A. E. van Vogt

He was married to Edna Mayne Hull from 1939 to 1975. She helped him by typing his stories, and later began to write herself, under the name E. Mayne Hull.

In 1979, he married his second wife Lydia Bereginsky, who had two children from an earlier marriage. She had been a model and a court interpreter who specialized in Russian.

He died on January 26, 2000, at the age of 87 from Alzheimer’s disease.

Alfred Elton van Vogt was born in a rural Russian Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada. His father was a lawyer who, affected by the Great Depression, had to constantly move his family from place to place.

Alfred could not afford college, and worked as truck driver, farm-hand, and also took up freelance writing. His initial writings were love stories, radio plays, and trade articles.

In 1939, van Vogt published his first science fiction story, ‘Black Destroyer,’ in the pulp magazine, ‘Astounding Science Fiction’. He describes a beast called Coeurl that feeds on the ‘id’ obtained from living bodies.

In 1939, he followed up with another space monster story, ‘Discord in Scarlet’ which introduces the readers to Ixtl, the last survivor of a once-great galactic civilization, floating alone in interstellar space.

‘The Weapon Makers’ and ‘The Book of Ptath’ were published in 1947. ‘The Weapon Makers’ was a prequel to ‘The Weapon Shops of Isher’, published four years later.

In the 1948 novel, ‘The World of Null-A’, the protagonist Gilbert Gosseyn discovers his memories are false, and seeks his real identity in a world where the mentally superior dominate over the rest.

’The ‘Black Destroyer’ and ‘Discord in Scarlet’ along with two other stories ‘War of Nerves’ and ‘M33 in Andromeda’ were integrated into his classic, ‘The Voyage of the Space Beagle’ published in 1950.

Van Vogt’s best known work, ‘Slan’, was a serialized novel in ‘Astounding Science Fiction’, published in hardcover in 1946. In this truly riveting adventure story, Slans are super-intelligent humans with psychic abilities.

‘The Voyage of the Space Beagle’, the 1950 novel, is an intergalactic adventure involving encounters with hostile aliens and creatures. The book still attracts readers, and inspired the TV serial, ‘Star Trek’.