A.E. van Vogt The Violent Man (1962)
Although he never quite retired from bolting old short stories together as occasionally bewildering fix-up novels, The Violent Man was apparently van Vogt's first original book in twelve years. Curiously, it isn't science-fiction, and in writing it he clearly held back a few of his weirder, more disorientating compositional techniques, so I'm inclined to wonder whether this might not have been a bid for mainstream success, or at least an attempt to elevate himself from the ghetto of science-fiction publishing.
That said, van Vogt's focus remains very much on themes which inform his science-fiction. In fact, the success of the novel is that he's covering old thematic ground, but for once it's fairly clear what he's trying to say.
Curiously, The Violent Man reminds me a little of Philip K. Dick's Gather Yourselves Together. Both novels are set in Communist China within self-contained communities isolated from the outside world, and you might argue that both approximately foreshadow certain aspects of Patrick McGoohan's Prisoner. Gather Yourselves Together was written a couple of years earlier, but was unpublished until fairly recently, so the similarities serve mainly as indicative of how much the two writers had in common, although it's doubtless significant that Dick had been reading van Vogt since he was twelve.
Two major preoccupations of van Vogt's later books are the totalitarian state and sexual inequality, and these combine in this novel with an examination of his primary obsession, the thought process itself - as has so often been examined through his interest in mind control, Korzybski's general semantics, and even L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics to some extent. Our story maroons a man named Ruxton in a prison compound as part of something called Project Future Victory, which aspires to turn unwilling test subjects into loyal Communists, specifically to educate them in such a way as to result in their embracing Communism of their own free will. Impressively, van Vogt gives a good impression of having done his homework with regard to Communist China, and if his narrative voice has often seemed to lean a little to the right with vaguely libertarian tendencies, here he remains relatively impartial in detailing the benefits of both Communist and capitalist systems whilst condemning shortcomings and inequalities on both sides of the fence. I don't personally agree with everything he seems to conclude, but the apparent absence of dogma is refreshing.
Similarly, van Vogt's later attempts to discuss what he regards as sexual inequality have generally been poorly argued at best, and profoundly troubling at worst, and yet here he manages to communicate his point very well. It still boils down to a general sense of exasperation at women not wanting to shag him as much as he wants to shag them, but in The Violent Man he strikes out and makes some effort to deal with female emancipation and to embrace a feminist perspective, so it comes across less like the creepy muttering of some dude in his mother's basement.
Somehow all of this is knitted together within the story of our man attempting to survive in what is more or less a concentration camp, told with van Vogt's characteristic focus on the psychological undercurrents of the tale; and while it may not be the greatest book I've read and probably isn't entirely successful in every respect, its ambition is tremendous, and van Vogt comes so very close to pulling it off. If ever proof were needed that the man really could write when he wanted to - meaning those weirder books came out that way by deliberation rather than because that was all he knew how to do - then it's right here in The Violent Man; and to be honest, as a discussion of ethics, morality and all of that good stuff, it not only pisses all over Crime and Punishment, but identifies a lot of what's wrong with our present system in identifying the psychology of what van Vogt terms the right man, meaning persons mentally incapable of accepting the validity of any argument other than their own. It might be argued that Dick inherited this theme in his railing against persons without the capacity for empathy, as we saw in Androids and others. In any case, whether referring to later writers or to global politics, it seems that van Vogt has ultimately been proven more prophetic than anyone could have anticipated.
Although he never quite retired from bolting old short stories together as occasionally bewildering fix-up novels, The Violent Man was apparently van Vogt's first original book in twelve years. Curiously, it isn't science-fiction, and in writing it he clearly held back a few of his weirder, more disorientating compositional techniques, so I'm inclined to wonder whether this might not have been a bid for mainstream success, or at least an attempt to elevate himself from the ghetto of science-fiction publishing.
That said, van Vogt's focus remains very much on themes which inform his science-fiction. In fact, the success of the novel is that he's covering old thematic ground, but for once it's fairly clear what he's trying to say.
Curiously, The Violent Man reminds me a little of Philip K. Dick's Gather Yourselves Together. Both novels are set in Communist China within self-contained communities isolated from the outside world, and you might argue that both approximately foreshadow certain aspects of Patrick McGoohan's Prisoner. Gather Yourselves Together was written a couple of years earlier, but was unpublished until fairly recently, so the similarities serve mainly as indicative of how much the two writers had in common, although it's doubtless significant that Dick had been reading van Vogt since he was twelve.
Two major preoccupations of van Vogt's later books are the totalitarian state and sexual inequality, and these combine in this novel with an examination of his primary obsession, the thought process itself - as has so often been examined through his interest in mind control, Korzybski's general semantics, and even L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics to some extent. Our story maroons a man named Ruxton in a prison compound as part of something called Project Future Victory, which aspires to turn unwilling test subjects into loyal Communists, specifically to educate them in such a way as to result in their embracing Communism of their own free will. Impressively, van Vogt gives a good impression of having done his homework with regard to Communist China, and if his narrative voice has often seemed to lean a little to the right with vaguely libertarian tendencies, here he remains relatively impartial in detailing the benefits of both Communist and capitalist systems whilst condemning shortcomings and inequalities on both sides of the fence. I don't personally agree with everything he seems to conclude, but the apparent absence of dogma is refreshing.
Similarly, van Vogt's later attempts to discuss what he regards as sexual inequality have generally been poorly argued at best, and profoundly troubling at worst, and yet here he manages to communicate his point very well. It still boils down to a general sense of exasperation at women not wanting to shag him as much as he wants to shag them, but in The Violent Man he strikes out and makes some effort to deal with female emancipation and to embrace a feminist perspective, so it comes across less like the creepy muttering of some dude in his mother's basement.
Somehow all of this is knitted together within the story of our man attempting to survive in what is more or less a concentration camp, told with van Vogt's characteristic focus on the psychological undercurrents of the tale; and while it may not be the greatest book I've read and probably isn't entirely successful in every respect, its ambition is tremendous, and van Vogt comes so very close to pulling it off. If ever proof were needed that the man really could write when he wanted to - meaning those weirder books came out that way by deliberation rather than because that was all he knew how to do - then it's right here in The Violent Man; and to be honest, as a discussion of ethics, morality and all of that good stuff, it not only pisses all over Crime and Punishment, but identifies a lot of what's wrong with our present system in identifying the psychology of what van Vogt terms the right man, meaning persons mentally incapable of accepting the validity of any argument other than their own. It might be argued that Dick inherited this theme in his railing against persons without the capacity for empathy, as we saw in Androids and others. In any case, whether referring to later writers or to global politics, it seems that van Vogt has ultimately been proven more prophetic than anyone could have anticipated.
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