3. A SELECTION OF VAN VOGT NOVELS

The crew of a modern U.S. submarine finds itself suddenly transported 24,999 years into the future where they have been time-transported by one group of engineered mutants (winged men) to blast the stronghold of another group of mutants (fish-men) to smithereens with their torpedoes as a condition for getting re-time-transferred back to their own age.
The trouble is not only that the Earth by this time has been practically destroyed by chemical experiments by uncaring aliens, but that (...)

In 1704 the English nobleman-turned-pirate Nathan Fletcher is en route to a planned assault on a British merchant ship in the Caribbean when one of the men spots a very strange unidentified object falling from the sky on the horizon. This turns out to be a disabled spaceship from the 83rd Century that sends one of theirs, in the form of a 14-year-old-boy, onto the pirate ship with the mission to get their engine repaired back in industrial England. Fletcher is an almost-likeable rebel (...)

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 (...)

A brilliant scientist has been condemned to death for suggesting that the collectivist social system of the government that’s on the verge of taking over control of the entire world needs to be seriously called into question, and when his close friend comes to deliver the verdict to him he finds that the scientist has succeeded in escaping — by switching bodies with him! So he will be executed in his place unless he can not only find the escaped scientist but also solve the many mysteries (...)

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 (...)

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 (...)

This 65,000-word 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 (...)

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, (...)

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, (...)

This major 76,000-word 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 (...)