A Lovecraft Retrospective by Harlan Ellison

Mayne Hull, Fantasy Publishing Company, Inc., 1948 If the stories have a dream consistency which affects readers powerfully, it is probably irrelevant that they lack ordinary consistency.” ( Science-Fiction Studies, v1n3, Spring 1974) Biographies of the authors, from the jacket of the anthology Out of the Unknown by A.E. This explains a good deal about his stories, and suggests that it is really useless to attack them by conventional standards. Responding to this revelation, Knight reconsidered his perspective on the author, writing: “van Vogt has just revealed, for the first time as far as I know, that he made a practice of dreaming about his stories and waking himself up every ninety minutes to take notes. One is that there are methods for doing things and the other is that I dream my story ideas in my sleep.” In other words, here I am living on things. In van Vogt’s 1975 autobiography (assembled from interviews he gave in the 1960s), he wrote: But then again, Knight later wrote: “Other writers may be able to work on intuition, but I can’t. In contrast, Damon Knight tore all aspects of that same novel to shreds, writing, “ is no giant he is a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter.” (From the fanzine Destiny’s Child, November 1945). Dick and Harlan Ellison credited van Vogt’s The World of Null-A as an early inspiration. He’s also regarded as something of an odd-duck, his work drawing a wide range of reactions.

Van Vogt is recognized as a Grand Master, having received the fourteenth instance of the Damon Knight Memorial award in 1996. The next in our series of posts in support of the 1946 Project at Chicon 8.Īs part of the 1946 Project, we’ll focus on the work of Alfred Elton “A.E.” van Vogt and his fellow author (also spouse) Edna Mayne Hull.

A Lovecraft Retrospective by Harlan Ellison