A E van Vogt

This is my first post in over a year, the reasons for the silence are a couple the main one being that I have been writing a biography of my father, I do work so only have so much spare time. In 2027 I will likely be retiring so may have some more time. I'd like to do something relating to David Bentley Hart. But currently I am a bit obsessed with early Science Fiction and I'd like to do some meditations upon that, but for this I want to focus on the Golden Age Science Fiction writer A E van Vogt.

I first read Science Fiction in my teens, I read Asimov, van Vogt, James Blish, Andre Norton, not a lot of authors at that time, in my twenties I read much more extensively. Van Vogt's name to me looked like a science fiction name and his writing seemed to encapsulated a specific quality that exemplified what I thought Science Fiction was.

Lately I have been re exploring his work and has started to build into an obsession with the man and his work. Looking across youtube science Fiction book reviewers I have found some interesting takes but I feel that he is under appreciated, both for what he achieved and for what the nature of his work actually is. This is also the case in reading some critical works on Science Fiction. 

Barry Malzberg wrote the following:

Alfred Elton van Vogt may be the most difficult of all science-fiction writers to judge. So much of van Vogt's work, reread after many years, seems to work in terms which are sub- or trans-literary: so much of his power seems to come not from sophisticated technique and/or pyrotechnic style as from his ability to tap archetypal power, archetypal "them," and open up veins of awe or bedazzlement that otherwise are found in love or dreams. 

This is not to call van Vogt incompetent: he is anything but. Indeed, he was from the beginning a competent commercial writer with a natural gift for the medium of science fiction and an extremely conscious awareness (rare enough in popular fiction) about the effects he sought and the methods he used. But no display of mere competence, no explanation of awareness or measure of talent, can account for the effect that van Vogt's early work—from 1939 to 1945, say—had upon his audience and has to this day. What van Vogt had then was nothing less than the ability to deliver (a) total alienness within (b) a hugely panoramic background that (c) seemingly lacked reason and yet came together to (d) end by making total, if terrifying, sense...

(Van Vogt might have been the first of the postwar American novelists, it seems; his vision foreshadowed modern absurdity.)

...that created what Brian Aldiss has called the fine, careless rapture of the early van Vogt, an artist of the commercial medium who went away into other things for almost a decade and a half and who returned in the mid-sixties with a different kind of work, a work that by no literary standard can be called inferior, but one that (and I am sure that van Vogt would be the first to admit this) lacked the early sense of mystery, impact, influence.

That impact has yet to receive satisfactory assessment. Science fiction, although maturing as a literature—at least the cliché is that it is maturing; sometimes I am not so sure of this—still has little critical literature. What critical literature there is—Budrys, Blish, Knight, Russ, Panshin—has usually ignored or under-assessed van Vogt, preferring to place him routinely within the "Golden Age" format and then dismiss the unique and individual impact of his work, which strikes me as having gone far beyond that of any of his contemporaries in its uniqueness. Heinlein, Asimov, Del Rey, Kuttner are marvelous writers making their contributions as a group to a body of literature; van Vogt is standing off by himself building something very personal and unique. His work is neither inferior to nor above that of his contemporaries; it simply cannot be judged in the same away. Above all, van Vogt is to himself. 

I salute this man. He is irreplaceable; he is incontestably alive. 

I think we're still in this place, in fact if anything I think we appreciate and understand him less now. It seems to be regarded as a truism that the three big Golden Age Science Fiction authors are Robert Heinlein, Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov and I have seen people talking about the Golden Age authors and failing to even mention van Vogt. To me this is a failure to even understand the Golden Age.

Outlaw bookseller did a video on the Gollanz Golden Age collection in which he criticised them for producing books with that moniker that are significantly after the golden Age even into the 1960s. So what is the Golden Age period, well I did loosely think of it as from the time John W Campbell started editing Astounding through to the 1950s and while that is the period that probably fascinates me the most I can see now why the 1950s are thought of as a significantly different period to The Golden Age. 

The Golden Age of Science Fiction was not an age of science fiction novels, it was an age of pulp magazines primarily Campbell's Astounding. They had colour covers, cheap paper and black and white illustrations, advertising, the occassional short science article. It would be good for there to be some classic releases of key issues, so we can appreciate them in their original formats.By 1950 the Science fiction books was a major part of the scene and there was a greater diversity of magazines, so John Campbell was no longer the primary driver. 

When I came to Science Fiction in the 1970s and the books I associated with Science Fiction were paperback novels with cool airbrush cover art they were about 160 to 220 pages long, they would grow longer. I did not realise that Slan or the Weapon Makers did not first appear in that format, or that Rogue Ship was originally a bunch of short stories that van Vogt in 1965 re worked into a novel.

Van Vogt was born in rural Canada in 1912, due to the depression his family was poor and he never made it to college. An essential part of his nature is that he is self taught, he reminds me in a lot of ways of Colin Wilson, who he later corresponded with and met. 

I have read van Vogt's short autobiography, which was started as an oral history, of which he massaged into a narrative. I'd recommend anyone who has become obsessed by van Vogt to read it, it is available on the internet archive unfortunately physical copies are scarce. 

Van Vogt talks about becoming increasingly introspective as he grew up the family moved from rural Canada to the big city of Winnipeg. This caused him to make the distressing change from being good at school to near the bottom of the class. He credited this in pushing him inward, and from this time he started reading a couple of books a day. 

From the age of 14 Vogt considered himself a writer, he had a major discovery while doing a writing exercise, he suddenly discovered how to write a line of fiction. He wrote a description of the ocean, which he'd never seen, but his line impressed him for its verisimilitude, which he regarded as the essence of fiction. 

Also at this time, he picked up on the news-stand the 1926 issue of Amazing Stories magazine, the first dedicated Scientifiction pulp magazine home and he read every issue published while we he lived in Winnipeg. 

In the coming years he was impressed by A. Merritt's vivid imagination, Max Brand, Fred MacIsaac, Don A. Stuart (the pseudonym of John W. Campbell, Jr.), E.E. Smith, E. Phillips Oppenheimer, John Dickson Carr, Edgar Wallace, Frank L. Packard (the Gray Seal stories) and Rafael Sabatini & H.L. Mencken . He was very interested in detective stories but he avoided books with long paragraphs.

he read westerns—B.M. Bower, Zane Grey, Max Brand, numerous mysteries, suspense, and adventure. Bulldog Drummond he was a fan of P.G. Wodehouse.

he would also go on to read Balzac, Dickens, Jane Austen, Arnold Bennett, George Moore, and other 19th century novelists of England and Europe. He read the plays of Shaw, Ibsen, Moliere, some of the Greek ancients. Among the more recent writers he enjoyed was the Aldous Huxley of CHROME YELLOW and POINT COUNTERPOINT. 

He was a voracious reader of many popularizations of science and psychology of that time.  In history,  he was fascinated by the Napoleonic era, Rome in the age of  Julius Augustus Caesar. the Italian Renaissance, King Richard the Lion-Heart of Britain and Europe, and ancient Egypt. 

He didn't considered this research. He just got obsessed with various subject and would familiarize himself with countless details.

Van Vogt discovered a book The Only Two Ways to Write a Short Story by John W. Gallishaw. He read it all through, though he found it incredibly hard to read, as it was long. It gave plenty of examples of stories, which were numbered and analyzed line by line. The idea was that stories should be written in scenes of about 800 words, and each scene had five steps. First, let the reader know where this is taking place. Second you establish the purpose of the main character or the purpose of that scene. Third you have the interaction of them trying to accomplish that purpose. The fourth step is, make it clear: did they or did accomplish that purpose? Then the fifth step is that, in all the early scenes, no matter whether he achieves that purpose or not, things are going to get worse."

He was also influenced by Thomas Uzzell's book Narrative Technique.Van Vogt must be one of very few authors to have built their career on a popular "how-to" guide. 

 In Ottawa van Vogt  took a course from the Palmer Institute of Authorship, entitled "English and Self-Expression." which he thought really helped him as a writer. Whoever created it was a lover of words and van Vogt would sometimes use words simply for their sound or he'd have a kind of instinctive response to them.

Wanting to test out these techniques his eye was caught by a writing prize for true life story, he spent nine days visiting the library to complete his story, It was written from the viewpoint of a young woman during the Depression period, and he called it "I Lived in the Streets." They changed the title to "No One to Blame but Herself" and while it didn't win the prize, he sold it for $110 which was still a significant amount of money. He was soon writing and selling more stories to "Confession" magazines and eventually did win a $1,000 first prize. Which sent him spinning into a state of euphoria. These stories also used his fictional sentences where every sentence would have an emotion in it.

However, he became tired of this genre. He realised he couldn't write something that he wouldn't read and midway through writing a story he gave it up in disgust and never wrote another. 

He then wrote some radio plays beginning in 1934 for a local Canadian station. It wasn't well paid. And then, a couple of years later, in 1938 he saw a Science Fiction magazine on a newsstand, it was not Amazing Stories which he regarded as THE Science Fiction magazine it the August issue of Astounding and he started reading a story by Don A Stuart called Who Goes There? Having got caught up in the story, he bought the magazine and finished reading the story when he got home. This proved to be a turning point. He then wrote to the editor with an outline of a story not knowing that he was the author of the story that had inspired him. If Campbell hadn't responded that might have been that, but he encouraged him to write. He sent in his first story “Vault of the Beast” which was rejected but with encouragement for more and some suggestions. He then wrote "Black Destroyer," which was not only accepted but was the cover story, this was a breakthrough all around, van Vogt had found his perfect niche and the story elicited an excitement in the readers and it is this issue and particularly this story which is often cited as the start of the Golden age of Science Fiction.

He would write Dischord in Scarlet together with Black destoyer would later form part of the fix up novel Voyage of the Space beagle. He realised he would need to write something different from Monster stories so he wasn't known as a one trick pony and started on his first serialisation the novel Slan. Reading these works now one can still appreciate how exciting their appearance must have been. He surprised himself tapping unplumbed creativity, he felt completely at home in the medium. The stars seemed to align, the right person at the right place, he had grown up with the fledgling science fiction magazine and he turned up when there was the right editor. 

When van Vogt wrote his true life stories his fictional sentences had each contained emotion, for his science fiction, he developed science fiction sentences where he tried to write each sentence so that the reader will have to make a creative contribution. Each sentence had what he called a hang-up with something missing, making it hard to read his work fast, or skim read it. 

Van Vogt married E. Mayne Hull in 1939 who went on to write science fiction and they remained together until her death in 1975.

Shortly after writing Slan John W Campbell contracted van Vogt to write for Astounding. It is worth noting that he did not do this for Asimov, and that during the Golden Age van Vogt was regarded as a more significant and exciting writer. He supplied a good proportion of the material published in Astounding Science Fiction. His stories all had a quality of mood, and they had drive and imagination, which  surprised him as he regarded himself as a relatively practical person.

He lived a very ascetic existence, because in order to produce what was needed, he worked from the time he got up until about eleven o'clock at night, every day, seven days a week, for years. 

Van vogt never worked his stories out in advance, he discovered where he was going as he wrote, and writing in 800 word blocks with the tight structure from his writing system he would often get stuck until he realised that after sleeping on a story problem a resolution often came upon waking or from his dreams. 

He then worked out a system for harnessing this approach where he would formulate the problem he had, set his alarm for 90 minutes and jot down the ideas that came to him and repeat that process throughout the night. He regarded it as a way of penetrating the subconscious. He did this for years.

Van Vogt noted:
I decided long ago that out of dreams must come another kind of enduring reality, and that readers would respond to such In a very involved way, without knowing what deep, unconscious motivations stirred them.  

Working like this all day seven days a week for years likely took it's toll, C M Kornbluth died young likely under the stress of needing to write enough to make a regular income. This became something of a recognised problem of Golden age writers, if only dealt with years or decades later.

van Vogt's work, took a hit from Damon Knight's 1945 article "Cosmic Jerrybuilder: A. E. van Vogt," which was reprinted in his collection of essays “In Search of Wonder” first published in 1956 in which he described The World of Null-A as "one of the worst allegedly-adult science fiction stories ever published," and van Vogt himself as "a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter."

Unfortunately for van Vogt, Damon Knight would later became the founder of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) and cofounder of the National Fantasy Fan Federation, so he was an incredibly influential person within the Science Fiction community. 

In 1949 van vogt wrote the Hypnotism handbook with Charles Edward Cooke, obviously quite unlike anything he'd written before, but it did surface an interest in the Mind that had been apparent in his fiction. 

I suspect that van Vogt needed a break from writing, and he was worried about getting caught up in automaticness, and failing to grow.He observed how writers become passé, they became old-fashioned to the readers. Another generation comes up in approximately a ten-year cycle. So his first ten years in science fiction was over, a new reality is coming up, and what should he do?

Then L Ron Hubbard wrote a massively popular book “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health” and he decided to try to recruit van Vogt for his new adventure into the life of the mind which he'd developed with John W Campbell. Hubbard started calling van Vogt long distance, which at that time was incredibly expensive and his persistent calling, day after day overcame van Vogt's initial resistance.It was beyond van Vogt's conception that anybody would phone that often—and talk that long—at those rates. So he became involved in Dianetics. 

One of the reasons the book Dianetics impressed him its lack of mysticism, not knowing, at that time, this was mainly due to John W.Campbell editing. He had previously met Hubbard in 1945 at a social gathering and his mysticism was apparent. So the lack of it in the book made him think it must be a good system, because it had knocked that out of him.

He started analysing himself, seeing his family strained through trauma. He noticed there were very few mothers in his stories...they're missing. Where was she in his stories? Was she there as little as it appeared, or maybe she was there very much, he concluded the later. He was personally impressed by the results. Van Vogt was quickly appointing head of the California Dianetics operation. Hubbard was a morning person and van Vogt a night person so their times at the centre diverged.

His wife had been ill, and had had operations about every two years, starting from about 1940. In 1951 a doctor examined her and suspected cancer. According to van Vogt with Dianetic auditing, her health issues faded. She was not sick again, for about 20 years when the problems returned.

The California Dianetics organization spent $500,000 in nine months and went broke. California was the only branch that did not go into bankruptcy, which van Vogt had an aversion to. So with an attorney friend, they fronted up to see all the creditors, and they let them fold and pay what they could. 

Hubbard would go on to develop Scientology, which was of no interest to van Vogt because of its mystical/religious aspects. I think the money from Dianetics and Scientology and the adulation Hubbard received through his fantastical claims for which he started to have a reverent audience ready with adulation rather than cynicism, did not do well for Hubbard's own mental health, Campbell too seems to have no long term benefit from his Dianetic work. They were certainly two people who needed mental health breakthroughs and Hubbard especially would cause a lot of personal damage.

I think Van Vogt remained pretty oblivious to Hubbard's subsequent exploits, but with his wife Mayne they decided to open up their own Dianetics center in Los Angeles. Which was partly supported by creating his fix up novels from earlier short stories throughout the 1950s. 

He saw Dianetics as similar to Freudian therapy, whereas Freud allowed the patient to freely associate, Dianetics would concentrate upon a single incident, going through it again and again. When that was done, things seemed to fade away. 

So after another period of ten years in around 1961 he set aside Dianetics, although his wife would continue and he would occasionally be drawn back for old clients. And he didn't stop thinking about psychology and developed systems of his own.

He returned to writing science fiction when he met Frederik Pohl in the early 1960s, who asked him to write for Galaxy which Pohl was then editing, and he wrote‘The Expendables,' and ‘The Silkie'. He was also working on a book called The Money Personality. Thinking about what personality traits did wealthy people have, as for all his intense work he still had trouble making enough money.

In the early 1990s, when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, his wife demonstrated her devotion to him by maintaining his business affairs and basically managing his life until he died in 2000.

Damon Knight's critique had a lasting impact. However Philip K. Dick would come to defend van Vogt 

 I started reading [science fiction] when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A. E. van Vogt. There was in van Vogt's writing a mysterious quality, and this was especially true in The World of Null-A. All the parts of that book did not add up; all the ingredients did not make a coherency. Now some people are put off by that. They think that's sloppy and wrong, but the thing that fascinated me so much was that this resembled reality more than anybody else's writing inside or outside science fiction.

And he directly addresses the criticism “Damon feels that it's bad artistry when you build those funky universes where people fall through the floor. It's like he's viewing a story the way a building inspector would when he's building your house. But reality really is a mess, and yet it's exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.”

France, where he is an extremely popular writer;

"Were it not for having run into science fiction and gained some consciousness-expansion, I would have ended up a clerk in the Canadian government."

Van Vogt believed that humanity is just Individuals who do, have, are and feel— the same wheels turning over, the same overall thoughts, as they have for millenia. In our moment of life we keep our gaze on the ground and go through our endless repetitions, and that's ok.

I'm glad they're there, with their bright eyes and bright brains. And I'm glad they're keeping the place going. But it bothered him that not only did they live these repetitions —they also want to read about them and endlessly so.

So he felt Science Fiction was like raise his eyes to look up at the stars, and locate himself in space, and visualize himself on a small planet at the outer rim of the Milky Way galaxy, thirty thousand light years along one "spoke" from that galaxy's center—and so science fiction gradually changing his natureand he's glad of the change. 

Van Vogt notes that:

Reading science fiction lifted me out of the do-and-be-and-have world and gave me glimpses backward and forward into the time and space distances of the universe. I may live only three seconds (so to speak), but I have had the pleasure and excitement of contemplating the beginning and end of existence. Short of being immortal physically, I have vicariously experienced just about everything that man can conceive will happen by reading science fiction. 

He saw reading science fiction as a transformative experience, is it? I don't know, but what I do know is that for me reading van Vogt gives that experience, more than any other Science Fiction writer, that we are being transformed and that maybe in the future we will become something greater than we are.

My Star Wars Canon

I saw the original Star Wars movie upon release in my High School years, I liked it and watched the two sequels when they came out and that was that, I wasn't a huge fan my enthusiasm had trailed off a bit when the Prequels started to appear and so I didn't have high hopes for them but I liked all of the Prequels. I personally experienced none of the outrage that was directed by fans at these movies. And "George Lucas ruined Star Wars" made no sense to me as he was the person who created it in the first place. 

So my love for those 6 movies has remained or even grown over time. They strike me as unique. I like Science fiction as a genre of books and my appreciation of that is mainly works from the 1940s to about the 1970s. There was an optimism and vibrancy of imagination and I suspect that partly because they were not accepted as "literature" there was something individualistic about them. As far as movies go Forbidden Planet is a classic and there are a few others from that time as well as TV series Star Trek, Doctor Who, Space 1999 I also think the 1960s shows The Avengers & The Prisoner have an aspect of sci fi and are excellent. 

George Lucas wanted to do a reboot of the Flash Gordon adventures and you can see that big screen ambitious, B Grade 1950s sensibility is the key to what makes Star Wars. It is a Science Fantasy with an abundance of fabulous creatures, settings and adventure. It makes me feel all warm inside. 

Lucas is old now and he got a lot of flack for making the Prequels so funnily enough he felt he couldn't devote his life to making another set of movies just to get more flack, so he sold it to Disney who said they would respect his stories and his legacy, but they lied to him and they did not. Lucas had written an outline for another film trilogy episodes 7,8&9 which Lucas film decided not to use probably because they thought fans wanted to pay big money to watch something that looks like episode 4 again, so that what they did even though in doing so it destroyed the continuity from the previous films. But anyway.

Now I've left something out, there was a Clone Wars movie that I didn't watch as I heard it was rubbish and their was a Clone Wars TV series which passed me by. However I had a daughter and I was always looking for DVDs to watch and the Clone Wars movie was in the sale bin for an irresistibly low price, so I bought it and I loved it as did my daughter and we bought the DVD series and they were an abundance of riches, my daughter particularly loved Ahsoka but i loved it all, it was a delight.

With the Release of the Force Awakens I experienced something of the emotions that those who had hated the Prequels experienced, watching the movie in the theatre I felt pleasing mild nostalgic feelings seeing Leia and Han older as I was and the Millennium Falcon and stuff, but upon stepping out and starting to think about what i had just seen I realised that the Triumphs of Luke, Han, Leia and Chewy had all turned to failure, they were losers and they didn't even bother to tell how they became such losers that was just back story and really the movie had none of Lucas' B Grade charm and undercurrent of humour. I didn't bother watching the next two, but I heard about them and nothing I heard made me eager to see them. 

However, I have watched quite a bit of the Rebels TV show, which is OK but totally non essential, it centres around a group of characters none of who I found particularly likeable. But it did no actual harm to earlier material and there was some nice bits where old characters showed up. 

The Movie Rogue 1 is is set just before episode IV but it has a unique grittier tone, but not without humour and pathos. Although there are no full Jedi it does have a cool Buddhist/Taoist kind of take on the force. It's a stand alone movie, an enjoyable watch with likeable characters and I'm glad it exists.

Then there were two seasons of the Mandalorian, which was a new take on Star Wars by John Favreau and Dave Filoni and it was set shortly after Episode 6 and was pleasing imaginatively, emotionally a kind of Star Wars Western was born and it worked at the end of season 2 there was a great conclusion to the story arc and it was done. It had managed to carve out a space that contradicted neither the original movies or Disney's monstrocities, but i suspect it will be hard to find such a place again, there have been more Favreau series since and I have found them all Ok but non essential, so I am happy that I have been able to get those two seasons on DVD.

So my visual canon is:

Films: Episodes I to VI

TV: The Clone Wars & The Mandalorian Seasons I&II

Which brings me to the books, I am now trying to work out a personal canon for these, I do not want to read them all, I don't have the time and inclination, but the Expanded Universe books were created with Lucas's approval and with some sort of high level guidance, even if it didn't mean he actually read them.

This is what I intend to read listed in chronological Order

Darth Plagueis by set prior to episode 1- Some Sith history

Episode III Revenge of the Sith Matthew Stovers - This is said to add depth to episode 3 as well as having some good character portraits of Count Dooku & others

Shadows of the Empire by Steve Perry set between Episode 5 Empire Strikes Back and 6 The Return of the Jedi.  

Kenobi by John Jackson Miller - This is supposed to be a really good read and doesn't just focus on Obi Wan.

Rogue Squadron X Wing by Michael A Stackpole. Might read the first 4 of this X Wing Series, this focusses on unknown or lesser known characters and picks up the story after episode 6.

The Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn, this is regarded as probably the most essential work in the expanded Universe, has some great new characters and a significant plot line often spoken of as the trilogy that should have been used for the sequel films: 

Heir of the Empire

Dark Force Rising

The Last Command

"I Jedi" by Michael A Stackpole - a good stand alone book references and builds on Thrawn and the X wing books.

The New Jedi Order - Maybe first 3 books, this is a big series too big for me to want to read it all, considered darker than much that went before, it has a good reputation, I'm interested to know if I'll like it :

Vector Prime

Dark Tide: Onslaught 

Dark Tide II: Ruin 

I have actually read the Thrawn Trilogy, I picked these by watching a number of youtube videos getting a sense of what they all thought were essential books, there was fairly wide agreement on what the important books were. This strikes me as a good rounded selection of works enough to fully indulge my love of Star Wars, to allow enjoyable repeated watching and reading and to be imaginatively satisfying. 

I have read plenty of novels including Science Fiction and Fantasy and yet I think reading Star Wars novels is a distinct thing in itself and that it is good to read books closely related to the film/TV format and material that extends beyond it. I think it will take a few books for it all to feel natural to me and I should update this as I read my way through some of these books.

Science Fiction

I want to gather together a small collection of Sci Fi novels, I have read sci fi much of my life but fit fully at least recently and I don't have quite the disposition towards novels generally as I did when I started reading them. For me sci fi is not about science but it is about a projection of the future and what i love about is the fabulous. It has much in common with fantasy but it starts with our modern sensibility and moves from there, I see it as best when it tries to mend our broken sensibilities. I also like my sci fi at around 200 pages, I am thoroughly put off by these 500 page and more modern sci fi novels, you should be able to read them in a day and I'm a slow reader, I'll put the long books down and never return to them, to me it shows a lack of concision in the writer and a lack of respect for the reader.

But I do think there are periods in art and for sci fi I'd say it is mainly from the 1950s to early 1980s, with of course some outliers.

So there are some things I know. 

I like Clifford D Simak, his work embodies a lot of what I love in Sci Fi, there are alien encounters, transformations of our humanity and generally he has a really likeable sensibility, he represents good human fellowship, acceptance, a pastoral element and an embrace of the fabulous. I 'd be happy to get all his novels. In recent times I have read Time is the Simplest Thing and Way Station and they are both fabulous novels.

A E Van Vogt, he doesn't have the same likeable sensibility, but he still embodies sci fi for me, he doesn't have a high literary appreciation, but this is sci fi and his novels are wonderfully crazy romps, again they do represent transformations and his very first novel from the late 1940s Slan has to be regarded as a classic.

Andre Norton I haven't read widely but her novel Star Born made a significant impression on me, again she has a pastoral element, harmony with nature, telepathy and changes developments of humanity. 

J G Ballard I read quite widely but now I wouldn't want to re read most of his novels with the possible exceptions of his more fabulous works like The Crystal World and the Unlimited Dream Company and maybe the short story collection Myths of the Near Future.

Barrington Bayley with his fabulous alchemical underpinning I found attractive I must re read Star Winds and possibly all of his novels.

Michael Moorcock mainly a fantasy writer and I am not that attracted to his work now, but maybe I should have the first Jerry Cornelius novel the Final Programme, a bit of the spirit of the 1960s lies there. 

Ursula K Leguin - I think always coming home put me off her work, it seemed narratively diffuse. But I love her earthsea books, fantasy rather than sci fi but think I should read Left Hand of Darkness & the Word for World is Forest. 

Edgar Rice Burroughs - I do feel a warm spot in my heart for his Mars books

Philip K. Dick I read quite a bit of, I feel like I should have at least 3 of his books, I have do androids dream of electric sheep, the other two maybe Clans of the Alphane Moon & maybe Eye in the Sky. I prefer more optimistic writers but he just feels essential to the genre and is wonderfully inventive. 

I suspect there will be occasional books by 

Lester del Rey (1915–1992)

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958)

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992)

Murray Leinster (1896–1975)

C. L. Moore (1911–1987)

Frederik Pohl (1919–2013)

Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985)

Jack Vance (1916–2013)

Jack Williamson (1908–2006)

Poul Anderson (1926–2001)

C. M. Kornbluth (1923–1958)

Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1923–1996)

Robert Silverberg (1935–)

I need to pinpoint a set of novels from these writers and maybe a few more. I just made a trip to a local 2nd hand bookshop and was disappointed to see that the classic era writers had receded from their shelves.

Materialism

Welcome. I wanted to do this vlog on a subject that is central to my vlogging: materialism. There is both a cultural aspect to this and a personal one.

This isa very materialistic time in our culture. Materialism expresses a couple of different but related ideas. One is the valuing of material possessions: a big house,; fancy car; lots of expensive appliances;  designer clothes etc. The second meaning is that the totality of life is material, what can be observed with our senses and there is nothing beyond that. Both of these meanings express a spiritual poverty, while I'd argue that material possessions are not in themselves a sure indicator of spirituality poverty, excess attachment to them certainly is. Many Christians might want to deny it, but the Jesus of the Gospels references to material possessions are generally entirely negative, he asked followers to leave all possessions behind them, this attitude to material possessions is quite common in eastern religions too. It is interesting that while a lot of religious folk can still take quite seriously their rejection of icons, they seldom have the same fervour in rejection of material possessions. 

This is the idea that the whole of existence is material has I think an experiential aspect to it and is the cultural norm of the modern era and now more so than any time in history. Why this is the case is difficult to say.

David Bentley Hart in his new book Roland by Moonlight, based on imaginery conversations with his dog Roland writes:

There was a time, again, when your kind was much better able to see the gods—the angels, deified mortals, spirits, fairies, what have you—than now you are. Not because there was a stabler and more open causeway between the two hemispheres of your brains or anything like that, but because there was a wider, more richly populated open causeway between your souls and the cosmos. And those gods—or what have you—were also mirrors of what you are, as spiritual beings, there above. ... that they came more easily into full sensuous manifestation so long as human beings were in a state of what Barfield called ‘original participation.’ Unlike him, however, I don’t believe that your kind’s estrangement from that original, more vividly theophanic world is simply a temporary stage—a kind of probationary process—on the way to a post-critical ‘final participation.’ It would be nice to imagine that that’s the case, but I fear that the reality will be one of continuing, deepening estrangement..."

 In Vedantic terms we say we're in the Kali Yuga the lowest most material of the 4 ages. It is interesting his reference to Barfield here. While I find the general outline of the changes to consciousness that have happened across the historical period, fit with his account of our move away from original participation, the idea of  final participation is an untested idea. It doesn't seem like Barfield himself attained to such a state, it could be argued that Steiner did, I don't think so, his autobiography showed that he had spiritual sight from a young age it was not something he created through a certain type of thinking and there is no evidence that he was able to guide his followers into such an experience. The Antroposophical movement has so far not ushered in a new post material age or even really subculture. 

There are obviously serious philosophical problems with materialism. There are certainly plenty of intelligent people that have expended a lot of time into shoring up it's arguments. But for me they always come across as special pleading.  The most consistent philosophical position seems to me to be Richard Dawkins view of humans as lumbering robots, our thoughts and consciousness are a by product of our biological processes. The physical activity in our brains produces thoughts. That strikes me as the clearest most consistent materialistic philosophy. I don't know that this is the predominant philosophical position, and materialism is assumed as the default position for most people it doesn't necessarily rest upon a clearly expressed philosophy. But what also seems obvious about this is that no one including Richard Dawkins would act in a way consistant with thinking it's true. Thinking is a direct experience and our thoughts are guided by the nature of their content, they are associative, reason or inclination based. We judge them qualitatively, not as givens through a mindless biological process. 

But here I'm not so much exploring the philosophical foundations of spiritual or materialist thought but reflecting on how I see it playing out in our culture, through a few examples that have struck me recently.

First example is seeing Rupert Sheldrake reference that he had been included in a spiritual 100 list for 2021 as being one of the 100 most influential living spiritual figures in the world. My initial thought was that's quite nice, Rupert probably deserves that he has done pretty significant work in creating experiments for psychic phenomena or non material action at a distance and his theory of morphic resonnance is an interesting one in exploring form in living organisms, something that DNA research hasn't been able to do. So I went to the list and I'll put a link to it in the description, I see that the Pope and the Dalai Llama were there as you would expect, but then I see that it includes David Attenborough, Sam Harris & Neil de Grasse Tyson who aren't spiritual at all. 

So then I looked at the criteria:

They need to be alive and   have made a unique and spiritual contribution on a global scale fair enough but criteria 3

3) The person is frequently googled, appears in Nielsen Data, has a Wikipedia page, and is actively talked about throughout the Internet. By taking into account the amount of times that a person is googled or how many times their Wikipedia profile is viewed, the list gains a highly democratic and transparent parameter. 

So here we have what is ostensibly a spiritual list and the criteria is quantitative, how many times googled, has a wikipedia page, spirituality is qualitative. This strikes me as an excellent example of just how pervassive materialism is now, a list dedicated to the idea of spiritually influentiual people has a bunch of people in it who are not spiritual and it has quantititve parameters for choosing them. oh my!

Next point I have seen some articles and watched the Netflix documentary on Near Death Experiences which I find fascinating and that we are seeing these is a good thing. Near Death experiences are when people usually as a result of an accident or medical emergency experience usually a time when there body experiences death, their pulse and brain activity flatlines and during that time they have an experience of leaving their body. These experiences feel very real, in fact they feel more real than life here a greater sense of awareness, they also lose their fear of death and in most instances the idea of returning to life on earth is not an attractive one as they feel like they have gone home.  This is an experience by Dr Mary Neal excerpted material from her book Heaven and back, she spent 30 minutes submerged in rapids after a kayaking accident.

At the moment my body was released and began to tumble, I felt a “pop' It felt as if I had finally shaken off my heavy outer layer, freeing my soul. I rose up and out of the river, and when my soul broke through the surface of the water, I encountered a group of fifteen to twenty souls (human spirits sent by God), who greeted me with the most overwhelming joy I have ever experienced and could ever imagine. It was joy at an unadulterated core level. ... Their brilliance was both blinding and invigorating. We did not speak, per se, using our mouth, but easily communicated in a very pure form. ... My arrival was joyously celebrated and a feeling of absolute love was palpable as these spiritual beings and I hugged, danced, and greeted each other. The intensity, depth, and purity of these feelings and sensations were far greater than I could ever describe with words and far greater than anything I have experienced on earth. ..God's world is exponentially more colorful and intense. It was as though I was experiencing an explosion of love and joy in their absolute, unadulterated essence. ..it is impossible for me to adequately describe what I saw and what I felt. When I try to recount my experiences now, the description feels very pale. I feel as though I am trying to describe a three-dimensional experience while living in a two-dimensional world. The appropriate words, descriptions, and concepts don't even exist in our current language. ...My companions and I began to glide along a path, and I knew that I was going home. My eternal home. We were returning to God and we were all very excited.

Our vocabulary is just not rich enough to describe the experience in a way that is understandable. Perhaps this is why Jesus often spoke in parables. I felt my soul being pulled toward the entry and, as I approached, I physically absorbed its radiance and felt the pure, complete, and utterly unconditional absolute love that emanated from the hall. It was the most beautiful and alluring thing I had ever seen or experienced. 

Mary describes the sense of going home and liken's God's world to a 3 dimensional world and this one only 2 Dimensional, she has a sense of completion and wholeness that we don't have here, and religious language keeps coming into her account because of course it is a religious experience, but when we strip our culture of religious language we lose even what tools we have to communicate this kind of experience.

Another thing that fascinated me about the Netflix documentary was how those returning here often felt alienated from those around them, one woman spoke of the difficulty she had coming back as she said "I find it hard to even talk to my husband...what i used to know is not what i know now...It's so hard when everybody else's point of view hasn't changed"our language does not seem fit for expressing what happened to them and in an article on Near Death Experiences it had this sentence:

"These kind of theories put Greyson on wobbly ground among neuroscientists, who mostly agree the mind to be a product of the brain."

This is an expression of not just scientific but cultural orthodoxy and it is completely inimical to the what they have just experienced. They have had an experience that has revealed something about their own nature, that there is a greater and more loving reality, that we survive the death of our body and this is flatly rejected. This is a severe impediment to understanding and experiencing who and what we really are, I would also say that the "spirit" of art can't truly survive in such a paradigm.

At the start I mentioned the spiritual list, which has a number of Spiritual not religious types on it at the end I'll talk about materialism in religion not spiritual types.  This is a good quote from CS Lewis:

..if Fundamentalism means accepting as a point of faith at the outset the proposition ‘Every statement in the Bible is completely true in the literal, historical sense’. That would break down at once on the parables... St. Jerome said that the whole Mosaic account of creation was done ‘after the method of a popular poet’. Of course I believe the composition, presentation, and selection for inclusion in the Bible, of all books to have been guided by the Holy Ghost. But I think he meant us to have sacred myth and sacred fiction as well as sacred history.

George MacDonald applauds those those "who want to find out what the Bible really means" we must dive into meaning and explore it, the meaning doesn't sit on the page of the Bible.

I wanted to show that the encroachment of materialism isn't just a matter for atheists, it has encroached into those who regard themselves as spiritual and religious. What can we do? Well we can do some easy things like avoiding some of the materialist metaphors, say "I don't think that way" rather than "My Brain isn't wired that way" But develop our spiritual practice and the acts of human kindness and compassion and for those whgo love reading, read the spiritual classics and meditate deeply upon them.

Thank you.

Notes:

https://www.watkinsmagazine.com/watkins-spiritual-list-for-2021

Vedanta blog

We currently live in a very connected world, on youtube we have people from Aotearoa New Zealand, The United States, the UK, Australia, Japan, France, Germany Europe, China, India and elsewhere. We can speak directly to one another and being universal is our reality. We have to acknowledge this universality. I think dialogue is relatively easy and while there are cultural differences there is a shared space for dialogue probably moreso than any time in recorded history and likely we're more culturally homogenous.

I have done a lot of vlogs on Christian writers but now I want to venture into Hinduism, Vedanta, the spiritual traditions of Bharat or India. However you want to refer to it. I'll use the term Vedanta from now on. This has a personal connection for me. I grew up in a secular household, both my parents grew up in Anglican  households, but our family had moved away from wider family, we didn't attend church and I didn't even know people that were strongly religious, even now I don't know that many although there are two operating churches in the town where I live but they're hardly flourishing. Growing up I wasn't drawn to Christianity, although Tolkien's fiction had a strong influence on me. It was reallyVedanta that was first real to me and it was through that any appreciation of Christian spirituality was born in me. In cultural terms it interesting for me to trace Vedanta in recent history. The Theosophists spoke of Vedanta and while I find Blavatsky an interesting figure I  don't find their writings very clear or illuminating.

There are number of significant modern Vedantic figures: Ramana Maharshi, Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, Paramahansa Yogananda, Sri Aurobindo and Prabhupada. The English writer Arthur Osborne wrote as number of books on Ramana Maharshi as well as one on Shirdi Sai Baba and Paul Brunton claimed Ramana Maharshi was his guru in his pretty popular book a search in Secret India. Sri Ramakrsihna came figuratively to the West through his key devotee Swami Vivekananda who attended the first world parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and the story of his going there is an interesting one as he represented India there but he came with no formal accreditation as was required and hadn't realised he needed it, but through certain interesting events it all worked out and he was probably the most momentous speaker there and he spent quite a while in the United States and established Vedanta centres there. 

Vivekananda interestingly emphasised how there is truth in all religions and used the quote from the Bhagavad Gita: "As different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their waters in the sea, so, Oh Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

Not that long afterwards in 1920 Paramahansa Yogananda came to the United States and for the most part lived there for the rest of his life establishing the Self Realisation Fellowship, he like Vivekanada arrived with little money and no contacts. Yogananda wrote the hugely influential book Autobiography of a Yogi. His tradition, the teachings through the line of his gurus was called Kriya Yoga. Yogananda has made his place in popular culture,his line of Gurus were included in the figures on the Beatles classic Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Interestingly my family has a nice tie into this album that dates back earlier than Vivekananda's visit to the US  back to 1856. Pablo Fanque who is featured in the song "Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite" toured New Zealand, 

George Harrison who was responsible for Yogananda appearing on the Beatles cover used to have piles of copies of the Autobiography of Yogi which he would give away to his friends and acquaintences. The mahaguru at the start of Yogananda's lineage Babaji is celebrated in song on the Supertramp album Even in the Quietest moments which had a real appeal to me, the brother of one of my school friends had a copy of this album. I think George Harrison's song Dear One is about Yogananda. I was also from a young age a fan of the group Yes and their album Tales from Topographic Oceans was based on a footnote from Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi. The singer from Yes: Jon Anderson has as his guru someone called Mother Aubrey who had as her spiritual ideal Ramakrishna. 

When I was about 30 years old I read Autobiography of a Yogi, I don't know that i was aware of the Beatles, Yes or Supertramp connections. I was interested in reading spiritual books but spirituality didn't really live for me, it felt like there was something of an abyss between me and spirit/God. This book changed that, Yogananda seemed to have and be able to convey having a living, personal and easy relationship with God. This came to me at a time when I desperately needed it, I was suffering from depression and  alienation from the spirit which was becoming intolerable. 

Some decades later I was initiated into Kriya Yoga by Swami Samapanananda now about 10 years ago and i have twice had spiritual retreats with the current Guru Paramahansa Prajnananandaji. The tradition luckily for a lover of reading like myself has a healthy literature. Prajnananandaji has written a lot of books, Yogananda too, his brother disciple Satyananda wrote a set of Biographies of the masters, Prajnanananda's guru Hariharananda wrote a number too. Yogananda's guru Sri Yukteswar wrote one called Holy Science and Prajnanada wrote a commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali based on the interepretations of that scripture by Sri Yuktesars's guru Lahiri Mahasya.

I'll make a few general comments about Vedanta, now one of the things i believe about religion generally is that it didn't used to be considered as a set of beliefs it was descriptive of actual experiences and could not be abstracted from other realms of life. Really only since modern times especially from the end of the middle ages the concept of the secular has opened up and we have come to conceive of religion as a set of beliefs and as something that could be abstracted from other realms of life. 

I'll now outline some key Vedantic concepts and practices: Dharma, Bhakti, Seva, Satsang, Dhyāna & Jnana. Your Dharma, is your path and could be translated as right conduct, speaking truthfully, compassion, we live with the Gunas or qualities: Thamas, Rajas and Sathwa or sloth, anger and Purity the first two are negative qualities but even the last  must eventually be transcended. Bhakti is devotion, prayer and devotional singing. Seva is service to others particularly the poor. Satsang is good company ,get togethers with other devotees. Dhyana or Meditiation is a practice and in Kriya yoga with initiation we are taught a specific mediation practice. And Jnana is wisdom, the study of the scriptures but more importantly the relisation of them and none of these are really seperate from one another. For instance in Jnana we are to realise our true nature is divine and in Seva or service to others we are acting on this by recognising the divinity in others, much like when Jesus said "what you do unto the least of these you do unto me."

David Bentley Hart wrote an excellent book the Experience of God, which compared the concept of God from Christianity the God of Classical Theism to that of Islam and the Vedantic conception of Sat Chit Ananda, or Being Consciousness Bliss. If God is essentially the same in these traditions then the metaphor of different paths to the one destination seems appropriate. 

I certainly make no claims to be a wonderful exemplar and atheists often point to less than perfect behaviour of religious people as hypocrasy and while that may sometimes be the case , often it is not. Religion is for the imperfect accepting teachings does not immediately mean you can fully live up to them. hypocracy is when you complain of the behaviour of others what you do yourself. 

I want to finish off by coming back to the start of this, I think we are now in a time when we can no longer ignore the fact that there are various religious traditions, also it may be that sincere practitioners of disparate traditions may find more in common than with many practitioners of those supposed to be within their own faith. 

New Zealand Cannabis Referendum

With the cannabis referendum I was quietly confident the time had finally come for Aotearoa New Zealand to act sensibly on the issue, I was surprised by just how annoyed I was, when the vote went no, still pending specials mind you .

In a perfect world no one would use cannabis and no one would use alcohol. I 'm a puritan about alcohol I despise the stuff and it bothers me that it is accepted as a default drug that is more normal to use than to avoid. It enhances bravado, foolhardiness, carelessness, ego and imperviousness. all of which this world has way too much of.

Not only is it legal but it is legal to push it with advertising, it kills by inspiring violence and dangerous deeds. It kills by direct physical destruction to human bodies, it damages the liver and increase rates of cancer. The emergency wards fill up on a Friday night due to idiots getting tanked and their stupidity enhanced.

Cannabis is a drug too and causes harm, but whereas a drunk person will blithely ignore the greatest art, a stoned person is likely to be stunned by the impression of even inferior art. You can be amazed by simple piece of music, lost in self contemplation, overcome by humility all things I would love to see enhanced in our culture. Wouldn't it be great to see an explosion of appreciation and wonder?

While a drunk and a stoned person will both have their driving performance impaired, a drunk person will drive too fast and be overconfident, while a stoned person will drive too slow and be overcautious.

We can awaken out sense of wonder without drugs, but currently we have a ubiquitous drug that vanquishes wonder. I am ashamed of you New Zealand for voting to keep laws that do more harm than good, that destroy lives for a victimless act, that hurt Maori disproportionately.

How do we react to the news of Donald Trump being infected with Coronavirus?

 What a strange time and how am I to react to the news that Trump has contracted Coronavirus? My first reaction was not sympathy for the man, I don’t want him dead, I don’t even want him to suffer, but I do want him to stop leading the United States and not just because he is a Republican President with policies I disapprove of, but because I think he is a genuine threat to democracy, and I base this on what he himself says “there will be no transfer of power” etc .

Trump’s neice wrote a book about with a subtitle “How my family created the world’s most dangerous man” and on reflection while there may be worse people in the world than Donald Trump, I can’t think of anyone more dangerous than he is. His sister talks of his cruelty and lying and says "Donald's out for Donald" reflecting on the war dead Trump says “what was in it for them?” Donald Trump is self centred, only looks out for himself and has no sense of altruism.

There are now over 200,000 dead in the US from Coronavirus, for such a technically advanced country this is appalling and it is obvious that so many died because Donald Trump did not act, he did not try to save the populace of the US from a deadly disease and while it is possible to contract the disease while still trying to do everything right, Donald and his entourage & supporters have not tried to do everything right. Just days before going to hospital he was criticising Joe Biden for wearing a mask all the time.

Trump might be ill, but while we can feel compassion for him we must not let that compassion make us think that he is not still uniquely dangerous. We have seen the Bob Mueller regarded Trump impervious to the law due to a DOJ Policy regarding indicting a sitting President. We have seen the Senate refuse to even hear the evidence of his corruption because he belongs to the majority Party. We have seen Trump break the democratic safeguards of the seperation of powers, with a subservient AG, corruptly loyal to Trump rather than law.

Trump represents a danger to the world, he has a legacy of death, violence and corruption that is clear to read. That he may be suffering now doesn’t suddenly turn him into a nice man, I do hope he starts to contemplate the things that he has done and repent, but mostly I hope that he is removed from his position of power where he is uniquely dangerous to democracy, civility, decency, honesty and compassion.