The Dusty Bookcase: van Vogt

Showing posts with label van Vogt. Show all posts

12 December 2022

Ten Kicks at the Can for A.E. van Vogt

Destination: Universe
A.E. van Vogt
New York: Signet, 1958

160 pages

I began this book wondering if I hadn't been too hard on A.E. van Vogt. Science fiction was an adolescent passion, and like so many abandoned in adulthood – superhero comics being the prime example – I can be overly critical.

I didn't read van Vogt as a kid; had I known he was Canadian I would've. In middle age, his novel The House That Stood Still (1950) served as my introduction. It begins well, reading like a decent pulp thriller, but things take an abrupt turn, the writing changes, and then comes a second turn, more changes, and near complete disintegration. I agree with Fletcher Pratt, who wrote in the 17 December 1950 New York Times that "it is frequently impossible to understand precisely what is going on."

And Pratt liked the novel.

I was similarly baffled, was less impressed, and even more confused by his other 1950 "novel" Masters of Time, my second van Vogt.

A decade passed. I felt no urge to give van Vogt another try, which is not to say that I wasn't curious. Surely he couldn't be so bad a writer as all that; after all, the man was a graduate of the Palmer Institute of Authorship.

Popular Mechanics, June 1949

And so in March, I made a commitment to read van Vogt's short story collection Destination: Universe before year's end.

A master of time myself, I finished with three weeks to spare.

Destination: Universe proved to be one of 2022's weakest books, but was not nearly so difficult to get through as Jeann Beattie's Blaze of Noon or Mrs Savigny's A Romance of Toronto. Most of its ten stories get off to a running start, propelling the reader for at least a couple of pages. But they soon become bogged down in a problem faced by the protagonist and his various attempts to find a solution. There's a good amount of repetition, explanation, and description of some future technology or other.

'Enchanted Village' concerns the first landing on Mars – a crash, really – which leaves one lone survivor who stumbles upon an uninhabited village that attempts to reconfigures itself to his needs. The visitor is repeatedly frustrated by his inability to communicate with his new home. I found the story memorable for the unnecessary twist in the penultimate paragraph.

'A Can of Paint,' provided a welcome touch of humour. In this story, space explorer Kilgour defies Earth's laws in voyaging to Venus, thus becoming the first human to visit the planet. He emerges from his cigar-shaped spaceship into a field of long green grass, breathing in the air, "tinglingly sweet and fresh and warm." and almost immediately spies a cube – note: not "can" – containing paint. It spreads over his body, endangering his life as he races against time to find a means of removing it.

The 1953 first Signet edition.

Of the ten, the stand out story is the first, 'Far Centaurus.' Its plot centres on a five hundred year voyage to Alpha Centauri undertaken by acquaintances and friends Pelham, Blake, Renfrew, and narrator Bill. Pelham, has invented a drug, Eternity, which enables humans to live in non-degenerative hibernation for decades on end. Throughout the centuries, the four return to consciousness, but only briefly and never at the same time. Bill, the first to emerge, finds Pelham's decomposing corpse. On his second awakening, 150 years later, he finds a note from Blake expressing concern about Renfrew's mental health. Bill is awoken a third time by an alarm. Through viewers, he sees another spaceship on fire, but can do nothing to help, and so takes another hit of Eternity. Bill awakens for the fifth time as the spaceship is reaching its destination, only to discover that the planet they'd thought might be habitable had been settled centuries earlier. Travel between Earth an Alpha Centauri now takes three hours.

Renfrew loses his mind and van Vogt loses his way.

Of the ending, Colin Wilson wrote that van Vogt had "no idea of how to finish his story."

I suggest that van Vogt had no idea of how to finish any story. The main thing I've learned in reading the man is that he could have a good idea for a beginning, and might even craft a pretty good middle, but that is it. Am I wrong? I ask because I have only twelve examples to go on.

I'm not interested in reading a thirteenth.

Bloomer:

"He turned. His horny body towered above the man."

Trivia: In 2004, sixty years after it was first published in the pages of Astounding Stories, 'A Can of Paint' was adapted to the screen in a 24-minute short.

Object and Access: The third Signet printing, my copy, a gift from a friend, is a bit worse for wear. The Stanley Meltzoff cover illustration imagines a scene not found in the book.

Within the pages of my copy I found this bookmark for Canadian Children's Literature. It appears to date from 1997.

A receipt suggests that it was once purchased for $3.50 at Ottawa's Book Bazaar.

The collection was first published by Pellegrini & Cudahy in 1952 as Destination: Universe! Signet dropped the exclamation mark for this printing. There have been many other editions from many other publishers over the years, but as far as I can determine the collection is currently out of print.

Used copies are numerous and cheap.

Destination: Universe! has been translated into French (Destination univers), Italian (Destinazione universo), Romanian (Destinat̨ia univers), and Swedish (Destination universum).

Wasting Time With A.E. van Vogt

The Dominatrix of Time (and other fantasies)

The Homoerotic A.E. van Vogt

14 March 2022

The Dustiest Bookcase: V is for van Vogt

The Dustiest Bookcase:

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

Destination: Universe
A.E. van Vogt
New York: Signet, 1958
160 pages

The Dustiest Bookcase series is meant to highlight books I've had forever, and have always meant to read and review, but haven't. Destination: Universe is a cheat. It was given to me just last year by someone who knew I liked vintage paperbacks. The pages are loose, the cover is more than scuffed, and still I'm happy to have it, despite my previous encounters with the author.

In the fourteen-year history of the Dusty Bookcase, I've given van Vogt two kicks at the can. I was first dawn into his orbit in by the 1952 Harlequin cover of The House That Stood Still.

(In all seriousness, WTF, Harlequin?)

I disliked The House That Stood Still so much that I included it in my book The Dusty Bookcase. Then gave van Vogt a second chance with Masters of Time, about which I remember nothing. This old review suggests I was unimpressed.

Philip K. Dick was an admirer of van Vogt. I'm not – not yet at least – though I've enjoyed bits of his writing. The beginning of The House That Stood Still reads like pretty good post-war noir pulp before becoming a muddled mess. That van Vogt had a habit of cobbling together disparate short stories for resale as novels may explain my dissatisfaction.

Destination: Universe looks promising as a collection of ten short stories first published in Astounding Science Fiction, Thrilling Wonder Stories, the Avon Fantasy Reader, and similar publications. As such, there should be no awkward couplings or ménages à trois.

"Want to take a rocket ship tour into space that lasts 500 years?"

Not really.

Still, I look forward to reading this collection.

I'll read it this year.

Ten stories.

Ten more kicks at the can.

Related posts:

SF, not S/M

Wasting Time With A.E. van Vogt

The Dominatrix of Time (and other fantasies)

The Homoerotic A.E. van Vogt

04 November 2014

Nothing Says Violence Like Harlequin

Violence sells but I'm not buying, which may be why it's taken me so long to see just how much it was used in pushing early Harlequins.

As near as I can tell, the publisher began using violence as a selling point with its third book, Howard Hunt's Maelstrom. We remember Hunt today as one of Richard Nixon's plumbers, forgetting that the man was once awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (whereas Truman Capote and Gore Vidal were not). His third novel, Maelstrom, was first published in 1948 by no less a house than Farrar Straus. Sure, the dust jacket was garish, but c'mon, Farrar Straus!

By contrast, the Harlequin edition issued the following June (four months before Hunt joined the CIA), seems bland… that is, until you read the tagline:

Harlequin used 'violence" in flogging all sorts of titles, no matter how unlikely. Its cover copy for Ben Hecht's Hollywood Mystery promises a plot in which "violence and murder intermingle with wacky situations." Lady – Here's Your Wreath by Raymond Marshall is a "story of violence, mystery and sudden death". Marshall's Why Pick On Me? was pitched with promises of "Punch, Action, Violence!" And, in event that you missed it the first time, Harlequin uses the word twice – in consecutive sentences – in describing James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish:

This is a fast moving very shocking crime story, which tells of a young and glamorous heiress, whose beauty excites a gang of brutal mobsters to such an extent that they leave a trail of death and destruction in their efforts to kidnap and debauch her. The detective, Dave Fenner, is called in to crack the case, and matches the sadistic brutality of the gang with his own particular brand of violence. This is definitely not a book for the faint-hearted who cannot stand explosive violence and action.

Chase is a special case. With I'll Bury My Dead, we're promised a tale of "murder and violence". Figure It Out for Yourself finds hero Vic Malloy "snarled up in a vicious vortex of murder, glamorous women and violent non-stop action". Twelve Chinks and a Woman, the title Harlequin would really like us all to forget, finds sleuth Dave Fenner descending into a "merciless violent Underworld".

Then there are the covers.

The Harlequin cover for Manitoba boy A.E. van Vogt's The House That Stood Still ranks with News Stand Library's Love is a Long Shot and The Penthouse Killings as the most disturbing and violent ever produced in this country. But those News Stand Library books are anomalies; in truth, the covers of Harlequin's early rivals rarely depicted violence. The typical New Stand Library book promises sex. On rare occasions – as with Too Many Women or Overnight Escapade – the two very nearly intersect, but never do. These News Stand Library covers suggest the possibility of violence, while those of Harlequin depict actual acts or the bloody results of same.

The ten Harlequins that follow give good example, each one typical of a time in which the publisher put forth brutal sagas of love and violence – and not slight stories of brutal love.

Maverick Guns
J.E. Ginstead
1950

The Case of the Six Bullets
R.M. Laurenson
1950

The Cold Trail
Paul E. Lehman
1950

Fall Guy
Joe Barry
1950

She Died on the Stairway
Knight Rhodes
1950

Wreath for a Redhead
Brian Moore
1951

The Dead Stay Dumb
James Hadley Chase
1951

False Face
Leslie Edgley
1951

Hunt the Killer
Day Keene
1952

The Body on Mount Royal
David Montrose
1953

Related posts:
Harlequin's Romantic View of the Past

Harlequin: The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name

Suggestive Harlequins: A Romantic Threesome

Harlequin Blondes: Terror Struck Them Dumb

20 January 2012

The Dominatrix of Time (and other fantasies)

There are no whip-wielding women in Masters of Time, green-skinned or otherwise. In fact, the only female so much as mentioned in the entire novel is aging spinster Nora Matheson. The 1974 Manor Books edition above is a cheat designed to appeal to adolescent boys. I was eleven when it arrived in stores.

With van Vogt, covers rarely reflect content. Publishers puff, peddling images that – four times out of five – are entirely unappealing.

Yes, four times out of five.

I present the following as evidence:

Super-Cérebro [Supermind]

Lisbon: Livros do Brasil, 1978

The Book of Ptath

London: Panther, 1975

Out of the Unknown
London: New English Library, 1970

宇宙嵐のかなた [Mission to the Stars]

Tokyo: Hayakawa, 1970

The Weapon Makers

New York: Greenberg, 1952

Related post: The Homoerotic van Vogt

18 January 2012

Wasting Time on A. E. van Vogt

Masters of Time
A. E. van Vogt
New York: Macfadden-Bartell, 1967

Masters of Time opens with poor Norma Matheson scrambling up a slippery riverbank after a failed suicide attempt. Eleven years earlier she'd rejected college boyfriend Jack's marriage proposal to pursue a career in social service. How'd that go? The author won't say, though the publisher provides plenty in this pitch to prospective purchasers:

Front cover, back cover, front page – Macfadden-Bartell describes this novel three different ways, though not one is true to the plot.

The finest scene is the first. Norma rests on a park bench gathering herself for another run at the river when she's approached by Dr Lell, a gaunt man who offers a job recruiting mercenaries for "the Calonian cause". That she accepts might be an indication that things didn't go so well in the social service game. Norma soon discovers that her employer is not the country of Calonia, but aliens amassing soldiers for a war in the distant future. She runs to the local police station only to be temporarily transformed into a mute old woman by Dr Lell.

Norma next turns to the US Mail, penning a plea to former beau Jack, now a world-renowned physicist. The lengthy letter she receives in response is full of mixed messages. Jack questions her sanity, repeats each and every detail Norma has gleaned of the alien plot, provides scientific analyses of same, and encloses $200 so that she might pay for psychiatric help.

What began as a mildly interesting episode of Twilight Zone suddenly becomes awkward and disjointed. The novel stumbles forward, picking up and discarding characters, concepts and concerns while torturing the reader with pedestrian prose. Here are Jack's thoughts upon learning that he's aboard a spaceship bound for Venus:

Venus! He let the word roll around in his mind and it was exciting, intellectual food, immensely stimulating to a mind shaped and trained as was his. Venus? For ages, the dreams of men had reached into the skies, immeasurably fascinated by the mind-staggering fact of other worlds, as vast as their own continents, seas, rivers, treasure beyond estimate. And now for him there was to be reality.

This plain passage is atypical in that it is at least comprehensible. As in Bond parodies, van Vogt's villains reveal too much. Explanations are plentiful, advanced knowledge is imparted and secrets are spilled, but nothing the aliens say makes much sense:

"–the seventeenth x space and time manipulations... taking place sometime in the future... several years from now. Your spaceship either by accident or design caught up in the eddying current in the resulting time storm– Still no clue to the origin of the mighty powers being exercised."

While readers may feel that they have missed something, fault lies wholly with the author who in his Reflections of A. E. van Vogt reveals that the novel was but one cobbled together from unrelated stories. The effort was, as he put it, "fix-up work". I suggest that "hack work" is more appropriate. I'll add that that grafting lifeless things to other lifeless things brings animation only in science fiction... and not with science fiction.

Oh, one more thing: Nora and Jack get married in the end.

Trivia: The novel first appeared as "The Recruiting Station" in a 1942 issue of Astounding Science Ficton. It first appeared in book form coupled with a shorter pulp story, "The Changeling". It has also been published as Earth's Last Fortress.

Translations include L'ultima fortezza della terra (1976), La dernière fortresse (1978) and Beherrscher der Zeit (1978).

Object and Access: A mass market paperback, typical of its time, copies of the Macfadden-Bartell edition are plentiful and cheap. Good copies can be had for one dollar (double that for Very Good). The first edition, published in 1950 by Fantasy Press of Reading, Pennsylvania, is not nearly as rare as one might expect. Near Fine copies begin at the forty dollar range. In Canada, only the Toronto Public Library and a handful of universities have the novel in their collections.