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innumerable ways that man is equal to the greatest potential and is godlike in himself. Man may varyhe may advance himself by conquest of his own mind or by evolutionary development of the next race, or he may deliberately remake himself into a scientifically constructed superior form, as in the recent Van Vogt novel The Silkie, whose hero is a being of that classification, able to change shape at will, able to be a space ship and a submarine, able to think with computerlike capacity and speed, able to play God as far as the old-style humans are concerned.
To the uninitiated layman all this may smell of megalomania and perhaps paranoia, but Van Vogt remains atop the lists of the most favored and bestselling science-fiction writers. There must be a reason and that reason is as I have outlined before: he has an instinctual belief in humanity, he believes in the invincibility of humanity, he refuses to accept the boundaries of time and space.
The fact is that science fiction readers agree with him. They, too, cannot believe that humanity has limitations.
Donald A. Wollheim, "Of Men Like Gods," The Universe Makers: Science Fiction Today (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 4748
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Paul A. Carter
Part of the continuing effectiveness of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein lies in its being told in substantial part from the monster's point of view. A. E. Van Vogt made his initial mark in science fiction with three stories (all in Astounding Science-Fiction) about humans in conflict with extraterrestrial creatures"Black Destroyer" (vol. 23, July 1939), "Discord in Scarlet" (vol. 24, December 1939), and "Vault of the Beast" (vol. 25, August 1940)in which the viewpoint of the alien is presented at the beginning of the story, before the reader is introduced to its human opponents. When the time came to undertake his first booklength novel, Slan (ASF: 26, September, October, November, December 1940; first hard-cover book version 1946), Van Vogt in effect translated the theme of those earlier stories into a conflict between man and supermanbut this time he told the story entirely from the alien's point of view. As the author remarked to a circle of fans at the Fourth World Science Fiction Convention (the ''Pacificon," Los Angeles, 1946), "I imagined one of my alien beings, but put him in a human body. The result was Jommy Cross," the superboy hero of Slan.

 
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