Astounding, Dec. 1949, Part 2

Robert A. Heinlein’s Gulf, Part II of II

As with my last installment of this read through of the December 1949 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, today’s newsletter features a review of only one story. I’m trying produce shorter and more readable newsletters. As such, some other stories from this issue of Astounding that I may like to get to will have to wait for a future missive. If a third installment comes, it will have to be next week or later. In my next post, I’ll be taking a break from this issue of Astounding and instead turning attention to what hitherto was the biggest gap in my science fiction reading—Dune!

Gulf, Part II of II by Robert A. Heinlein

Illustration by Rogers.

In my reading of Part I of this serial, my assessment was that the novella was a mediocre espionage story with science fiction window dressing. In that installment, the protagonist Abner-Gilead-Greene¹ is involved in spycraft to prevent a doomsday weapon from falling into the hands of an evil old woman called Mrs. Keithly. In the course of his mission, he meets Kettle Belly Baldwin, a prominent dealer in used helicopters who is also secretly a famous physicist named Dr. Hartley Baldwin. When the intelligence agency that employs Abner-Gilead-Greene flips on him, he is recruited by Kettle Belly to join a secret organization of “supermen.” According to the recap at the beginning of Part II, this is all taking place at a time in the future after a period of global Communist rule. I either missed that in the initial installment or it wasn’t stated explicitly.

My goal with these magazines is to read them cover to cover. I have a strident commitment to this that comes from a place of curiosity and a hypothesis that I will better understand science fiction if I read non-canonical stories alongside the classics. Without this strident commitment, I must confess I would not have bothered with Part II of this serial. I’m glad I don’t let whim dictate my relation to these magazines because it turns out Part II of Gulf constituted some interesting science fiction.

Once Abner-Gilead-Greene is submerged in the community of supermen (“Homo novis”²), the reader is treated to some truly wild speculation about human evolution, political science, the acquisition of knowledge, language, and the nature of thought. Unfortunately, all of this comes out awkwardly in unevenly written pure exposition or dialogue. Perhaps this serial would have been better cut in half or rewritten as an essay.

Naturally Campbellian psi powers exist in this story but they are not what distinguish Homo novis. Instead, since humans are distinguished by our ability to think, our evolutionary successors are distinguished by their ability to think even better. Because of his increased intellectual faculties, Homo novis is able to make use of advanced pedagogical heuristics to learn in short order many times what less advanced humans might learn in a lifetime. Discernible biological differences between man and superman have not yet developed. Actual speciation may occur through millennia of selective breeding among Homo novis.

According to the philosophy of Kettle Belly and his comrades, Homo novis’ increased capacities give him a responsibility to direct the affairs of his less evolved kin. In essence, they believe that democracy might be a nice idea, but that people are not wise enough to govern themselves in an era whose technological capabilities include causing the extinction of the species. This must be done in secret to avoid the resentful rabble turning against their Homo novis superiors. Moreover, Homo novis must not release his own advanced technology, which includes a miniature factory device that can reproduce any item more-or-less for free, until humanity’s economic life is no longer governed by “economic wolves.”³

Homo novis’ naturally superior intelligence is enhanced greatly through the use of certain pedagogical techniques and an artificially created language. The pedagogy amounts to learning to take in a whole statement or equation all at once as a “gestalt” rather than front to back, etc. Developing this technique is a prerequisite to learning the new language Speedtalk.

The story’s clunky exposition of Speedtalk bears some quotation:

[O]ne phonetic symbol was equivalent to an entire word in a “normal” language; one Speedtalk word was equal to an entire sentence. The language consequently was learned by letter units rather than by word units—but each word was spoken and listened to as a single structed gestalt.

But Speedtalk what not “short-hand” Basic English. “Normal” languages, having their roots in days of superstition and ignorance, have in them inherently and inescapably wrong structures of mistaken ideas about the universe. One can think logically in English only by extreme effort, care, so bad it is as a mental tool. For example, the verb “to be” in English has twenty-one distinct meaning, every single one of which is false-to-fact.

A symbolic structure, invented instead of accepted without question, can be made similar to the real-world to which it refers. Speedtalk did not contain the hidden errors of English. . . .For example, it did not contain the unreal distinction between nouns and verbs found in most languages. The world—the continuum known to science and including all human activity—does not contain “noun things” and “verb things”; it contains space-time events and relations between them.

(Emphasis and odd punctuation in the original.)

The narrative continues like this ad nauseum for a few more paragraph but you’ve gotten the gist by now. Speedtalk compresses information and, so says the omniscient narrator, better reflects reality than inherited human language. This is all well and good but Heinlein doesn’t try his hand at portraying how a Speedtalk gestalt might differ from an English sentence in real terms. When the supermen communicate with each other in their invented language, it’s rendered in pretty typical English sentences.

The story’s final proper science fiction element is that it posits two different, seemingly mutually exclusive theories of how thought works. This contradiction isn’t acknowledged, let alone resolved. The first is that thought is pure language, i.e., humans have no thoughts that are not expressible in words. In this framework, it’s easy to see why Speedtalk’s true-to-reality nature is important. Heinlein could’ve left it there but he also has a superman with well-developed E.S.P. put forward that thought is composed of mysterious quantum particles called “psychons.”

Neglected in this review are Abner-Gilead-Greene’s further adventures as a secret agent and his romance with a Homo Novis woman named Gail. A weakness of Gulf is that most of what is interesting in the second half of the serial amounts to a long info dump and the plot escalates from nonexistent to a sudden and unsuccessful crescendo. This attempt amounts to padding a lot of love and death into the story right at the end. I would’ve rather read more about psychons.

1. These are all three of Heinlein’s protagonist’s aliases strung together; the character is usually referred to by some alternate combination of hyphenated aliases without a consistent selection or ordering among them or simply as “Joe.”

2. This Latin name is not italicized in the body of the story. I’ve chosen to preserve the original lack of emphasis.

3. I’m not a Heinlein scholar and have no hope of becoming one. Still I find this line about “economic wolves” interesting for tracking Heinlein’s ideological development. Gulf paints itself in anti-Communist colors that are mostly superfluous. It’s published around a decade and a half after Heinlein’s involvement in Upton Sinclair’s socialist End Poverty in California movement. This places it also around a decade and a half before the right-libertarian classic The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Walt Whitman wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”