Name: VAN VOGT, Alfred Elton Aged: 87
Born: April 26, 1912 Where: Winnipeg, Manitoba, CANADA
Died: January 26, 2000 Where: Los Angeles, CA
Interred: Holy Cross Cem., Culver City, CA
Married: Edna Mayne Hull When: May 9 1939 (d 1975)
Married 2: Lydia Brayman When: 1979
Awards: Canada's 1980 Aurora (nee Casper) for Lifetime Achievement; 1996 Grand Master Nebula; and one of 1996's inaugural writers inducted into the Science Fiction & Fantasy Hall of Fame. (The body of his work being created prior to the body of awards.)

A. E. van Vogt

"I wrote my stories from a subjective, schizoid isolation that was pretty grim
--- but not the grimmest, I observe with some relief."

Some would say that with A. E. van Vogt's passing, the Golden Age of Science Fiction is truly gone. For he was of that Age, easily among the top ten best writers of his genre for plot complexity and originality, and a creator of worlds that stunned the mind as much as the imagination.

A. E. van Vogt was born of Dutch parents on a farm south of Winnipeg, Canada. After ten years the family moved to Winnipeg where van spent his teen years. During this time he became a voracious reader, consuming as many as two books a day. A limited contact with Science Fiction came thru the pulp magazine, Amazing Stories, but after an editorial change, van dropped that. It was Depression and he worked on farms, as a truck driver, and statistical clerk but was continually experimenting with writing and markets, becoming successful in the "True Story" field where repeated sales were encouraging. He added confession and love stories to his sales.

In 1938, A. E. van Vogt read "Who Goes There" in Astounding and that inspired and renewed his earlier Science Fiction interest. His first SF story, "Vault of the Beast," was rejected by Campbell, who then accepted "Black Destroyer" in 1939. WWII came earlier for Canadians than Americans, but Van was rejected for poor vision. He worked for the Department of National Defense while writing Slan at night which was published in late 1940 in Astounding. By 1941, A. E. van Vogt had relocated and began writing fulltime. "The Weapon Shop" followed and Astounding began buying most of Van's Science Fiction output. In 1944, the A. E. van Vogts moved to Los Angeles and acquired a lovely Spanish villa on the hillside beneath the HOLLYWOOD sign. There they remained until death.

Using ideas advanced in Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybsky, A. E. van Vogt created The World of Null-A which was followed by the The Players of Null-A or, aka The Pawns of Null-A. This exploration of mentality, inevitably drew A. E. van Vogt into the emerging Dianetics theory of John W. Campbell and L. Ron Hubbard...where he remained for most of the rest of his life. A. E. van Vogt's writings can be divided that way, pre and post Dianetics. Post novels included The Mind Cage and The Expendables. Toward the end of the run, in 1985, the last of the first, Null-A Three.

Notable stories in the middle of Van's career were "The Silkie," the novella "The Weapon Shops of Isher," and "The Rull."

In the end he was taken by Alzheimer's complicated by a case of pneumonia. As everyone knows who has witnessed Alzheimer's first hand, it is a terrible, incremental death for anyone but even more so for an intellectual.

Van Vogt's writing style was often stiff and confusing, in part attributed to many of his novels being "fixups," which are combinations of existing short stories. Writer/critic Damon Knight described van Vogt as "a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter." On the other hand, he could have been a giant attempting to operate a miniature typewriter...with the result being the same mechanical difficulty. Alzheimer's can exist for a very long time unnoticed or shrugged off and for one to accomplish in spite of it takes a superior will power.

There is a great deal of information on A. E. van Vogt freely available on the web and any search engine can take you to most of it. But be warned that the combination of the events above created a very complex personality that may appear off the wall to the casual passerby. As Science Fiction writers go, Van was highly successful, long lived, and now immortal. So somewhere in all of that verbage...something must have been correct. Its too deep for me, I just loved his stories.

PEN NAMES: None known.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mine here.

BIOGRAPHY: Reflections of A.E. van Vogt, auto-biography, 1975

OBITUARY: Some here or SFWA's here.

Send relevant email to George C. Willick