Dick, whose extraordinary novels and stories are inconceivable without the opening onto that play of unconscious materials and fantasy dynamics released by van Vogt." Dick frequently gave credit to van Vogt, as did Harlan Ellison, and his acknowledged or apparent influence shows up in other odd places - the socio-psychological speculations of Colin Wilson, for example, or Stan Lee's X-Men.īut I am also fascinated by van Vogt's nonfiction works. Literary critic Fredric Jameson has asserted that "an Vogt's work clearly prepares the way for that of the greatest of all science fiction writers, Philip K. Others see van Vogt's main claim to fame residing in the later writers who followed in his footsteps. The displacer beast in the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons was inspired by van Vogt's coeurl, also from The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The TV series Star Trek also boldly went where van Vogt had gone before, although no cash payments validated its apparent borrowings. The producers of the Oscar-winning film Alien had to pay off van Vogt for their alleged borrowing from his 1950 novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle. His stories anticipated - and may well have inspired - various hit movies, television shows, and games. A strange omission, no? Not many people participate in the birth of a religion, and van Vogt was proselytizing for Hubbard in Hollywood, out of an office on Sunset Boulevard, even before Tom Cruise and John Travolta were born.īut this mainstay of science fiction's "Golden Age" had no shortage of other achievements to his credit. Ron Hubbard and van Vogt's role running the West Coast base for Dianetics - the precursor to Scientology. When van Vogt died in Los Angeles in January 2000, at age 87, the New York Times obituary discreetly passed over his close relationship with L. The storylines are squeezed together, and sometimes the seams show. Van Vogt's life was also something of a fix-up. I could only shake my head over these people to me, they were obviously dilettantes who didn't understand the economics of writing science fiction." It was only later that I learned the fix-ups had their critics. "Hence, the great thought came and the fix-up novels began. "Let's put it very simply: a novel would sell whereas the individual stories seldom did," van Vogt explained to interviewer Robert Weinberg. But few writers embraced the technique with more zeal than van Vogt, who built much of his reputation on fix-ups such as The Voyage of the Space Beagle, The Mixed Men, and Empire of the Atom. ![]() Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses are fix-ups, and one might even assign that label to The Canterbury Tales, Le Morte d'Arthur or The Decameron. A fix-up is a novel constructed out of shorter works of fiction, a kind of Frankenstein's monster of narrative, stitched together with hopes that the seams don't show.Īlthough van Vogt originated the term, he didn't invent the concept. van Vogt, who would have celebrated his hundredth birthday on April 26, introduced a new term into the literary vocabulary: the fix-up.
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