van VOGT, A(lfred) E(lton)

(1912-)

   Canadian-born writer who moved to the USA in 1944 after establishing his name as one of the creators of John W. CAMPBELL Jr's GOLDEN AGE OF SF with a flood of material in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION,starting with "Black Destroyer" (1939), though he had been active for several years in various other genres. In 1939 he married E. Mayne HULL, and produced several stories with her until she stopped writing in 1950. With his conversion to DIANETICS - also in 1950 - AEVV became virtuallysilent for several years. After the early 1960s, however, a second, smaller spate of new material came from his pen.In 1939-47 AEVV published at least 35 sf stories in ASF alone, some of novel length, and it was the work of these years, much of it not to be published in book form until long afterwards in reconstructed versions, that gave him his high reputation as a master of intricate, metaphysical SPACE OPERA. Along with Isaac ASIMOV and Robert A. HEINLEIN, and to a lesser extent L. Sprague DECAMP and L. Ron HUBBARD - he seemed nearly to create, by writing what Campbell wanted to publish, the first genuinely successful period of US sf; only in this "Golden Age" did it begin to achieve, in literary terms, what the writers of US GENRE SF had eschewed 20 years earlier when they had found that PULP MAGAZINES not only wished to publish sf but were their only consistent market. Although AEVV catered for the pulps, he intensified the emotional impact and complexity of the stories they would bear: his nearly invincible alien MONSTERS, the long timespans of his tales, the TIME PARADOXES that fill them, the quasimessianic SUPERMEN who come into their own as the stories progress, the GALACTIC EMPIRES they tend to rule and the states of lonely transcendental omnipotence they tend to achieve - all are presented in a prose that uses crude, dark colours but whose striking SENSE OF WONDER is conveyed with a dreamlike conviction. The abrupt complications of plot for which he became so well known, and which have been so scathingly mocked for their illogic and preposterousness - within narratives that claimed to be presenting higher forms of logic to the reader - are best analysed, and their effects best understood, when their sudden shifts of perspective and rationale and scale are seen as analogous to the movements of a dream. It is these " HARD-SF dreams", so grippingly void of constraints or of the usualsurrealistic appurtenances of dream literature, that have so haunted generations of children and adolescents.AEVV's first novel, and perhaps still his best known, is SLAN (1940 ASF; 1946; rev 1951). Its HERO, the young Jommy Cross, is a member of a MUTANT race, the Slans, originally created to help mankind out of its difficulties but long driven into hiding because of the jealousy of normals. Jommy's powers (CHILDREN IN SF), which include ESP, physical superiority to normals (he has 2 hearts)and extraordinary INTELLIGENCE, enable him to survive the mobbing, arrest and offstage death of his mother and to escape from sight into an adolescence and young manhood during which he begins to sense his true powers. As a man he becomes involved with Earth's mysterious dictator, with defective Slans, and with various intrigues centring on new sources of energy. Matters are cleared up only at the book's close with the revelation that the dictator is himself a secret Slan, that the girl Slan with whom Jommy is in love is the dictator's daughter, and that Jommy is in line for the succession. SLAN is a much imitated model for the creation of wish-fulfilment stories.However, it was in the 2 Weapon Shops books-THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER (1941-2 ASF, 1949 Thrilling Wonder Stories; fixup1951) and The Weapon Makers (1943 ASF; 1947; rev 1952; vt One Against Eternity 1955 dos), assembled as The Weapon Shops of Isher, and The Weapon Makers (omni 1988 UK) - that AEVV's mixture of hard-sf dreams, enormities of complication, and transcendent superheroes was most hypnotically presented. The main protagonist of the 2 books, the immortal Robert Hedrock (IMMORTALITY), has not only in the dim past created the WEAPONShops as a LIBERTARIAN force to counterbalance the imperial world government long dominant on Earth, but also turns out eventually to have literally begotten the race of emperors and empresses who rule that government in traditional opposition to the mysterious Shops, which are invulnerable and sell weapons to anyone. To cap this dream of omnipotence, Hedrock unwittingly passes a Galactic initiation test at the end of the2nd book, the test having been designed to select the next rulers of the "sevagram". The word "sevagram" appears only once in the series, as the very last word of The Weapon Makers; in its placing, which seems to open universes to the reader's gaze, and in its resonant mysteriousness, for its precise meaning is unclear, this use of "sevagram" may well stand as the best working demonstration in the whole of genre sf of how to impart a SENSE OF WONDER.The 2nd major series of AEVV's prolific decade-the Null-Asequence comprising The World of A (1945 ASF; rev 1948; rev vt The World of Null-A 1970) and The Pawns of Null-A (1948-9 ASF as "The Players of A"; 1956; rev vt The Players of Null-A 1966), plus Null-A Three (1984 France [in French]; 1985 UK) - may have appeared weightier in its attempts to present its arguments in terms of "non-Aristotelian" thought (GENERAL SEMANTICS), a claim which might seem ominously to prefigure arationalization of the effortless dream logic of the earlier stories; but in the event tends to stumble into excessive tangles of complication. The protagonist, Gosseyn (go sane), lacks humour even more decidedly than his superman predecessors, and his rapid, confusing, nearly emotionless shifting from one Gosseyn body to another, in a kind of cloning (CLONES) without the concept of cloning to sustain it, makes his eventual supremacy so peculiarly disorganized as to be almost without effect on the reader. By this time AEVV was nearing the end of his association with ASF, afteran extraordinarily productive decade, and would soon stop writing entirely; perhaps The Pawns of Null-A, which in magazine form stretched to 100,000 words, was about as far as he could go without an extendedbreather. Certainly his 3rd series from this period-the Linn sequence comprising Empire of the Atom (1946-7 ASF; fixup 1957; cut 1957 dos) and The Wizard of Linn (1950 ASF; 1962) - is considerably less intense. JamesBLISH argued of this series about superscience and palace politics that its plot and characters closely resemble those of Robert GRAVES's Claudius novels: it would have been a brave critic who, with equal persuasiveness, found AEVV's earlier series to resemble any previous work of world literature.During this first decade of his career, AEVV contributed material also to ASF's sister magazine, Unknown, most notably The Book of Ptath (1943 Unknown; 1947; vt Two Hundred Million A.D. 1964; vt Ptath1976), a FAR-FUTURE epic in which a reincarnated god-figure must fight to re-establish his suzerainty. Some of the independent stories of these years were collected in Destination: Universe (coll 1952) and Away and Beyond (coll 1952; with 2 stories cut rev 1959; with 1 story cut rev 1963UK). The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1939-43 ASF and 1950 Other Worlds; fixup 1950; vt Mission: Interplanetary 1952) marshalled several early stories into a chronicle depicting various ways in which a "Nexialist", Elliot Grosvenor, by using a response to ALIENS and their environmentsthat synthesizes different fields of knowledge, copes with divers monsters. The book incorporates AEVV's first 2 sf stories; and Nexialism itself, which involves a system of intensive psychological training, interestingly prefigures L. Ron HUBBARD's Dianetics, with which AEVV was to become so closely involved. This involvement was the culmination of his persistent interest in all training systems which purport scientifically (or pseudo-scientifically; PSEUDO-SCIENCE) to create physical or mentalsuperiority and awaken dormant talents, an interest which generated not only the 3 General-Semantics novels described above but also Siege of the Unseen (1946 ASF as "The Chronicler"; 1959 dos; vt as title story in TheThree Eyes of Evil coll 1973 UK), in which, inspired by the Bates eye-exercise system, he dramatized the curing of eye problems through partly mental means.In the autobiographical Reflections of A.E. van Vogt (1975), AEVV uses the term "fix-up" (or FIXUP) in the sense which we haveadopted for this encyclopedia: a book made up of previously published stories altered to fit together - usually with the addition of new cementing material - the end product being marketed as a novel. It is possible that AEVV invented the term for, although fixups are not unknown outside sf, the peculiar marketing circumstances of the genre in the USA encouraged their creation, and certainly AEVV wrote (or compiled) more fixups than any other sf writer of stature. It was during his time of relative inactivity as a creator of original material - the 1950s and early 1960s - that he began producing these numerous fixups, including of course THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER, perhaps the most successful and ingenious of all. Fixups incorporating Golden-Age material include The Mixed Men (1943-5 ASF; fixup 1952; cut vt Mission to the Stars 1955), TheWar Against the Rull (1940-50 ASF; fixup 1959), The Beast (1943-4 ASF; fixup 1963; vt Moonbeast 1969 UK) and Quest for the Future (1943-6 ASF; fixup 1970).The Silkie (1964-7 If; fixup 1969), though technically similar, was the first to use substantially contemporary material - and may have been the first whose component parts were all written with the end result in mind. It signalled the beginning of AEVV's 2nd period of productivity, with Children of Tomorrow (1970) being his first completely new sf novel since The Mind Cage (1948 Fantasy Book as "The Great Judge"; exp 1957) - although he had also published a political thriller about the attempted brainwashing of Westerners in contemporary communist China, The Violent Man (1962). The most sustained effort of this 2nd wave of titleswas perhaps The Battle of Forever (1971), in which the enhanced-human protagonist, Modyun, leaves the refuge where his kind have for eons dwelt in seclusion and undertakes a far-future odyssey through a decadent world and Galaxy, battling against aliens and gradually coming to full stature as a superman. Compared to the fixups of the previous decade or so, the story is well paced and emotionally coherent, though the oneiric flow of arousing event and imagery is damaged by a sense of self-consciousness. Further novels do not live up to this promise of partial renewal, and havenot been well received.Critics such as Damon KNIGHT - in an essay reprinted as "Cosmic Jerrybuilder" in In Search of Wonder (critical coll 1956; rev 1967) - have tended to treat the typical AEVV tale as a failedeffort at hard sf, and have consequently tended to describe stories others have written in the modes he developed - like Philip K. DICK, Charles L. HARNESS and Larry NIVEN-as "improvements" on the original model. In someways, of course, these writers have built upon the complexity of AEVV's worlds and have significantly rationalized his convulsive shuffling and reshuffling of every element of his stories. But AEVV's space operas, as noted, are at heart enacted dreams which articulate deep, symbolic needs and wishes of his readership. Because there is no misunderstood science or cosmography or technology at the very heart of his best work, there is no "improving" AEVV.

   JC

   Other works: Tomorrow on the March: The Text of the Speech Delivered July 4, 1946 at the PACIFICON by the Guest of Honor (1946 chap); Out of the Unknown (coll 1948; exp 1969; vt The Sea Thing and Other Stories 1970 UK; with 5 of the 6 original stories under original title,cut 1970 UK) with E. Mayne Hull, 3 stories by each writer; Masters of Time (coll 1950), comprising 2 stories later published separately as TheChangeling (1944 ASF; 1967) and Earth's Last Fortress (1942 ASF as "Recruiting Station"; 1960 dos; vt Masters of Time 1967); The House that Stood Still (1950; rev vt The Mating Cry 1960; text restored vt The Undercover Aliens 1976 UK); The Universe Maker (1949 Startling Stories as "The Shadow Men"; rev 1953 dos); Planets for Sale (1943-6 ASF as by Hull alone; fixup 1954) with Hull alone credited; the 1965 ed credits both authors; Rogue Ship (1947 ASF, 1950 Super-Science Stories and 1963 If; fixup 1965); The Twisted Men (coll 1964 dos); Monsters (coll 1965; vt The Blal and Other Science-Fiction Monsters 1976); The Winged Man (1944 ASF asby Hull alone; exp 1966) with Hull; The Far-Out Worlds of A.E. van Vogt (coll 1968; vt with added stories as The Worlds of A.E. van Vogt 1974);More than Superhuman (coll 1971); The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders (coll 1971; with 1 story cut and others retitled but unrevised, rev vt The Gryb 1976); M-33 in Andromeda (coll 1971); The Darkness on Diamondia (1972); The Book of Van Vogt (coll 1972; vt Lost: Fifty Suns1979); Future Glitter (1973; vt Tyranopolis 1977 UK); The Secret Galactics (1974; vt Earth Factor X 1976); The Man with a Thousand Names (1974); The Best of A.E. Van Vogt (coll 1974 UK), a different selection from The Best of A.E. Van Vogt (coll 1976); Supermind (fixup 1977; The Anarchistic Colossus (1977); Pendulum (coll 1978); Enchanted Village (1950 OtherWorlds; 1979 chap); Renaissance (1979); Cosmic Encounter (1980); Computerworld (1983; vt Computer Eye 1985).Omnibuses include: Triad (omni 1959) assembling The World of A, The Voyage of the Space Beagle and SLAN; A Van Vogt Omnibus (omni 1967 UK) assembling Planets for Sale, The Beast and The Book of Ptath; Van Vogt Omnibus (2) (omni 1971 UK) assembling The Mind Cage, The Winged Man and SLAN; Two Science Fiction Novels (omni 1973UK) assembling Siege of the Unseen (as The Three Eyes of Evil) and Earth's Last Fortress; The Universe Maker and The Proxy Intelligence (omni 1976 UK).

   About the author: "A.E. van Vogt" in Seekers of Tomorrow (1966) by Sam MOSKOWITZ; "The Development of a Science Fiction Writer" by AEVV in Foundation \#3, 1973; The World beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (1989) by Alexei and Cory PANSHIN.

   See also: ADAM AND EVE; ANTIMATTER; ARKHAM HOUSE; CANADA; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; COSMOLOGY; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FRANCE; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GENERATION STARSHIPS; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GODS AND DEMONS; HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; ILLUSTRATION; INVASION; LIVING WORLDS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); PARANOIA; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; POLITICS; PSI POWERS; PSYCHOLOGY; REINCARNATION; RELIGION; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SERIES; SUSPENDED ANIMATION; THRILLING WONDER STORIES; WAR.