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A.E. Van Vogt, 1912-2000
Snark Boojum writes "Well, I'm sorry to bring this one in, but it seems A.E.VanVogt died last Wednesday." One of the great science fiction writers of the 1940s, his famous
Slan
inspired a lot of the period's pulp SF. I'm going to try to get to the library to check out The World of Null-A before it gets
slashdotted. Meanwhile, here's a good
site
or
two.
Speaking of this talk about the "old masters", I'm reminded of something that a friend said once. In his opinion, science fiction (SF) had a lifespan like computers or M$ OS's. Once the science and the social context became dated, then the story was obselete. I disagree with this, but I think it's much too common in SF for old gems to be ignored in favor of the new. By those standards, van Vogt would be *extremely* obselete. His science was always on shaky ground, adn the stories clearly weren't polished gems. And he had a disturbing tendency to interject weird (and flawed) philophical reasoning in his stories. I was about ten pages into "The World of Null-A" before I realized that van Vogt wasn't being sarcastic about "Null-A" ("nonaristolean logic"). :-) But the stories are so exciting that you'll forgive the rough edges. No one thinks that George Orwell's "1984" is irrelevant because the year 1984 passed without incident. Should Asimov's Robot and Foundation series be ignored? Clearly, the three rules of Robotics aren't going to cut it for programming your bot. And hopefully we'll never be able to predict the future of the human race like Hari Seldone could in the Foundation series. But the ideas are there to provoke us. Even pulp material like the Doc Savage series which features the "man of bronze" against villians all over Earth. His ideas on curing crime through brain surgery would be extremely illeagal today, but tommorrow? :-) Finally, witness the stories of the earliest true science fiction authors H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. Sure the Martians aren't invading any day soon, but H. G. Wells take on human nature in "The War of the Worlds" is dead-on. And Verne beats the environmentalists by a cool hundred years with "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" and "The Master of the World". Admittedly, some of the new SF is awesome. Especially, the Hyperion Cantos ("Hyperion" and :Fall of Hyperion" by Dan Simmons) and the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson ("Red Mars", "Green Mars", and "Blue Mars" in order of occurence and difficulty). Haven't read much Brin, but he has the vision. Gibson may be downbeat, but his world is fascinating. I'll reserve judgement on Greg Bear. He wrote "Blood Music" which is cool, but he's treading on dangerous ground with that "Foundation and Chaos" nonsense. Also, I still haven't recovered from "Psyclone". :-) BTW, how in the world did "steampunk" (Victorian age meets cyberpunk) become a real genre? Am I off-topic yet?
A. E. van Vogt dies.
Golden Age SF scribe meets
final Black Destroyer
van Vogt's Super Slan:
Science Fiction fans had their
tendrils on their can.
General Semantics
And Hubbard's Dianetics:
Lost mind more than once.
A great writer, but
one caught in amber; the field
Just moved beyond him.
van Vogt: "The right to
buy weapons is the right to
be free." Then as now.
- Lawrence Person
lawrence@bga.com
http://www0.delphi.com/sflit/novaexpress/
I don't see why not. Elf Sternberg did it.
What is it that people see in Slan over and above his other work? Or is it just that it's among the easier of his books to find, so more people have read it?
As a side note, I find it incredibly depressing how hard it's becoming to buy classic science fiction. Here in the UK, at least, it's rare to find more than 6 or 7 books by the major names (Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein), and others like Van Vogt and John Windham are almost non-existent. Even worse, I'm talking about specialist SF bookshops like New Worlds and Forbidden Planet here. In "normal" bookshops the situation is even more dire. Surely these books have the same appeal now that they always did? Or am I just showing my age?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
good ones. add Greg Egan too; /. readers should find him especially interesting.
Its Science Fiction not Science Prediction. The only point at which Sci-Fi can be judged is when something is found not to be viable (and we still don't know that someone won't come along in the future and work it out). Good Sci-Fi is about general/philosophical ideas.
I read a few of A. E. Van Vogt's novels when I was younger, and throughly enjoyed them. I particularly remember one (whose title I forget) where society is dominated by women by making men wear coloured spectacles, and this guy finds that clear adhesive tape over a the 'lenses' nullifies the effect and is set free. I'm sure that wasn't meant as a prophecy. It was a very exciting read.
Right, I'm off to find out what that book was called and give it another read. Its sad to think that I only got round to this because of the author's death.
Or these:
John Barnes
Greg Egan
Ken MacLeod
James Morrow
I think the problem is that the market has become too diffuse: there are no BIG NAMES like there were before, so it looks like there are no 'masters'.
I think the Null-A site explains it pretty well - he and his wife got sucked into the black hole of Scientology in the early Fifties and did not re-emerge until the Seventies. A lot of the work that made his contemporaries better-known (Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, et al.) was going on throughout that period. Unfortunately Van Vogt never again rose to his previous level of prolific output even after ditching the Hubbardites. Damn those Clams!
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Vernor Vinge?
Try reading his ex-wife's books. Joan Vinge has a lot going for her, as does Ursula LeGuin. There are still a lot of good ones out there (m and f).
Van Vogt stories were broadly similar in that his (super-)hero kept expanding his capabilities, and then meeting dangers he would have been defeated by just one chapter earlier. I suppose the stories would have been a lot shorter otherwise!
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Of course, they're not gone, they are exactly as present in the literary world as they were when they were still alive. No great books have up and disappeared from the earth that I can remember.
I remember reading "Slan" when I was 14 or 15. Man, that was great science-fiction.
But, much more than that, it meant to much to me because it described my life. In the books, Slans are rejected, feared and hated for being different. Mr Van Vogt had hit on a very universal theme.
I also remember that, at the same time I was reading the book, me and some of my high-school friends were being rejected (and feared and ridiculed, etc...) for being the first kids on the block with a passion for micro-computers. That book was such a mirror image of my life. I kept re-reading it, when I was not busy hacking on the CP/M machines my high-school had. Even though I do not necessarily like the conclusion, the "politics" or the black/white plot logic of the book, I guess I'll always a soft spot for the hunted Slans -- strangers, geeks and nerds before these terms became mainstream.
He'll be missed.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
If you haven't read anything by David Brin, Lois McMaster Bujold, John Varley or Greg Bear, do so. There is a future in SF, and they are leading it.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
One thing to keep in mind (regarding old SF vs. new SF) is that fact that the basic nature of people does not change (just take a look at history). It doesn't really matter whether people are running around in reflective space suits and
:-)
wielding death rays or fusion-powered armor and hauling plasma cannons; the technology is just there to help tell the story (whatever that story may be), which is invariably about people.
Well I think it matters. If you look at things like star trek their society is fundamentally different. Do you happen to see any bums on Earth? Are there panhandlers outside Starfleet Academy? No. People work for the hell of it and to gain status. I think this is fundamentally different from what we do today. Some of the ideas that I actually look at are taken from science fiction. What I generally don't like is where we take good ideas and put them in a package that makes it seem like crap. Suppose I get a car with a superior engine, 1,000 miles to the gallon, can achieve speeds of 200 Mph and go from 0 - 60Mph in say 2.3 seconds. This car will also run off of urine or almost anything that is put in the tank (including sugar). No suppose I take this an put it into a pinto's chasis. Now do you like the car as much? Will you buy it if all you see is the outside of the car? First impressions matter. Human nature can change based on what the human has. If I can say do something a little more efficiently then I will be able to have more time to ponder the great questions.
But predictions are, in my opinion, what science fiction is all about! As I said above, I generally view the technology as an aid for the story. A story itself is about people. Ever read a work of SF (or any literature, for that matter) that
didn't have any characters?
Predictions are nice however not all of them are acurate. A great deal of the future concepts of what society will be like are crappy. Here is a popular one:
Man builds intelligent cyborgs. Cyborgs serve man for a time. Eventually cyborgs say "fsck this" and decide to kick ass. Man is destroyed, forced underground, or enslaved.
Now we can see that even with the possibility that cyborgs are strong they are most likely not invincible. Humans obviously will not invest trillions of $$ without control.
Modern SF is every bit as "preachy" as classic SF. It's just a different kind of preaching. It's the change in the zeitgeist, the prevailing philosophy of the time, that makes it seem more hokey or preachy now than it may have 50 years
ago. But it's good to read the stuff that's stood the test of time; there's a reason it did stand.
Does anyone have any opensource sf (ala gutenberg) out there? I know that probably Edward Belemay's "Looking Backward" (supposedly how a time traveler from the 19th century ends up in the year 2000) is most likely out there are there others?
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
[slashdot-terminal@slashdot slashdot-terminal]$ flameshield --verbose --activate --abestos
;) In the Campbell era, there were genuinely new ideas, examination of social issues without being preachy or satirical, great writing and (oddly absent from many
===============================================
Ok now that I am protected I have a little critique on this post.
We're losing all the old great masters of science fiction. I guess this is inevitable, but modern science fiction just isn't the same.
I would say that it's a little more realistic in terms of what humanity will actually do. Come on. Do you really think that peole will actually go around in flying saucers and wear crappy reflective space suits and kill aliens will the "Evil Death Ray of Doom"(tm)? I think the recent incarnations of Star Trek and such are far more realistic then people who actually believed that there was a whole civilization on mars. Ever read some of the stuff Bradbury created? If people genuinely believe that science will make people like that they have to take a step back and look at themselves. What early science fiction is more of is just like myths and legends. Generally these things are obviously not real and have no truth to them they are just teaching some kind of early prophecy or moral. I look to science fiction to see how realistically we can achieve various elements. Having people in reflective spandex just dosn't cut it.
I think modern writers can learn something from the Great Old Ones.
modern writers) a great knowledge of science. You can find pieces of that puzzle everywhere now, but the specialization leaves us with few authors who try to be great in everything.
In the beginning everything is new. You remember the joke about the chicken crossing the road? Well at one time in history it was really knee slapping funny too. However we have things like cliches and things like that and because of this we have to do things differently or rish looking like a fool. Maybe these guys are equivelent to Mel the programmer of bygone days who wrote everything in machine code and did it better than people do now. Maybe these guys were better than we think. However time they are a chinging. Generally I want something that dosn't think that PCs are not a reality that only the 5 richest kings of Europe can have them, that humans will turn into mutated creatures and live underground, etc. In short I want a picture of the mid to far future that I like.
So while we're mourning, and catching up our anthology collections, let's think about where we want science fiction to be going.
Something that isn't so far flung that it makes Santa and the Tooth Fairt, The Easter Bunny and The Great Pumpkin seem to be fact. I want more use of technology and less reliance on unrealistic social and political predictions of the future.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
The great masters of Science Fiction have been gone for a century now.
Of course, they're not gone, they are exactly as present in the literary world as they were when they were still alive. No great books have up and disappeared from the earth that I can remember.
The poster is refering to the use of new talent in the area. I am sure that Win 3.11 is a cool shell/sub-operating system but that dosn't mean there is any quality development on it. How about kernel 0.99 or so? Debian beta 0.98? I didn't think so. Generally the lack of new talent kills a medium.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Site on Null-A
threadeds blog
As for "ring around the sun" stories, it may sound rung to death but we haven't even started on the variations of this theme.
That's true, but will a SF author "reuse" a plot device like the Ringworld when it's already "been done" by Larry Niven?
To tell you the truth, I wish they would. Ringworld was a pretty bad novel from a plot and character point of view, but the themes were so fascinating that it made up for them. I wouldn't be opposed at all to seeing other authors pick up these themes are try fresh plots but with the same device. There are innumerable interesting stories that could be told about different reasons a ringworld would be built, and different societies that would come out of it.
The question is, would the author get slaughtered for "unoriginality" or "ripping off" Larry Niven? One would hope not, since zillions of authors have ripped off themes from Shakespeare, but often the variations on the same theme can bring a freshness to the material.
--
Van Vogt wrote big idea science fiction. He was particularly prescient in The Weapon Shops of Isher -- combining elements we've grown familiar with from Mao and the NRA [the defenseless cannot long remain free, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun] with those of the Clinton administration's latest proposal [guns that can only be fired by the owner, and indeed can only be used for defensive purposes].
I remember reading somewhere that the question with A.E. Van Vogt's novels was not how good they are, but how they can be so fascinating, intense, and ultimately, influential, despite all their shortcomings. I think that sums the situation up. AEVV was mentally more daring and ready to try with his mind than anyone else around, and that's including the Beat Generation people. That put him in contact with ideas and things that have turned out to be less than hoped (e.g General Semantics), or even downright nefarious (e.g Dianetics). But that's the price to pay for being open-minded and ready to experiment. We all owe Van Vogt a collective thanks for the mass of intense ideas that he acquainted us with. And, what the hell, Korzybski still makes an interesting read.
Ok try the following
Stephen Baxter
David Brin
David Mace (who can name them books)
Iain M Banks (Ok not a tech.)
David Drake
Joe Haldeman
So the old masters go and new ones come along.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Declining? There's lots of good SF out there still, though Sturgeon's law (sigh...lost him too) still applies.
There's Stephanson, of course (though his last wasn't SF) as well as the SF B's, Bear, Brin and Benford. (Just read Benford's "Cosm", BTW. recommended if you are looking for hard SF.)
Of the old masters, Jack Vance, Frederick Pohl and Poul Anderson are still active and writing. (And up to full caliber.) (Though I suppose Vance is more fantasy usually.)
Then there's Haldeman, and Varley, and Kim Stanley Robinson. About half of Cherryh's stuff is SF. (She's currently doing fantasy, but she recently completed the "Foreigner" series, which was SF.)
There's also Vernor Vinge.
There's plenty of stuff. You just have to learn to sort through the chaff.
The cake is a pie
Also, for some reason, fantasy has been exploding while SF has been declining. I'm not a huge fantasy fan, so this has been really depressing for me.
Is there that much more of a demand for fantasy books rather than good ol' SF?
Maybe it's because its OK to be unoriginal in fantasy (the themes are generally timeless), but how many books about a "ring around the sun" can be done? Perhaps were just running out of stories to tell.
Well this is probably stating the obvious, but I think it's largly because fantasy is easier to write. "Science" has expanded greatly in the years since the so called Golden Age of SF. It's gotten much harder to be a well rounded generalist. A fantasy writer pretty much only has to be self-consistent, mess up a fact in SF and you'll get slaughtered by your readers.
I'm not putting down fantasy writers by any means, I read both, and for me the hard thing is not finding SF but finding readable SF. Publishers demand much higher page counts than they did in the past, probably a consequence of Tolkein's success. But while cool ideas can carry a book thru 2 or sometimes 3 hundred pages, get much over that and I need some character to keep my interest. Sadly most SF writers cant hold a candle to the Fantasy writers when it comes to characterization. There are exceptions of course, but as a rule...
There's something to what you say about fantasy being unoriginal too but perhaps not in the way you mean. (Most) Fantasy writers dont deliberatly reuse plots and such out of laziness, familiarity and certian themes/moods are an inherent quality of what their readers are looking for. Fantasy is a "comfort" literature to a large degree, which is not to say it cant tackle issues, but a reader expects to be left with a certain type of feeling from the experience. SF doesn't promise that.
SF will never die, it may get harder and harder to write, but unless they kill of everyone who loves a good mind-stretch it'll never go away.
Also, for some reason, fantasy has been exploding while SF has been declining. I'm not a huge fantasy fan, so this has been really depressing for me.
Is there that much more of a demand for fantasy books rather than good ol' SF?
Maybe it's because its OK to be unoriginal in fantasy (the themes are generally timeless), but how many books about a "ring around the sun" can be done? Perhaps were just running out of stories to tell.
--
Yes they got the science right (more or less) but they completely missed the cultural change. They placed a fifties man in a future environment, not a future person. Their future was the future of the white western male.
This not said to be judging. I'm a product of my time, just like they were a product of theirs.
Ever tried Stephen Baxter? There you have a modern sf-writer who gets the science right and avoids the Gibson-ish bleak alleys.
Rest in peace Van Vogt. There will be followers boldly going where... wait a moment, I'm becoming pathetic....
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Personally, I've never heard of Van Gogt, but I'm sure he was a good writer if he had a following.
People were saying how modern writers just aren't the same. That's tough, I think it depends on what you like in writing. Today a lot of people who know only modern literature will think that the older writing is wierd.
Personally, I think the idea of sci-fi has evolved as long as the media has evolved. People say older writing is better because they seemed to have a better grasp of good story and plot, character development. Today, good stories are rated on the pumping adrenaline kind of gripping action. I love good stories, and I'm always impressed when I find a book that accomplishes that kind of immersion and depth, and I've noticed that it seems to be the more real life type novels that do that. I think the sci-fi of old dealt more with expanding humanity, the importance of still recognizing one's self while growing in knowledge. Today, all that matters is that we get the technology, and try to learn as much as possible. But we lose ourselves in the process. Our Reach is exceeding our grasp. We have technologies today that people never would have tohught of long ago. But are we wise enough to handle that responsibility? That's where the good sci-fi writing comes in, IMHO.
A lawsuit by A.E. van Vogt, claiming plagiarism of his 1939 story "Discord in Scarlet" (which he had incorporated in the 1950 novel "Voyage of the Space Beagle"), was settled out of court.
(The suit was with regard to the movie Alien)
"Discord in Scarlet" was a great chapter in Voyage of the Space Beagle, which is my favorite A.E. Van Vogt book. If you've ever read it, you'll understand why he sued! "Discord in Scarlet" is about finding an alien body floating deep in interstellar space, far from anything, but still alive. The alien is a millions-of-years-old survivor of a hyper-advanced civilization, and it is at least as vicious as the alien in "Alien", without all the acid drooling and with the cool ability to walk through walls. It reproduces by grabbing an egg out of it's own chest and passing it into the body of a host, in this case a crew member of the ship that found it. The ensuing battle between the alien and the crew of the ship is a lot more interesting, and clever, I think, than the plot of "Alien", as much as that movie rocked.
A.E. Van Vogt was certainly before my time, but I have fond memories of reading his stories out of my father's collection of Science Fiction, including lots of old back issues of Analog magazine. "Voyage of the Space Beagle" is my favorite Van Vogt book, but Slan is pretty good too, and the Weapon Shops stories are a lot of fun. I'd recommend Van Vogt to nerds everywhere, for a big ol' dose of prime vintage Sci-Fi
-------------------- the list is long. dirac angestung gesept
It was sad to hear this-- I remember sitting up at night in middleschool and high school reading the old sci-fi classics.
We're losing all the old great masters of science fiction. I guess this is inevitable, but modern science fiction just isn't the same.
I think modern writers can learn something from the Great Old Ones. ;) In the Campbell era, there were genuinely new ideas, examination of social issues without being preachy or satirical, great writing and (oddly absent from many modern writers) a great knowledge of science. You can find pieces of that puzzle everywhere now, but the specialization leaves us with few authors who try to be great in everything.
So while we're mourning, and catching up our anthology collections, let's think about where we want science fiction to be going.