A. E. van Vogt
Alfred Elton van Vogt was a Canadian-born American science fiction writer. His fragmented, bizarre narrative style influenced later science fiction writers, including Philip K. Dick. He was one of the most popular and influential practitioners of science fiction in the mid-twentieth century, the genre's so-called Golden Age, and one of the most complex. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him their 14th Grand Master in 1995.
Early life
Alfred Vogt was born on April 26, 1912, on his grandparents' farm in Edenburg, Manitoba, a tiny Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba, Canada, in the Mennonite West Reserve. He was the third of six children born to Heinrich "Henry" Vogt and Aganetha "Agnes" Vogt, both of whom were born in Manitoba and grew up in heavily immigrant communities. Until he was four, van Vogt spoke only Plautdietsch at home.For the first dozen or so years of his life, van Vogt's father, Henry Vogt, a lawyer, moved his family several times within the Prairies, moving to Neville, Saskatchewan; Morden, Manitoba; and finally Swift Current, Saskatchewan, where the family spent the majority of the 1920s. Alfred Vogt found these moves difficult, later remarking:
By the late 1920s, living in Saskatchewan, his father Henry worked as an agent for a steamship company, but the stock market crash of 1929 proved financially disastrous, and the family could not afford to send Alfred to college. During his teen years, Alfred worked as a farmhand and a truck driver, and by the age of 19, he was working in Ottawa for the Canadian Census Bureau.
In "the dark days of '31 and '32," van Vogt took a correspondence course in writing from the Palmer Institute of Authorship. He sold his first story in fall 1932. His early published works were stories in the true confession style of magazines such as True Story. Most of these stories were published anonymously, with the first-person narratives allegedly being written by people in extraordinary, emotional, and life-changing circumstances.
After a year in Ottawa, he moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he sold newspaper advertising space and continued to write. While continuing to pen melodramatic "true confessions" stories through 1937, he also began writing short radio dramas for local radio station CKY, as well as conducting interviews published in trade magazines. He added the middle name "Elton" at some point in the mid-1930s, and at least one confessional story was sold to the Toronto Star, who misspelled his name "Alfred Alton Bogt" in the byline. Shortly thereafter, he added the "van" to his surname, and from that point forward he used the name "A. E. van Vogt" both personally and professionally.
Career
By 1938, van Vogt decided to switch to writing science fiction, a genre he enjoyed reading. He was inspired by the August 1938 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, which he picked up at a newsstand. John W. Campbell's novelette "Who Goes There?" inspired van Vogt to write "Vault of the Beast", which he submitted to that same magazine. Campbell, who edited Astounding, sent van Vogt a rejection letter in which Campbell encouraged van Vogt to try again. Van Vogt sent another story, entitled "Black Destroyer", which was accepted. It featured a fierce, carnivorous alien stalking the crew of a spaceship, and served as the inspiration for multiple science fiction movies, including Alien. A revised version of "Vault of the Beast" was published in 1940.While still living in Winnipeg, in 1939 van Vogt married Edna Mayne Hull, a fellow Manitoban. Hull, who had previously worked as a private secretary, went on to act as van Vogt's typist, and was credited with writing several SF stories of her own throughout the early 1940s.
The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 caused a change in van Vogt's circumstances. Ineligible for military service due to his poor eyesight, he accepted a clerking job with the Canadian Department of National Defence. This necessitated a move back to Ottawa, where he and his wife stayed for the next year and a half.
Meanwhile, his writing career continued. "Discord in Scarlet" was van Vogt's second story to be published, also appearing as the cover story. It was accompanied by interior illustrations created by Frank Kramer and Paul Orban. Among his most famous works of this era, "Far Centaurus" appeared in the January 1944 edition of Astounding.
Van Vogt's first completed novel, and one of his most famous, is Slan, which Campbell serialized in Astounding. Using what became one of van Vogt's recurring themes, it told the story of a nine-year-old superman living in a world in which his kind are slain by Homo sapiens.
Others saw van Vogt's talent from his first story, and in May 1941 van Vogt decided to become a full-time writer, quitting his job at the Canadian Department of National Defence. Freed from the necessity of living in Ottawa, he and his wife lived for a time in the Gatineau region of Quebec before moving to Toronto in the fall of 1941.
Prolific throughout this period, van Vogt wrote many of his more famous short stories and novels in the years from 1941 through 1944. The novels The Book of Ptath and The Weapon Makers both appeared in magazines in serial form during this period; they were later published in book form after World War II. As well, several of the stories that were compiled to make up the novels The Weapon Shops of Isher, The Mixed Men and The War Against the Rull were published during this time.
California and post-war writing (1944–1950)
In November 1944, van Vogt and Hull moved to Hollywood; van Vogt would spend the rest of his life in California. He had been using the name "A. E. van Vogt" in his public life for several years, and as part of the process of obtaining American citizenship in 1945 he finally and formally changed his legal name from Alfred Vogt to Alfred Elton van Vogt. To his friends in the California science fiction community, he was known as "Van".Method and themes
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 on temporal conundra, a favorite theme. He stated that he acquired many of his writing techniques from three books: Narrative Technique by Thomas Uzzell, The Only Two Ways to Write a Story by John Gallishaw, and Twenty Problems of the Fiction Writer by Gallishaw. He also claimed 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.Van Vogt was also always interested in the idea of all-encompassing systems of knowledge. The characters in his very first story used a system called "Nexialism" to analyze the alien's behavior. Around this time, he became particularly interested in the general semantics of Alfred Korzybski.
He subsequently wrote a novel merging these overarching themes, The World of Ā, originally serialized in Astounding in 1945. Ā, or non-Aristotelian logic, refers to the capacity for, and practice of, using intuitive, inductive reasoning, rather than reflexive, or conditioned, deductive reasoning. The novel recounts the adventures of an individual living in an apparent Utopia, where those with superior brainpower make up the ruling class... though all is not as it seems. A sequel, The Players of Ā was serialized in 1948–49.
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". These sympathies were the subject of much critical discussion during van Vogt's career, and afterwards.
Van Vogt published "Enchanted Village" in the July 1950 issue of Other Worlds Science Stories. It was reprinted in over 20 collections or anthologies, and appeared many times in translation.
Dianetics and fix-ups (1950–1961)
In 1950, van Vogt was briefly appointed as head of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics operation in California. Van Vogt had first met Hubbard in 1945, and became interested in his theories, which were published shortly thereafter. Dianetics was the secular precursor to Hubbard's Church of Scientology; van Vogt would have no association with Scientology, as he did not approve of its mysticism.The California Dianetics operation went broke nine months later, but never went bankrupt, due to van Vogt's arrangements with creditors. Shortly afterward, van Vogt and his wife opened their own Dianetics center, partly financed by his writings, until he "signed off" around 1961. From 1951 until 1961, van Vogt's focus was on Dianetics, and he produced no new fiction.
Fix-ups
However, during the 1950s, van Vogt retrospectively patched together many of his previously published stories into novels, sometimes creating new interstitial material to help bridge gaps in the narrative. Van Vogt referred to the resulting books as "fix-ups", a term that entered the vocabulary of science-fiction criticism. When the original stories were closely related this was often successful, although some van Vogt fix-ups featured disparate stories thrown together that bore little relation to each other, generally making for a less coherent plot. One of his best-known novels, The Voyage of the Space Beagle was a fix-up of four short stories including "Discord in Scarlet"; it was published in at least five European languages by 1955.Although Van Vogt averaged a new book title every ten months from 1951 to 1961, none of them were entirely new content; they were all fix-ups, collections of previously published stories, expansions of previously published short stories to novel length, or republications of previous books under new titles and all based on story material written and originally published between 1939 and 1950. Examples include The Weapon Shops of Isher, The Mixed Men, The War Against the Rull, and the two "Clane" novels, Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn, which were inspired by Roman imperial history; specifically, as Damon Knight wrote, the plot of Empire of the Atom was "lifted almost bodily" from that of Robert Graves' I, Claudius.
After more than a decade of running their Dianetics center, Hull and van Vogt closed it in 1961. Nevertheless, van Vogt maintained his association with the organization and was still president of the Californian Association of Dianetic Auditors into the 1980s.