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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.
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.