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Page 190
of such single stories as "Heir Apparent"the hero of the latter being a "benevolent dictator," if you please.
I am attacking van Vogt on literary, not political grounds, so I shall not say what I think of a man who loves monarchies. Neither do I think it relevant that these stories were written and published during a time when both van Vogt's country (Canada) and ours were at war with dictatorships, except insofar as it serves to accentuate this point: Obviously van Vogt is no better acquainted with current events than he is with ancient or modern history.
The absolute monarchy was a form of government which evolved to meet feudal economic conditions everywhere, and which has died everywhere with feudalism. Modern attempts to impose a similar system on higher cultures have just been proven, very decisively, to be failures. Monarchy is dead, and it can never revive until the economic conditions which produced it recur. It is no crime for van Vogt as a private citizen to wish it were not so; but ignorance, for an author, is a crime.
Another trend which appears in van Vogt's work is an apparently purposeless refusal to call things by their right names. "A" and "lie detector" are two examples; another is the term "robot" which was employed throught the "Mixed Men" series. Etymologically the usage was correct; the word, as first used by Capek, meant an artificially created protoplasmic man. But it has since been altered through wide use to mean a mechanical device which performs some or all of a human being's functions. "Android''first used, as far as I know, by Jack Williamsonhas assumed the original meaning of "robot" in science fiction.
"Robot," in the aforementioned series, was a key word; to garble its meaning was to render the entire story meaningless. Van Vogt certainly is aware of the changed meaning of the word, as shown by his use of the term "roboplane"; yet he did not hesitate on that account to call his androids "robots." I do not pretend to know why.
Still another trend is the plot wherein two opposing parties turn out to be identical (Slan, "The Weapon Shop"). This trend, however, appears not only in van Vogt's work but in that of several other Astounding writers; and I suspect that final responsibility for it rests with (John W.) Campbell.
The plot device was used by G. K. Chesterton to beautiful effect in The Man Who Was Thursday, and it was effective precisely because the impression the author wanted to give was of utter and imbecilic pointlessness. In van Vogt's hands it gives the same impression, but without Chesterton's charm.

 
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