Home > A. E. van Vogt
Alfred Elton van Vogt ( April 26, 1912 - January 26, 2000) was a Canadian-born science fiction author. After starting his writing career by writing for "true confessions" style pulp magazines, he decided to switch to writing something that he enjoyed: science fiction. His first published science fiction story, Black Destroyer ( Astounding Science Fiction, 1939), depicting a fierce, carnivorous alien stalking the crew of an exploration ship was extremely popular and set the style for a number of science fiction films over the years. He was one of the most popular and highly esteemed science-fiction writers of the 1940s. Many fans of that era would have named van Vogt, Robert A. Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov as the three greatest science-fiction writers. In 1995 he was awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.Extremely prolific for a few years, van Vogt wrote a large number of short stories, many of which were retrospectively patched together into novels, or " fixups" as he called them. Sometimes this was successful (The War against the Rull); other times the disparate stories thrown together made for an incoherent plot (Quest for the Future).
He had always been interested in the idea of all-encompassing systems of knowledge--the characters in his very first story used a system called "Nexialism" to analyse the alien's behaviour--and he became interested in the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski, and wrote three novels on this theme, The World of Null-A and The Pawns of Null-A in the late 1940s, and Null-A Three in the early 1980sMillennia: 1st millennium 2nd millennium 3rd millennium Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s 2030s Years: 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 Events and trends. (The term Null-A refers to non-Aristotelian logicThe term non-Aristotelian logic is used for any system of logic which does not divide statements into "true" and "false" statements, as opposed to Aristotle's two-valued system of logic. See: General Semantics Fuzzy logic Modal logic Paraconsistent logic.)
In the 1950sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s Years: 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 Events and trends Technology United States tests the first fusion bomb., he became involved in L. Ron HubbardLafayette Ronald Hubbard ( March 13, 1911 January 24, 1986), better known as L. Ron Hubbard was a prolific and controversial American writer of fiction in all genres, science fiction, religious works, technical, educational and management texts, and misce's DianeticsAccording to author L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology, the word Dianetics comes from the Greek dia meaning “through” and nous meaning “soul”, and is defined as “what the soul is doing to the body. Dianetics claims to be a methodology to and his writing more or less stopped for some years. He resumed writing again in the 1960sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Years: 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around.
He had systematised his writing method, using scenes of 800 words or so where a new complication was added or something resolved. He claimed to get many of his ideas from dreams, and indeed his stories at their worst had the coherence of a dream, but at their best, as in the fantasy novel The Book of Ptath, his works had the power of a dream, as well. Philip K. DickPhilip Kindred Dick ( December 16 1928 March 2 1982), often known by his initials PKD or by the pen name Richard Phillips was an American science fiction writer and novelist who changed the genre profoundly. Though hailed during his lifetime by peers such has said that van Vogt stories got him interested in science fiction, with their strange sense of the unexplained, that there was more going on than the protagonists realized.
