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Page 196
Actually, Jommy Cross is no more "alien" than Edmond Hall (in Stanley G. Weinbaum's The New Adam), and he is considerably less so than (Olaf Stapledon's) Odd John. He has two hearts, convenient enough should one of them conk out, and he has tendrils on his head, a feature genetically linked with a faculty of telepathy, but otherwise he is a humanand, at the beginning of the story, badly frightenedlittle boy. And that, as editor John Campbell was the first to point out, was the way Van Vogt solved the superman problem, using one of the oldest dodges in the booksimple reader identification.
The opening of Slan is a fast-paced chase scene, in which Jommy's mother is shot down by mutant-hunting policemen, and her nine-year-old son makes his escape on the rear of a bumper car in which sits the human police chief who is directing the hunt. The suspense is maintained with very little let up until the final instalment, which closes with a double surprise ending. It is a pulp plot, if you will, but in its day it was very good pulp; Slan was one of the earliest novel-length magazine stories to be reprinted in hard covers by a major commercial publisher, and a post-pulp generation in science fiction has continued to find it readable.
The basic literary and philosophical problemhow an ape is to tell a man's story, or a man a superman'sremains unsolved. However, as Van Vogt had shown, telepathy offered an easement of this dilemma. J. B. Rhine's ESP (extra-sensory perception) experiments at Duke University were quite well known to readers and writers of science fiction, and in the stories ESP could plausibly be described by analogy with sight, touch, and hearing. Thus the coming superman could be described as a conventional specimen of Homo sapiens, except for the ability to use ESP to read others' minds. Indeed, telepathy and ESP (or "psi," as it came to be called) need not be a foretaste of human evolution at all; they might be traits that humans unknowingly have always possessed.
Paul A. Carter, The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 15253
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Brian Stableford
One has to admire van Vogt. He doesn't write very well, but whereas common mortals with this affliction try to cope with it in the ordinary, tedious way (i.e. by trying to write better) van Vogt goes to extraordinary lengths to turn his incompetence into an advantage.

 
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