A.E. van Vogt - Cosmic Encounter (1980)

I still find it amazing that my first encounter with the writing of A.E. van Vogt led me to conclude that he couldn't write, and that I might therefore scratch his name from my list; and yet here I sit, approximately fifteen years later, having now read thirty-four of his thirty-six novels - many of which bordered on incomprehensible - and countless short stories. I have only Siege of the Unseen and To Conquer Kiber left to read, and the latter exists only in its French translation so that one probably ain't happening. The French regard van Vogt as an important surrealist writer, which is fair.

My initially unfavourable reaction stemmed from his fiction suggesting an author drunk at the typewriter, and even now that's often how his books read. The difference is that I've learned to appreciate that the disorientation is orchestrated, and that there's a lot going on with this guy's work if you know what to look for.

Cosmic Encounter was one of his last novels and seems better realised than many others written around the same decade - although by better realised I mean that you can see he's doing something even if it's not obvious what it could be. We open on a pirate ship in the year 1704 as it encounters the robots of a Lantellan spacecraft and all spacetime collapses to that one year, with the entire past and future of the universe simply ceasing to exist, after which the novel gets weirder by the chapter. The explanation, when it finally comes, is difficult to understand, being wrapped up as it is in a mesh of van Vogt's ideas regarding the gulf between that which we observe and how we describe it; but if you hold on tight, concentrate hard, and re-read the more obtuse passages until some sort of understanding is reached, you just about get an impression of what he's been trying to do; and I'm beginning to suspect that he may have been using language and narrative to rewire the reader's brain so as to facilitate cognition in terms described by Korzybski's general semantics, of which A.E. was very much a fan. Of all his works, Cosmic Encounter is very odd, even more dreamlike than usual, and certainly seems to do something peculiar to your head.

Without being particularly familiar with Korzybski, I gather van Vogt's interest lay in establishing a form of logic which eschews the binary of either-or with nothing in between, a logic wherein two plus two can equal five, and we shouldn't get too hung up on his using pirates and space robots to communicate this. Cause and effect being something traditionally subject to an either-or duality, van Vogt plays it down, often uncoupling one from the other, writing everything exclusively in the moment - which is why you really have to hold on tight with this stuff, to pay attention, and not get too upset where common or garden linear sense goes flying out of the window.

So I enjoyed Cosmic Encounter a lot, even if I struggle to describe what it's about, that being something you have to experience for yourself. It's worth the effort.