Lost: Fifty Suns

A.E. van Vogt Lost: Fifty Suns (1972)
I've now reached the point of owning so many van Vogt paperbacks that I have to spend at least five minutes inspecting each new, unfamiliar title found in Half-Price just to make sure it isn't one of the ones I already have under a different name. So far as I can work out, I think there are about five or six which I'm still to read - which is impressive for an author I initially dismissed as worthless after struggling with Away and Beyond back in the before times. That said, there are still a good number of his short story collections I'm yet to read, albeit short story collections most likely containing a couple of things I've already read through van Vogt subsequently welding them to other short stories and having the resulting Frankenbook published as a novel. The somewhat lengthy Lost: Fifty Suns, for example, was eventually stitched together with related material to form the novel Mission to the Stars, as I read it, or The Mixed Men, as seems to be its more popular title.

I found Mission to the Stars a little underwhelming - not without redeeming features but nothing special - which is sadly equally true of both Lost: Fifty Suns, the short story, and this collection as a whole. The main problem is that it all seems very uneven. The Timed Clock is okay, but leans a little too heavily on multiple twist endings the approach of which can be seen from many miles away, and - as with The Confession and The Rat and the Snake - doesn't quite read like the work of Alfred Elton, lacking the usual atmosphere, jarring angular sentences, or even any of his customarily familiar themes; and The Rat and the Snake stands suspicious comparison with his wife's writing, although I haven't found anything online to support the possibility of it being one of her efforts. The Barbarian is enjoyable, but worked just as well in Empire of the Atom, leaving Ersatz Eternal - which didn't leave much of an impression - and The Sound of Wild Laughter featuring characters from The Secret Galactics and which is another of van Vogt's slightly puzzling examinations of sexual inequality. The same views were expressed quite clearly in The Violent Man, but for some reason he never quite managed to get the subject working in any of his science-fiction novels, usually leaving us with a series of faintly troublesome mumblings about women turning frigid immediately following marriage. The frustrating thing is that while he probably doesn't quite qualify as a feminist pioneer, van Vogt's views on sexual inequality seem entirely reasonable in comparison with those of his contemporaries, but were often poorly expressed, as they are here, perhaps through a reluctance to terrify his mostly male audience. Although, given the number of female characters featured in this collection I can't help wonder if it might not have been assembled as one for the ladies, so to speak.

Oh well. His heart was in the right place, I guess.

Planets for Sale

A.E. van Vogt & E. Mayne Hull Planets for Sale (1954)
Edna Mayne Hull was van Vogt's wife and secretary, in which capacity she apparently typed out a great many of his manuscripts. She also wrote her own science-fiction stories, mostly short, and with two novels to her name - although this one is actually a cluster of short stories bolted together as a fix-up. However, her actual authorship of this work is not undisputed. The general consensus seems to be that her husband added his name as a co-credit in the hope of generating sales by underscoring their association; and yet, it has been suggested that both Planets for Sale and The Winged Man were entirely his work.

It's been eight years since I read The Winged Man, and it was one of the first van Vogts I read. I recall it as a narrative suggestive of his involvement, but as I say it's been a while. The word on the proverbial street is that she wrote it and he tidied it up, or edited or something, and I don't recall anything to contradict this claim. Planets for Sale on the other hand is very clearly not the work of A.E. van Vogt, and anyone claiming otherwise really needs to read more van Vogt and pay attention to what he does. Aside from elements common to the work of a great many science-fiction writers of the fifties, this does nothing you might reasonably expect to find in a novel by Alfred Elton - none of the weirdly angular sentences, no dramatic random swerves, none of his common themes relating to general semantics or mind control, and certainly no trace of the dreamlike atmosphere which permeates his best work.

Planets for Sale is a story centered around the adventures of one of your typical Gernsback style science-heroes, but worse, he's actually a sort of science-business-hero, an interplanetary CEO who outwits them all in both the boardroom and on the field of combat as a host of secretaries stand around giggling about how terribly dishy he is. I have no idea what actually happened in this novel because it's one of the most boring, unimaginative things I've ever read; and there aren't actually any planets for sale anywhere in the story.

I know A.E. didn't always hit the bullseye, and truthfully some of his novels border on incomprehensible, but if you genuinely believe he could have written this, you're an idiot. That said, I believe we at least have an answer as to why he felt the need to slap his name on the cover.

The Gryb

A.E. van Vogt The Gryb (1976)
Well, I was warned that I might find this collection a little underwhelming, but the timing seemed good, so ahead I forged. It's an odd bunch of tales, apparently a slight reshuffle of The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind-Benders from 1971. I bought this copy from a second hand book store in Rockport, since destroyed by Hurricane Harvey, so it felt important that I should get something from it for reasons I can't quite define; and I tried, but…

The Gryb - here referring to the collection as a whole rather than to the short story of the same name - feels like a novella with a bunch of shorts plopped on the side of the plate as some kind of concession to value for money. The novella would be Humans, Go Home which was written in 1969, and quite conspicuously reads like late period van Vogt, contrasting with the rest - all earlier, shorter, and probably not to be counted among his better efforts. It isn't that anything here is actively poor, or even without enjoyable aspects, but not much of this actually reads like van Vogt. The prose is unusually prosaic for the most part, functional, and lacking Alfred Elton's typically startling images, abrupt swerves, or harsh grammatical angles; and the stories seem to lack his customary ambition, at least in places - The Problem Professor for example, which borders on being one of those Asimov tales wherein eggheads have a conversation about rockets and we get to listen in for twenty or thirty not conspicuously gripping pages. At first I wondered if these might be really early works written before he'd developed his characteristic techniques, but no - I checked, and Black Destroyer predates everything in this collection. The Invisibility Gambit and Rebirth: Earth were supposedly co-written with his wife, E. Mayne Hull, which might account for the stylistic variance except that there isn't anything much to differentiate them from the stories for which she isn't credited - which would additionally seem to support the theory that most of that which has been published under her name was actually written by himself.

The Gryb, more commonly known as Repetition, was recycled to better effect as part of The War Against the Rull; and both Rebirth: Earth and The Star-Saint are fun, and enough so to justify reading the thing; and many of his usual themes are present, unfortunately including his slightly peculiar attitude to women which is given full expression in Humans, Go Home; but otherwise this just doesn't feel like our guy. Maybe he was ill, or maybe he was reigning it in a bit just to see how it felt. The Gryb is an interesting collection in terms of this writer and his career, principally because it seems so out of character; but with another name on the cover, it's unlikely that anyone would have noticed.

Rogue Ship

A.E. van Vogt Rogue Ship (1965)
Here's one of those fix-up novels van Vogt made by sewing a couple of short stories together. It's a practice you might suspect likely to yield mostly tripe depending on the consistency of themes shared by the component stories, but strangely I've found the most memorable hybrids to be the likes of Quest for the Future or The Beast wherein source material facing in completely different directions has been jammed together and obliged to make friends. Rogue Ship, on the other hand is only just a fix-up, comprising two closely related stories, one a sequel to the other, mixed in with a third, and all rewritten for the sake of elevation to novel status. So you might anticipate something which at least runs along in a straight line, which is what I anticipated, having given up on initial attempts to read The Pawns of Null-A and then Future Glitter because I just wasn't in the mood for that level of non-sequiteurial action.

Glancing at the shelf where they're all lined up from Slan through to Null-A Three, I can't help but form the impression of Alfred Elton having produced Rogue Ship during a brief phase of writing outside his comfort zone. There's The Violent Man, which I haven't read but which I'm told isn't science-fiction; and The Winged Man, seemingly co-written with his wife, Edna Mayne Hull; and Rogue Ship is dedicated to Ford McCormack, described by A.E. as a logician and technical expert and whom he credits as source of nearly all of what is scientifically exact in this fantastic story. Weird though it may seem, I think this was our boy having a go at hard science-fiction vaguely in the spirit of Asimov and the like. It's set on a generation ship travelling to a distant star system, just like in serious science-fiction, and there's an awful lot of talk of different kinds of proton and the laws of physics during the first third of the book.

A.E. van Vogt can usually be identified by random narrative swerves, dreamlike atmosphere, and impossible occurrences introduced for no immediately obvious reason, but he keeps it more or less under control for most of this one, which is in itself at least as odd as the bursts of explosive surrealism for which he is usually known. The first third of the book, peculiarly sober though it is, is actually quite absorbing as our ship arrives at its destination, many decades after leaving Earth, and fails to find anything habitable. Unfortunately this development inspires a series of mutinies, presumably as we encounter material from the second component story, and the narrative becomes convoluted and difficult to follow. By the time my attention span began to reconnect, it's clear that A.E. just couldn't keep a straight face after all and the ship is back on Earth, its crew frozen like statues, which is because they aren't back on Earth but are now travelling many times faster than the speed of light, and this is one of the weirder side effects; so as a novel, although it's not going to knock any of his biggies off the top spot, it finds its second wind and resumes something resembling pace towards the end.

The power struggles of the central passage may say something or other about government or society as a whole, although I found it difficult to tell what; and van Vogt's weird attitude to women comes to the fore in a couple of places. Here the ship's captain gets as many as four wives, women who seem content to be bartered as trophies as different factions seize power on board the Hope of Man. I have a feeling this may be one of those things which may have made evolutionary sense in the pre-Christian middle east, and thus is proposed as workable in outer space for the same reasons. The author himself doesn't seem to approve of his polygamous characters, but he's nevertheless the one moving those conveniently compliant gals from one bed to another like chess pieces.

On the other hand...

The universe was not a lie. It was what it was. There had been an apparency perceived by the highly evolved nervous systems of man and animals. Evidently—it was postulated—life had required a unique stability and had therefore created brain mechanisms that limited perception to the apparent stable condition. Within this solid frame, life lived its lulled existence, evolving painfully, constantly adjusting at some unconscious level to the real universe.

Rogue Ship goes deep in places, but tends to muddy its own arguments - whatever they may be - with the relentless constant motion which van Vogt tended to write, and which otherwise often works so well. It's not an amazing book, but it's mostly decent, and there's probably a lot more to be had from it than I managed if you have the patience.