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van Vogt Alfred Elton
(1912—2000)

Alfred Elton van Vogt was a Canadian-born science fiction author regarded by some as one of the most popular and complex science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century: the "Golden Age" of the genre.

Van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba, Canada. Until he was four years old, van Vogt and his family spoke only a dialect of Dutch in the home. Van Vogt's father, a lawyer, moved his family several times and his son found these moves difficult, remarking in later life:

Childhood was a terrible period for me. I was like a ship without anchor being swept along through darkness in a storm. Again and again I sought shelter, only to be forced out of it by something new.

After starting his writing career by writing for "true confession" style pulp magazines like True Story, van Vogt decided to switch to writing something he enjoyed, science fiction.

Van Vogt's first published SF story, "Black Destroyer" (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939), was inspired by Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. The story depicted a fierce, carnivorous alien stalking the crew of an exploration spaceship. It was the cover story of the issue of Astounding that is sometimes described as having ushered in the "Golden Age" of science fiction.The story served as the inspiration for a number of science fiction movies. In 1950 it was combined with "War of Nerves" (1950), "Discord in Scarlet" (1939) and "M33 in Andromeda" (1943) to form the novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950).

In 1941, van Vogt decided to become a full-time writer, quitting his job at the Canadian Department of National Defence. Extremely prolific for a few years, van Vogt wrote a large number of short stories. In the 1950s, many of them were retrospectively patched together into novels, or "fixups" as he called them, a term which entered the vocabulary of science fiction criticism. When the original stories were related (e.g. The War against the Rull) this was often successful. When not (e.g. Quest for the Future) the disparate stories thrown together generally made for a less coherent plot.

One of van Vogt's best-known novels of this period is Slan, which was originally serialised in Astounding Science Fiction (September - December 1940). Using what became one of van Vogt's recurring themes, it told the story of a 9-year-old superman living in a world in which his kind are slain by Homo sapiens.

In 1944, van Vogt moved to Hollywood, California, where his writing took on new dimensions after World War II. Van Vogt was always interested in the idea of all-encompassing systems of knowledge (akin to modern meta-systems) -- the characters in his very first story used a system called 'Nexialism' to analyze the alien's behaviour, and he became interested in the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski.

He subsequently wrote three novels merging these overarching themes, The World of Null-A and The Pawns of Null-A in the late 1940s, and Null-A Three in the early 1980s. Null-A, or non-Aristotelian logic, refers to the capacity for, and practice of, using intuitive, inductive reasoning (compare fuzzy logic), rather than reflexive, or conditioned, deductive reasoning.

Van Vogt was also profoundly affected by revelations of totalitarian police states that emerged after World War II. He wrote a mainstream novel that was set in Communist China, The Violent Man (1962); he said that to research this book he had read 100 books about China. Into this book he incorporated his view of "the violent male type", which he described as a "man who had to be right", a man who "instantly attracts women" and who he said were the men who "run the world".

At the same time, in his fiction, van Vogt was consistently sympathetic to absolute monarchy as a form of government. This was the case, for instance, in the Weapon Shop series, the Mixed Men series and in single stories such as "Heir Apparent", whose protagonist was described as a "benevolent dictator".

Van Vogt systematized his writing method, using scenes of 800 words or so where a new complication was added or something resolved. Several of his stories hinge upon temporal conundra, a favorite theme. He stated that he acquired many of his writing techniques from three books, "Narrative Technique" by Thomas Uzzell, and "The Only Two Ways to Write a Story" plus "Twenty Problems of the Short-Story Writer", both by John Gallishaw.

He said many of his ideas came from dreams; throughout his writing life he arranged to be awakened every 90 minutes during his sleep period so he could write down his dreams.

In 1950, van Vogt was briefly appointed as head of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics operation in California. Dianetics was the secular precursor to Hubbard's Church of Scientology. The operation went broke 9 months later, but never went bankrupt, due to van Vogt's arrangements with creditors. Van Vogt and his wife opened their own Dianetics centre, partly financed by his writings, until he "signed off" around 1961. At the time of his interview with Charles Platt, van Vogt was still president of the Californian Association of Dianetic Auditors. Between 1950 and 1960, van Vogt produced collections, notable fixups such as: The Mixed Men (1952) and The War Against the Rull (1959), and the two "Clane" novels, Empire of the Atom (1957) and The Wizard of Linn (1962), which were inspired (like Asimov's Foundation series) by the fall of the Roman Empire, specifically Claudius. He resumed writing again in the 1960s, mainly at Frederik Pohl's invitation. His later novels included fixups such as The Beast (aka Moonbeast) (1963), Rogue Ship (1965), Quest for the Future (1970) and Supermind (1977); expanded short stories (The Darkness on Diamondia (1972), Future Glitter (aka Tyranopolis) (1973); original novels such as Children of Tomorrow (1970), The Battle of Forever (1971) and The Anarchistic Colossus (1977); plus sequels to his classic works, many of which were promised, but only one of which appeared, Null-A Three (1984; originally published in French). Several later books were original in Europe, and at least one novel has only ever appeared in Italian, no English version yet published. On January 26, 2000, van Vogt died in Los Angeles, USA from Alzheimer's disease, and was survived by his second wife, the former Lydia Bereginsky.

Guinea, 2010, Writers