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A. E. van Vogt
b. 1912
Alfred Elton Van Vogt was born near Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada, on April 26, 1912, to parents of Dutch descent. He was raised in rural Neville, Sasketchewan, where his father was an attorney and co-owner of a grocery store with his brothers. Van Vogt was a self-conscious child, and his family's move to the larger city of Winnipeg when he was fourteen intensified his introspectiveness and contributed to his poor performance at school. He began reading voraciously to compensate, and in 1926 discovered the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, which he read faithfully for several years.
While working as a census taker in Ottawa in 1931, van Vogt took a writing course at the Palmer Institute of Authorship. Over the next few years he embarked upon a professional writing career, contributing to highpaying "true confession" magazines and writing radio plays. In 1938 he came upon a copy of Astounding Science-Fiction and was struck by Don A. Stuart's story "Who Goes There?" Unaware that Stuart was a pseudonym for the magazine's editor, John W. Campbell, van Vogt submitted his first science fiction story, "The Vault of the Beast," to Astounding. Campbell, impressed by the story's energy and audacious ideas, bought it, although it did not see print until 1940. The appearance of van Vogt's first published science fiction story, "Black Destroyer," side by side with Isaac Asimov's first sale to Astounding in the July 1939 issue, is considered the beginning of science fiction's Golden Age.
Readers responded enthusiastically to van Vogt's dazzling and complex reworkings of familiar themes into the stuff of mind-boggling science fiction. Van Vogt explained his formula for success in 1946 by admitting that he tried never to write scenes longer than 800 words, a technique that allowed him to accommodate any idea that came to mind and to maintain a furious pace through narrative cross-cutting. Although many critics derided his confusing style of writing and imperfect grasp of science, readers hailed his stories as instant classics, particularly the novel Slan (serialized 1940; pub-

 
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