“Enchanted Village” by A. E. van Vogt has been extensively reprinted. It first appeared in the July 1950 issue of Other Worlds Science Fiction. I just read the story in Possible Worlds of Science Fiction edited by Groff Conklin. I first read it in The Great SF Stories 12 (1950) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg several years ago, although today, I had no memory of reading it before. I can’t tell if it’s a forgettable story, or I’m just forgetting everything.
Bill Jenner is the lone survivor of the first mission to Mars after his rocket crashes. Jenner crosses hundreds of miles of Martian desert on foot with just a bit of food and one bag of water. Jenner thinks he’s saved when he stumbles upon a deserted alien village.
The story is nicely told. Who doesn’t love a Robinson Crusoe type story? Isn’t that why The Martian by Andy Weir was a bestseller and blockbuster? “Enchanted Village” takes a left turn though, one that reminds me of Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. It’s amusing how A. E. van Vogt anticipated so many modern science fiction stories (Forbidden Planet, Star Trek, Alien, etc.).
Jenner eventually realizes the village is an organism or machine, even an intelligent one, and he must learn to communicate with it. The village produces food automatically in low troughs but is poison to Jenner. Through a series of observations Jenner discovers the village could make food for him, but he doesn’t have enough human food for it to model.
Now here is where you should leave this essay if you don’t want spoilers.
“Is it possible?” is the number one criterion I use to define and judge science fiction. All too often science fiction readers are given magic rather than honest speculation. There is nothing wrong with magic in a story if you enjoy fantasies, but the belief in magic is why our species never grows up. To me, fantasy is the fentanyl of fiction. It will make you feel great, but eventually, it will kill you.
The surprise ending of “Enchanted Village” is when Bill Jenner dies, he wakes up to discover he’s a kind of creature that can consume the nourishment the village provides. Bill Jenner is reborn. We are not told how. We are not told anything, but that Jenner now has sharp teeth and a snout allowing him to slurp up the alien food. I pictured the reborn Jenner looking like a lizard creature, suitable for the dry Martian desert.
The alien village is like Jesus, or other deities that tell us to accept them and be saved. Van Vogt’s use of the word enchanted should have warned us this was a story about magic. I don’t know if van Vogt was intentionally parodying religion, or he just needed a quick ending to sell a story. It’s interesting to compare “Enchanted Village” to “A Martian Odyssey” by Stanley G. Weinbaum. That story has strange aliens that accomplish bizarre feats, but I believe it’s within the realm of possibility, and honest science-fictional speculation.
Even with my criticism, I enjoyed the story. It’s the old fashion kind of pre-NASA science fiction I’ve always liked most. But then, science fiction was my substitute for religion. I wanted to believe in the fantasies that science fiction sold me. If we could only fly beyond the Earth, they would all come true. I never really wanted to grow up in Earthly reality but be reborn in outer space. I’ve always known that science fiction was just storytelling, but it did leave me with a kind of secret hope that I should have ignored. There’s a reason Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses, it’s because it makes us want to believe in magic. There’s a safe kind of making believing while turning pages, but if you let science fictional beliefs go beyond them, they can be dangerous.
If you think I’m being silly, read “Racked by Pain and Enraptured by a Right-Wing Miracle Cure” from yesterday’s New York Times. It’s quite moving, and I feel deserves some kind of journalism award. These people hope for a science fictional cure, ones I’ve seen in science fiction stories.
I’m getting worried that I’m becoming too critical of science fiction, and I should stop reviewing it. I don’t want to come across as a downer. I know science fiction should be judged just on its merit as a story, but I can’t help but evaluate it psychologically and philosophically as a kind of hope for the future. I assume my growing doubts and rejection of SF is because I’m getting older and thinking about how things have impacted me psychologically.
James Wallace Harris, 7/29/24
Classics of Science Fiction 
To each their own. I don’t mind if the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy are blurred. I’ve always thought of SF as a branch of fantastic literature.
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I had the same reaction to “Enchanted Village” on first reading that you did. That was in the second Signet edition of his collection DESTINATION: UNIVERSE!, issued in late 1958. I would have been ten years old when I got hold of it. I was annoyed because it was obviously a fairy tale. Much of van Vogt’s work was fairy tales–the majority of it, some would argue. One of the most prominent of these, which I imagine you have read, is “The Monster” a/k/a “Resurrection,” in which aliens arrive on Earth, find the ruins of human civilization, and revive one of them from very old remains; the resurrected human proceeds to destroy them through sheer psychic power. This is a less charming fairy tale than “Enchanted Village”–more of a malignant power fantasy. That’s why it appeared in ASTOUNDING while “Enchanted Village” did not (OTHER WORLDS if memory serves). But the stories’ relation to logic and reality is equally distant.
But the point is you’re not being too hard on the story. A good working definition of SF might be “fantasy that pretends to be possible”; neither of these stories pretends very hard so it has limited interest for those interested in what is or might be possible. It might be interesting to compare EV to another story with similar plot in broad outline: Chester S. Geier’s “Environment,” which I encountered in Conklin’s OMNIBUS OF SCIENCE FICTION. To my mind it tries a lot harder to be plausible in its presentation of incomprehensible super-science and resulting human transformation, and so is a bit more satisfying than EV. But it’s still about the pretense of possibility.
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For the record, the full Marx quote on religion is more expansive and forgiving: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”
As regards van Vogt’s ‘Enchanted Village,’ a writer today could come up with slightly more convincing guff about Martian nanotech rebuilding Bill Jenner. But, sure, it’s a fantasy using SF tropes.
As is all of van Vogt’s writing, really, including ‘The Monster,’ about which I am more forgiving that John B. Why? Because I think that’s one of van Vogt’s stories where he was operating at the height of his peculiar power, which was to write, yes, fantasy, but with wild imaginative leaps that used SF tropes in ways no one else would have thought of. ‘Recruiting Station’ is another instance of this.
Of course, much of the time van Vogt’s writing was merely illogical/inept/stupid. Still, every so often I read something of his and the imaginative power is striking. And I dislike most straight fantasy, too.
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I agree that “The Monster,” though I characterized it as a malignant power fantasy, is a powerful malignant power fantasy, by van Vogt at the height of his powers. If Trump could sit still long enough to read a short story, he would probably like it. (Maybe someone could make a film of it for him.) In fact I agree generally with your comments on van Vogt, though I’d cite “Asylum” rather than “Recruiting Station”–the last time I read that, as I recall, I thought parts of it made no sense at all.
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I mean, I’m a rationalist. Benford’s Timescape, or the stuff Bruce Sterling was writing in the 1990s, or J.G. Ballard’s High Rise even, is what I consider real SF, the sort of thing the field should be aspiring to. (Fat chance.)
And yet there’s something powerful there in van Vogt.
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That’s what mundane science fiction is about. No fantasy, everything must be grounded in realistic science.
As for me, I find the idea that we can realistically predict what’s going to happen centuries from now to be quite silly. Some critic whose name I don’t recall said “proponents of mundane SF hate the idea that someone, somewhere, might be having fun.”
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I finally had a chance to read Van Vogt’s story “Enchanted Village,” and I loved it. I don’t care about the implausibilities, or the fact that the story may be science fantasy (like The Martian Chronicles), as it were, rather than science fiction. I like this sort of thing just as much as straightforward hard SF.
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