“Black Destoryer” by A. E. van Vogt first appeared in the July 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. It’s been reprinted many times, including in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 1: 1939. I read that book all the way from cover to cover when I was in high school, yet I have no menory of this story.

I feel old.

I read it in The World Turned Upside Down yesterday. Just scanning the list of where it’s been reprinted, I think I have at least five other copies of it in varous anthologies.

It’s easy to see why this story has been so popular over the years. For the most part, the story still holds up quite well. It served in part as the inspiration for the movie Alien. Van Vogt collected fifty grand in an out of court settlement.

A human expedition lands on an alien planet orbiting a star outside of our galaxy. This is an important point.

The planet is inhabited by a creature that resembles a cat with tentacles called the Coeurl. It eats what it calls id. This is actually phosphorus, not some Freudian reference.

It has regressed from a highly advanced member of the now dead civilization that once lived on the planet. It’s highly intelligent.

The Coeurl has pretty much consumed all of its possible food sources when the humans arrive. It pretends to be friendly.

You can probably guess how things go from here.

The humans are able to defeat it, but not before it kills a number of them and steals their spaceship with the humans in it. If the Coeurl’s sun had been within the galaxy, its race would have figured out how to travel between star systems. Since it’s an isolated star outside the galaxy, the race never progressed that far before their civilization fell.

This was an enjoyable story. I’m surprised I don’t remember it. I guess I’m approaoching the age where everything old is new again.

Not sure how I feel about that.

Anyway, this issue of Astounding is generally regarded as the beginning of John Campbell’s Golden Age of science Fiction. This story is in large part the reason for that.

Van Vogt would go on to write a number of highly regarded stories for Campbell, such as The Weapon Shops of Isher and Slan. He was considered one of the Big Three during the early forties. He’s pretty much forgotten today. (I’m seeing a pattern in this week’s posts.) A large part of his fall into obscurity is due to his embracing Scientology or at least its predcudrsor, dianetics. I’m not going to get in to that.

NESFA Press published a large retrospective of van Vogt’s work about twenty-five years ago, Transfiinite: The Esesntial A. E. van Vogt. “Black Destoryer” was the story featured on the cover. Bob Eggelton did a great job of depicting the Coeurl. His cover is more accurate as to the descriptions of the monster and the space ship.

There are a number of other stories worth reading in it. Check it out.