A. E. van Vogt

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Alfred Elton van Vogt (April 26, 1912 – January 26, 2000) was a Canadian-born science fiction author who was one of the most prolific, yet complex, writers of the mid-twentieth century "Golden Age" of the genre. Many fans of that era would have named van Vogt, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov as the three greatest science fiction writers.

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[edit] Science Fiction's Golden Age

Born in Edenburg, Manitoba, Canada, van Vogt was one of the most popular and highly esteemed science fiction writers of the 1940s, during what is frequently referred to as the genre's Golden Age. After starting his writing career by writing for 'true confession' style pulp magazines like True Story, van Vogt decided to switch to writing something he enjoyed, science fiction.

Van Vogt's first published SF story, "Black Destroyer" (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939), was inspired by The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. The story depicted a fierce, carnivorous alien stalking the crew of an exploration spaceship. It was the cover story of this issue of Astounding, the issue often described as having ushered in the Golden Age of science fiction[1]. The story became an instant classic and eventually served as the inspiration for a number of science fiction movies. In 1950 it was combined with "War of Nerves" (1950), "Discord in Scarlet" (1939) and "M33 in Andromeda" (1943) to form the novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950).

In 1941 van Vogt decided to become a full time writer, quitting his job at the Canadian Department of National Defence. Extremely prolific for a few years, van Vogt wrote a large number of short stories. In the 1950s, many of them were retrospectively patched together into novels, or "fixups" as he called them, a term which entered the vocabulary of science fiction criticism. Sometimes this was successful (The War against the Rull) while other times the disparate stories thrown together made for a less coherent plot (Quest for the Future).

One of van Vogt's best-known novels of this period is Slan, which was originally serialised in Astounding Science Fiction (September - December 1940). Using what became one of van Vogt's recurring themes, it told the story of a 9-year-old superman living in a world in which his kind are slain by Homo sapiens.

[edit] Post-war philosophy

The April 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, containing the first appearance of The Wizard of Linn; which eventually appeared in book form from Ace Books in 1962.
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The April 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, containing the first appearance of The Wizard of Linn; which eventually appeared in book form from Ace Books in 1962.

In 1944, van Vogt moved to Hollywood, California, where his writing took on new dimensions after World War II. Van Vogt was always interested in the idea of all-encompassing systems of knowledge (akin to modern meta-systems), the characters in his very first story used a system called 'Nexialism' to analyze the alien's behaviour, and he became interested in the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski. He was also profoundly affected by revelations of totalitarian police states that emerged after World War II. He wrote a mainstream novel that was set in Communist China, The Violent Man (1962); he said that to research this book he had read 100 books about China.

He subsequently wrote three novels merging these overarching themes, The World of Null-A and The Pawns of Null-A in the late 1940s, and Null-A Three in the early 1980s. Null-A, or non-Aristotelian logic, refers to the capacity for, and practice of, using intuitive, inductive reasoning (compare fuzzy logic), rather than reflexive, or conditioned, deductive logic.

Van Vogt systematized his writing method, using scenes of 800 words or so where a new complication was added or something resolved. Several of his stories hinge upon temporal conundrums, a favorite theme. He stated that he acquired many of his writing techniques from books on writing by Thomas Uzzell.

He said many of his ideas came from dreams, and indeed his stories at times had the incoherence of dreams, but at their best, as in the science fantasy novel The Book of Ptath, his works had all the vision and power a dream can impart. Throughout his writing life he arranged to be awakened every 90 minutes during his sleep period so he could write down his dreams.

In the 1950s, van Vogt briefly became involved in L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. Van Vogt operated a storefront, for the secular precursor to Hubbard's Scientology sect, in the Los Angeles area for a time, before winding up at odds with Hubbard and his methods. His writing more or less stopped for some years, a period in which he bitterly claimed to have been harassed and intimidated by Hubbard's followers. In this period he was limited to collecting old short stories to form notable fixups like: The Mixed Men (1952), The War Against the Rull (1959), The Beast (1963) and the two novels of the "Linn" cyle, which were inspired (like Asimov's Foundation series) by the fall of the Roman Empire. He resumed writing again in the 1960s, mainly through Frederik Pohl's invitation, while remaining in Hollywood with his second wife, Lydia Bereginsky, who cared for him through his declining years. In this later period, his novels were conceived and written as unitary works. On January 26, 2000, van Vogt died in Los Angeles, USA from Alzheimer's disease.

[edit] Recognition

In 1946, van Vogt and his first wife, Edna Mayne Hull, were co-Guests of Honor at the fourth World Science Fiction Convention.

In 1980, van Vogt received a "Casper Award" (precursor to the Canadian Aurora Awards) for Lifetime Achievement. In 1995 he was awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. In 1996, van Vogt was recognized on two occasions: the World Science Fiction Convention presented him with a Special Award for six decades of golden age science fiction, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame included him among its initial four inductees.

[edit] Critical praise

Fellow science fiction author Philip K. Dick has said that van Vogt's stories spurred his interest in science fiction with their strange sense of the unexplained, that something more was going on than the protagonists realized.

In a review of Transfinite: The Essential A.E. van Vogt, science fiction writer Paul Di Filippo said:

Van Vogt knew precisely what he was doing in all areas of his fiction writing. There's hardly a wasted word in his stories... His plots are marvels of interlocking pieces, often ending in real surprises and shocks, genuine paradigm shifts, which are among the hardest conceptions to depict. And the intellectual material of his fictions, the conceits and tossed-off observations on culture and human and alien behavior, reflect a probing mind...Each tale contains a new angle, a unique slant, that makes it stand out.
(DiFilippo, Paul, (2003) Off The Shelf, Retrieved 9 January 2003).

[edit] Criticism

Writer and critic Damon Knight wrote in 1945 that "van Vogt is not a giant as often maintained. He's only a pygmy using a giant typewriter".

Most science fiction/space opera authors in van Vogt's day did not strive to be absolutely flawless scientifically, preferring storytelling over accuracy. Despite this, van Vogt has been singled out by some critics for it. Examples:

  • In Cosmic Encounter, one result of the crash of an alien spaceship is the generation of a temperature of minus 50,000 degrees, well below absolute zero.
  • The title of his story collection M33 in Andromeda is incorrect: M33 is in Triangulum; M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is in Andromeda.
  • The popular short story Vault of the Beast hinges on the concept of the largest prime number; it was demonstrated as far back as Ancient Greece that the series of primes is infinite and thus that there is no largest prime number.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

  • Slan (1946)
  • The Weapon Makers (1947)
  • The Book of Ptath (1947)
  • The World of Null-A (1948)
  • The House That Stood Still (1950)
  • Masters of Time (1950)
  • The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950)
  • The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951)
  • Mission to the Stars (1952)
  • The Universe Maker (1953)
  • Planets for Sale (1954) (with Edna Mayne Hull)
  • The Players of Null-A (1956) also published as The Pawns of Null-A
  • The Mind Cage (1957)
  • Empire of the Atom (1957)
  • Siege of the Unseen (1959)
  • The War against the Rull (1959)
  • Earth's Last Fortress (1960)
  • The Wizard of Linn (1962)
  • The Violent Man (1962)
  • The Beast (1963)
  • The Twisted Men (1964)
  • Rogue Ship (1965)
  • The Winged Man (1966)
  • Moonbeast (1969)
  • The Silkie (1969)
  • Children of Tomorrow (1970)
  • Quest for the Future (1970)
  • The Battle of Forever (1971)
  • More Than Superhuman (1971)
  • The Darkness on Diamondia (1972)
  • Future Glitter (1973)
  • The Man with a Thousand Names (1974)
  • The Secret Galactics (1974); also published as Earth Factor X
  • Supermind (1974)
  • The Anarchistic Colossus (1977)
  • The Enchanted Village (1979) (chapbook)
  • Renaissance ( 1979)
  • Cosmic Encounter (1980)
  • Computerworld (1983)
  • Computer Eye (1983)
  • Null-A Three (1985)
  • To Conquer Kiber (1987)

[edit] Collections

  • M33 in Andromeda (1943)
  • Out of the Unknown (1948) (with Edna Mayne Hull)
  • Away and Beyond (1952)
  • Destination: Universe! (1952)
  • The Far-Out Worlds of A. E. van Vogt (1956)
  • Monsters (1965)
  • The Van Vogt Omnibus (omnibus - 1967)
  • The Sea Thing and Other Stories (1970)
  • The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders (1971)
  • The Van Vogt Omnibus 2 (omnibus - 1971)
  • The Book of Van Vogt (1972)
  • Far Out Worlds of Van Vogt (1973)
  • The Three Eyes of Evil Including Earth's Last Fortress (1973)
  • The Best of A. E. van Vogt (1974)
  • The Gryb (1976) (with Edna Mayne Hull)
  • Pendulum (1978)
  • The Best of A. E. van Vogt 1949-1968 (1979)
  • Lost: Fifty Suns (1979)
  • The Best of A E van Vogt 1940-1948 (1979)
  • Futures Past: The Best Short Fiction of A.E. Van Vogt (1999)
  • Essential A.E. van Vogt (2002)

[edit] Non-fiction

  • The Hypnotism Handbook (1956) (with Charles Edward Cooke)
  • The Money Personality (1975)
  • Reflections of A. E. Van Vogt: The Autobiography of a Science Fiction Giant (1979)
  • A Report on the Violent Male (1992)

[edit] References

  1. ^ For example, the Nicholls ( [1993] Clute, John & Nicholls, Peter: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 199. ISBN 0-312-09618-6.) says "The beginning of Campbell's particular Golden Age of SF can be pinpointed as the summer of 1939," and goes on to begin the discussion with the July 1939 issue. Lester del Rey (del Rey, Lester (1979). The World of Science Fiction and Fantasy: The History of a Subculture. New York: Ballantine Books, 94. ISBN 0-345-25452-X.) comments that "July was the turning point".

[edit] External links

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