A phrase you’d hear often thirty or forty years ago in regard to science fiction was the “Big Three”. It referred to the three most successful authors in the genre. By the 1980s, it was generally accepted these were Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke and Robert A Heinlein. But the three changed over the years, especially during the earlier decades. Frank Herbert was sometimes named as a member, but he was never that successful when the term was in use. Earlier decades saw several authors nominated to the top three.
One of those was AE van Vogt.
He was popular. There’s no denying it. He was also prolific. I’ve not counted how many stories and novels he had published, because his bibliography is a complete mess. He would cobble stories together into a novel, those novels would be published under different titles, and he’d often rewrite them to produce entirely different novels.
The Universe Maker (1953, USA) is a… well, “a case in point” is perhaps an over-used phrase when it comes to van Vogt’s career. As a novel, it’s fairly typical of his career — initially published as a novella under an entirely different title, and then expanded to novel-length — but many of its ideas were taken from earlier stories by van Vogt, and recycled in his later fiction.
In a review of van Vogt’s The Players of Null-A (1956, USA; see here), I mentioned a scene from one of van Vogt’s novel that had stayed with me over the years, that of a figure made of shadow, called Grannis, approaching a man in clearing. The scene does indeed appear in The Universe Maker, and the name Grannis is an important plot point.
In my teens, I was a fan of the science fiction of AE van Vogt. I’m not sure why I fastened onto him rather than other sf novelists available then — this would be the late 1970s and early 1980s, when WH Smith had a huge selection of sf paperbacks. It’s not like his books had the best covers — the Chris Foss spaceships on Asimov’s Foundation trilogy were way cooler, for example. And, it has to be said, while many of the covers of van Vogt’s novels featured spaceships, the novels themselves usually did not.
Reading van Vogt’s fiction now, forty years later, I’m even more puzzled why I read so many of his books. Like The Universe Maker. Whose cover (see below) has a spaceship and a giant brain.
Only the giant brain appears in the novel.
The Universe Maker is an expanded version of a novella, ‘The Shadow Men’, which was originally published in Startling Stories’ January 1950 issue. In many respects, it’s typical van Vogt. The protagonist is a soldier, about to be shipped to Korea as the novel opens; the story continues after he returns.
While out on the town, he hooks up with a young woman. They leave to drive to her place. Both are drunk. The hero crashes the car and the young woman dies. He does a runner. Shortly after his return from the Korean War, he is contacted by a woman with the same name as the car crash victim. Intrigued, he meets her... and awakes to find himself in the year 2391. He’s told the death of the young woman caused her family generations of trauma, and so the soldier must be executed, while the woman’s descendant watches, in order to cure them. Before this can happen, the soldier is kidnapped again…
This future US is populated by three groups: the Tweeners, who live in a handful of cities; the Floaters, who travel about the continent in caravan-like airships; and the Shadows, who offer guidance and technology from their sealed city in the Rockies. Both a shadow character and people who live in airships appeared in van Vogt’s The Players of Null-A.
The soldier spends time with the Floaters, and is briefly dragged into the far future for an enigmatic meeting with someone who tells him he must destroy the Shadows. He is then recruited by the Tweeners, and applies to join the Shadows. There he learns the truth about Grannis, himself, the Shadows, and the giant brain at the end of time which seems to have brought everything into existence. Or something.
When discussing van Vogt, it’s not worth mentioning his prose style, which was famously based on the advice given in a “how to write” book. Or his plots, which were often based on dreams. Or even his ideas, which he cheerfully borrowed and re-used and recycled from his oeuvre. He was also fond of crackpot science and philosophy, and frequently made use of both in his fiction...
But there were occasions when his brief membership of the Big Three seemed justified, when something he wrote involved that rapid and unexpected change of scale, which sort of made everything in the story up to that point look like something tilt-shift. Van Vogt was not alone in managing this, they all did it, even EE Doc Smith and Asimov; I suspect it was a feature of the sf of the day…
There is a cocktail called the B-52, named, I assume, for the bomber, and not the US band responsible for ‘Love Shack’ and ‘Rock Lobster’. A B-52 is a layered shot of Kahlúa, Baileys Irish Cream and Grand Marnier (or triple sec). You knock it back, it hits your stomach, and moments later you feel it, well, sort of “explode” in your stomach. I drank rather a lot of them when I lived in the United Arab Emirates.
There is something about science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s which often has an effect similar to a B-52. It was not always there, and other elements of a science fiction often undermined it — cf EE Doc Smith’s triumphant misogyny, or Asimov’s failure to invent worlds that did not in most ways resemble 1950s USA. But van Vogt was often the least objectionable, and managed to write the occasional female character with agency (although most were of his time); and he showed far more inventiveness, even if repeatedly recycled, in his settings. I also think he was far better at those shifts in scale than his contemporaries.
Unfortunately, where The Universe Maker initially succeeds — a man dragged into the future to be murdered to “cure” generational trauma — it later, well loses the plot. When the hero is pulled to the far distant future, and given an explanation that contradicts everything he has learnt to date, and which then proves entirely wrong; and then the giant brain (of the cover art) from the far far distant future kidnaps him and explains everything…
Except this is a book full of explanations, few of which actually comprise a coherent plot. It is one of van Vogt’s better novels, but that’s a low bar to clear.
Van Vogt may have briefly been one of the Big Three once upon a time. But his time has passed, the concept of the Big Three has passed, and I can’t honestly understand why anyone unfamiliar with his oeuvre would want to read any of his novels now.
