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