Stories

The July 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, featuring A. E. van Vogt’s first published s-f story Black Destroyer on its iconic cover by Graves Gladney, is generally considered to have initiated the golden age of science-fiction, extending throughout the forties and into the early fifties.
It later became the initial six chapters of van Vogt’s great 1950 novel of interstellar exploration, The Voyage of the Space Beagle. However there are very many textual variations between (…)

This is the dramatic story of the struggle for survival of the inter-galactic exploration ship The Space Beagle, after having being invaded by an incredibly powerful alien being – a narrative familiar to viewers of Ridley Scott’s 1981 masterpiece Alien, which was largely based on this story. First published in the December 1939 issue of the Astounding Science Fiction magazine, Discord in Scarlet is the direct sequel of van Vogt’s equally dramatic novella Black Destroyer that had appeared (…)

In this very early story first published in the January 1940 edition of Unknown magazine, A. E. van Vogt made a rare but very successful venture into the realm of fantasy. Or rather near-fantasy, as the shark-god "Thing" (in human form!) that comes out of the sea to wreak revenge on a group of fishermen in an isolated area of the South Seas is an interesting and just-about-credible (especially at night in sufficiently-eerie surroundings) incarnation of the ancestral lore of the native (…)

These fifteen stories are all fine examples of this great writer’s best work from his most creative period – the forties and early fifties, the "golden age" of science-fiction.
All of the stories published here are the original magazine versions, with the magazine artwork and cover for each story.
An e-book of this sizable anthology (185,000 words, 600+ standard printed pages) is available for downloading below. TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Repetition (1940) - an emissary from Earth struggles (…)

A. E. van Vogt’s first published story was the celebrated Black Destroyer, that appeared in the August 1939 edition of Astounding Science Fiction.
But Black Destroyer was not actually van Vogt’s first science-fiction story : that distinction goes to this one, a remarkably inventive and dramatic space-adventure tale that he had submitted to the Astounding magazine in 1938.
Its publication was however delayed for editorial reasons, as a shape-changing alien had featured in Who Goes There?, (…)

An unusual ghost story with whodunit and time-conundrum elements, written during van Vogt’s Canadian days.
It was first published in the August 1942 issue of the bi-monthly magazine Unknown Worlds.
With the original Unknown Worlds illustrations by Orban.]]
(12,500 words)
An e-book is available for downloading below. 1. THE GHOST
One of the most unusual tales of haunting and ghosts we’ve seen—and one that might explain what ghosts really are— "Four miles," Kent thought, "four (…)

First published in the November 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, this well-written wartime story, only ever republished in the sixties in a little anthology of van Vogt stories bizarrely and off-puttingly entitled Monsters (and Bug-Eyed Monsters — even worse! — in the UK edition at the time), tells of confrontation and — yes! — (eventual) cooperation between a group of isolated whale-fishermen in the northern seas and strange aliens desperately fighting a ferocious enemy that has (…)

One of van Vogt’s iconic stories, this theme of a mysterious "Weapon Shop" organization, subtly fighting to oppose by advanced technological, ideological and organisational means the overreaching tyranny of a populist-style family dictatorship, provided the central theme to a number of works by van Vogt during the forties and early fifties.
This series of stories and novels, all placed 7,000 years in the future and all featuring a vast network of technologically-advanced semi-underground (…)

An aircraft pilot on a critical war-time mission across the Atlantic is suddenly warned by a mysterious passenger that the flight is in mortal danger from enemy warcraft that have been informed of the flight’s secret contents and of its flight plan. The passenger turns out to possess extraordinary powers that are turned to good use to save the ship and the whole Allied war effort from catastrophe.
The Flight That Failed was credited to E. Mayne Hull (A. E. van Vogt’s wife) in the December (…)

A young teacher comes to the seaside town where his great-grandmother was supposed buried, only to find the lady in good health although apparently capable of being in two places at the same time. The more he observes her, the more he begins to understand the mortal danger she represents for his young wife, whose body the old witch would like to be rejuvenated in at midnight on a certain day.
The Witch was first published in the February 1943 issue of Unknown Worlds.
With the original (…)