Masters Of Time - A E van Vogt

 MASTERS OF TIME - A E VAN VOGT

Do you know on 'Flying Ant Day' when ants swarm and seagulls feast upon them, and the ants  supposedly make the seagulls drunk? In a very roundabout way, if you can imagine what a seagull drunk on ants might feel like, then that's how it is reading A E van Vogt. I'm not well versed when it comes to science fiction so I don't know if this effect is unique to van Vogt or if it's something that other writers within that same genre are also capable of? Philip K Dick perhaps? Brian Aldiss? Time will tell once I get around to ploughing through their respective canons, along with exploring the works of other science fiction writers of course.

In the meantime, there's Masters Of Time, by A E van Vogt that I've just read which is quite a stupid book, actually. Just overly fantastical and an almost child-like flight of imagination. To pause a moment, however, and to consider it seriously, it is on a certain level a very strangely written book. It's disorientating. It's not so much the actual story that is of any note but the technique in which it's written. It's not the meaning, it's not the conclusion, it's not the plot. It's the process.

When it comes to trying to explain what Masters Of Time is about, there's very little point but to say it's disjointed and discombobulated. In the way it jumps from one set-piece to another, there's a similarity with Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, as in Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim finding himself one moment in Dresden during World War Two and the next moment finding himself as a zoo exhibit on the planet Trafalmadore. There's also an element of Michel Faber's Under The Skin in there, in regard to men being kidnapped and reduced to fodder.

The really interesting thing about it, however, is the fact it was written in 1942. Think about it. The idea of going to the moon was still but an impossible dream. The Manhattan Project that would deliver the atomic bomb was not even a glint in Oppenheimer's eye. So for someone like A E van Vogt to be churning out stuff like Masters Of Time in pulp fiction form is pretty impressive, even if the results are somewhat befuddling. 

John Serpico

The Proxy Intelligence And Other Mind Benders - A E van Vogt

 THE PROXY INTELLIGENCE AND OTHER MIND BENDERS - A E VAN VOGT

Of all the books in all the world, why choose to read one above another? There are probably as many reasons as there are books but it's a question I often ponder, particularly after finishing a book and am wondering what next to read? Why do I choose to read, for example, The Proxy Intelligence And Other Mind Benders by A E van Vogt over, for example, Borstal Boy by Brandan Behan? I have both books on my shelf so why choose one above the other? 

In a way, the answer can be very simple though it comes with provisos: Instinct. It's instinctive. It's essentially just giving way to natural attraction and following the heart. You simply block out all external influence so the decision is wholly yours. 

And how did I end up even owning a copy of this book by A E van Vogt in the first place? Well, it's one I found in a second-hand bookshop and among the hundreds of other sci-fi books in there, I just beamed in on this one along with a few others. Grabbing while the going was good. The title was ambiguous and the cover art sort of proto-psychedelic, and as we all know: to fathom hell or soar angelic you need a pinch of psychedelic. So I went for it.

A E van Vogt is a major name when it comes to science-fiction writers and apparently was a big influence upon Philip K Dick. His writing has a hallucinatory quality about it. Very dream-like. In fact at times it's almost child-like due to the sometimes lack of formal structure. There is lineage but it sometimes comes across as having been written in tiny chunks, a paragraph a day with there sometimes being a disconnect. It can be like reading a join-the-dot picture.

The Proxy Intelligence And Other Mind Benders is a collection of six short stories written by van Vogt, all previously published in various science-fiction magazines during the Forties, Fifties and Sixties. What they're all actually about is probably of little significance. I mean, I'm not even sure what all of them are about and I've read them! 

The point of the stories instead, it seems to me, is the experience. It's a bit like those holidays you can take where you can get to swim with dolphins. There's no real meaning in swimming with dolphins so instead the experience is all. Though that's not to say this collection of short stories should be compared to a pod of dolphins because they're not as beautiful as that. If anything, I'd compare them to a school of fish. A hover of trout. Swimming under ice.

And is it just me, or after reading A E van Vogt are you meant to be left feeling a bit woozy?

John Serpico