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lished as a book 1946), which is told from the point of view of a mutant superman, and The World of A (1948) and its sequel The Pawns of Null-A (1956), which promulgated Alfred Korzybski's general semantics movement and induced other writers to explore the ramifications of Korzybski's interest in non-Aristotelian logic in their own science fiction. |
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Van Vogt's ingenious and sometimes infuriatingly opaque epics of characters who realize their destiny as supermen in time to overthrow futuristic despotic monarchies dominated the pages of Astounding in the 1940s, where he contributed stories under his own name and in collaboration with E. Mayne Hull, whom he had married in 1939. He moved to the United States in 1944. His preoccupation with L. Ron Hubbard's self-help science Dianetics led to his withdrawal from writing science fiction in the 1950s, although several "fix-ups"novels assembled from loosely interconnected stories that had been published previouslyappeared during these years, most notably The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950), The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951), Empire of the Atom (1956), and The War against the Rull (1959). |
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Van Vogt returned to writing science fiction in the late 1960s but few of his recent novels have fared well critically. Since the publication of his autobiographical Reflections of A. E. van Vogt and the death of E. Mayne Hull in 1975, he has led a quiet life in California, publishing only sporadically. He married Lydia I. Byerman in 1979. In 1985 a third Null-A novel, Null-A Three, was issued. |
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I have been progressively annoyed by van Vogt ever since Slan. The first part of this article has vented much of that annoyance, but there is a remainder: there are trends in van Vogt's work as a whole which either do not appear strongly in 'The World of A, or could not be treated in a discussion of that story without loss of objectivity. |
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There is the regiphile trend, for example. It strikes me as singular that in van Vogt's stories, nearly all of which deal with the future, the form of government which occurs most often is the absolute monarchy; and further, that the monarchs in these stories are almost always depicted sympathetically. This is true of the "Weapon Shops" series and the "Mixed Men" and |
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