Kpfa - Bookwaves On Cover To Cover

A.E. Van Vogt, born April 26th, 1912, died January 28, 2000 at the age of 87, was a science fiction writer who had his heyday from the mid 1940s through the 1960s, with such novels as The Weapon Shops of Isher, Slan, The Voyage of the Space Beagle and The World of Null A. Named a science fiction grandmaster in 1995, Van Vogt started by writing for Astounding Stories under editor John W. Campbell in the early 1940s, and most of those novellas and serialized novels found their way into hardback and paperback years later, as fix-ups, reworked material often with new titles. In 1950, he came under the spell – as did Campbell – of L. Ron Hubbard and Dianetics, and later wrote through the lens of general semantics, founded by Alfred Korzibsky. In 1980, with the publication of a new novel, Cosmic Encounter, and a lawsuit against Twentieth Century Fox over the film Alien, parts of which were derived from his story “Discord in Scarlet” in the book Voyage of the Space Beagle, he was available to be interviewed on Febr