by A. van Vogt (Author)
In the 1940s, the Golden Age of science fiction flowered in the magazine Astounding . Editor John W. Campbell, Jr., discovered and promoted great new writers such as A. E. van Vogt, whose novel SLAN was one of the basic works of the era. SLAN is the story of Jommy Cross, the orphan boy mutant, outcast from a future society prejudiced against mutants, who grows up to be a superman and to represent the next stage in human evolution. Throughout the forties and into the fifties, SLAN was considered the single most important science fiction novel, the one great book that everyone had to read. Today, it remains a monument to pulp science fiction adventure, filled with constant action and a cornucopia of ideas.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272
Edition: Reprint
Publisher: Orb Books
Published: 01 Jan 1968
ISBN 10: 0312852363
ISBN 13: 9780312852368
Over fifty years on from when it first saw print, van Vogt's Slan is still one of the quintessential classics of the field that other SF novels will inevitably be measured against. Charles de Lint
Van Vogt was creating the mythology of science, writing stories of science as magic or magic as science. James Gunn
Along with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein--and to a lesser extent L. Sprague de Camp and L. Ron Hubbard--he seemed nearly to create, by writing what Campbell wanted to publish, the first genuinely successful period of U.S. SF; only in this 'Golden Age' did it begin to achieve [success], in literary terms.... The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
Over fifty years on from when it first saw print, van Vogt's Slan is still one of the quintessential classics of the field that other SF novels will inevitably be measured against. --Charles de Lint
Van Vogt was creating the mythology of science, writing stories of science as magic or magic as science. --James Gunn
Along with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein--and to a lesser extent L. Sprague de Camp and L. Ron Hubbard--he seemed nearly to create, by writing what Campbell wanted to publish, the first genuinely successful period of U.S. SF; only in this 'Golden Age' did it begin to achieve [success], in literary terms.... --The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
A. E. Van Vogt was a SFWA Grand Master. He was born in Canada and moved to the U.S. in 1944, by which time he was well-established as one of John W. Campbell's stable of writers for Astounding Science-Fiction. He lived in Los Angeles, California and died in 2000.