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.