Crud. I failed to hit PUBLISH last night. I know today is the 27th.
Today is April 26, and it is the birthday of two men who were once major figures in the field. One was a writer, and the other, while he did write fiction, was the editor of one of the major magazines.
A. E. Van Vogt and H. L. Gold.
I’ll start with van Vogt. He was one of the major writers for John W. Campbell’s Astounding in the 1940s. The quote on the left is from one of his best known works, the two novel series The Weapon shops of Isher and The Weapon Makers. I’ve not read those yet, but they’ve been in the queue for a while.
Van Vogt is also well known for such classics as The Voyage of the Space Beagle and Slan. The Voyage of the Space Beagle is a fix-up novel about a spaceship exploring the galaxy and the different alien lifeforms its crew encounters.
I read Slan in high school (junior high/middle school ?) It’s about mutants who are persecuted because they are the next step in human evolution. It was extremely popular in its day. Not too long after publication, the slogan “Fans are Slans” entered the fandom lexicon. I’m not sure if it’s still there or not. Van Vogt has been out of print for years. I doubt many of the younger readers have heard of him, much less read his work.
He didn’t write during the fifties due to his involvement with Dianetics. I’m not going to get into that.
In the sixities, seventies, and eighties, he resumed writing, but he was never as successful as he was in the forties. Much fo his work, new and old, was in print when I was in junior high and high school. Van Vogt’s name was a prominent one then.
The last van Vogt collection, Transgalactic from Baen, was nearly twenty years ago. He has pretty much been out of print since then. When NESFA Press published their large collection, Transfinite: The Essential A. E. van Vogt, in 2003, I bought it. The stories in it were quite good.
I also got my hands on some of his later paperback collections, which unfortunately not only weren’t very good, many of the stories were unreadable.
The other birthday today is Horace L. Gold.
Gold wrote a decent number of shosrt stories in the thirties and early forties. Most of those have never been collected. A few were included in Some Die Rich. His best known piece of short fiction is probably “The Trouble With Water.” Gold resumed writing short fiction in the fifties.
But it was as an editor that Gold had his greatest impact. While editing Galaxy in the fifites, he published many stories that would go on to become classics. One of the most prominent of these was The Space Merchants by Fred Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth.
Gold’s emphasis was on social science fiction, for lack of a better term. This was a departure from the technological emphasis of John W. Campbell, Jr., at Astounding.
