A.E. van Vogt
Critique • Works

Born
Edenburg, Manitoba, Canada, 1912
Died
Los Angeles, California, United States, 2000
Nationality
Canadian; American
Publications
Novels, stories
Genres
Science fiction
Writing language
English
Places of writing
Ottawa, Toronto and Winnipeg, Canada; Los Angeles, United States
Stories
• "The Weapon Shop" (1942)
Science Fiction
• Slan (1946)
• The World of Null-A (1948)
Science Fiction Stories
• "The Weapon Shop" (1942)
Becoming more than human
The superman concept has had a steady run in science fiction. Since the genre's early days, great and mediocre writers have produced narratives around characters surpassing the natural limits constricting humanity—with or without the disturbing Nietzschean or fascist undertones. Readers have long been fascinated by imagining creatures like themselves becoming superhuman beings, whether through some kind of forced evolution, bio-tech enhancements, psycho-therapeutic training, or paranormal powers.
This is the vein A.E. van Vogt worked, more than any other acclaimed master of science fiction who arose in science fiction's Golden Age of the 1940s and early 1950s.
In his personal life also, he seems to have been led down some pseudoscientific rabbit holes, such as the general semantics theory of Alfred Korzybski and the Dianetics of fellow science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, both promising to develop advanced beings.
Nonetheless, his writing was vastly influential in his heyday and in his latter less-active career. His appeal was only partly due to his superhuman themes but also due to the exciting construction of his tales. His energetic style of writing never let up on the action, eschewing standard story arcs, skipping the stepwise progressions and logical connections demanded by the "hard science fiction" of his day. He developed and discarded new ideas every few pages, piling extended fragments of plot and dialogue upon each other until crashing through to breathless finales.
Controversial style
You've heard of the injunction to start a piece of fiction in the middle of the action? Well, at his best, a van Vogt story is all middle. Or you could say it's all climax. His first novel and most most acclaimed work, Slan (1946), featuring struggles among races of different psychic powers, set the pattern—a whirling happening from on-the-run beginning to cliff-hanging end.
This and his subsequent work would prefigure the more fluid style of "softer" science fiction in the post-Golden Age era. Among the younger writers who claimed van Vogt as inspiration were Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick. They admired the unpredictability of his unconventional works.
He also came under criticism from some writers and critics for what was seen—often justifiably—as sloppiness and inconsistency.
Some of van Vogt's more episodic works are that way because they are in fact made up of several more-or-less related stories. He created the term "fix-up" to describe the stitching together of previously published short pieces of fiction into a novel. Other former magazine writers sometimes practised this repurposing of materials too. Most notably Isaac Asimov reworked earlier stories and novellas into his famous Foundation Trilogy (1951–1953).
But van Vogt made a career out of the practice. His first fix-up was The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950), which presents four adventures befalling a spaceship as it encounters aliens, usually trying to take over or destroy the ship. (One of the episodes may have been the basis for the film Alien, for which van Vogt sued the movie studio.) The hero of the Beagle stories adheres to Nexialism, a fictional scientific discipline, allowing the man to out-think hostile aliens, as well as seize power on the ship.
This was followed by another fix-up, The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951), combining three stories in van Vogt's popular magazine series. It was another hit, despite its sometimes confusing structure.
Many more fix-ups were to appear, more or less haphazardly organized, culminating in Supermind (1977), a loosely connected series on his usual theme of, you guessed it, superhuman mental powers.
Alternative logic
Not all van Vogt's major works are chaotic concatenations of short stories. He also produced chaotic original novels, though most—like Slan—were revisions of novels previously serialized in the magazines.
Among the most beloved are The World of Ā (1948) and its sequel The Pawns of Ā (1964), popularly styled The World of Null-A and The Players of Null-A. Null-A is short for non-Aristotelian logic, which rejects classical forms of reasoning. In the world of these novels, this alternative form gives its practitioners a step up on the rest of humanity, allowing them to rule the world and defend it against aliens.
Despite the book's wide success, The World of Null-A over the years came under attack for incoherence and superficial characterizations.
But Van Vogt heeded the criticism and more than two decades later, he published a revised edition. More than anything he's written, this willingness to accept criticism and to change illustrates van Vogt's own strength of mind and character. Simple human understanding without paranormal tricks or superpowers.
By all accounts, van Vogt in person was a gentle, kind man, nothing like his fiercely authoritarian superhuman heroes. And I suspect his wider work would be more highly regarded today if some of that humanity came through in his writing. But then again, in that case he might not have made such an impact as he did on readers and other writers.
— Eric
Critique • Works