AE Van Vogt

[dask]

Impressive and useful for sure. Note to Donald Tuck: There's a new kid in town.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I've compiled what I hope is a useful list of all van Vogt's English-language science fiction/fantasy books with a lot of information (including what's in the various fixups and collections) packed in a single page:

Bibliography: A. E. van Vogt

If it's not useful, this can at least serve to maybe resurrect the thread.

May well be very useful. Thank you. I have a lot of van V's books but the thing I would REALLY like to get hold of a copy of is a screenplay he (co)wrote for the sequel to that masterpiece of trash moviemaking Starcrash

Co-written in 1977 with SciFi novelist, A.E. Van Vogt, STAR RIDERS would never make its way to the Silver Screen, at least not in the form envisioned by its creator. It did survive in the written form, though; the novel version of Star Riders would surface several years later in 1986 in Italy as I cavalieri delle stelle (The Knights of the Stars).

Was this ever translated?

The Haunted Stars....

 

[hitmouse]

I missed this one the first time round.

 

[J-Sun]

Impressive and useful for sure. Note to Donald Tuck: There's a new kid in town.

Thanks! Good to hear. As far as Tuck, though, those guys really worked - I just sort of selected and presented.

Was this ever translated?

Interesting articles, but nope, that's never appeared in English. There's another case sort of related to that, in that van Vogt wrote a story, another Italian author expanded it, he sent a translated version to van Vogt, van Vogt tweaked it, and it was published as a collaboration (in French and German!) but has also never been actually published in English. The real bibliography of Storysource covers these.

I missed this one the first time round.

Me, too! Thanks for pointing it out and I'll update the bibliography soon.

 

[BAYLOR]

I missed this one the first time round.

View attachment 89338

I loved this book.

 

[BAYLOR]

Destination Universe

 

[BAYLOR]

Destination Universe

I Seems to have repeated myself again.

My favorite short story by him Is sometimes its under a different title Resurrection. This is story twould been a great choice forefather The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone.

 

[BAYLOR]

Damon Knight basically shredded Van Vogt in the sixties, quote:

"In a series of reviews for various magazines, he became famous as a science fiction critic, a career which began when he wrote in 1945 that Van Vogt, ...is not a giant as often maintained. He's only a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter. After nine years, he ceased reviewing when a magazine refused to publish one review exactly as he wrote it."

URL: Damon Knight - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Funnily enough I re-read Van Vogt, but can't remember the last time I read Damon Knight.

A E Van Vogt is better remembered in science fiction then is Damon Knight .

 

[psikeyhackr]

Damon Knight basically shredded Van Vogt in the sixties,

I remember Damon Knight as an SF writer but his only title I remember is Hell's Pavement. I liked it at the time.

I will have to look at his bibliography to see what else I might recall.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I remember Damon Knight as an SF writer but his only title I remember is Hell's Pavement. I liked it at the time.

I will have to look at his bibliography to see what else I might recall.

Knight's short story Four in One is one of those that keeps coming up in any 'Help me find a story I remember... ' thread.

 

[Matteo]

Somehow missed this thread. But did see another one yesterday and posted my collection. I'm a fan - though not to the extent where I can quote passages or remember specific scenes; I like the genre and he's a great example of it. And I agree he's not a great  writer but he can certainly tell a great story - even if (or perhaps  because) they're loopy.

A lot of these I read in one long "binge" so they tend to merge together and it's hard to pick out specific favourites.

 

[BAYLOR]

Somehow missed this thread. But did see another one yesterday and posted my collection. I'm a fan - though not to the extent where I can quote passages or remember specific scenes; I like the genre and he's a great example of it. And I agree he's not a great  writer but he can certainly tell a great story - even if (or perhaps  because) they're loopy.

A lot of these I read in one long "binge" so they tend to merge together and it's hard to pick out specific favourites.
View attachment 123706

The Human Operator is a story that he. He co-wrote with Harlan Ellison in 1971. It was laster adapted for the 1990's Outer Limits tv series.

The story can be found in the 1975 book Partners in Wonder

 

[JunkMonkey]

A lot of these I read in one long "binge" so they tend to merge together and it's hard to pick out specific favourites.

For me it has to be The Moonbeast - a pure feverdream of a book. Any novel that has (almost as an aside) an immortal sabre Tooth tiger that lives on the Moon and eats a diet of cowboys that fall through an interdimensional rift has got to be high on anyone's list of all time greats.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I have just finished van Vogt's Cosmic Encounter ,his penultimate finished novel (that was published in English at least - his last book À la conquête de Kiber has only been published in French and Romanian) and it's a bewildering mess. I seriously had no idea what was going on for most of the book.

The action of the piece takes place in 1704 A.D. where, because of reasons, various bits of time have congregated, bringing with them a Transport Ship from the 83th century crewed by a young boy and with 47,000 passengers in suspended animation, a 'Lantellan Battle Cruiser' from the 25th century crewed by robots in the middle of their war with the 'Tellurian Federation', a sleezeball from a 23rd century New York , and, most inexplicably, a dinosaur which arrives in the middle of night (and the middle of the book) on the front lawn of an English country house, is herded into a stables where it eats a horse - and is never mentioned again.

All this time collapsing and the imminent End of the Universe are centred on our former nobleman, turned pirate, arsehole of a hero. In chapter two he kills the heroine of the book - though he graciously offers to spare her life if she 'consents to be raped' (sic) by a few of his pirate crew (including him, obviously). She refuses, so he ties her to an anchor and kicks her overboard into the Caribbean - where she drowns. The fact that it turns out later in book he was he was getting paid to kill her makes you wonder how sincere his sparing her life offer was - which makes him even more disgusting a character than he was to start with. Anyway, she drowns and is dead for a bit before being bought back to life and given telepathic super powers by a submerged spaceship she happens to land on. After that it gets messy. The end of the book has the characters repeating over and over again the same 18 or so hours of rushing backwards and forwards around London as the hero, escaping some imminent execution, is repeatedly thrown backwards in time through alternate realities with some of the people around him (including Queen Anne) remembering the events of the previous iteration and sometimes not (some of them deliberately programming themselves to forget, and others being hypnotised or sleepwalking through them).

As far as I could make out, all this interdimensional, time-warping heck was put in train when our hero was conceived. An atom in the sperm and an atom in the ovum that joined to create him recognised each other. The last time these two atoms had been in close proximity was at the centre of the giant sun that immediately followed the Big Bang. Having bumped into each other again the atoms wondered what all the other atoms they hung around with in the urstar were doing and wouldn't it be nice if they all met up for a reunion - so they sent out an invitation across time and space....

In the end the universe is saved and time de-collapsed (or at least stopped from collapsing any further) when the two atoms are somehow convinced they don't want to see their chums after all and they cancel the invitation.

The writing oscillates wildly between awful and impenetrable with big loud side harmonics of WT actual F?!

like

​

The Nature of what happened next, Captain Nathan Fletcher was not qualified to evaluate. As the aircraft swooped down upon the little ship, the latter aimed a nadir beam up at the air vessel's propulsion system.​

The name of the instrument indicates its action. It was not a weapon. It, among other things, nullified weapons. By the eight-third [sic] century the discoveries of the nature of nature had made possible . . . simplicities.​

There is no such condition as heat. No radiation. No light waves. These are only the phenomena of the basic effort of space to maintain itself. Wherever space is in difficulties there will be found the turbulence called energy.​

(Atoms do not realise they have no existence, as such. That they are only a relation to.)​

or

Deliberately, standing there, the man from New York took a small gleaming instrument from a special pocket inside his tight fitting coat. It was slightly curved, shaped like a long, silver knife handle (but there was no knife blade attached). And it had several small dial faces and even smaller adjustment knobs that could be locked in position.​

The instrument was called GROETWUC. Which was an acronym for . . . Guidance Over Extended Territory With Unlimited Conversion.​

principally it operated on two levels. Connected to the flight suit with its warming system , it could focus intense heat - and thus boil water in a container, or ward off big fish in the ocean.​

and

The operation of the engines telepathed Ahlone, who was now holding on to invisible supports on the glass window - they seemed invisible because Fletcher could not see them -​

Seriously bewildering stuff on every page. Love it!

 

[BAYLOR]

For me it has to be The Moonbeast - a pure feverdream of a book. Any novel that has (almost as an aside) an immortal sabre Tooth tiger that lives on the Moon and eats a diet of cowboys that fall through an interdimensional rift has got to be high on anyone's list of all time greats.

The recently Published The Last Dangerous Vision contains a story by A E Van Vogt.

 

[JunkMonkey]

The recently Published The Last Dangerous Vision contains a story by A E Van Vogt.

Cool! and it's a previously unpublished one too!

Title: Skin

www.isfdb.org

 

[BAYLOR]

Cool! and it's a previously unpublished one too!

Title: Skin

www.isfdb.org

Im glad he made it into a Dangerous Visions anthology .

 

[dask]

Thought was The Last Dangerous Visions was nothing more than an enduring urban myth. Well, now I know what to say when my wife asks me “What do really need for Christmas.”

 

[BAYLOR]

Thought was The Last Dangerous Visions was nothing more than an enduring urban myth. Well, now I know what to say when my wife asks me “What do really need for Christmas.”

It exists, Ive held ia copy of in my hands , i've turned actual pages , I know it's real.

 

[Matteo]

I have just finished van Vogt's Cosmic Encounter ,his penultimate finished novel (that was published in English at least - his last book À la conquête de Kiber has only been published in French and Romanian) and it's a bewildering mess. I seriously had no idea what was going on for most of the book.

The action of the piece takes place in 1704 A.D. where, because of reasons, various bits of time have congregated, bringing with them a Transport Ship from the 83th century crewed by a young boy and with 47,000 passengers in suspended animation, a 'Lantellan Battle Cruiser' from the 25th century crewed by robots in the middle of their war with the 'Tellurian Federation', a sleezeball from a 23rd century New York , and, most inexplicably, a dinosaur which arrives in the middle of night (and the middle of the book) on the front lawn of an English country house, is herded into a stables where it eats a horse - and is never mentioned again.

All this time collapsing and the imminent End of the Universe are centred on our former nobleman, turned pirate, arsehole of a hero. In chapter two he kills the heroine of the book - though he graciously offers to spare her life if she 'consents to be raped' (sic) by a few of his pirate crew (including him, obviously). She refuses, so he ties her to an anchor and kicks her overboard into the Caribbean - where she drowns. The fact that it turns out later in book he was he was getting paid to kill her makes you wonder how sincere his sparing her life offer was - which makes him even more disgusting a character than he was to start with. Anyway, she drowns and is dead for a bit before being bought back to life and given telepathic super powers by a submerged spaceship she happens to land on. After that it gets messy. The end of the book has the characters repeating over and over again the same 18 or so hours of rushing backwards and forwards around London as the hero, escaping some imminent execution, is repeatedly thrown backwards in time through alternate realities with some of the people around him (including Queen Anne) remembering the events of the previous iteration and sometimes not (some of them deliberately programming themselves to forget, and others being hypnotised or sleepwalking through them).

As far as I could make out, all this interdimensional, time-warping heck was put in train when our hero was conceived. An atom in the sperm and an atom in the ovum that joined to create him recognised each other. The last time these two atoms had been in close proximity was at the centre of the giant sun that immediately followed the Big Bang. Having bumped into each other again the atoms wondered what all the other atoms they hung around with in the urstar were doing and wouldn't it be nice if they all met up for a reunion - so they sent out an invitation across time and space....

In the end the universe is saved and time de-collapsed (or at least stopped from collapsing any further) when the two atoms are somehow convinced they don't want to see their chums after all and they cancel the invitation.

The writing oscillates wildly between awful and impenetrable with big loud side harmonics of WT actual F?!

like

​

The Nature of what happened next, Captain Nathan Fletcher was not qualified to evaluate. As the aircraft swooped down upon the little ship, the latter aimed a nadir beam up at the air vessel's propulsion system.​

The name of the instrument indicates its action. It was not a weapon. It, among other things, nullified weapons. By the eight-third [sic] century the discoveries of the nature of nature had made possible . . . simplicities.​

There is no such condition as heat. No radiation. No light waves. These are only the phenomena of the basic effort of space to maintain itself. Wherever space is in difficulties there will be found the turbulence called energy.​

(Atoms do not realise they have no existence, as such. That they are only a relation to.)​

or

Deliberately, standing there, the man from New York took a small gleaming instrument from a special pocket inside his tight fitting coat. It was slightly curved, shaped like a long, silver knife handle (but there was no knife blade attached). And it had several small dial faces and even smaller adjustment knobs that could be locked in position.​

The instrument was called GROETWUC. Which was an acronym for . . . Guidance Over Extended Territory With Unlimited Conversion.​

principally it operated on two levels. Connected to the flight suit with its warming system , it could focus intense heat - and thus boil water in a container, or ward off big fish in the ocean.​

and

The operation of the engines telepathed Ahlone, who was now holding on to invisible supports on the glass window - they seemed invisible because Fletcher could not see them -​

Seriously bewildering stuff on every page. Love it!

Me too - completely bonkers!