The Mixed Men
Dust-jacket from the first edition.
AuthorA. E. van Vogt
Cover artistRic Binkley
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreScience fiction
PublisherGnome Press
Publication date
1952
Media typePrint (hardback)
Pages223

The Mixed Men is a 1952 fix-up science fiction novel by the Canadian-American writer A. E. van Vogt.[1]

The book is an early example of "fix-up" literature, the combination of several separately-published stories into a cohesive novel, a practice van Vogt not only pioneered but informally named in the early 50's.[2] Its title is borrowed from the 1945 Astounding SF short story "The Mixed Men," the third of five comprising the book, which was nominated for a Retro-Hugo Award in 1996.[3] The first three stories were originally published between the 1943 and 1945 in Astounding Science Fiction,[4] with the fix-up adding two new ones first published in a 5,000 copy printing in 1952 by Gnome Press; a 1955 Berkley Books edition changed the title to Mission to the Stars.[2]

Contents

  • "Concealment" (Astounding, September 1943) (adapted as the prologue of the book)
  • "Lost: Fifty Suns" (previously unpublished) (corresponding to chapters 1 through 7)
  • "The Storm" (Astounding, October 1943) (chapters 8 - 15)
  • "The Mixed Men" (Astounding, January 1945) (chapters 16 - 22)
  • "Is it True?" (previously unpublished) (chapter 23; not present in all editions)

Setting

The story is a typical Golden Age space opera, enlivened by van Vogt's trademark themes of metacognition, mind-control, and paranoid intrigue. It is set at an unspecified date in the far future, at a point when the Milky Way is ruled by a benevolent but centralizing Empire with a population of 300 quintillion. Unbeknownst to the Empire, the Lesser Magellanic Cloud is home to the Fifty Suns, a much-smaller civilization established by refugees from the Milky Way 15,000 years earlier. The Fifty Suns are populated by "robots," though van Vogt uses the term eccentrically; his "robots" are flesh-and-blood humans, descendants of people who had faced violent persecution after being accidentally altered by a matter-teleportation process invented by a man named Joseph M. Dell. They are divided into three groups: "Dellian robots" (who have extraordinary strength, intelligence and willpower, but no faculty for creative thought), "non-Dellian robots" (indistinguishable from normal humans), and a very small minority of hybrid "Mixed Men" (who have a single personality but a bicameral consciousness, with separate Dellian and non-Dellian minds and the ability to voluntarily switch between the two.)

Faster-than-light travel exists in the setting, but space is crisscrossed by "storms," violent interactions between matter and antimatter gas clouds, through which a ship cannot pass at superluminal velocity without being destroyed. These storms are monitored and charted by specialized navigators, who are known as "meteorologists." As superluminal ships have very large turning radii, travel through uncharted areas can only be done relatively slowly (at no more than two light-years per hour), to provide a margin of safety for course changes if a storm is detected ahead. In explored areas, travel can be much faster, at up to thirty light-years per hour, with a transit time to the Cloud of about nine months.

Stories

In "Concealment," the Empire has dispatched the enormous battleship Star Cluster - 4.5 kilometers long, with crew of thirty thousand, commanded by the young noblewoman the Lady Gloria Cecily Laurr - on a ten-year mission to explore the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. By chance, the Star Cluster comes across a "meteorological" station in an uninhabited system. Its sole occupant immediately broadcasts an alert to the Fifty Suns and blows it up. Grand Captain Laurr orders the station and its inhabitant "reconstituted," in order to learn the location of his homeworld and of the local meteorological conditions, which would enable the ship to move quickly around the Cloud. The resurrected station operator is a Mixed Man, who proves uncooperative; when Grand Captain Laurr puts herself at personal risk to draw information from him, he uses his bicameral intelligence to conceal his murderous intent until he has an opportunity to assassinate her, but fails and is killed a second time. The disappointed Grand Captain Laurr notes that the Empire will now have to methodically search the entire Cloud to discover one of the Fifty Suns, which will - in the absence of accurate meteorological data - take decades.

"Lost: Fifty Suns" begins on Lant, an outer world of the Fifty Suns. Captain Peter Maltby, a Mixed Man and military astrogator, is distrusted by his comrades, as his people had attempted a coup against the Fifty Suns a generation ago and been defeated; however, they not know that Maltby is secretly the hereditary leader of the Mixed Men. In a public broadcast, Grand Captain Laurr announces that she knows of the Fifty Suns, but does not know their location. She declares that - due to the risk of war - "Earth [will] not permit a separate sovereign state anywhere in the universe," and that the humans of the Cloud must reveal themselves and consent to be annexed, though she promises autonomy, democracy, and respect for human rights. Maltby learns that his rival among the Mixed Men, the firebrand Hunston, is considering either betraying the Fifty Suns to Earth in exchange for status or using their people's hypnotic powers to seize the Earth battleship for use against the Fifty Suns. Maltby is then summoned to a high-level government conference where he is asked to act as a go-between between the Fifty Suns and the Mixed Men, conveying an offer of amnesty and limited civil rights in exchange for solidarity against Earth.

Meanwhile, Grand Captain Laurr is troubled with dissension among her ranks, as much of her crew does not wish to spend additional years trying to find the hidden separatist worlds. She broadcasts an ultimatum to the Cloud: the Imperial battleship will begin destroying random planets with "cosmic bombs" until one the worlds of the Fifty Suns unmasks itself. The battleship's thirty sub-captains vote to override her authority and return to the Milky Way, but she forces a plebiscite of the crew, buying herself additional time. Maltby hijacks a Fifty Suns warship by hypnotizing its command crew and travels to a secret planet of the Mixed Men, where he succeeds in placing Hunston under arrest. Immediately following, his ship is captured by the Star Cluster, but is able to use his hypnotic powers to subvert some of the Imperial crew and escape, taking advantage of a brief opportunity to confront Laurr (from whom he is able to conceal his identity) in person. The Fifty Suns government decides to commit their entire fleet in an attempt to destroy the Earth battleship. Laurr, who had just lost the plebiscite and reluctantly changed course for home, is instead forced into pitched battle, which the vastly superior Star Cluster easily wins, capturing the entire opposing fleet without a shot fired. All the Fifty Suns' astro-navigators (including Maltby) voluntarily commit suicide, but the Grand Captain orders them all resurrected and quickly learns the locations of the Fifty Suns.

"The Storm" opens on Kaider III, a different outer world of the Fifty Suns, which the Star Cluster has discovered by pure chance (the immediately-preceding story not having been written yet.) It reintroduces Peter Maltby, who is now a lieutenant assigned to the Star Cluster by his capitulated world to guide it to the capital world of the Fifty Suns. His secret actual mission is to destroy the battleship by providing falsified navigation data, which will guide it at full speed into one of the matter/antimatter storms. Grand Captain Laurr takes a personal interest in Maltby; with the aid of the ship's psychologist, Lieutenant Neslor, she analyzes his mind, discovers he is lying, and issues an emergency deceleration order, but a moment too late: the Star Cluster crashes into a storm and is shattered into thousands of individual survival modules. The module containing the captain and Maltby lands on a uncivilized planet, where they are stuck for a while until the reconstituted Star Cluster returns to pick them up. Before the shipwreck, Maltby had been psychologically conditioned to love the Grand Captain in an attempt to get him to talk, and during their time stranded she comes to be impressed by him and decides to marry him.

"The Mixed Men" begins en route to Cassidor VII, the capital world of the Fifty Suns, where the Star Cluster is heading to accept the capitulation of the government. Maltby is secretly contacted by Hunston, and learns that the Mixed Men - a tiny, discriminated-against minority among the Dellian and non-Dellian population - have decided to stage a coup, as they wish to enhance their status within the Fifty Suns before the Empire formally annexes the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, freezing all existing social arrangements in place at the moment of annexation. Laurr intercepts the call and, trusting Maltby's judgement, lets him disembark on the world of Atmion IV, but also (out of a sense of duty) has herself conditioned out of love with him. Maltby finds the Mixed Men sharply divided, returns to Atmion, and waits; he learns that the coup of the Mixed Men coup against the Fifty Suns has succeeded, that they have decided on a policy of armed resistance against Earth, and - finally - that they have by subterfuge managed to capture the Star Cluster. Maltby resolves to rescue his wife, but when he travels to Cassidor and faces Hunston, he learns he has been deceived: the Mixed Men have not captured the Star Cluster, but they have stolen an advanced battleship from an Imperial shipyard, with which they plan to destroy the Star Cluster before launching an assault against Earth itself. Maltby overpowers Hunston and takes control of the stolen battleship, ending the crisis. In a brief epilogue, the council of captains holds a hearing and rules that Lady Laurr's conditioning must be reverted and her pre-existing love for her husband restored.

"Is it True?" is a chapter-length expansion of the epilogue; it describes all three groups of the Fifty Suns coming to terms with the offer of freedom and equality made by Earth. During the subsequent legal proceedings, Lady Laurr pleads with Maltby not to have the conditioning that makes her dislike him removed. Maltby replies that he is only seeking the undoing of an artificially-imposed mental state, after which she will be free to choose whether to stay married to him or not, but he is still troubled by her visible unhappiness. Once the council rules for Maltby, he privately points out to Lady Laurr that she could have had their marriage annulled at any time by virtue of infertility, as Mixed Men cannot (without special treatment) procreate with normal humans; the fact she did not do so can only mean that she subconsciously still wants to share her life with him. He asks the court to alter the ruling, to grant him 48 hours alone with Laurr on the uncharted world on which she originally fell in love with him, after which she would be free to choose whether to keep her conditioning.

Novel

Van Vogt made substantially greater changes in combining the original three stories into a single book-length narrative in 1952 than he did with most of his other fixups: seven new chapters (later published separately as the novella "Lost: Fifty Suns") were interpolated between "Concealment" and "The Storm," introducing Maltby (whose rank was increased to captain) much earlier and providing a significant amount of backstory regarding the origin of the Dellian "robots." Other changes included the capabilities of the Mixed Men, which were upgraded from mere hypnotism to telepathic though control; the population of the Fifty Suns was also reduced from thirty to sixteen billion, and (perhaps most momentously) the setting was moved from the Lesser to the Greater Magellanic Cloud.

Reception

The novel was negatively received, with a 1952 reviewer for the New York Times calling it a "bad parody" of science fiction and high adventure.[5] P. Schuyler Miller in Astounding Science Fiction (1952) found the novel to be "distinctly minor van Vogt" and that the protagonist "isn't very convincing."[6] Author Bob Shaw later cited that one of the stories in the novel sparked his interest in the science fiction genre, stating that the "reading of that first story changed the entire course of my life".[7]

References

  1. ↑ Westfahl, Gary (2009). Science Fiction and the Two Cultures. McFarland. pp. 133–134. ISBN 978-0786442973.
  2. 1 2 "A.E. van Vogt: The Weinberg Interview (1980)". Robert Weinberg. Retrieved 5 November 2012.
  3. ↑ "1946 Retro-Hugo Awards". Hugo Awards. 26 July 2007. Retrieved 5 November 2012.
  4. ↑ The Kirkus Service, Volume 2. Kirkus Service (Kirkus Reviews). 1948. p. 1762.
  5. ↑ J. F. M. (Aug 10, 1952). "The Magellanic Cloud: THE MIXED MEN. By A. E. Van Vogt. 223 pp. New York: Gnome Press. $2.75." New York Times. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2008), pg. BR15. Retrieved October 24, 2012
  6. ↑ "The Reference Library", Astounding Science Fiction, December 1952, pp.102
  7. ↑ Stableford, Brian (2007). Algebraic Fantasies and Realistic Romances: More Masters of Science Fiction. Borgo Press. pp. 25–26. ISBN 978-0893702830.

Further reading



This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.