Alfred Elton van Vogt had two separate careers as
a science fiction writer, the first lasting from 1939
to the early 1950s, the second from the middle of
the 1960s until the 1980s. During the first phase of
his career, he was an influential and popular writer
who penned several minor classics; during the second, he was clearly out of touch with the changes
in the genre and lacked the powerful imaginative
creativity that was characteristic of his prior work.
Many of the early novels appeared only in magazines until several years later. He was a prolific and
inventive writer whose favorite themes included
alien monsters, time travel paradoxes, and superhumans, and who spent comparatively little time
on characterization or prose styling.
His first novel, SLAN (1940, book form in
1946), is still his best-known and possibly bestwritten novel, the story of mutants living hidden
among ordinary humans to avoid persecution. It
was not typical of the work that followed because
of its relatively straightforward plot. Van Vogt
would quickly become known for the complexity of
his stories, which sometimes seemed to evade even
the writer’s control. Three short sequences quickly
established his reputation, of which the Gilbert
Gosseyn novels are the best known. The Gosseyn
stories are The World of Null-A (1945/48) and The
Pawns of Null-A (1948/56, also published as The
Players of Null-A). Gosseyn is a superhuman whose
consciousness moves between bodies, but he has
no memories of his own past and eventually discovers he is a tool used by one alien species to protect the Earth from yet another. He overcomes one
menace in the first book, only to face an even
greater threat in the second. Van Vogt belatedly
added Null-A Three in 1985, sending Gosseyn off
to battle the masters of the universe, but this final
adventure is markedly inferior.
A more coherent set consists of The Weapon
Shops of Isher (1949/51) and The Weapon Makers
(1943/46, also published as One Against Eternity).
The backdrop is a future interstellar civilization
that is ruled as one mildly despotic empire. A mysterious organization has built a series of weapon
shops from which any citizen can buy highly advanced weaponry, the shops themselves being invulnerable to attack. Although many elements of
the story are implausible and the libertarian message is thickly laid over the narrative, the author
keeps all the plot elements moving so quickly that
the many flaws are generally overlooked. A third
set includes Empire of the Atom (1957) and The
Wizard of Linn (1950/62). An interstellar war has
left Earth with a devastated civilization that possesses remnants of a technology it no longer understands. The alien Riss return and the battle is
renewed with humans at a decided disadvantage.
Many of van Vogt’s stand-alone novels from
this period involve similarly epic events. An employment agency proves to be a conduit for soldiers employed in a savage war in the distant future in Recruiting Station (1942, also published as
Earth’s Last Fortress and Masters of Time [1950]).
The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950, also published as Mission: Interplanetary) is comprised of a
series of short stories about the adventures of an
interstellar exploration team, one segment of
which—“The Black Destroyer”—was the author’s
first science fiction sale in 1939. The Book of Ptath
(1943/47, also published as Ptath and as Two Hundred Million A.D.) deals less successfully with a battle between superhumans in the very distant
future. Immortals plot an escape from an Earth
besieged by aliens in The House That Stood Still
(1950, also published as The Mating Cry and as
Undercover Aliens).
Van Vogt continued to be a prolific short story
writer, and he made many of these shorter works
serve double duty by assembling them into novels,
sometimes with notable lack of success. This reprocessing included The Mixed Men (1952, also published as Mission to the Stars), in which a starship
searches for a lost civilization that does not want
to be found; The War Against the Rull (1959),
which provides episodic glances at a war between
humans and aliens; and The Twisted Men (1964).
The Mind Cage (1957), on the other hand, is a
much more linear story in which a citizen in a
dystopian future discovers that his personality has
been transferred into another man’s body. It was
van Vogt’s most coherent novel during the late
1950s, and his last for almost 10 years.
When van Vogt began to write again during
the 1960s, it was with considerably less success.
The Beast (1963, also published as Moonbeast) involves the discovery of alien technology and a possible threat to the world, but the story is at times
almost impossible to follow. Rogue Ship (1965) is a
routine, episodic space opera about an extended
voyage that ends in mutiny. Both novels were assembled or expanded from existing shorter works.
The Silkie (1969) seemed to promise better things.
Humans create an artificial race to help them administer their society, but the silkies prove to have
an agenda of their own. Although also published
initially as short stories, the end result was more
cohesive than the previous quasi-novels.
Three somewhat interesting books followed
during the early 1970s. In Children of Tomorrow
(1970), a space traveler returns to Earth after a
long absence and discovers that the current generation is developing psi powers. Quest for the Future
(1970) is an expanded version of van Vogt’s classic
short story “Far Centaurus” (1944), in which a
slower-than-light starship is launched to Alpha
Centauri, arriving to discover that the subsequent
development of faster-than-light travel has led to
its colonization in advance of their arrival. The
Battle of Forever (1971) takes an inhabitant of a
supposed utopia out into a wider universe inhabited by unfriendly aliens and other challenges. The
Darkness on Diamondia (1972) is a less ambitious
and reasonably well done adventure involving a rebellious colony world and a superweapon, but Future Glitter (1973, also published as Tyranopolis) is a
rather pedantic story of rebellion against a dictatorship. The Secret Galactics (1974, also published
as Earth Factor X) is an implausible story of the secret invasion of Earth by aliens.
Van Vogt’s last few novels were sometimes embarrassingly awkward. The Man with a Thousand
Names (1974) is an almost incomprehensible tale
of body-switching and interplanetary conspiracies.
The Anarchistic Colossus (1977) has Earth falling
into anarchy, supported by artificial intelligences,
until an alien invasion causes a crisis. An experiment designed to enhance human intelligence goes
awry in Supermind (1977). Renaissance (1979) is a
mildly misogynistic dystopia in which women rule
and men are deprived of their rights. The proliferation of computers extinguishes most human freedoms in Computerworld (1983), sparking yet
another unlikely rebellion.
Although his short stories generally embraced concepts as ambitious as those in his novels, van Vogt occasionally narrowed his focus,
sometimes with surprisingly good results, as in “A
Can of Paint” (1944). Many of his short stories
are of little interest and are intermixed with the
better ones in various collections. The best selections are contained in Destination Universe
(1952), Monsters (1965), More Than Superhuman
(1971), M33 in Andromeda (1971), The Worlds of
A. E. van Vogt (1974), and The Best of A. E. van
Vogt (1976).