The word “SLAN” reached out and made me pay attention. I picked up a copy of A.E. van Vogt’s last book at the library yesterday. It came as a surprise until I saw it was co-authored by Kevin J. Anderson and his widow. Its title is “Slan Hunter” – how bad could it be? Van Vogt was one of those prescient authors back in the first half of the 20th Century who created the literary genre, Science-Fiction. In 1940 he wrote SLAN and it became a classic. It is a story of Samuel S. Lann, a scientist who produced three children, a boy and two girls and we are led to guess they became the progenitors of a new race of humans. At this point, we should mention that Slan Hunter lays out the history of the world from the time of the first Slans to this last book that was only in outline and some writing by van Vogt. We find that there are humans, Original Slans (with tendrils) and tendril-less Slans.
What differentiates the Slan children of Dr. Lann from others is that they have this telepathic ability provided by tendrils mixed with the hairs on an individual’s hair. These new people also are very powerful physically and are, of course, geniuses. They slowly became known and feared by the regular human population who tried to exterminate them. Laws were enacted against them and killing them became legal and mandatory. The underlying belief was that because of their superiority, the Slans would one day rule the world and make regular humans their slaves. Another “mutation”, the tendril-less Slans, appeared. They became all powerful because they could not be visually distinguished from humans. There were a series of SLAN wars involving all three groups. The Original Slans with Tendrils seemed to disappear and those without the visible difference founded a civilization on Mars and in this book planned and executed an attack on Earth.
This last book was terrible. I began it last afternoon and finished it last night. I was disappointed but then, I was not a teen-ager in 1940 anymore when the first book appeared. It immediately tickled my imagination and I thought telepathy was a powerful attribute. Throughout this book were themes recalling the hoax about Jews, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
When you think about it, telepathy is much like cell phone-accessibility. I also was alerted to the persecution of humans by the tendril-less Slans and the humans persecuted the Slans. This was a cautionary tale then and is most instructive today when you could equate the major religious groups with the different peoples called human, SLANS and Tendril-less Slans. The simplistic resolution of the problem in the Slan future tries to lessen the differences between peoples. Nevertheless, nihilists and chauvinists from each group abound. Fear of science, which is around today in the political wars against abortion and stem cell research, was presaged by Van Vogt way back in 1940.