A E van Vogt

Master science-fiction writer who brought psychology to bear on his tales of aliens and inter-galactic struggle

The author AE van Vogt, who has died aged 87, spearheaded a golden age of science fiction - along with such writers as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.

In his early writing, van Vogt displayed a wild talent, creating stories of vivid imagery and sudden, dream-like twists of plot and perspective that found an appreciative audience in a genre trying to shake off its image of rockets and ray guns. Encouraged by editor John W Campbell, van Vogt brought his interest in psychology and language to traditional science-fiction themes such as alien contact, interstellar war, time travel and its paradoxes, immortality and the superhuman.

Although critics often found his plots complex, others saw him stretching the possibilities of the field while retaining the sense of wonder vital to imaginative fiction.

AE van Vogt was born in Canada, and educated at var ious schools in Manitoba, graduating to the University of Ottawa in 1928. His first story sales were to "true story" confession magazines in the early 1930s while he was working as a census clerk and representative of Maclean Trade Papers. It was here that he honed a unique style, based on his reading of John W Gallishaw's The Only Two Ways To Write a Short Story, which included what van Vogt called "a hang-up" - some piece of missing information which the reader's imagination had to supply.

Later, he developed a system to cope with story problems: he forced himself to wake up every 1 hours to think about a solution, and found that his subconscious would often have the problem resolved by morning.

It was after a period of writing plays for Canadian radio that van Vogt rediscovered his early love of science fiction pulps, and, in 1939, he began submitting stories and serials to Astounding Science Fiction. Of his 38 novels, his earliest are still regarded as classics. His first, Slan, dealt with a persecuted race of human-bred mutants and attempts to bring peace between "normals" and their physical and mental superiors; The Weapon Shops Of Isher mixed future politics, immortality and galactic-scale space opera; The World of Null-A, and its sequel The Pawns of Null-A, introduced Alfred Kotzybski's general semantics - a system through which the higher levels of the mind could be accessed via non-Aristotelian (or null-A) teaching - into a galaxy-spanning political intrigue; the four stories that made up The Voyage Of The Space Beagle revolved around "nexialist" scientist Elliot Grosvenor, and how he and the crew of an intergalactic spacecraft coped with a variety of alien attackers. One sequence in this tale is a remarkable foreshadow of the movie, Alien, produced 36 years later.

When, in 1948, The World Of Null-A was published in book form, it was the first SF magazine serial to appear in hardcover from a major publisher (earlier titles had appeared from specialist houses). In France, it was translated by surrealist Boris Vian and created a market for science fiction.

However, van Vogt's interest in disciplines that would focus latent talent led him to dianetics, the memory auditing system developed by fellow SF writer L Ron Hubbard, which became the cornerstone of scientology. Although not interested in the mystical/religious aspects of scientology, van Vogt maintained the Los Angeles Hubbard Dianetic Centre from 1950 until 1961, partly financing the gesture by gathering together and reworking earlier stories into novels.

He also worked on his only non-SF novel, The Violent Man (1982), about communist China. At the invitation of editor Frederick Pohl, he then returned to science fiction, producing a string of well-received stories for the magazine If.

However, while some novels, notably The Silkie and The Battle Of Forever, were well-paced and well-written, van Vogt's fiction over the next two decades rarely achieved the critical acclaim his earlier work had earned. Some of his later novels only appeared in France, where he was championed by Jacques Sadoul, the editor at J'ai Lu, although many of his earlier novels remain in print.

In later years, van Vogt suffered from Alzheimer's disease. His first wife, the writer E Mayne Hull, died in 1975. He is survived by his second wife, Lydia Brayman.

Steve Holland

Alfred Elton van Vogt, author, born April 26 1912; died January 26 2000

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