A.E vanVogt - Yay or nay?

He was one of the undisputed Top 3 writers in the so-called Golden Age of SF, and one of the first to transition from the magazines to having actual books published. He developed many of the genre's main themes and inspired new writers including Philip K. Dick.

Nowadays almost his entire opus is out-of-print although Heinlein and Asimov remain popular. He is lampooned by the few critics who consider him worth commenting on, and reviled for his involvement in Scientology.

I wonder how folks in the group feel about him. Personally I still like some of his stuff, although I can admit there may be some flaws there.

I still rate and recommend The House That Stood Still, and I still feel a little nostalgia for one or two others of his books. But they were all very much pants.

>1 EnsignRamsey: Wouldn't L. Ron Hubbard have been in the top three during those years? Not that I'm endorsing Hubbard, but fans of the era had different ideas about what's good than we do. Do you have a source for how the top writers were ranked?

I think I've noted this somewhere already, but Michael Swanwick's story "Legions in Time" is a van Vogt hommage, and it won the 2004 Hugo for novelette. So there's still some affection in fandom for van Vogt.

The SF Encyclopedia's longish van Vogt entry puts forward a common, modern interpretation of his stories as "Hard-SF dreams", no more to be held to the standards of reason than any dream.

Which is not really to disagree with iansales, I guess.

I'm a big follower of 501 Must-Read Books, and Slan made that list.

>1 EnsignRamsey: I probably have (percentage-wise, at least) more books by van Vogt than most people here. I'll admit that some of them are merely for the cover, but I'm very sentimental about him. I strongly recommend reading his autobiography, which is alternatively strange and sad (from our long distant perspective, here in a different century):

Reflections of A. E. van Vogt

He was a master of what he called fix-ups, where he would rewrite (or sometimes just retitle) a book or story he'd written. I own more than a few of those. He was still producing, and respected as an important member of the SF community when I first started reading SF (circa 1955 or 1956). Probably half of his best output was written in the forties, including all those Weapon Shop books. The Weapon Shops of Isher was one of the first books I read that made me think about things, and question how society worked. Life is far more complex than it seems in that book, but it was still a revelation to me then.

I own two copies, but would probably buy more of them if they were unusual editions.

It's always sad when it's dementia that takes out a great mind. Not everything he wrote is still worth reading, but gosh, it was something back in the day.

Wouldn't L. Ron Hubbard have been in the top three during those years?

No. He would not. Some of the top authors of that era (at the very least 1938-1946, and possibly extending into the early to mid-1950s) were (in no particular order): Isaac Asimov, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Ray Bradbury, Frederic Brown, Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke. Cyril Kornbluth, Eric Frank Russell, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Vance, Clifford Simak, and the aforementioned A.E. van Vogt.

One might note, for example, the conspicuous lack of a story by Hubbard in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame series, the first three books of which (I, IIA, and IIB) existed to honor stories mostly drawn from the "Golden Age" era.

>1 EnsignRamsey: I enjoyed Slan as a kid but the Suck Fairy has landed on it, hard.

I enjoyed the Weapon Shops books as well and could probably reread them.

I strongly disliked the Book of Ptah from the first read.

All the other books I remember reading or still own by him wouldn't be re-reading material I think.

I don't regret reading them when I did, and I am still very glad that the public library I relied on at the time I discovered SF carried him and the genre in general, when that wasn't at all a given or all that widespread.

But I'd expect more enjoyment of even a middling still-new-to-me Sci-Fi author of today picked at random because, well, even if (s)he was mindlessly projecting too much of current societal expectations and typical interactions, amidst all the wondrous inventiveness regarding pretty much everything else, hopefully the frame of reference would have moved at least a bit forward from the '40s-'50s, or whenever.
Well, as long as I avoid a select few of the Puppies persuasion I guess.

>6 StormRaven: Ah, I think I see my error above.

I wasn't claiming any particular excellence for Hubbard, but rather referring to what 1940s fans might have thought. I think I was drawing on a 1990 remark by Algis Budrys I once read:

The fact is that L. Ron Hubbard played a much larger part in the development of Astounding (and Unknown) than he is generally given credit for, now that the past is receding swiftly into legend. While events were fresher in the minds of fans, there was no doubt that Campbell's Big Three were Heinlein, Hubbard, and van Vogt.

But this remark must be taken with caution, in light of Budrys's association with the Hubbard-backed Writers of the Future program, something I wasn't thinking of in my post above. I copied the quote from an article by Alexei Panshin, in which Panshin goes on to pretty well debunk Budrys's statement. So, looks like I was wrong to rely on the one source.

In that article Panshin also quotes a 1945 essay by Damon Knight where Knight disparages van Vogt in comparison to Heinlein, Hubbard and de Camp. Still, not evidence for general fan approval. But it does suggest that van Vogt wasn't undisputedly in the top three, either. It's difficult at this remove to say with any certainty who might've been the number three figure after Heinlein and Asimov.

If EnsignRamsey meant to say that van Vogt should be seen today as part of a best-three, I'd have to disagree, fun though he was.

>8 dukedom_enough: Briefly. It was well known that Knight had it in for van Vogt. I even referenced that in my review in his autobiography. I never cared much for Knight, and care even less for the petty jealousy that he displayed.

So it goes.

>3 dukedom_enough: I think I read it somewhere, but I can't recall a source. It's really based more on what I've read from, and about the period, so "undisputed" might be a bit strong. I never read anything by Hubbard, but maybe he was more popular at the time than I realise. Funny how history gets rewritten.

>4 Cecrow: I love Slan, even if it is technically dubious.

>5 Lyndatrue: I think The Weapon Shops of Isher still stands up today.

8: Budrys' quote says that Hubbard was part of Campbell's "big three", but even as important to the genre as Campbell was, he didn't define its entire landscape. Campbell certainly bought a lot of stories from Hubbard, but in large part that was probably because Hubbard wrote in a way that Campbell favored, which in large part consisted of being able to write a lot and meet deadlines.

Outside of Astounding, Hubbard seems to have had at most moderate success. For example, he never sold a story to Galaxy as far as I can tell. He was more or less a one-trick Campbellian pony, and rode that one trick as long as he could. His output may have been voluminous, but I don't think anyone regarded it as being particularly notable.

On a side note, the Writers of the Future volumes often contain an essay and at least once a story by Hubbard. Every one I have ever read has been embarrassingly bad.

I haven't felt a need to reread them, but enjoyed several of them back then. Certainly the Weapon Shops, and Slan. I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Voyage of the Space Beagle, more recently notorious as the inspiration for the Aliens films.
As a younger person, I liked the wish-fulfillment aspect of the all-powerful protagonist. It's much less attractive now.

>14 rshart3: The Voyage of the Space Beagle is in my All Time Top 10, but I thought I'd take a break from banging on about it this time :)

Vogt is mostly remembered for Black Destroyer (which still holds up).

Although Hubbard was not one of the 'greats', he still wrote two first class stories; Fear and Typewriter in the Sky.

Van Vogt is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine: I realize that his books and stories are objectively bad (one-note characters, formulaic prose, dated, on-the-fly plots, ...), but if I happen to aimlessly browse that section of my library, I will read at least one story and enjoy it in all its handwavey nonsensical glory. I like to think of his stuff (and that of Charles Harness) as quickly-written, barely edited fluff that unashamedly revels in how much sense it doesn't make, and I'm convinced that there is a place for that.

Of course, having encountered his work in my early teens, I cannot help but read him with thick nostalgia goggles.

What >17 Petroglyph: said. I've got 39 of his plus 4 duplicates, but then I am a completist, but not overly assiduous. I think what I like about them is that they are short and you don't have to engage your brain. Probably some while since I read many of his - perhaps it's better left with the rosy glow I have, rather than diving back in to check up on my memory.

Yea. I like to re-read his short story "The Monster" every couple of years. Also, it appears I don't own a copy of Slan, so I'm going to have to remedy that next time I go to a used bookstore.

>14 rshart3: >15 EnsignRamsey: When I started reading this thread the mention of the story Voyage of the Space Beagle attracted my attention immediately.

There is another very famous ship called the Beagle.... HMS Beagle which was a survey ship, led by Captain Robert FitzRoy - famous in his own right as an innovator of modern weather forecasting - from 1831 to 1836 and his equally famous passenger Charles Darwin as they explored and surveyed the southern tip of South America.

There is an excellent book on these adventures based in part on diary entries by Darwin, titled This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson.

It would not surprise me if A.E. Van Vogt took inspiration at least for the title. I am going to search for this book to see if there are any parallels to the real "Beagle"

>20 Lynxear: I don't see why anyone would think van Vogt was not thinking of the original Beagle; it's one of the most famous voyages of scientific discovery in history. I don't remember the association being explicitly noted in the novel, but then it wouldn't need to be.

>21 dukedom_enough: I Seem to recall van Vogt's wiki mentions the connection to the original Beagle.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone!