A.E. Van Vogt Biography

Alfred Elton Van Vogt was born to parents of Dutch ancestry in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and raised in Neville and Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and then in Morden and Winnipeg, Man. He wrote his earliest science-fiction and fantasy stories in the Winnipeg Public Library before moving to Ottawa, where he was employed by the Department of National Defence. He then lived for two years in Toronto. Van Vogt's first story, ‘Black destroyer’, appeared in the July 1939 issue of Astounding Science, along with fiction by Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, and this conjunction of talents marked the beginning of sf's so-called Golden Age. With this story, subsequently included in The voyage of the Space Beagle (1950), Van Vogt found his métier: incident-packed prose, concepts galore, superhuman conflict, heroic action to save civilization if not entire solar-systems, and dream-like logic. He wrote some 600,000 words of fantastic fiction during the Canadian years, including much of his most imaginative prose. Between 1940 and 1942 he published in magazines the original versions of The weapon shops of Isher (1951), an epic of libertarianism, and Slan (1946; rev. 1951), a classic novel of the persecution of a mutant whose telepathic powers hold the key to the survival of individualism.

In 1944 Van Vogt immigrated to the United States and subsequently resided in Hollywood, California, where he was briefly associated with Dianetics and Scientology. One of the leading contributors to sf's Golden Age, he wrote more than fifty novels and collections of stories, including The world of Null-A (1948), The war against the Rull (1959), The Silkie (1969), and The battle of forever (1971). As he once explained, ‘Science fiction, as I personally try to write it, glorifies man and his future.’

John Robert Colombo