Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | E | Extrapolation

The disorientations of A.E. van Vogt.

Article Excerpt
A.E. van Vogt's place in science fiction history is an ambiguous one. While he was one of the bestselling authors of the 1940s and 1950s, van Vogt has attracted little of the critical appreciation afforded to many of his Golden Age contemporaries. Sf writers and critics like Damon Knight, David Pringle, Eric S. Rabkin and David Ketterer have each dismissed him in their own ways. (1) Yet van Vogt has also interested some very influential sf writers and critics, including John Brunner, Philip K. Dick and Fredric Jameson. For Dick and Brunner, he was influential on a formal level, his compositional techniques innovative and effective. For Jameson, he is of historical interest, his compositions relevant to the imagination of space in the post-war era. The two sections of this paper develop formal and historical reasons for thinking more about van Vogt. The first analyses van Vogt's writing techniques according to Kant's notion of the sublime. The second section suggests reasons that van Vogt's sublimity may have appealed to the first readers of the Weapon Shops series, back in the 1940s and 1950s.

The publishing history of The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951) and The Weapon Makers (1952) is well documented by Isaac Wilcott's bibliography. They are both based on stories published in Astounding in the early 1940s, and were published as revised versions of these stories in the early 1950s. The story behind the two novels is of a conflict between the Empire of Isher, whose dynasty has ruled the solar system for four thousand years, and a network of weapon shops. They keep the government's power in check by arming the population with guns. They elude the Empire's troops with a device that allows their shops to appear and disappear at will. At the beginning of The Weapon Shops, a weapon shop's man is using the device to routinely transfer one of the shops to another point in space, but ends up shifting it backward in time. It manifests by accident in the twentieth-century United States. People gather around it, thinking that its appearance is a hoax. When a reporter walks through its front door, he experiences a disorientation that is first cognitive, before creeping its way through his body:

An emptiness struck into McAllister's mind, matching the hollowness that was beginning to afflict the pit of his stomach, a sense of unplumbed depths, the first staggering conviction that all was not as it should be ...

How had he come here into this fantastic world? Something was very wrong indeed. (WS 7-8)

This description of disorientation disrupts the continuity of van Vogt's narrative, as the reader knows as little as McAllister about where he is. As the novel progresses, van Vogt piles one disorientation upon another, such that the very thing that had disrupted his narrative becomes a part of his reader's expectations and forms a continuity of style.

When another shop appears out of nowhere, this time in the right place, the pro-Empire character Fara walks through its front door to find himself on another world:

Fara stood for a moment in the neat little pathway, striving to grasp the finality of his situation. But nothing would come except awareness of many men around him. His mind was like a log drifting along a stream at night. Through the darkness grew a consciousness of something wrong. The wrongness was there in the back of his mind as he turned leftward to go to the front of the weapon shop. Vagueness transformed to a startled sense of shock. For he was not in Glay, and the weapon shop was not where it had been. (WS 86)

In a third example, Lucy walks into a "House of Illusion," van Vogt's future version of the brothel, only to fall "into darkness," and to proclaim that she doesn't "know what happened" (WS 80). McAllister, Fara and Lucy are three of the protagonists in Weapon Shops who describe different narrative lines that unfold and intersect with each other. Descriptions of disorientation facilitate the movement from one narrative line to another, and between heterogeneous spaces--McAllister from his home town into the future; Fara into a different world; and Lucy into a House of Illusion.

Damon Knight, Fredric Jameson and Philip K. Dick have each compared van Vogt's writing to dislocated architectures and building methods. In 1951, Knight reviewed The Weapon Shops and accused van Vogt of having "vacant stages in the scaffolding" (101-02). For Dick and Jameson, this is precisely what makes...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!