A First Encounter with A.E. van Vogt
Since I spent most of my high school and college years reading the classics of mainstream literature, I've felt that my reading of Science Fiction was spotty. That, for someone who wants to write in this genre and its parent genre Fantasy, is not a good state to be in, at least in my opinion.
Don't misunderstand, I've read some of the greats. Wells, Verne, and Shelley were childhood favorites of mine, and Bradbury, Ellison, and Le Guin were discoveries I made in adolescence (all of which remain worth revisiting). So to mitigate this feeling of ignorance, I've been playing catch-up ever since.
In my attempt to immerse myself in this field, I read some of the works from the Golden Age onward. I've met and spoken to people who are brilliantly literate in this field. In our conversations, they've always advised me about what works by what authors I should read.
One such author was A.E. van Vogt.
(Let me explain).
In many of my discussions with other SFF authors and scholars, Van Vogt's name had been mentioned again and again. In the pantheon of early 20th Century SF writers, Van Vogt was one of the four writers who jump-started what eventually became known as the "Golden Age of Science Fiction". In 1938, he, along with Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Isaac Asimov, were all published for the first time in, what was then called, Astounding Science Fiction (now Analog Science Fiction and Fact), under the editorship of John W. Campbell. At that time, it was the taste-maker of SF Pulp Magazines, establishing the paradigm for what Science Fiction would be for the next decade; so-called Hard Science Fiction was born and the old tradition of Space Opera continued to thrive, but with greater attention paid to scientific accuracy.
Unfortunately, whenever Van Vogt's name was mentioned, in today's post-New Wave SF present, it was usually followed by a disparaging remark about his writing. People have said that he's one of those authors who excelled at writing in a way that made the reader want to keep reading, but that his way with prose was cringe-worthy--serviceable, but slapdash.
Having never read him, I took their word for it. However, I refused to form and hold any final opinion until I had read something of his. Recently, I finally got the chance.
At a rummage sale, I came across an anthology. (A great boon for me, because I got it for virtually nothing). Specifically, it was DAW Books' Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 6 (1944). This particular edition features not only Asimov's Introductions, but it also features one story by Van Vogt, titled "Far Centaurus."
The story is told through the first-person voice of a passenger on a space ship traveling to the nearest habitable planet, the titular Centaurus. Every hundred years, the traveler awakens from a chemically induced stasis to check on the ship before returning to stasis. Upon awakening for the first time, our narrator discovers that one of his crew-mates had died due to the failure of the drug to properly preserve him. The remaining story is an anxiety-riddled narrative as to whether or not the dead crew-mate's best friend, a fellow passenger, will go crazy over his friend's death and possibly endanger both the mission and the remaining crew's lives. (I won't go into any further description than that).
As I read this piece, I kept a pencil on hand for underlining and note taking, much like I used to do with the works I read in my college courses. Except, in this case, I was going to highlight section that I thought concurred with the sentiments I'd heard previous.
And there were no shortage of those.
The story begins with this line:
"I wakened with a start and thought: How was Renfrew taking it?"
Considering everything I've written about good first lines being ones that force the reader to ask questions, I must admit that this line actually is a pretty good one. Several questions spring to mind as I look at it again. Who is this person speaking? Who is this Renfrew to whom they refer? Why are they worried about Renfrew's reaction?
It does the job a first line should.
But, it's not exactly an elegantly put together line. It's understandable, sure, but it's also rather--how to put it--clunky. Why use a colon? Why not just make it a compound sentence, or a sentence with a clause, or even a semicolon? Why not write, "I awoke with a start; how was Renfrew taking it?"
I found myself writing, "Rewrite and rephrase," in the margins as I read this story a lot.
I also found myself cutting out words that I thought were unnecessary, namely adverbs.
For example, the very next sentence of the story:
"I must have moved physically for blackness edged with pain closed over me."
(Let's set aside the slightly melodramatic tone for now.) The part of this sentence that immediately rankles me is that phrase, "moved physically." When I read it, the little editor voice inside my head started shouting.
"Well...HOW ELSE CAN YOU MOVE? INSTEAD OF USING AN ADVERB, WHY NOT USED A STRONGER VERB, like, JERKED, FLINCHED, or SEIZED?"
(Incidentally, that editor voice always sounds like George Carlin for some reason.)
However, despite these stylistic flaws, I must admit that I kept reading the story. Van Vogt may not have been a Sturgeon or a Bradbury when it came to how he strung words together, but he did know how to spin an engaging yarn. At the end of each scene, I felt compelled to know what would happen next, and the beginning of each succeeding scene made me want to keep reading. What he lacked in stylistic elegance he made up for in sheer narrative drive.
Also, again, despite these flaws, the likely reason why Van Vogt's work was clunky remained apparently to me. His greatest period of productively was during a time when the magazines he wrote for paid obnoxiously little money. Pulp writers like him got paid a half cent a word, a penny word, two cents a word, or (when you caught them, as Harlan Ellison said), three cents a words. For such paltry sums, of course Van, like any writer who lacked an outside income, was going to use as many words as he could. And, of course, to make a living, he like any writer of that time had to produce, produce, produce, like a machine on an assembly-line to get as much work into every magazine he could to survive. This process, I imagine, was not one that encouraged writers to slave over every word and carefully revise their sentences. This was New York's Grub Street, not Paris' Left Bank.
The result was melodramatic and unpolished, yet readable and nonetheless compelling
Van Vogt might not have been one of the cleanest, lustrous stylists, but, if this story is any indication of what he was on a macro scale, he was certainly an accomplished and skillful storyteller.
 |
| This Guy |
In my attempt to immerse myself in this field, I read some of the works from the Golden Age onward. I've met and spoken to people who are brilliantly literate in this field. In our conversations, they've always advised me about what works by what authors I should read.
One such author was A.E. van Vogt.
(Let me explain).
In many of my discussions with other SFF authors and scholars, Van Vogt's name had been mentioned again and again. In the pantheon of early 20th Century SF writers, Van Vogt was one of the four writers who jump-started what eventually became known as the "Golden Age of Science Fiction". In 1938, he, along with Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Isaac Asimov, were all published for the first time in, what was then called, Astounding Science Fiction (now Analog Science Fiction and Fact), under the editorship of John W. Campbell. At that time, it was the taste-maker of SF Pulp Magazines, establishing the paradigm for what Science Fiction would be for the next decade; so-called Hard Science Fiction was born and the old tradition of Space Opera continued to thrive, but with greater attention paid to scientific accuracy.
Unfortunately, whenever Van Vogt's name was mentioned, in today's post-New Wave SF present, it was usually followed by a disparaging remark about his writing. People have said that he's one of those authors who excelled at writing in a way that made the reader want to keep reading, but that his way with prose was cringe-worthy--serviceable, but slapdash.
 |
| This exact one, but more battered. |
Having never read him, I took their word for it. However, I refused to form and hold any final opinion until I had read something of his. Recently, I finally got the chance.
At a rummage sale, I came across an anthology. (A great boon for me, because I got it for virtually nothing). Specifically, it was DAW Books' Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 6 (1944). This particular edition features not only Asimov's Introductions, but it also features one story by Van Vogt, titled "Far Centaurus."
The story is told through the first-person voice of a passenger on a space ship traveling to the nearest habitable planet, the titular Centaurus. Every hundred years, the traveler awakens from a chemically induced stasis to check on the ship before returning to stasis. Upon awakening for the first time, our narrator discovers that one of his crew-mates had died due to the failure of the drug to properly preserve him. The remaining story is an anxiety-riddled narrative as to whether or not the dead crew-mate's best friend, a fellow passenger, will go crazy over his friend's death and possibly endanger both the mission and the remaining crew's lives. (I won't go into any further description than that).
As I read this piece, I kept a pencil on hand for underlining and note taking, much like I used to do with the works I read in my college courses. Except, in this case, I was going to highlight section that I thought concurred with the sentiments I'd heard previous.
And there were no shortage of those.
The story begins with this line:
"I wakened with a start and thought: How was Renfrew taking it?"
Considering everything I've written about good first lines being ones that force the reader to ask questions, I must admit that this line actually is a pretty good one. Several questions spring to mind as I look at it again. Who is this person speaking? Who is this Renfrew to whom they refer? Why are they worried about Renfrew's reaction?
It does the job a first line should.
But, it's not exactly an elegantly put together line. It's understandable, sure, but it's also rather--how to put it--clunky. Why use a colon? Why not just make it a compound sentence, or a sentence with a clause, or even a semicolon? Why not write, "I awoke with a start; how was Renfrew taking it?"
I found myself writing, "Rewrite and rephrase," in the margins as I read this story a lot.
I also found myself cutting out words that I thought were unnecessary, namely adverbs.
For example, the very next sentence of the story:
"I must have moved physically for blackness edged with pain closed over me."
(Let's set aside the slightly melodramatic tone for now.) The part of this sentence that immediately rankles me is that phrase, "moved physically." When I read it, the little editor voice inside my head started shouting.
"Well...HOW ELSE CAN YOU MOVE? INSTEAD OF USING AN ADVERB, WHY NOT USED A STRONGER VERB, like, JERKED, FLINCHED, or SEIZED?"
(Incidentally, that editor voice always sounds like George Carlin for some reason.)
However, despite these stylistic flaws, I must admit that I kept reading the story. Van Vogt may not have been a Sturgeon or a Bradbury when it came to how he strung words together, but he did know how to spin an engaging yarn. At the end of each scene, I felt compelled to know what would happen next, and the beginning of each succeeding scene made me want to keep reading. What he lacked in stylistic elegance he made up for in sheer narrative drive.
Also, again, despite these flaws, the likely reason why Van Vogt's work was clunky remained apparently to me. His greatest period of productively was during a time when the magazines he wrote for paid obnoxiously little money. Pulp writers like him got paid a half cent a word, a penny word, two cents a word, or (when you caught them, as Harlan Ellison said), three cents a words. For such paltry sums, of course Van, like any writer who lacked an outside income, was going to use as many words as he could. And, of course, to make a living, he like any writer of that time had to produce, produce, produce, like a machine on an assembly-line to get as much work into every magazine he could to survive. This process, I imagine, was not one that encouraged writers to slave over every word and carefully revise their sentences. This was New York's Grub Street, not Paris' Left Bank.
The result was melodramatic and unpolished, yet readable and nonetheless compelling
Van Vogt might not have been one of the cleanest, lustrous stylists, but, if this story is any indication of what he was on a macro scale, he was certainly an accomplished and skillful storyteller.
Comments