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Worlds Without End Blog

Reading the Pulps 9: “Co-Operate—Or Else!” by A. E. van Vogt Posted at 9:13 AM by James Wallace Harris

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“Co-Operate—Or Else!” originally appeared in the April 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. You can find this story in these anthologies, which include:

  • The Great SF Stories 4 (1942) edited by Asimov & Greenberg
  • Futures Past: The Best Short Fiction of A. E. van Vogt
  • The War Against the Rull by A. E. van Vogt (fix-up novel)

Warning: This column contains minor spoilers

 

“Co-Operate—Or Else!” begins with a bang and keeps exploding with action. Readers feel like they’ve been thrown into a climax of an adventure novel as Professor Jamieson hangs from an anti-gravity disc high above a jungle planet. (Think high tech parachute.) We learn later in the story that his spaceship has been destroyed by one violent alien creature, an ezwal, and Jamieson is the sole survivor from a crew of over hundred humans. The ezwal, a giant six-legged creature stands on top of the anti-gravity disc trying to kill Jamieson as they float towards the surface of a deadly planet. Later on another race of aliens, the Rull, try to kill both of them, thus the title. This is a terrific start to a science fiction adventure.

Every time I read a science fiction story about aliens I wonder if the author will present a new view of aliens. I’ve been consuming science fiction for sixty years and it’s been a long time since I encountered anything different. Have SF writers imagined all the possibilities? One of my retirement projects is reading all the great short stories in the science fiction genre. I’m systematically going through the annual best-of-the-year anthologies starting in 1939 as well as reading the outstanding retrospective anthologies that preserve the most distinctive science fiction stories from the last four hundred years.

I’ve been keeping a mental list of alien archetypes. It’s starting to feel like that list will be finite because of the constant reuse of the same old forms. In the next decade, I’ll be reading a couple thousand stories which should give me a good statistical example to see if I’m right.

In counting types of imagined aliens, I’m wondering if it should be a list of discrete examples or a list of spectrums. Should alien invaders be subcategorized into various kinds of invading beings or just a spectrum from ultimate nightmares to ultimate BAFFs? Should we create a database of alien taxonomies or just use a spectrum from completely incomprehensible to just like us? We could divide alien relationships into enemies, allies, traders, friends, rulers, subjects, equals, etc., or give a numerical score of 0 for no communication possible to 10 for aliens with whom we develop a telepathic symbiotic relationship.

Science fiction writers have a hard time portraying aliens without using human attributes. “The Martian Odyssey” was such an astounding story in 1934 because Stanley Weinbaum described aliens by their bizarre behaviors. Concurrent with Weinbaum in the 1930s Olaf Stapledon in Star Maker, presented most kinds of aliens we’d see in science fiction for decades to come.

Science fiction writers work hard to imagine what a first contact will reveal. Have they pre-imagined all the possibilities? I sometimes wonder if they have, but I’m going to assume when we actually encounter aliens they will be everything we never imagined. Of course, they might be a black swan, and we’ll hit our heads like a V-8 commercial and say, “That’s so obvious, why didn’t we ever think of that?”

Everyone knows we have mental receptors for recognizing characteristics of sexual attraction in other humans. What if we also have receptors for archetypes in fiction? And even specific ones for science fiction? And what if those archetypes are finite because of hardwired neural limitations?

I’m going to use “Co-Operate—Ore Else!” because it triggered several archetypes as I read. I’m learning from old science fiction why we psychologically respond to science fiction. I’m sure how we imagine aliens in science fiction is directly related to how we pre-imagined people from other cultures. Science fiction often connects deeply with our xenophobia. The trouble is science fiction writers need to imagine beings that aren’t like us, and that’s very hard to do. Look how long we’ve taken to recognize intelligence in other Earthly animals.

Great science fiction lies between the gosh-wow thrill of a Buck Rogers serial and the hard precise mathematically reality of the latest NASA probe. “Co-Operate–Or Else!” reminds me of so many science fiction stories that came later. Picture Captain Kirk in an Enemy Mine conflict on a Deathworld planet.

Back in the 1940s A. E. van Vogt was a superstar of science fiction pulp writers. Many claim The Golden Age of Science Fiction began in July 1939 with his story “The Black Destroyer.” And anyone who has read that story is reminded of the film Alien because of the monster who sneaks onto the ship. Plus, the captain and crew will remind them of Forbidden Planet and Star Trek. Back in 1966 when Star Trek premiered, I thought it original because I had only been reading science fiction for four years. But in the fifty plus years since, I keep discovering how it riffed off Golden Age science fiction. When I read even older science fiction, I discovered the Golden Age writers weren’t original either.

Science fiction writers keep repeating certain concepts while using the same writing techniques. Both the concepts and the techniques can be considered archetypes that go way back into our collective consciousness. Because science fiction works off our past, it has a very difficult time imagining beings we’ve never encountered.

Fantastic Action Adventure might be the first archetype we’re dealing with in this van Vogt story. I doubt Homer was the first to use it or George Lucas the last, yet elements of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Star Wars have striking similarities. Joseph Campbell has covered that thoroughly. Heroic conflict in strange lands with fantastic creatures can’t be claimed by science fiction but they are part of its evolutionary development.

Also common to all fiction is the Cliffhanger-Escape technique. Van Vogt throws his characters into a series of traps that promise certain death only to have them escape. The new Lost in Space often featured two or three cliffhangers with escapes in each episode. Combining fast action with repeated escapes was the standard plot structure of most pulp fiction stories. So, what archetypes of storytelling are unique to science fiction?

Two that van Vogt uses in this story effectively is the Not Like Us Alien and the Ultimate Threat Alien. The ezwal are an intelligent race of beings that don’t use technology. The unnamed telepathic ezwal in this story wants to kill humans for invading their planet, treating his species like food animals, and not recognizing their form of intelligence. The Rull are a species of intelligent being that use technology and travel from galaxy to galaxy destroying all intelligent species. They also eat humans which makes them our ultimate enemy. Cannibalism has always been the pinnacle of horror for describing human enemies. The ezwal are like us getting to talk to an octopus about why we eat them. Van Vogt creates the Rull by imagining a top-level predator who would eat us.

We learn later in the story that Professor Jamieson was bringing the ezwal to Earth to prove their species were intelligent so the federation of over 4,800 worlds with indigenous intelligent species would change their policy on Carson’s Planet, the homeworld of the ezwal. Just before the story began the ezwal escaped aboard ship and killed every human except Jamieson and destroyed the spaceship. “Co-Operate—Or Else!” is about Jamieson’s struggle to convince the ezwal to change his mind about humans. He also wants to convince the ezwal to combine forces, first to survive the deadly planet, and later to fight the Rull. He tells the ezwall his species must join their federation to war against the Rull or else all the species in our galaxy will be destroyed. The ezwal wants to ally his race with the Rull to destroy the humans, and Jamieson struggles to convince the ezwal the Rull have no allies. How many times have we seen this plot?

Nostalgia is an archetype used by all types of fiction. “Co-Operate—Or Else!” doesn’t use it directly, except that I imagine 1942 SF readers were reminded of Edgar Rice Burroughs planetary adventures, or earlier science fiction classics like “A Martian Odyssey.” It’s funny, but much of modern film/TV science fiction is strongly nostalgia driven. Fans can’t let go of Star Trek, Star Wars, or even Lost in Space. I suppose rebooting classic science fiction TV shows only reinforces my theory that there’s a limited number of science fictional archetypes that appeal to us.

If you analyze all the science fiction books, movies and television shows about alien contact, we could sort them into a set of categories. War of the Worlds is not the first alien invasion story, but probably the one most people think defined the archetype. It also illustrates xenophobic science fiction. Tweel in “The Martian Odyssey” is probably how most older SF  readers remember the E.T. category of a good alien. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers defines the ultimate threat alien to many readers. These are aliens we can kill without ethical consequences. That is until Orson Scott Card refined the category with Ender’s Game/Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide. The ezwal reminds me of the one-with-nature aliens in Avatar.

“Co-Operate—Or Else!” suggests another archetype – nonhuman intelligence. In most science fiction stories aliens are pretty much like us. Few authors work to convey truly alien aliens who perceive reality much differently from humans. The ezwal claims humans use of technology is a crutch. The ezwal are like dolphins, being intelligent without building things. The ezwal tells Jamieson that technology made them blind to their superior mental abilities. The ezwal use telepathy to survive and evolve. Does that make them superior aliens? Quite often in science fiction, we define superior beings by their ability to use psychic powers. But isn’t that the same thing we did with gods and God? We have a very limited ability to imagine beings more advanced than us.

I just finished the new 10-part Lost in Space on Netflix. The aliens in this show are intelligent robots. Are they evil beings out to exterminate humans, or are there reasons their violence against us could be ethical? Because fiction often wants pure enemies to destroy without moral qualms, science fiction often invents Borg, Bezerkers, Bugs, or Buggers to kill without empathy. But isn’t this like video games seeking kill thrills?

Van Vogt covers a lot of ground in “Co-Operate—Or Else!” Jamieson wants humans and ezwal to coexist. But he also claims there will be aliens who want to exterminate all other intelligent beings and they should be made extinct. Is that the true spectrum of how we imagine aliens — from those we should kill, to those we should befriend? In Roadside Picnic, Russian SF writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky imagined aliens we couldn’t comprehend. who were neither a threat nor potential friend, because we were completely inconsequential to them.

“Co-Operate—Or Else!” is a fairly early SF story. As I continue to read through the years of science fiction I expect to find a variety of aliens, yet I worry I won’t find anything I haven’t encountered before. I feel challenged to seek authors who can escape the event horizon of our collective imaginations. But is that possible? I plan to keep a spreadsheet of  SF archetypes, and maybe that will eventually describe the scope of science fiction.

 

 

JWH

3 Comments

Chuck Litka   |   03 May 2018 @ 11:59

A thought provoking essay. I may be wrong, but I suspect that, for several reasons, your spreadsheet of science fiction archetypes will not need all that many rows and columns. One big reason is that SF is genre fiction. Genre fiction can be described as fiction whose stories offer variations of a limited and well-defined set of reader expectations. Second, the stories you are currently reading were written by a small group of mostly men furiously cranking out these stories to pay their rent. They wrote the stories to sell to a handful of men; the editors of cheap magazines. The most famous and most published of these writers were the ones who knew the tastes and requirements of the most successful magazine editors, and wrote the type of stories these editors would most likely buy. The editors in turn, were buying stories that fit their magazine’s formula and a readership of mostly adolescent boys and young men. Having been one myself, I’d suggest that audience is neither very sophisticated nor the most demanding, save that the stories deliver their favorite SF tropes. I don’t see this process encouraging a great deal of diversity. And finally, by confining your reading to the stories selected for the “best of” collections, you are reading stories selected by the SF insiders – editors, writers and hardcore fans – which, I think, makes these collections something of an exercise in navel gazing, as they likely overlook stories too far from the accepted tropes of the day to have been widely read and remembered. Still, what do I know? I’ll know more when you deliver your report. Thanks for the essay, I enjoyed thinking about what you had to say.

PetrusOctavianus   |   03 May 2018 @ 15:19

I wrote a long comment on one of your first blog posts, but was met by “comments closed”.
Too bad.

Jim Harris   |   08 May 2018 @ 12:40

Chuck, I think my list will be rather limited too. Although I do have a three-volume set of books called The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy Themes, Works, and Wonders which lists hundreds.

Within the limits of the genre, there are endless variations. That gives the illusion that science fiction covers far more than it does. In recent decades science fiction keeps breaking out of its old forms with slipstream, alternate history, steampunk, etc., making it very hard to classify.

Petrus, the only time I can remember the comments being closed was for an essay I wrote at SF Signal. The editor did that, not me. I always love hearing what people have to say, even when they attack me.

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