Alfred Elton van Vogt, legendary science fiction writer, died of complications following pneumonia in Los Angeles Wednesday morning. He was 87 years old.
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"Van Vogt was the ideal practitioner of 'Doc' Smith's billion-year spree. He was not hard and cold and unemotional, in the manner of Clement, Asimov and Heinlein. He could balance his cubic light-years and the paraphernalia of super science with moments of tenderness and pure loony joy."
- Brian W. Aldiss |
"Van Vogt's The World of Null-A, there was something about thatwhich absolutely fascinated me. It had a mysterious quality, it alluded to things unseen, there were puzzles presented which were never adequately explained. Ifound in it a numinous quality..."
- Philip K. Dick |
"Ah, careless, rapturous van Vogt!"
- Barry N. Malzberg |
In a notice on the Tor Books website, SF anthologist Patrick Nielsen Hayden eulogized van Vogt -- better known to fans as "A.E." -- as a leading figure of the "golden age" of science fiction that
Astounding Science Fiction editor John Campbell presided over throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Van Vogt was, Nielsen Hayden said, "nearly the last of the great first generation of Campbell discoveries to go."
According to lists maintained by fans, the Canadian-born writer was, at the time of his death, the 10th-oldest living SF author of note.
"He was the author of Slan, one of the definitive SF treatments of posthumanity, and of the 'Weapons Shops' tales and The World of Null-A and its sequels, brave early advances into the uncharted world of SF as a dance of gaudy concepts," Nielsen Hayden said of him.
"Alternately mindboggling and dreamlike, his best work remains compelling and justifies his place as one of the giants of the field. "
The fusion of space opera with semantics
In the golden age, van Vogt was famously prolific, contributing three dozen stories to Astounding while also selling fiction to Unknown. Highlights of this period include Slan (1940) and the stories collected in the two Weapons Shops books (originally published 1941-3, collected 1946 and 1951).
Van Vogt often collected separately-published works in this way, and is widely credited with having coined the term "fix-up" for this novelistic tactic.
Despite the praise justly heaped upon these early works, the Null-A series, also written in this period, is arguably the author's finest creation.
Beginning with The World of Null-A (1945) and continuing through The Players of Null-A (1948) and Null-A Three (1984), van Vogt embraced the dizzying limits of science fiction, radically redefining humanity through the character of Gosseyn, a protagonist with two brains and a seemingly unlimited supply of bodies.
A layer of anti-Aristotelian semantics further complicated the series, leaving readers enthusiastic but reeling. Perhaps thanks to the heady subject matter, The World of Null-A is reportedly the best-selling SF novel ever published in France.
Such works, replete with metaphysical grace notes and meditations on the paradoxical nature of consciousness, would later spur the SF imagination of such writers as Philip K. Dick.
The movement inward
Van Vogt became an advocate of Dianetics, the quasi-psychoanalytic method invented by fellow SF writer L. Ron Hubbard, in 1950, crediting the system for wife E. Mayne Hull's 19-year remission from cancer symptoms.
Like John Campbell, van Vogt never had much patience for Dianetics' religious outgrowth, Scientology.
His affiliation with Dianetics, however, was another matter. Not only did he open one of the first auditing centers in Los Angeles -- the city where he spent the last half-century of his life -- but he remained the president of the California Association of Dianetics Auditors until late in life.
Unfortunately for SF fans, this growing interest in the inner depths of the mind took him increasingly away from traditional science fiction. His once-prodigious output slowed to a few scattered stories in the 1950s, only returning in force to the genre with Children of Tomorrow (1970).
Van Vogt received the Grand Master award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1996, becoming the 15th person to earn that title.
Also in 1996, the New England Science Fiction Association awarded him with a "retro-Hugo" for The World of Null-A. Since Hugo awards were not given until 1953, fans would otherwise have missed the chance to honor the 1945 work.
Waning health left van Vogt largely silent in recent years.
He is survived by wife Lydia.
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