The Disorientations of A.E. Van Vogt (Critical Essay)
By Extrapolation
Release : 2008-03-22
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines, Books, Professional & Technical, Education
Kind : ebook
A.E. van Vogt's place in science fiction history is an ambiguous one. While he was one of the bestselling authors of the 1940s and 1950s, van Vogt has attracted little of the critical appreciation afforded to many of his Golden Age contemporaries. Sf writers and critics like Damon Knight, David Pringle, Eric S. Rabkin and David Ketterer have each dismissed him in their own ways. (1) Yet van Vogt has also interested some very influential sf writers and critics, including John Brunner, Philip K. Dick and Fredric Jameson. For Dick and Brunner, he was influential on a formal level, his compositional techniques innovative and effective. For Jameson, he is of historical interest, his compositions relevant to the imagination of space in the post-war era. The two sections of this paper develop formal and historical reasons for thinking more about van Vogt. The first analyses van Vogt's writing techniques according to Kant's notion of the sublime. The second section suggests reasons that van Vogt's sublimity may have appealed to the first readers of the Weapon Shops series, back in the 1940s and 1950s. The publishing history of The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951) and The Weapon Makers (1952) is well documented by Isaac Wilcott's bibliography. They are both based on stories published in Astounding in the early 1940s, and were published as revised versions of these stories in the early 1950s. The story behind the two novels is of a conflict between the Empire of Isher, whose dynasty has ruled the solar system for four thousand years, and a network of weapon shops. They keep the government's power in check by arming the population with guns. They elude the Empire's troops with a device that allows their shops to appear and disappear at will. At the beginning of The Weapon Shops, a weapon shop's man is using the device to routinely transfer one of the shops to another point in space, but ends up shifting it backward in time. It manifests by accident in the twentieth-century United States. People gather around it, thinking that its appearance is a hoax. When a reporter walks through its front door, he experiences a disorientation that is first cognitive, before creeping its way through his body:
The Disorientations of A.E. Van Vogt (Critical Essay)
By Extrapolation
Release : 2008-03-22
Genre : Language Arts & Disciplines, Books, Professional & Technical, Education
Kind : ebook
