Told most effectively from the thing’s point of view.Īn emissary from Earth struggles for survival on a moon of Jupiter in horrendous conditions, accompanied by a deadly enemy, with the fate of the solar system at stake.
This hard-to-forget story became, with some modifications, chapters 13-21 in The Voyage of the Space Beagle.Ī thing – a shark-god – capable of assuming human form comes ashore on a remote Pacific island to wreak revenge on a team of shark fishermen. It was obviously a major source for Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning film Alien (a fact that was initially unrecognised by the film’s producers, who eventually paid an irate van Vogt a settlement of $50,000 well after the film had been distributed). This superb story features the amazingly-developed and quite indestructible – but marooned in space – creature Xtl, who again poses an enormous threat to the very existence of the first human exploration expedition outside of the Milky Way galaxy. They will need all their wits and pooled resources to survive when the big cat – desperately in need of life-giving " id" from their bodies – lets loose with all he’s got!Ī modified version of this story became chapters 1-6 in his 1950 novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle. THE SHORT STORIES, NOVELETTES AND NOVELLASĪn exploratory mission lands on a planet apparently devoid of all life except for a rather powerful-looking feline-like creature, and makes the mistake of bringing "Pussy" on board for examination.
A E VAN VOGT SUPERMIND FULL
In the lists below, stories and novels for which the title is highlighted can be seen in full by clicking on the title.Ģ. was 32 the couple moved to Los Angeles, where he continued to write full-time – but only for five or so more years, after which his preoccupation with psychology in general, with the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski and with the “dianetics” of Ron Hubbard resulted in a long 14-year gap in his writing career, apart from a number of "fix-up novels" that he published during the fifties and sixties.Īlthough van Vogt started writing science fiction again in 1964, he never quite recovered the golden-age touch that had put him on the s-f map. moved to Ottawa to work for the Canadian Government at the beginning of WW2, and continued to write, in Quebec in the Gatineau hills near Ottawa where he lived after resigning his post in the spring of 1941 and in Toronto where he bought a house with his wife, the author E. He later wrote one "mainstream" novel, the very political The Violent Man (1962).Ī. It made the cover of the July 1939 issue of the prestigious Astounding Science-Fiction magazine and is often considered to have launched the "golden age" of science fiction.įrom then on he wrote mostly science fiction, with the exception of a few stories and a novel ( The Book of Ptath (1943)) in the fantastic vein, and one Western story, Ride In, Killer! (1951). He wrote his first science-fiction story Vault of the Beast in 1938 (published in 1940), followed shortly by Black Destroyer, his first published story.
A E VAN VOGT SUPERMIND PROFESSIONAL
He became a professional writer in the early thirties after working briefly for the Canadian government, writing mostly true-confession-type romance stories and a considerable number (50-odd) of radio scripts, and became the Winnipeg correspondent for McLean Publishing Group, writing interviews and articles for various corporate publications.
He was brought up in the small rural town of Neville in the neighbouring province of Saskatchewan until the family moved to Winnipeg when he was ten. He spoke Frisian (a Germanic language spoken in the north of Holland) at home until the age of four. van Vogt (1912-2000) was born on a farm in the vicinity of Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada) in a family of Dutch extraction.
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