novels

First published in four installments in the September-December 1940 issues of Astounding Science Fiction, this smoothly-written and ambitious first novel with its action-oriented, science-minded, Big-Ideas-About-The-Evolutionary-Future-of-Humanity theme, its dramatic story line involving an incredibly intense and long-lasting manhunt, wild careening all over the solar system, much grim violence and some pretty intense man-woman confrontations, is a quintessential golden-age masterpiece that (…)

This novel was the third publication by van Vogt in as many years on the theme of an on-going conflict between a 4,000-year-old autocratic “Isher” regime, some 7,000 years in the future, and a powerful, scientifically-minded opposition organisation, The Weapon Shops, after the short story The Seesaw (1941) and the novelette The Weapon Shop (1942).
It was followed by the novella The Weapon Shops of Isher in 1949 and the novel of the same name in 1951.
Here the narrative not only recounts (…)

Richard Holroyd, a World War II tank captain who has been blown sky-high by a direct hit from a German dive-bomber, wakes up to find himself in the person of a somewhat amnesic semi-god named Ptath in the far, far, far-off world of 200 million A.D., where the continents have changed shape and whose 80 billion people spread over the three remaining ones are on the point of going hammer and tongs at one another with their spears and bows and arrows and their deadly attacking giant birds, egged (…)

First published in monthly installments in the August-October 1945 issues of Astounding Science Fiction, this fast-paced and very ambitious blockbuster novel set in 2580 A.D. was A. E. van Vogt’s fourth major novel in that glorious heyday-decade of science fiction, the golden forties.
Regularly reissued ever since in hardcover, paperback and foreign-language translations, it is certainly the author’s most-republished work, and one that, with Slan, established him definitively in the front (…)

This major work, first published in the October-November-December 1948 and January 1949 issues of Astounding Science Fiction as The Players of Ā, is the direct sequel to his renowned 1945 opus The World of Null-A.
It has all the key players of the first episode – the Null-A (non-Aristotelian) mutant Gilbert Gosseyn with an extra brain(!) who has learned how to “similarize” (transport instantaneously) himself to previously-memorised places in case of need, the superiorly intelligent and (…)

We are in California in a coastal town in the late forties, and a hard-working young lawyer (and ex-Marine) hears screams somewhere in the building as he is leaving his office around midnight. Rushing upstairs to deal vigorously with the problem, he gets rapidly involved with a group of cultists, with the powers that control the city, with the multi-millionaire whose ancient house overlooking the Pacific is at the centre of all of the many dramas in the story, with a series of murders, with (…)

If there is one "golden-age" science-fiction novel that has passed the most demanding literary test of all – the test of time – with flying colours, it is this brilliant account of the exciting – and thought-provoking – adventures of mankind’s first voyage of exploration outside of his own galaxy.
The eponymous space vessel was named in honour of The Beagle, the ship that took Charles Darwin and his fellow scientists on the five-year journey of scientific investigation that led to the (…)

This was one of the van Vogt’s most famous golden-age novels with its iconic slogan “The Right To Buy Weapons Is The Right To Be Free” and its theme of a secret and scientifically-advanced organisation providing superior defensive weapons to citizens of a far-off future civilization to protect them against encroachments on their liberties by a totalitarian government.
It was the last of the author’s several accounts of the conflict between the four-thousand-year old Isher dynasty and the (…)

The inhabitants of the 70 inhabited planets of the Fifty Suns civilisation in the Greater Magellanic Cloud galaxy are up against a gigantic invading warship from Earth bent on finding them out and integrating them into their empire that rules the Milky Way galaxy.
Based on somewhat modified versions of the stories Concealment (1943), The Storm (1943) and The Mixed Men (1945), with a considerable amount of additional text — 8 of its 24 chapters were entirely new — this is a wide-ranging and (…)

We are in 1953 and Lieutenant Morton Cargill is on leave from the Korean War when he stumbles into a young woman who is also leaving the dive he has been binge-leavng in. The next thing he knows is that he’s running away from a car crash that the young acquaintance hasn’t survived. However, when he comes back the following year he’s unexpectedly confronted with another young woman whose photos prove his incvolvement in the tragic death of the first and very fleeting acquaintance. Then he’s (…)