A. E. Van Vogt
Alfred Elton van Vogt (1912-2000) was a prominent Canadian science fiction writer known for his influential works that often explored themes of superior human beings and complex logic. Born in Manitoba and later moving to Winnipeg, van Vogt was introduced to science fiction through the magazine *Amazing Stories*, which led him to pursue writing after a brief stint in civil service. He gained recognition in the late 1930s with his story "Vault of the Beast," published in *Astounding Science Fiction*, the same magazine that featured many of his subsequent works.
His most notable novel, *Slan* (1940), introduced a race of superior mutants, setting the stage for his exploration of similar themes in later works, such as *The World of Null-A* (1945) and its sequel. Van Vogt's engagement with general semantics and later with L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics informed his writing and character development. He continued to innovate within the genre, introducing the concept of "fix-up" novels, which combined short stories into a cohesive narrative. In the 1980s, he pivoted to themes of cybernetics in novels like *Computer Eye* and remained active in publishing until his death. Van Vogt's contributions to science fiction were recognized with prestigious awards, including the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 1995. His legacy endures as a foundational figure in the genre, influencing countless writers and thinkers.
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A. E. Van Vogt
- Born: April 26, 1912
- Birthplace: Near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
- Died: January 26, 2000
- Place of death: Los Angeles, California
Biography
Alfred Elton van Vogt was born on April 26, 1912. His father, a Dutch émigré lawyer, moved to rural Manitoba in his infancy, but returned to Winnipeg in 1926. The move so upset the fourteen-year-old van Vogt that he retreated into fiction, particularly the science fiction he found in Amazing Stories.
After finishing high school, van Vogt took up a civil-service job with the census bureau in the Canadian capital of Ottawa. By then he had become bored by science fiction, but yearned to write, and began in 1931 selling romance and “true confessions” stories to American magazines. In 1934 he began writing for radio, and in 1938 the chance reading of John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There” (the inspiration for the 1951 film The Thing) alerted van Vogt to the increased quality of American science fiction, so he submitted a story inspired by Campbell’s to Astounding Science Fiction—which happened to be edited by Campbell.
Campbell bought the story, “Vault of the Beast,” and van Vogt followed it with the novel Slan (1940), which inaugurated a series of novels about superior human beings, the type of story with which van Vogt would be most associated. The title Slan refers to a race of superior human mutants who must hide from normal humans who hate them for their superiority. When van Vogt began reading Alfred Korzybski’s works on general semantics in 1944, he recognized a discipline that offered an intellectual underpinning to his stories of superior humans. The result was The World of Null-A (1945), wherein the superior beings this time were merely those who had mastered non-Aristotelian logic (Null-A or Ā). A sequel, The Pawns of Null-A (1948), cemented in the minds of fans van Vogt’s fiction with the supermen idea.
About the same time, another science-fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard, developed a form of psychoanalysis known as Dianetics, which offered to unleash the individual’s potential to become the very sort of superman that van Vogt’s Slan and Null-A novels depicted. Van Vogt explored Dianetics in The Mind Cage (1957), but wrote no science fiction in this period. When Dianetics evolved into Scientology, Hubbard and van Vogt parted company. In the mid-1960’s, van Vogt returned to science fiction with another mutant hero, The Silkie (a series of stories published from 1964 to 1967 and novelized in 1969). Van Vogt called this kind of novel-made-from-short-stories a “fix-up” and the term became standard in science fiction.
In the 1980’s van Vogt’s fiction turned to cybernetics to find his supermen, in such novels as Computer Eye and Computer World (both 1983). In 1995 he was named Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master by the World Science Fiction Convention, and the following year he was named Grand Master also by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He continued publishing new science fiction (and reworking his older material) up to his death in 2000.