"Dormant" (1948) by A. E. van Vogt

TITLE: "Dormant" (1948) by A. E. van Vogt
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Short Story
SOURCE: BEST SCIENCE-FICTION STORIES edited by Michael Stapleton (Hardcover, Hamlyn, 1977, ISBN: 0-600-38243-5, 750pp)
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: Startling Stories, November 1948

I was rummaging in the vaults a while ago, and I came upon an old anthology that I haven't read in years. Well, me being me, I couldn't resist having a browse through it, and looking at the extensive contents listing of excellent stories, the memories started flooding back.

I fondly remember this particular story as one of my favourites from that anthology. A. E. van Vogt's short story "Dormant" was one of those Golden Age of Science Fiction classics first published in the November 1948 edition of Startling Stories, and the story isn't one of those far-future, outer space tales, but is actually pretty much in a contemporary setting, 1948, the same year as the actual publication date of the story. Being an historian (I was actually studying history at school at the time I read it), I've always really liked the strong post-World War II setting of this tale, with the US destroyer Coulson and it's crew doing mop up operations on a remote pacific island, finding hidden caches of fuel and other goodies left behind by the Japanese.

But they also find a lot more than just Japanese leftovers. There's the perplexing mystery of a gigantic rock, weighing millions of tons, which seems to be able to move around the island at will. A rock with a surface temperature of many hundreds of degrees, and which hurls out seemingly random destructive radioactive blasts. A giant rock which is not actually a rock, but an ancient, sentient robot bomb left on Earth countless millions of years ago by some alien race in a long-forgotten interstellar war.

The sections of the story from the POV of the bomb are among my favourites. The bomb, which actually has a name (it calls itself Iilah), has been dormant for countless aeons, but has recently been reawakened by the radiation from the atomic bomb tests on Bikini Atoll in 1946. It has got only low-level life functions back, and is suffering from amnesia. It cannot see the water, air, and even the humans around it. It's simply totally unaware of their existence. All it can see are the ships and the planes, which it takes for strange lifeforms, flying around in the "sky". And it's the bomb's attempts to communicate with these "lifeforms", to try find out where it can get more sources of atomic energy to revive it, which unwittingly causes so much destruction and kills so many people.

And of course the humans, predictable as ever, just HAVE to start shooting at the damned thing. The giant "rock" fights back, kicking their asses and destroying the Coulson, much of the other equipment, and unknowingly snuffing out dozens of lives of which it is totally unaware. The remainder of the taskforce is ordered off the island, and an atomic bomb dropped, which is, ironically, exactly what Iilah needs. The flood of energy totally reinvigorates it, and it remembers its mission. It IS a robot bomb, after all, so it promptly follows orders, explodes and knocks Earth out of its orbit and into the sun. And so the world ends in 1948. :)

"Dormant" must be one of the first A. E. van Vogt short stories that I read (maybe even the first) back in the day, although I'd definitely read a few of his novels before that point. It was during this timeframe that I also came across three other van Vogt short stories - "The Monster", "Vault of the Beast" and "Black Destroyer" - in anthologies that I'd taken out from the local library, but I'm pretty sure that I read "Dormant" before any of the others. Those four stories became huge favourites of mine during my mid-to-late-teens, and kick-started my obsession for hunting down collections of van Vogt short fiction.

"Dormant" (indeed all four of these stories) has stuck in my mind these past forty years, and is one of those early gems that cemented my newly-acquired obsession as a hardcore SF fan. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for this one.

Anyone who might want to read this story, and is finding it hard to get a copy of this anthology, can also find the story in a couple of van Vogt's short story collections, notably Destination: Universe! and Transfinite: The Essential A.E. van Vogt.

CLASSIC SCIENCE FICTION - THE FIRST GOLDEN AGE edited by Terry Carr

Here is yet another SF anthology edited by one of my favourite SF anthologists, Terry Carr. It's a nice, beefy one this time, at 445 pages, with twelve stories, plus an introduction by Carr.

Do NOT skip the Introduction. It is a fascinating, lengthy, detailed 17-page thesis by Carr, which serves as an excellent historical background to the First Golden Age of Science Fiction. This one is an absolute must for anyone, like myself, who is as much a student of the history of science fiction as I am a fan of the literature itself.

TITLE: CLASSIC SCIENCE FICTION - THE FIRST GOLDEN AGE
EDITED BY: Terry Carr
CATEGORY: Short Fiction
SUB-CATEGORY: Anthology
PUBLISHER: Robson Books Ltd., London, 1979
FORMAT: Hardback, 1st Edition, 445 pages
ISBN: 0-86051-070-0

CONTENTS:

• Introduction by Terry Carr
• "The Smallest God" by Lester del Rey (Astounding Science Fiction, January 1940)
• "Into the Darkness" by Ross Rocklynne (Astonishing Stories, June 1940)
• "Vault of the Beast" by A. E. van Vogt (Astounding Science Fiction, August 1940)
• "The Mechanical Mice" by Eric Frank Russell (Astounding Science Fiction, January 1941)
• "-And He Built a Crooked House-" by Robert A Heinlein (Astounding Science Fiction, February 1941)
• "Microcosmic God" by Theodore Sturgeon (Astounding Science Fiction, April 1941)
• "Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov (Astounding Science Fiction, September 1941)
• "By His Bootstraps" by Robert A. Heinlein (Astounding Science Fiction, October 1941)
• "Child of the Green Light" by Leigh Brackett (Super Science Stories, February 1942)
• "Victory Unintentional" by Isaac Asimov (Super Science Stories, August 1942)
• "The Twonky" by Henry Kuttner (Astounding Science Fiction, September 1942)
• "Storm Warning" by Donald A. Wollheim (Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, October 1942)

Intriguingly, and in addition to the fantastic main Introduction, each of the twelve stories has its own multi-page introduction, each of which which gives detailed background information on the author and the story itself. How I wish that every anthology would do this. And then there are the twelve stories themselves. And what stories they are.

This anthology contains some of the greatest short stories from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, and I'm familiar with most, but not all, of them, as they've appeared in other anthologies or single-author collections. Just looking at the roll-call of authors, it's like a who's-who of the biggest SF names from that era. Of course, eight of the twelve stories are from Astounding Science Fiction, which is unsurprising, as it was by far the biggest SF magazine of the Golden Age.

We have two of the best of the early stories written by Isaac Asimov, as well as one of the best and probably the most famous story written by Henry Kuttner, and likewise absolute gems by Eric Frank Russell, Theodore Sturgeon and Lester del Rey. I've always been a huge fan of Leigh Brackett, and her story "Child of the Green Light" is also a cracker. Even the two stories that I was totally unfamiliar with, "Storm Warning" by Donald A. Wollheim and "Into the Darkness" by Ross Rocklynne, are excellent stories.

A. E. van Vogt's story "Vault of the Beast" easily ranks up there alongside "Black Destroyer", "The Monster" and "Dormant", as one of my all-time favourite van Vogt short tales. And the two Robert A. Heinlein short stories, "By His Bootstraps" and "-And He Built a Crooked House-", well, what superlatives can I heap upon them other than to say that they are two of the greatest SF short stories ever written?

As this is an older book, and has been out of print for a number of years, I guess anyone looking for a copy will have to haunt the second-hand/used books stores. And if you spot one, snap it up right away! This is a fantastic anthology of Golden Age SF short fiction. I enjoyed every single story, which is something that I rarely say about most anthologies, as there are usually at least one or two stories which aren't as good as the rest.

Terry Carr very rarely disappointed with his anthologies, and with this one, he came up with the goods yet again. This is an absolute gem of an anthology, and I'd recommend it without any hesitation to all fans of Golden Age SF.

A Couple of Classic Alternate History Stories

[I]'ve recently come upon an unusual (but nice) little paperback anthology of alternate history stories, OTHER EARTHS edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake. I'll talk more about that one at a later date.

Strangely enough (well, maybe not so much for me), finding this anthology started me on a major alternate history trip, sending me off on an expedition to dig out of the vaults some of the best examples of classic AH in my admittedly large collection of SF books. I've just finished re-reading two of my favourite classic alternate histories, and these two stories are a perfect example of just how good AH can be.

The first is the magnificent novelette, He Walked Around the Horses, written by one of my favourite-ever SF authors, H. Beam Piper. The story was first published in the April 1948 edition of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, but I first read it back in 1982-1983, in the anthology THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION, edited by Kingsley Amis, which is also where I've just finished re-reading it. It is set during the Napoleonic War, when a British ambassador to her European allies takes a step sideways into an alternate reality where Napoleon never made it big, there is no war, and the political and military alliances in Europe are quite different from those in "our" world. This world's alternate version of the protagonist leads a different life altogether, and, understandably, the authorities in this alternate reality consider "our" protagonist to be some crazy guy, so he's locked up.

The second story is the excellent novella The Summer Isles, written by one of the best SF authors in the UK, Iain R. MacLeod. I first read this little gem back in the October/November 1998 edition of ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, and I've just re-read it in MacLeod's excellent short story collection, BREATHMOSS AND OTHER EXHALATIONS (2004). This is a sensitive tale of a forbidden homosexual relationship, set against a background of fear, paranoia and deadly political skullduggery. It takes place in an alternate 1930s Britain, in a reality in which the Allies lost in World War I, and the Germans were obviously victorious. In this reality, it is, ironically, Britain which has become the repressed fascist dictatorship, and not Germany.

Both stories are exquisitely written, and examples of the best of the genre. They're the sort of story you can show to even mainstream literary snobs without fear of them ridiculing you, and they are also the type of story that the pretentious "mainstream literary wannabies" within SF itself can't even begin to criticize. I don't believe in any of the elitist bullshit that these people hold to - a good story is a good story, irrespective of genre. And keep in mind that SF isn't merely a "genre", it's a "state of mind", a meta-genre, encompassing many other sub-genres. Alternate histories represent one of the many "respectable" faces of SF, a sub-genre with (in the vast majority of cases) no spaceships, laser guns or BEMs, just mankind and the "human condition", and a lot of history, mixed with a big dollop of "What If?" that really gets the speculation flowing. And one of the main fundamental pillars of SF has always been "What If?"

In my "mundane"/non-SF persona, I'm an historian. I've always been fascinated by history, its mechanics, and its possibilities, its futures. And I've also always loved SF. So mixing the two in the shape of alternate histories was always going to be a winner in my book. The two stories above are among my favourites, but there are so many other great alternate histories out there that I can't even begin to list them all. Go track them down, take your pick of a few of the recommended ones, and read some of the best stories that SF has to offer.