You might easily mistake a list of A.E. van Vogt's classic stories for the names of bygone rides in Disney's Tomorrowland: Empire of the Atom, Mission to the Stars, Two-hundred Million A.D., Project: Spaceship. This Nebula Grand Master, while still writing well into the 1980s, was a pioneer of sci-fi's golden age, an author that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credits with creating--along with Heinlein and Asimov--"the first genuinely successful period of U.S. SF." A prolific contributor to such early mags as Thrilling Wonder, Startling Stories, and Astounding, van Vogt distinguished himself with his expert pacing, his mind-bending ideas, and--surprising in the starched-lab-coat 1940s--his serious access to weird. (Check out 1945's cult hit The World of Null-A as a prime example.)
The War Against the Rull, assembled from five stories written for Astounding between 1940 and 1950, is classic, keep-you-guessing van Vogt, even if it doesn't quite qualify for must-read status like Null-A and Slan. Our hero is Trevor Jamieson, chief scientist of the Interstellar Military Commission, on the front lines of humanity's war with a shape-shifting race of insectoid aliens known as the Rull. Jamieson may have found the key to victory, but first he must simply survive--marooned on a wild, hostile planet with a 6,000-pound, blue-furred, six-legged, human-hating telepathic bear, Jamieson escapes only to find himself trapped days later in a meteor-carved cave with a woman who wants him dead, armed with only a knife and his wits against a blood-thirsty giant weasel that can claw through solid rock. --Paul Hughes
Review
"A.E. van Vogt is truly a grand master of science fiction. He is to Canadian SF what H.G. Wells is to the British variety or Jules Verne to the French. We all stand on his broad shoulders." --Robert J. Sawyer
"Nobody, possibly with the exception of the Bester of The Stars My Destination, ever came close to matching van Vogt for headlong, breakneck pacing, or for the electric, crackling paranoid tension with which he was capable of suffusing his work." --Gardner Dozois
Description:
Amazon.com Review
You might easily mistake a list of A.E. van Vogt's classic stories for the names of bygone rides in Disney's Tomorrowland: Empire of the Atom, Mission to the Stars, Two-hundred Million A.D., Project: Spaceship. This Nebula Grand Master, while still writing well into the 1980s, was a pioneer of sci-fi's golden age, an author that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credits with creating--along with Heinlein and Asimov--"the first genuinely successful period of U.S. SF." A prolific contributor to such early mags as Thrilling Wonder, Startling Stories, and Astounding, van Vogt distinguished himself with his expert pacing, his mind-bending ideas, and--surprising in the starched-lab-coat 1940s--his serious access to weird. (Check out 1945's cult hit The World of Null-A as a prime example.)
The War Against the Rull, assembled from five stories written for Astounding between 1940 and 1950, is classic, keep-you-guessing van Vogt, even if it doesn't quite qualify for must-read status like Null-A and Slan. Our hero is Trevor Jamieson, chief scientist of the Interstellar Military Commission, on the front lines of humanity's war with a shape-shifting race of insectoid aliens known as the Rull. Jamieson may have found the key to victory, but first he must simply survive--marooned on a wild, hostile planet with a 6,000-pound, blue-furred, six-legged, human-hating telepathic bear, Jamieson escapes only to find himself trapped days later in a meteor-carved cave with a woman who wants him dead, armed with only a knife and his wits against a blood-thirsty giant weasel that can claw through solid rock. --Paul Hughes
Review
"A.E. van Vogt is truly a grand master of science fiction. He is to Canadian SF what H.G. Wells is to the British variety or Jules Verne to the French. We all stand on his broad shoulders." --Robert J. Sawyer
"Nobody, possibly with the exception of the Bester of The Stars My Destination, ever came close to matching van Vogt for headlong, breakneck pacing, or for the electric, crackling paranoid tension with which he was capable of suffusing his work." --Gardner Dozois