A SELECTION OF VAN VOGT STORIES

THIS EARLY GOLDEN-AGE STORY HAS BEEN RE-ISSUED AFTER A LONG AND REGRETTABLE ABSENCE FROM THE SITE
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 (Bug-Eyed Monsters — even worse! — in the UK edition at the time), tells of confrontation and — yes! — (eventual) cooperation between a group of isolated (...)

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.
First published in the December 1942 edition of Astounding Science Fiction under the name (...)

1. RESEARCH ALPHA (1965) A ruthless doctor in a research lab secretly tries out his new serum for accelerating evolutionary development on two unsuspecting office workers, with variable but amazing results, astounding even the superiorly-intelligent aliens who are monitoring the lab’s results — and mankind’s progress in general — from behind the scenes. Written in collaboration with James H. Schmitz. Illustrated by Gaughan. (21,000 words)
2. HUMANS GO HOME! (1969) Miliss and Dav are the (...)

1. ITSELF! (1963) A militarised surveillance robot in the depths of the Pacific discovers an alien warship lurking in its vicinity and reacts violently to their presence. (1,000 words)
2. LOST: FIFTY SUNS (1972) A gigantic Earth battleship has appeared in the Greater Magellanic Cloud galaxy to search out the rebels from the Milky Way who had hidden there thousands of years before. The leader of the ultra-gifted Mixed Men segment of the Fifty Suns civilization in that galaxy does his best (...)

1. THE EXPENDABLES (1963) A spaceship on an exploration mission encounters crafty and powerful aliens who threaten to take over after they are brought on board – and a ferocious struggle breaks out in parallel among the ship’s leading officers for control of the ship. . (11,400 words)
2. THE REPLICATORS (1965) Steve Matlin is a particularly ornery farmer who comes across a very big alien monster on a back road near his farm, and as he was out on a hunting expedition he shot the thing. So (...)

1. THE GHOST (1942) An unusual ghost story with whodunit and time-conundrum elements, written during van Vogt’s Canadian days (van Vogt emigrated from Toronto to Los Angeles two years later, in 1944.) (12,500 words)
2. THE WITCH (1943) 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 (...)

This dramatic tale of a struggle in a remote valley between a group of cowherds and a professional killer bent on stealing their cattle – and killing them all in the process – was only ever previously published in the February 1951 issue of the “pulp-western” magazine Famous Western.
It was A. E. van Vogt’s only foray into the vastly popular (at the time) world of the western, and a very successful one at that. Told from the “other’s” (the bad guy’s) point of view, a van Vogt technique (...)

Lee Baines is a solitary bachelor who spends his evenings alone before the TV set feeling cynical about the world in general and TV programs in particular. And one night he sees a university professor talking about his new time-traveling machine and asking for volunteers who, unlike the mice he has been using so far for his experiments, could come back and report on the result of his experiments.
That night Lee decides to go for it: to go back to the day of what was for him his perfect (...)

After more than a decade of absence from the science-fiction field in the fifties and early sixties, A. E. van Vogt started writing science fiction again in the sixties, after the not particularly successful publication of a mainstream political novel, The Violent Man, in 1962.
In these three inter-linked novellas with a strong cosmological bent, he developed one of his favourite themes, the potential long-term future evolution of humans into a higher and more intelligent (and better?) (...)

This long, well-developed novella, revisiting the saga of the mysterious "Weapon Shops" organization that acts as a check-and balance on the powers of the world-dominant Isher dynasty some 7000 years in the future, was first published as the cover story of the February 1949 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.
It has never before been republished!.
That state of affairs is perhaps due in part to its considerable length (33,000 words), and perhaps more for commercial reasons, as van Vogt (...)