Early life Alfred Vogt (both "Elton" and "
van" were added much later) was born on April 26, 1912, on his grandparents' farm in Edenburg, Manitoba, a tiny (and now defunct)
Russian Mennonite community east of
Gretna, Manitoba, Canada, in the Mennonite
West Reserve. He was the third of six children born to Heinrich "Henry" Vogt and Aganetha "Agnes" Vogt (née Buhr), both of whom were born in Manitoba and grew up in heavily immigrant communities. Until he was four, van Vogt spoke only
Plautdietsch at home. For the first dozen or so years of his life, van Vogt's father, Henry Vogt, a lawyer, moved his family several times within the Prairies, moving to
Neville, Saskatchewan;
Morden, Manitoba; and finally
Swift Current, Saskatchewan, where the family spent the majority of the 1920s. Alfred Vogt found these moves difficult, later remarking: By the late 1920s, living in Saskatchewan, his father Henry worked as an agent for a steamship company, but the
stock market crash of 1929 proved financially disastrous, and the family could not afford to send Alfred to college. During his teen years, Alfred worked as a farmhand and a truck driver, and by the age of 19, he was working in
Ottawa for the Canadian Census Bureau. In "the dark days of '31 and '32," van Vogt took a correspondence course in writing from the
Palmer Institute of Authorship. He sold his first story in fall 1932. His early published works were stories in the
true confession style of magazines such as
True Story. Most of these stories were published anonymously, with the first-person narratives allegedly being written by people (often women) in extraordinary, emotional, and life-changing circumstances. After a year in Ottawa, he moved to
Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he sold newspaper advertising space and continued to write. While continuing to pen melodramatic "true confessions" stories through 1937, he also began writing short radio dramas for local radio station CKY, as well as conducting interviews published in trade magazines. He added the middle name "Elton" at some point in the mid-1930s, and at least one confessional story (1937's "To Be His Keeper") was sold to the
Toronto Star, who misspelled his name "Alfred Alton Bogt" in the byline. Shortly thereafter, he added the "van" to his surname, and from that point forward he used the name "A. E. van Vogt" both personally and professionally.
Early career By 1938, van Vogt decided to switch to writing science fiction, a genre he enjoyed reading. He was inspired by the August 1938 issue of
Astounding Science Fiction, which he picked up at a newsstand.
John W. Campbell's novelette "
Who Goes There?" (later adapted into
The Thing from Another World and
The Thing) inspired van Vogt to write "
Vault of the Beast", which he submitted to that same magazine. Campbell, who edited
Astounding (and had written the story under a pseudonym), sent van Vogt a rejection letter in which Campbell encouraged van Vogt to try again. Van Vogt sent another story, entitled "
Black Destroyer", which was accepted. It featured a fierce, carnivorous
alien stalking the crew of a spaceship, and served as the inspiration for multiple science fiction movies, including
Alien (1979). A revised version of "Vault of the Beast" was published in 1940. While still living in Winnipeg, in 1939 van Vogt married
Edna Mayne Hull, a fellow Manitoban. Hull, who had previously worked as a private secretary, went on to act as van Vogt's typist, and was credited with writing several SF stories of her own throughout the early 1940s. The outbreak of World War II in September 1939 caused a change in van Vogt's circumstances. Ineligible for military service due to his poor eyesight, he accepted a clerking job with the Canadian Department of National Defence. This necessitated a move back to
Ottawa, where he and his wife stayed for the next year and a half. Meanwhile, his writing career continued. "Discord in Scarlet" was van Vogt's second story to be published, also appearing as the cover story. It was accompanied by interior illustrations created by
Frank Kramer and Paul Orban. (Van Vogt and Kramer thus debuted in the issue of
Astounding that is sometimes identified as the start of the
Golden Age of Science Fiction.) Among his most famous works of this era, "
Far Centaurus" appeared in the January 1944 edition of
Astounding. Van Vogt's first completed novel, and one of his most famous, is
Slan (Arkham House, 1946), which Campbell serialized in
Astounding (September to December 1940). Prolific throughout this period, van Vogt wrote many of his more famous short stories and novels in the years from 1941 through 1944. The novels
The Book of Ptath and
The Weapon Makers both appeared in magazines in serial form during this period; they were later published in book form after World War II. As well, several (though not all) of the stories that were compiled to make up the novels
The Weapon Shops of Isher,
The Mixed Men and
The War Against the Rull were published during this time.
California and post-war writing (1944–1950) In November 1944, van Vogt and Hull moved to
Hollywood; van Vogt would spend the rest of his life in California. He had been using the name "A. E. van Vogt" in his public life for several years, and as part of the process of obtaining American citizenship in 1945 he finally and formally changed his legal name from Alfred Vogt to Alfred Elton van Vogt. To his friends in the California science fiction community, he was known as "Van".
Dianetics and fix-ups (1950–1961) In 1950, van Vogt was briefly appointed as head of
L. Ron Hubbard's
Dianetics operation in California. Van Vogt had first met Hubbard in 1945, and became interested in his theories, which were published shortly thereafter. Dianetics was the secular precursor to Hubbard's Church of
Scientology; van Vogt would have no association with Scientology, as he did not approve of its mysticism. The California Dianetics operation went broke nine months later, but never went bankrupt, due to van Vogt's arrangements with creditors. Shortly afterward, van Vogt and his wife opened their own Dianetics center, partly financed by his writings, until he "signed off" around 1961. From 1951 until 1961, van Vogt's focus was on Dianetics, and he produced no new fiction.
Fix-ups However, during the 1950s, van Vogt retrospectively patched together many of his previously published stories into novels, sometimes creating new interstitial material to help bridge gaps in the narrative. Van Vogt referred to the resulting books as "
fix-ups", a term that entered the vocabulary of science-fiction criticism. When the original stories were closely related this was often successful, although some van Vogt fix-ups featured disparate stories thrown together that bore little relation to each other, generally making for a less coherent plot. One of his best-known (and well-regarded) novels,
The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950) was a fix-up of four short stories including "Discord in Scarlet"; it was published in at least five European languages by 1955. (Also, one non-fiction work,
The Hypnotism Handbook, appeared in 1956, though it had apparently been written much earlier.) After more than a decade of running their Dianetics center, Hull and van Vogt closed it in 1961. Nevertheless, van Vogt maintained his association with the organization and was still president of the California Association of Dianetic Auditors into the 1980s. and van Vogt thereafter returned to science fiction. From 1963 through the mid-1980s, van Vogt once again published new material on a regular basis, though fix-ups and reworked material also appeared relatively often. His later novels included fix-ups such as
The Beast (also known as
Moonbeast) (1963),
Rogue Ship (1965),
Quest for the Future (1970) and
Supermind (1977). He also wrote novels by expanding previously published short stories; works of this type include
The Darkness on Diamondia (1972) and
Future Glitter (also known as
Tyranopolis; 1973). Novels that were written simply as novels, and not serialized magazine pieces or fix-ups, had been very rare in van Vogt's oeuvre, but began to appear regularly beginning in the 1970s. Van Vogt's original novels included
Children of Tomorrow (1970),
The Battle of Forever (1971) and
The Anarchistic Colossus (1977). Over the years, many sequels to his classic works were promised, but only one appeared:
Null-A Three (1984; originally published in French). Several later books were initially published in Europe, and at least one novel only ever appeared in foreign language editions and was never published in its original English.
Final years When the 1979 film
Alien appeared, it was noted that the plot closely matched the plots of both
Black Destroyer and
Discord in Scarlet, both published in
Astounding magazine in 1939, and then later published in the 1950 book
Voyage of the Space Beagle. Van Vogt sued the production company for
plagiarism, and eventually collected an out-of-court settlement of $50,000 from
20th Century Fox. In increasingly frail health, van Vogt published his final short story in 1986. Van Vogt's first wife, Edna Mayne Hull, died in 1975. Van Vogt married Lydia Bereginsky in 1979; they remained together until his death. On January 26, 2000, A. E. van Vogt died in
Los Angeles from
Alzheimer's disease. He was survived by his second wife. ==Method and themes==