< previous page page_192 next page >

Page 192
idea, then the brain will concentrate around that idea, and will stop manufacturing new ones.
My own experience has been that the brain thrives on positivity. Take it for granted that ideas will come as you need themand they do. Don't hoard, but start a flow. Once such a flow is under way the problem will be to turn it off, not to keep it going.
A. E. van Vogt, "Complication in the Science Fiction Story," Of Worlds Beyond, ed. Lloyd Arthur Eshbach (Reading, PA: Fantasy Press, 1946), pp. 54, 56
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
P. Schuyler Miller
"Black Destroyer" was and is one of the finest science fiction stories of the last fifteen years. It now serves as curtain-raiser for a series of episodes in which the crew of the Space Beagle, outward bound through the fringes of our own galaxy to the Andromeda universe, meet, are threatened by, and defeat the monstrous representatives of rival races. The second longest of these adventures appeared here as "Discord in Scarlet," and a short connecting link has been published elsewhere as "War of Nerves."
The complete rewriting of these stories to give them some of the unity needed in a novel has created the character of Elliott Grosvenor, Nexialist of the expedition, a diffident exponent of the new science of things as a whole. Nexialism in this book might be considered the parallel of the Null A philosophy in van Vogt's previous volume in this series, but it has not been so well developed, either through explanation or example, as the world of A. Grosvenor is retiring to the point of being exasperating, and neither his own struggle for recognition nor the built-up feud between Morton and Kent for directorship of the expedition gives the book the unity a novel needs. The catlike Couerl, the birdlike Riim, the red devil Ixtl, the gaseous, whispering Anabis of the final episode are interesting enough concepts, but this is one case where the whole is less than the sum of the original parts.
P. Schuyler Miller, [Review of Voyage of the Space Beagle], Astounding Science-Fiction 47, No. 3 (May 1951): 152
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Anthony Boucher
Van Vogt has been known to the hardcover reading public chiefly as the author of vast, intricate and ponderous

 
< previous page page_192 next page >