Ae van vogt biography

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In 1944 he moved to Hollywood, California. A follow-up tale based on an unknown amount of draft material from the end of Van Vogt's active career around 1984, Slan Hunter (December 2006-April 2007 Jim Baen's Universe; 2007) with Kevin J Anderson might almost be deemed a Sequel by Other Hands, and is very significantly less interesting.

As a man he becomes involved with Earth's mysterious dictator, with defective Slans, and with various intrigues centring on new Power Sources. Certainly his third series from this period – the Clane sequence comprising Empire of the Atom (stories May 1946-December 1947 Astounding; fixup 1957; cut 1957 dos) and The Wizard of Linn (April-June 1950 Astounding; 1962) – is considerably less intense, though something of the effect of the original is recaptured in Transgalactic (omni 2006), which reprints the series in its magazine form.

Thus freed of any surface verisimilitude, Van Vogt's space operas, as noted, are at heart enacted dreams which articulate deep, symbolic needs and wishes of his readership. The earlier Masters of Time (coll 1950) – a volume comprising two long stories later published separately as The Changeling (April 1944 Astounding; 1967) and Earth's Last Fortress (March 1942 Astounding as "Recruiting Station"; 1960 dos; vt Masters of Time1967) – contains in the novella "Recruiting Station", a genuine if primitively couched Changewar in which the victory of one side will mean the extinction of the other throughout history (see also Parallel Worlds; Time Loops).

A few prime stories by Van Vogt appeared, like The Enchanted Village (July 1950 Other Worlds as "Enchanted Village"; 1979 chap) [for further title details see Checklist], which rebukes triumphalist assumptions about Homo sapiens's supremacy as a species.

It was rejected, but the rejection letter encouraged him to try again. The distinction in Van Vogt between an sf and a fantasy Superman is not perhaps great; but it is the case that he rarely claimed to write in the latter genre.

In Reflections of A.E. van Vogt: The Autobiography of a Science Fiction Giant, with a Complete Bibliography (1975), van Vogt uses the term "fix-up" (or Fixup) in the sense which we have adopted for this encyclopedia: a book made up of previously published stories altered to fit together, usually including new material to cement these parts, and with the end product being marketed as a novel.

James Blish 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, could have found van Vogt's earlier series to resemble any previous work of world literature.

The Voyage of the Space Beagle (stories July 1939-August 1943 Astounding, May 1950 Other Worlds; fixup 1950; vt Mission: Interplanetary1952) marshalled several early stories into a loose chronicle depicting various ways in which Elliot Grosvenor – a "Nexialist" trained to synthesize different fields of knowledge – makes First Contact with Aliens (some of them Monsters) over the course of a Fantastic Voyage in which he visits a Galapagos-like Archipelago of planets.

Jommy's Superpowers (see Children in SF), which include Telepathy, physical superiority to normals (he has two hearts) and extraordinary Intelligence, enable him to survive the mobbing, arrest and offstage death of his mother (see Women in SF) and to escape from sight into an adolescence and young manhood during which he begins to sense his true powers.

The main protagonist of the two books, the immortal Robert Hedrock (see Immortality; Secret Masters), has not only in the dim past created the Weapon Shops 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.

(Van Vogt himself never seemed closer to sounding American than in this presentation of the inalienable right to own guns.) En passant, as revealed at the very end of the second book, Hedrock unwittingly passes an initiation test designed by previously unmentioned Forerunners to select (see Uplift) the next rulers of the galaxy, announcing their choice in the last sentence of the novel: "Here is the race that shall rule the sevagram." The word "sevagram" only appears once in The Weapon Makers, as its last word.

His first published SF story, "Black Destroyer" was published in 1939, and is considered to be one of the first works of the Golden Age of science fiction. Further novels do not live up to this promise of partial renewal, and were not well received.

Critics such as Damon Knight – in an extended review (1945 Destiny's Child; exp in In Search of Wonder, coll 1956; exp 1967; exp 1996) – have tended to treat the typical van Vogt tale as a failed effort 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.

This happened after he casually picked up the August 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction from a newsstand, and found the story “Who Goes There?” The story inspired him to write “Vault of the Beast,” which he would send to the same magazine. Slan is a much imitated model for the creation of this sort of wish-fulfilment [for Hidden Monarch see TheEncyclopedia of Fantasy under links below].

Matters are cleared up only at the book's close with the revelation that the dictator is himself a secret Slan (see Secret Masters), that the girl Slan with whom Jommy is in love is the dictator's daughter, and that Jommy is in line for the succession. John C Wright's authorized Sequel by Another Hand, Null-A Continuum (2008), is much more ingeniously recomplicated and expanded in scope, far surpassing van Vogt's weak third volume.

By this time van Vogt was nearing the end of his association with Astounding, after an extraordinarily productive decade (see above), 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 extended breather.

In some ways, of course, these writers have built upon the complexity of van Vogt's worlds and have significantly rationalized his convulsive shuffling and reshuffling of every element of his stories, but without paying sufficient attention to the hauntingly whited-out wilderness venues that in their very absence of human detail impart a deeply Canadian chthonic frisson to otherwise jumbled plotlines (see above).

The many Space Opera empires in his work generally pre-exist the tales that describe them, and are conquered from within by protagonists who may be revealed already to have been Secret Masters. The book incorporates van Vogt's first two sf stories; and Nexialism itself, which involves a system of intensive psychological training, symptomatically prefigures L Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, with which van Vogt was to become so closely involved.