At a glance details for 2005-05
Notes
It has been agreed that we will meet at Josh's and that everyone will bring a chocolate cake.
Heather provided the following relevant link to the topic of General Semantics:
http://time-binding.org/about/about-gs.htm
Cara provided some follow-up information:
I have a large Dorling Kindersley Encyclopedia of SF, which has neat pictures of old things, but which has text which is sometimes smart, sometimes annoying. However, I thought its entry on Van Vogt was interesting. Here's part of it:
"In 1939 . . . he began to write SF for John W Campbell Jr's Astounding magazine, and within a very short time -- along with Asimov, de Camp, Heinlein, and Sturgeon -- he had become a central figure of the new Golden Age SF. He was prolific, inventive, and very popular.
"But around 1950 he virtually stopped writing, and for almost 20 years produced little more than reworked versions of earlier work. When he began to produce new stories again, around 1968, his time had passed. He had been gone too long -- maybe his work was always too peculiar -- for him to become one of the oldtime writers who, like Asimov, restarted their careers on a wave of nostalgia. Van Vogt is a forgotten giant of the Golden Age, a living ghost. Are there good reasons for this?
"There are two. The first is complex: from the start, van Vogt specialized in a kind of dream SF -- stories whose logic was hard to pin down; heroes who were both godlike and juvenile; venues as difficult to understand as an Escher drawing. . . .
" . . . These stories sound too silly for words -- until one reads them, when the astonishing dreamlike intensity of the early van Vogt's style captures one, and pulls one through harum-scarum events that leaves no time for questioning. . . . Stories told so intensely, with such disregard for common sense, are easy to mock, and it may be that during the years of his inactivity readers got used to thinking of van Vogt as an eccentric. But there is a second reason for his oblivion. In 1950 or so, van Vogt became enthralled by Dianetics . . . Van Vogt became deeply involved in the early years of the enterprise, and although he never became similarly involved in Scientology . . . the momentum he lost as a writer was gone forever. . . .
"It is often said that early van Vogt wrote like a man caught in an unstoppable dream. Late van Vogt writes as though he has awakened into the drabness of the day, and cannot quite remember the glories of the night."
[written by John Clute.]
BTW, Clute cites Slan, the Null-A series, and the Weapon Shop series as the most significant V V works.
BTW again, the book implies that van Vogt claimed that the movie Alien was too close to one of his Space Beagle stories for legality, and it further implies that the studio paid V V money thereafter.
Poking about online, the following is the clearest explanation I've found for the van Vogt lawsuit -- apparently, as this was settled out of court, there are few details known.
[written by Cory Doctorow for craphound.com]
4. A.E. Van Vogt versus Alien A.E. Van Vogt is one of the early pioneers of science fiction, a writer whose fiction career stretches back into the thirties. In December, 1939, he published a story in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction, called "Discord in Scarlet." In 1950, he incorporated the story into his novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle. Along the way, this Canadian wrote seminal episodes for The Outer Limits, became one of the earliest converts to Scientology (running the L.A. Dianetics Foundation in the early fifties, then repudiating the whole thing), and grew to be one of the oldest surviving members of the Science Fiction Writers of America. In 1979, Ridley Scott based his seminal horror/science-fiction film, Alien, on "Discord in Scarlet." Which startled the hell out of Van Vogt, since he'd never granted permission for Scott to use the work. Scott denied it, then settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, adding Van Vogt to the credits.
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