A. E. Van Vogt - Early Life and Writings

Early Life and Writings

Van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba, Canada. Until he was four years old, van Vogt and his family spoke only a dialect of Low German in the home. Van Vogt's father, a lawyer, moved his family several times and his son found these moves difficult, remarking in later life:

Childhood was a terrible period for me. I was like a ship without anchor being swept along through darkness in a storm. Again and again I sought shelter, only to be forced out of it by something new.

After starting his writing career by writing for "true confession" style pulp magazines like True Story, van Vogt decided to switch to writing something he enjoyed, science fiction.

Van Vogt's first published SF story, "Black Destroyer" (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939), was inspired by Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. The story depicted a fierce, carnivorous alien, the coeurl, stalking the crew of an exploration spaceship. It was the cover story of the issue of Astounding that is sometimes described as having ushered in the "Golden Age" of science fiction. The story served as the inspiration for a number of science fiction movies. In 1950 it was combined with "War of Nerves" (1950), "Discord in Scarlet" (1939) and "M33 in Andromeda" (1943) to form the novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950). Positing the need for exobiologists who will appreciate the differences between the inhabitants of other planets and ourselves, it stresses the importance of the non-military in the exploration of other cultures.

In 1941, van Vogt decided to become a full-time writer, quitting his job at the Canadian Department of National Defence. Extremely prolific for a few years, van Vogt wrote a large number of short stories. In the 1950s, many of them were retrospectively patched together into novels, or "fixups" as he called them, a term which entered the vocabulary of science fiction criticism. When the original stories were related (e.g. The War against the Rull) this was often successful. When not (e.g. Quest for the Future) the disparate stories thrown together generally made for a less coherent plot.

One of van Vogt's best-known novels of this period is Slan, which was originally serialised in Astounding Science Fiction (September - December 1940). Using what became one of van Vogt's recurring themes, it told the story of a 9-year-old superman living in a world in which his kind are slain by Homo sapiens.