James Nicoll Reviews

Jean Sutton and Jeff Sutton’s 1967 The Beyond is a stand-alone juvenile SF novel.

Starship Cosmic Wind snuck down to Engo’s surface, hoping to trade necessities for contraband. Captain Gordon Cromwell witnesses something he should not have seen. Worse, once back in civilization, he talks about what he has seen.

Enter the secret police.

Imperator Sol Golom and the High Council of Ten of the Federation believe that telepaths and mutants are threats to public safety. Any who are caught are exiled to Engo, the prison planet.

The three thousand worlds of the Federation enjoy freedom, peace, and wealth. Engo does not. It’s a harsh, inhospitable world.

Cromwell, while visiting Engo, saw a boy psychokinetically lift a stick and a dog. While telepathy is old hat, pk is so uncommon it’s not clear if previous reports of pk were factual or fantasies. Whether a pk confined to a prison world is really a threat is unclear, but Department 404’s Director Philip Wig believes that even the rumor is enough to justify murdering the boy Cromwell saw.

404 answers to Social Administration. SocAd Director Korl Smithson disagrees with Wig. It would be better, he thinks, to have some unbiased agent investigate first, if only because SocAd and 404 are not sure of the identity of the supposed pk. There are two boys of the correct age to be the one Cromwell saw: Johnny Sloan and David Gant. Alek Selby is dispatched on the Cosmic Wind to conduct the field investigation.

Selby finds Engo curiously deserted. Only Old Simon lives near the landing field. Otherwise, the village where any reasonable person would expect to find the unfortunates exiled to Engo is almost deserted. While the graveyard is ominously large, the number of exiles is larger still. Where is everyone?

Selby does encounter two locals: Lora Gant, David’s sister, and Johnny Sloan. David himself resides in the cemetery. If David was the pk, problem solved. However, Johnny Sloan is nothing like the boy his files claim he is. Also, Johnny has David’s faithful dog. Something odd is going on.

The attempt at a methodical investigation is aborted when Wig arrives with his own team of murderous fanatics. Wig is determined to find the pk. That the pk never existed or is dead are scenarios in which Wig has no interest. Wig will find the pk, if he has to mind-probe every exile.

Step one: show that David, considered the likely pk, is still alive. Result: abject failure, as David’s corpse is where it should be.

However, there is an unintended result of the survey: the other graves appear to be empty. Is the mutant underground smuggling people off-planet?

Readers then learn that the truth is far odder: a dying race of telepathic aliens can, with Johnny’s help, open a bridge between Engo and a planet in the Magellanic Clouds. That is where most the telepaths and mutants have fled. Only a few remain.

Johnny and Lara are willing to confide in Selby because they can sense a secret that Selby has heretofore concealed: Selby is himself a telepath. Even if basic decency did not compel him to side with the outcasts over the deranged 404 agents, self-interest would.

But is anyone on Engo safe from Wig?

~oOo~

Remember how often I praise Poul Anderson for world-building and his grasp of galactic scale? No praise for the Suttons, the authors of this book. Their version of orbital dynamics is best ignored. For instance, they claim that the distance between our galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds is so great that starships cannot bridge it. However, our galaxy is large enough that to travel across it would be the same distance as the distance between it and the Magellanic Clouds. Yet our galaxy is regarded as easily traversable¹.

Readers may wonder why telepaths and mutants in particular are deemed a threat. The justification is that telepaths are an inherent threat to privacy. The casualness with which the Federation mind-probes citizens suggests that privacy is not mission one. At the risk of seeming judgmental, it may be the jackbooted thugs who run 404 and the politicians who empower them are lying.

There may be other factors in play. The Federation is said to be trouble-free. That could be an issue for governments, because without crises to address, what are they for²? Hence the invention of a crisis (those pesky telepaths!) that is useful to government and law enforcement in particular.

But there’s a further problem for the world-building: witch hunts are useful to politicians seeking re-election, but there is little evidence the Federation is democratic. One might go so far as to say no evidence at all and lots that it is not. Words like ​“vote,” ​“election,” and ​“democracy” are nowhere to be seen. Sol Golom is the ​“Absolute Ruler of the High Council of Ten.”

I should also add that Federation citizens believed that ​“the Federation was all-powerful, all-benevolent. Its uncounted billions of citizens enjoyed a greater degree of security, freedom, and luxury than any people in the long and twisted history of man” — but maybe, just maybe they’re kidding themselves.

Perhaps this is all due to the fact that this book was written for kids. Perhaps democracy was deemed too esoteric a subject for school kids. More prudent to reserve such complicated ideas for graduate students at good schools.

Minor electoral issues aside, this is a novel that explores the consequences of apolitical cynicism, particularly the bit where citizens like Selby learn to look the other way rather than get drawn into the plight of the telepaths, even when they themselves are telepaths. Of course, in the end, there’s no blind neutrality, just the choice of whether to facilitate oppression or resist it. Not a bad moral, although one wonders when on Earth readers would ever get to apply in real life.

The Beyond stuck in my memory because it happened to be the first novel in which I encountered the idea of an old, dying race eager to mentor the young³. Otherwise, The Beyond is a standard juvenile that hits all the notes it needs to, without going much beyond the necessary. No particular surprise that The Beyond is out of print.

1: The Milky Way (our galaxy) is about 27 kiloparsecs (kpc) across. The Large Magellanic Cloud is about 50 kpc away from Sol and the Small Magellanic Cloud is about 63 kpc away. As Sol is only 8.3 kpc from the galactic centre, the distance between the outer Milky Way and the closest parts of the Clouds would be a bit closer.

On that subject, the Sutton’s Milky Way has a very clearly defined edge, where stellar density drops to nearly zero.

2: Yeah, yeah, maintaining infrastructure and political institutions, and keeping merchants from selling dimethylmercury as a food additive. None of that is sexy.

3: Also, I remembered this as the novel with huge stoats trained to hunt criminals. Which as it turns out is wrong. The animals are ​“groat hounds,” drooling alien dogs from Algol.

Speaking of Algol, this is a novel that sets habitable worlds around named stars readers might have heard of, rather than sunlike stars too dim to get names if they are further from Sol than ten parsecs.