Futures Past: The Best Short Fiction of A.E. Van Vogt [Hardcover]

A. E. Van Vogt (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Tachyon Pubns; First Edition edition (October 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 189239104X
• ISBN-13: 978-1892391049
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,147,425 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent collection by a Master, July 12, 2000

By 

Paul Lappen (Manchester, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Futures Past: The Best Short Fiction of A.E. Van Vogt (Paperback)

This is a group of lesser-known science fiction stories, first published between the 1940s and 1960s, by one of the all-time masters of the field. When writers like Asimov and Heinlein were hitting their stride, van Vogt was the pinnacle to which they aspired. When the first specialty book publishers were looking for material to republish after World War II, van Vogt was their first stop. In this book, the last survivor of a spaceship that crash landed on Mars finds a deserted Martian village. Natives of the Andes Mountains are able to survive in the thin atmosphere of Mars, without pressure suits, to the great resentment of those born at sea level. A human and an ezwal, a large, blue, three-eyed being with the power of telepathic communication, crash land on a jungle planet and are forced to cooperate with each other to survive. This is despite the fact that the ezwal hates humans and would just as soon tear the human into little pieces. These may not be classic, well-known stories, but they still run rings around most of what was, and is, in the science fiction section of the local chain bookstore.