A. E. van Vogt (1912-2000) was born on this date, April 26.  He was one of the most prolific and popular science fiction writers of the 1940s.  In addition to a sizeable body of shorter works, he wrote the popular novels The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Slan, and The Weapons Shops of Isher.  These were either serialized in Astounding or put together from individual stories.

Just as a side note, I haven’t given up on the Retro Hugo posts.  The semester is about over, and I I’ve been swamped.  I’ve also been reading Foundation. The two Asimov stories on the Retro Hugo ballot are the last two sections of the book.  I decided to read the whole thing (something I was thinking about doing anyway) to give them some context.

I was going to look at all the novelettes before moving on to the short stories, but van Vogt doesn’t have an entry in that category.

“Far Centaurus” is one of van Vogt’s most reprinted stories. If I’ve counted correctly, I’ve got copies of it in about ten different publications.  I first read it in middle school, and the last two paragraphs have stuck with me all these years. 

This is a story about four men who have gone into a type of suspended animation brought on not by cryogenics but a drug.  They are taking a voyage to the Alpha Centauri system.  It will take them 500 years.  They wake up periodically on a rotating basis.  Along the way, one dies and another allegedly goes insane.

When they get to the Centaurus system,  they discover that humanity has been there for centuries.  An interstellar drive was discovered while they were traveling.  This has become a pretty standard trope in stories where people are in some type of suspended animation while traveling to other star systems. When they get there, people who left later had better star ships and got there first.

People are somewhat different in this time period. They find the three men to have incredibly offensive body odor. I thought is was a nice touch.

What I didn’t accept as easily was the technobabble van Vogt used to explain his star drive.  And this is one of the weaknesses of van Vogt’s writing. His hand waving just doesn’t hold up well. In the early 00’s, I tried to read some of his collections.  Granted they weren’t his best known stories, i.e., his best stories. But I found several of them to be pretty much unreadable. The gobbledy-gook he used to explain some things was just too whacked.

That’s not to say “Far Centaurus” is a bad story or that you can’t follow it. It’s a very good story, and I enjoyed rereading it quite a bit. The double-talk was a bit much at one point, but I was able to ignore it.  The focus here was on the characters.  The ending was nice, too.

Surprisingly, “Far Centaurus” is only in print in Transfinite, the NESFA collection of his work from 2003.  If there is a more recent reprinting, the ISFDB doesn’t show it.

It’s a bit pricey, but Transfinite has some really good stories in it.  Check it out if your cash flow can handle it. I promise they’re all readable.  (This wasn’t the collections I was referring to above.)