in part, because van Vogt got really busy shilling a new pseudoscience that you may have heard of: Dianetics. While he didn’t join the Church of Scientology, van Vogt shilled Dianetics for little over a decade, and by the time he gave up that business and got back to writing in earnest he had lost his prestige—although he still had his fans.

On top of the Dianetics business, van Vogt saw some pretty biting criticism during his heyday, most famously from a young Damon Knight who tore apart the serial version of The World of Null-A. When van Vogt returned in the ’60s his work was not up to the standard of prior material, such that it became easy to assume that van Vogt was never good. It’s a shame, because van Vogt’s best stories are pretty special, with nuggets like “Far Centaurus,” “Enchanted Village,” “The Weapon Shop,” “The Rull,” “The Great Judge,” and of course the stories making up The Voyage of the Space Beagle being well worth reading today. The Chronicler, also reprinted as Siege of the Unseen, does not look to be one of van Vogt’s finer moments, although it’s still far too strange an endeavor to be considered dull.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in the October and November 1946 issues of Astounding Science Fiction, which can be found here and here. The Chronicler has only been reprinted a few times in English and you’re more likely to find it as Siege of the Unseen. It was first reprinted under its original title as part of Five Science Fiction Novels (ed. Martin Greenberg) and then as one half of an Ace Double in 1959—the other half being John Brunner’s The World Swappers. It has not seen print since the ’70s (in English, that is, since apparently the French love van Vogt) and there may be a reason for that.

Enhancing Image

Normally I would try to do a point-by-point synopsis, but the plot for The Chronicler is nigh undiscernible and so for the sake of my own sanity I’ll be instead focusing on scenes and ideas that caught my attention—for better or worse. A common criticism of van Vogt is that his stories make no sense, and while this is sometimes not the case (the aforementioned “Enchanted Village” and “The Great Judge” have straightforward narratives), it is very much true here. This thing makes no sense. There are some pretty memorable scenes and if van Vogt has a major talent it’s for crafting moments like these, but stringing them together is a different story.

So…

Michael Slade is co-head of a brokerage firm who survives a car accident with his wife at the beginning of the story. He gets cut pretty badly on his forehead, but the injury is nothing compared to what lies under the skin: a third eyeball, lidless but otherwise functional, which hitherto had been dormant since it couldn’t see anything. It’s suggested that the third eye has to do with the pineal gland, which if you’ve read some really old-timey SF (for example, Lovecraft’s “From Beyond”) then you might be familiar with it as a trope. We’re literally two pages in and we’re already being introduced to some Cronenberg-esque body horror and pseudoscience that would’ve been old hat even in 1946. Slade always knew his forehead was soft (something that really should’ve concerned him more than it does), but he didn’t know he had a dormant third eye hiding in there.

But wait, there’s more!

Slade, whose vision in his two normal eyes is poor and in his third eye very bad, goes to see an eye doctor who suggests an alternative method for restoring his eyesight. The doctor is a quack, although he’s framed as perfectly legit in-story, and I’m bringing this up being he employs an actual eye correction method that van Vogt may or may not have also bought into: the Bates method. Named after William Horatio Bates, this is a “theory” that proposes that poor eyesight comes not from something wrong with the eye itself, but with how the brain functions. The idea is that someone will basically go through therapy and relax their mental state such that they’re able to see more clearly, foregoing surgery and prescription glasses. I shouldn’t have to tell you this, but the Bates method has long since been discredited and it was likely already considered bunk by most eye doctors even when van Vogt was writing this story.

Using a method that doesn’t work, Slade is able to not only to improve his eyesight but see things with his third eye that he normally should not be able to, even being seemingly transported to a different location from where he was a second ago. It’s during one of these sessions that Slade finds himelf by a stream, in a place he’s never been before, and he sees a woman who looks like she’s about go skinny dipping, as “except for a rather ornamental silvery belt around her waist, she had no clothes on.” This is an unexpectedly titillating scene, given it was printed in Astounding, but more importantly, Slade and this woman (let’s call her Leear) have a short interaction. The thing that really catches Slade’s attention, aside from the view, is that Leear also has a third eye. What could this mean?

Before I get into what will be the main setting, let’s talk about pseudoscience, as it’s a word that’s come up a few times now. Pseudoscience, which is really an umbrella term that can cover anything from ESP to UFOs to alternatives to Darwinian evolution, has historically played a major part in the conceiving of science fiction—which creates a problem. For decades SF fans and writers have prided themselves on keeping up to date with the latest scientific findings, but if you check the facts you’ll find this rarely the case; and even then, science goes through far more changes than myth. Some writers intentionally fall back on speculations that held water decades ago but have since then been disproved, writing what we’d call recursive SF to achieve a retrograde effect. Nobody with sense would seriously object to someone writing a story set on a swampy Venus in 2023.

The problem is that outdated science is not quite the same thing as pseudoscience—i.e., as fake science, i.e., once more, as science that, when asked for evidence and consistency, fails the test. ESP is fake science. Dianetics is fake science. The Dean Drive is fake science. The Bates method is fake science. Despite John W. Campbell’s proclaiming that Astounding (and later Analog) would print fiction based in real science (or at least credible speculation), the magazine would oftentimes print fiction that takes advantages of fake science, and it would become such a habit that it would persist even after Campbell’s death. One of the differences between Heinlein and van Vogt is that while Heinlein was masterful at incorporating real (for the time) science, van Vogt was equally masterful at incorporating fake science. The result is that van Vogt’s premises are often patently absurd, as is the case with The Chronicler.

One more thing to bring up before we get to “the other plane,” which is that this story swaps back and forth between in-the-moment third-person narration and a series of recorded interviews with different characters that presumably happen after the story ends; saying “presumably” because Slade has apparently died. According to Slade’s wife (or ex-wife, as she leaves him during the eye therapy ordeal), the quack doctor, and a few other people, Slade ATE SHIT, and yet in the third-person half of the narrative he is very much alive. This is an unusual method of creating intrigue and I have to give van Vogt kudos for trying, but I have to think it would also be more effective if I could understand what was happening.

Upon returning to his old family estate outside the city where he normally lives, Slade follows through on a deal made with Leear—that he is to meet her on this farm at midnight on any given day. It works, and through means which not even the omniscient narrator is able to explain, Slade gets spirited away to “the other plane”—a place not so much on a different planet as in another dimension existing in tandem with Earth, thanks to his third eye. It’s here that we’re moved into the city of Naze, a massive shithole which is perpetually under siege and which is host to thousands of… and this is really the best way I can put it… non-supernatural vampires. People who have a bit of an addiction to human blood, much like how we might have an addiction to cocaine or jerking off. The city is home to savages while Leear and her people are civilized folks who live in caves because their spaceship has been put out of commission. Nice little reversal there, huh? The civilized live like barbarians while the barbarians live in the city.

Slade jumps back and forth a few times between Naze and Earth, but mostly he sticks to Naze, and perhaps too quickly he comes to the conclusion that he’s likely to stay here in spite of everything. Slade’s mindsert makes sense to a degree, since he is a three-eyed freak who’s now getting divorced and whose friends won’t return his calls. Something that keps popping into my head while reading this installment, aside from “WHAT THE FUCK’S GOING ON?,” is the possibility that van Vogt had been rereading the John Carter novels at the time. The Chronicler, in some ways, certainly echoes A Princess of Mars. While John Carter astral projects himself to Barsoom (itself a hard pill to swallow nowadays), Slade has more esoteric ways of shifting between the dimensions. Romance also comes up unusually quickly, although I’m not sure if it’s weirder to crush on a female alien who mostly look human but lays eggs or a three-eyed crackhead vampire.

There Be Spoilers Here

It’s hard to spoil something you barely comprehend.

Let me put it another way. This installment of The Chronicler is pretty short, being only thirty pages. Looking at both installments I would say it comes to maybe about 30,000 words—honestly short enough to have been published in one piece as a novella, except there was probably an issue with scheduling and Campbell needed a serial. Despite being objectively short, and despite not being boring (it has other issues, but not that one), reading it can feel like an endurance test. The worst part is that van Vogt crams so much plot development in here, and so little of it connects, that you’d be tempted to read the recap section of the second installment right away just to see what you might’ve missed. Like I said, while there are scenes that work (I’m thinking of a very odd bit wherein Slade considers hitting on Amor, a city dweller and ally to Leear, only for her to ask him if she could have a little taste of his blood), the dots do not connect.

I have many questions and I suspect only some of them will be answered in the next installment. Van Vogt has this thing for flashbanging the reader with an enigma or unexplained revelation at the last minute, which sometimes works, but not so much here.

A Step Farther Out

See you next time.