<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

A. E. van Vogt (1912 -2000) A Canadian-born writer who depended on dream-like logic to create future worlds and characters, Alfred E. van Vogt was also the first major science fiction writer to convey libertarian points of view in his work. One of the major discoveries of John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, van Vogt became known for stories featuring either supermen or super-human aliens in stories told with a rococo approach to plot development.

Van Vogt's first four sales to Astounding, beginning in 1939, were novelettes dealing with super-human aliens. Then in 1940 he introduced the first of his supermen in his first novel, Slan. The novel opens with the persecution of a young boy, Jommy Cross, for reasons he does not understand. Cross is smuggled into hiding where he grows up to discover that there are at least two types of "slans" -- mutant human beings -- who were genetically engineered for telepathy and super-human intelligence by a scientist named Samuel Lann. (Their name is derived from the abbreviation S. Lann.) Jommy, as it turns out, is destined to become the ruler of the world state that has hitherto suppressed him and his kind (who have infiltrated the government and actually run it). Never before had science fiction produced a novel that so successfully drew on suspense techniques to provide a vision of self-empowerment. Not as rococo as some of van Vogt's later work, Slan nevertheless is flawed by the incomplete resolution of some of its sub-plots. Aware of this criticism, van Vogt revised the novel in 1951, although he did not entirely succeed in plugging all of the holes he had created.

In 1942 van Vogt began the "Weapon Shops" stories, the series that most clearly expressed his libertarian tendencies. The Empire of Isher is a post-industrial authoritarian regime, headed by the first of van Vogt's many female villainesses, that has not been able to eliminate from its midst a group of stores that sells weapons to anyone. But these are not just any weapon: in the prime example of van Vogt's dream-logic, these are guns that will only fire in self-defense. There are two volumes in the series as subsequently collected in book form: The Weapon Makers (1946) and The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951).

Van Vogt said that his own favorite among his works was his 1945 novel The World of Null-A. Here van Vogt presents another libertarian premise -- that rising standards of intelligence and education will eventually eliminate crime and war, and therefore the need for government. During an annual testing period in which the police refrain from any action, Gilbert Gosseyn appears on the scene to take what amounts to a civil service exam to see if he will be eligible to go to the settlements on the planet Venus, where a society built on non-Aristotelian (null-A) logic is being set up. Gosseyn (pronounced "go sane") is a superman who has mastered the art of non-Aristotelian logic and can overcome any tendency toward emotional thinking, which enables him to prevail in any situation. As it turns out, Gosseyn is one of a number of clones who are given consciousness and turned loose at various intervals. At the conclusion of the novel, he meets an older version of himself who has been influencing events on Earth after having arrived from another galaxy.

"Null-A" is the most rococo of all van Vogt's novels, and it was famously criticized for its logical gaps by Damon Knight. Aware of some of the novel's short-comings, van Vogt revised it for book publication in 1948, and further revised it in 1970 to explain that its scenes on Venus took place after the planet had undergone terraforming (it having been discovered since 1945 that the surface of Venus is hot enough to melt the average Volkswagen in a matter of minutes). Van Vogt also managed to explain some of the dangling mysteries of the first book in a sequel, The Players of Null-A (serialized in Astounding in 1948-49 and published in book form as The Pawns of Null-A in 1956). Unfortunately, the galaxy-spanning warfare that comprises the main action of the second volume tends to numb the mind of the reader, who loses sight of the story line and most of the characters in the process. Much later van Vogt completed Null-A Three (1985), which sadly lacks the energy and robustness of his earlier efforts.

Van Vogt was a highly prolific writer through to the beginning of the 1950's. At that time he became involved in L. Ron Hubbard's "Dianetics" movement (although van Vogt said publicly that he was never an adherent of Scientology) and stopped almost all writing for a period of about 14 years. When he returned to his earlier career, the power of the dream-like state he was able to project in his writing had largely faded.

Further reading: Alexei and Cory Panshin's The World Beyond the Hill (1989) is a history of Astounding in the 1940's and was instrumental in reviving the critical appreciation of van Vogt. There is also a van Vogt website worth visiting: Icshi: The A. E. van Vogt information site.