Customer Reviews

Slan Hunter

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Slan Hunter (2007) is the sequel to Slan. In the previous volume, Jommy Cross learned that the tendrilless slans were preparing to invade the Earth. Returning from Mars, he attempted to warn the human government. He entered the palace by a hidden way and was met by Kier Gray, the President of Earth.

Gray released him from the trap -- which Jommy had already neutralized -- and received the news of the invasion. Then Jommy learned that Kathleen -- whom he had thought dead -- was alive and cured of the terrible wound inflicted by John Petty.

In this novel, Davis Stewart is driving his very pregnant wife to the hospital. Anthea is in labor and Davis is in a hurry. When he reaches the emergency room, he runs into the hospital to get help and comes out pushing a wheelchair and leading an orderly.

The orderly wheels Anthea toward the delivery room while calling out to the nurses. A nurse stops Davis at the door, but Anthea is quickly moved into position. The doctor speaks calmly to Anthea and tells her to push.

The baby comes quickly and the doctor holds him up for his mother to see. A nurse cries out and the doctor shows a horrified expression. The baby has golden tendrils growing out of the back of his head. He is a slan.

Neither Anthea nor Davis show any sign of being slans. They certainly are not aware of any such possibility. However, the doctor fills a hypodermic syringe with a poisonous substance and reaches for the baby.

Davis comes into the delivery room, responding to a feeling of danger. Nurses and orderlies try to block his passage, but he fights his way through. Anthea tells him of the doctor's intention and Davis throws aside everyone between him and the doctor.

After removing Anthea and their baby from the room, Davis immediately recognized the danger of three security men and a secret policeman coming toward them. He tells Anthea to take the baby and run, then he runs toward the security men. As Anthea goes the other way, she hears the shots that signal the death of her husband.

In this story, Petty had the president's quarters bugged by his secret police and learns that Gray is really a tendrilless slan. He has the president arrested and then captures Jommy and Kathleen. They are all secured in cells under the palace. Jommy and Kathleen are detained in adjacent cells and soon free themselves from their captors.

Gray was imprisoned elsewhere in the underground facility. Jommy and Kathleen soon learn the location of his cell and manage to break him free. But Petty has set up an ambush nearby and recaptures all three.

Meanwhile, the tendrilless slans attack the planet, including Centropolis, the capital. They are bombing the palace while Petty is securing his captives. Petty quickly agrees to join forces against the tendrilless slans.

This story concludes the storyline established in Slan. Very little is new other than the plot. Most of the characters, the locales and the technology are taken from the earlier story. This trend is unlike Van Vogt, who usually tried to introduce new ideas into each sequel within a series. Across series, however, he often reused older ideas. The best innovation in this tale is indicated by the concluding paragraph.

The Foreword describes how this book came to be published. This provides a fascinating -- and dismaying -- glimpse into the Van Vogt life story. The senior author tried to produce this book, but was overcome by Alzheimer's. Eventually, the novel was put into the hands of the junior author.

Recommended for Van Vogt & Anderson fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of viable mutations, reactionary social elements, and human relationships.

-Arthur W. Jordin

I really wanted to like this story. Slan: A Novel was a classic tale of a (mutant) superhero triumphant over incredibly competent enemies. Since said superhero's powers were mostly mental and since he won the love of a beautiful and brilliant woman, the story was very appealing to adolescent male science fiction fans. The story had a perfect "happily ever after" ending (last four paragraphs) - hero wins beautiful daughter of powerful ruler, who offers him role in ruling - that it didn't really need a sequel.
So much is changed in Slan Hunter, that I wonder if the author bothered to read the original - certainly, it fails a reading comprehension test.
Major characters are so distorted as to be barely recognizable - their competence disappears. The chief of secret police who was so capable of intrigue and so knowing of all sorts of difficult to obtain information suddenly needs simple items explained to him. The president/dictator who climbed to the top of a brutal society is easily overthrown. The superhero who escaped so many difficult and clever traps is captured again and again. The heroine whose wits kept her alive against tremendous odds is transformed into someone barely capable of living independently. "Granny", a greedy, alcoholic, barely functional, paranoid derelict, who lived in filth until the superhero cleaned up her living space, is now a practical grandmother and hostess who contributes useful ideas to the resistance.
Plot continuity almost disappears. Contradiction after contradiction with the previous novel occurs. The very nature of the conflict between true and tendrilless slan - a major feature of both books - has changed (van Vogt states it was intentionally provoked to keep the tendrilless from sinking into complacency; Anderson doesn't know how it started). The governmental structure is changed - the world president in the original is the head of a council who got their positions through intrigue, assassination and sheer viciousness; in the new book, he is a democratically elected leader. A woman whose recovery from a severe head injury in the original book was interfered with when the superhero disguised himself as her husband to escape capture and managed by means of his high level abilities to do what the husband was to do in the recovery process and avoid the very likely several mental damage an impostor would like cause, now considers him a hero who saved her, instead of the fraud who almost destroyed her. So many minor warped versions of the first book occur that it's hard to consider this book as anything other than a trashing of the first novel.
Beware - a rather cheap setup for another sequel appears in the final few lines.

From Slan Hunter, chapter 4: "...but even Jommy had not been able to decipher his father's intricate invention."

From Slan, chapter 18: :"He [Jommy speaking to Kier Gray about his father] evolved a central core of positive electrons spun out like a fine wire. At this core, but not directly at it...he discharged his negative electron 'comets' at the speed of light. The sun...flung them out... at a second positive core [which] catapults them faster than light..."

"Hunter," which begins only days after the end of Slan has many such jarring "continuity" holes.

The characters are wooden and unbelievable. The situations contrived. The ending a joke. I feel so sorry for Lydia van Vogt. In her moving forward, she explained the background of this manuscript. Given A. E. van Vogt's health when he wrote it, I can understand how he might have made these mistakes. There is no excuse for Kevin Anderson. Any competent writer, who recently read the original, could have done a better job. And shame on the editor, too, for accepting this.

I first read Slan back in the fifties and have always wished for a sequel. This one left a bad taste in my mouth.

This sequel was an attempt to write in the 1940's style and science environment. It ends up being worse than the original book ("Slan"), which was very dated, and the plot is lame.

Kevin Anderson should have updated the science and complicated, rather than simplified, the plot. The object should have been to capture Van Vogt's intricacies, not the outdated science of the period.

Van Vogt has always been one of my favorite SF authors (Weapon Shops, Null-A, etc.), but this book and even its original predecessor (Slan) are not worth the read.

For years now, Kevin Anderson has made a career of destroying established SF worlds with his own unique brand of arrogance, massive plot holes, and plain bad writing. Just before Slan Hunter he did this to H G Wells with The Martian War, writing as Gabriel Moesta. Since the late '90s, he's been decimating the Dune universe (unaffectionately called by me and others who enjoy Herbert's work the PseudoDune series) of Frank Herbert under Brian Herbert's watchful eye. Now, working from the draft of an incomplete Slan novel by A E van Vogt, Anderson strikes again. Van Vogt's original novel Slan was hardly the greatest breakthrough in SF at the time, but it was ingenious enough to become a seminal piece of writing in that genre. Like the fan fiction writers of Edgar Rice Burroughs or L Sprague de Camp when alternately denigrating and imitating Robert E Howard, Anderson just can't match the verve and brilliance of van Vogt's work and produces a novel that reads more like an imitation of a bad Sci Fi channel movie based on Slan than on a draft of a story written by van Vogt himself. Unfortunately thanks to PseudoDune, Anderon's name is out there for better or worse (mostly worse), and for that reason, he gets to bowdlerize the concepts of far better writers than he. Anyone looking at this book should avoid it and read or reread van Vogt's original. It's much better than any trash written by modern science fiction's version of L Sprague de Camp.

a.e. van vogt does it again! with the able help of kevin j. anderson! a wonderful book--and a worthy successor to slan!! i hope everyone enjoys it as much as i have--

This book, Slan Hunter, is the sequel to Slan written by A E Van Vogt in the 1940's. The present book was started by Van Vogt but not finished at this death; Kevin Anderson recently finished it from Van Vogt's start. Overall, I liked Slan Hunter; looking at some other reviews, I wonder if we all read the same book given the negative comments of some reviewers.

Before reading this book, I would recommend reading Slan, or it may be a bit hard to follow Slan Hunter. One thing readers of both may notice is that Anderson did a decent job on continuity with Slan and modernized the wording somewhat, so it does not appear as dated as Slan does today.

In this book, a slan baby is born to two people who appear human and all hell breaks loose. Kier Gray is deposed and held by John Petty of the secret police; Petty is often called the slan hunter as in the title, but it seems to me that the title was intended to point to something else - but I am not sure what. Jommy and Kathleen, both are slans, are back and in love. Granny is also back as are some other characters from Slan.

The tendrilless slans start an invasion of Earth from their base on Mars and really damage Earth. As the action proceeds, the regular slans, who had been hiding for years, make an appearance and put a stop to the fighting. Jommy has his tendrils cut off before this, but has them restored.

The book ends with the slan baby from the first part of the book getting the identity of an important person who lived long before the time in either book. A possible setup for another sequel? Perhaps.

If you liked Slan, but thought it a little dated, you should really like Slan Hunter. Happy reading!

A. E. van Vogt's works were some of the very first Science Fiction I read. I truly enjoyed them. Unfortunately, since it's been around 40 years since I've read them, I barely remember them. But, I KNOW they were a whole lot better than Kevin J. Anderson's version of "Slan Hunter." The book reads like a caricature of 1940s-1950s SciFi. It's corny to the point of being unreadable with shallow, fractional-dimensional characters and really silly situations. I've read comic books with more depth to them. Ugh.

It's a shame that this book is so bad. But, one good thing has come from it. Now that I've been reminded of van Vogt's work, I'll go back and re-read some of his actual stuff. But, for this book, I can only give it a Terrible 1 star out of 5.

It is difficult to tell from the foreword (written by Van Vogt's wife, Lydia) how much of this posthumously completed collaboration was Van Vogt's and how much was Anderson's. Mrs. Van Vogt makes a great deal of Van's diminished faculties towards the end of his life, when this project was conceived and executed. What a shame, then, that the resulting piece of tripe should see the light of day: on the one hand, as the record of a failing, once creative mind; on the other, as the effort of a mediocre stylist who could do nothing with whatever material may have been good in the master's sketches.

Van Vogt was, of course, an enormously important seminal SF writer; but it would be hard to argue that he was a good writer, in the mainstream sense. He had little flair for description, setting, or depth of character. What made him stand out in the field of early SF was the imaginative scope of his ideas.

Slan Hunter has all of Van's defects--wooden dialogue, flat characters, vaguely grey and unevocative settings; yet it has none of his strengths--clever (even mind-bending) ideas and interesting plot turns. But the plot of this book is pure drivel. Even the worst of modern, derivative, hack-work SF isn't this bad. In fact, the novel reads more like a tongue-in-cheek parody of 40's-50's pulp SF than the real thing.

On thing Van Vogt never did was to write long, drawn-out battle, chase, or danger scenes. This book, however, falls deeply into the trap of going on for many filler-stuffed pages depicting our heroes fleeing or fighting someone or something. Lots of explosions and crumbling infrastructure, but nothing to really engage the reader; lots of sound and fury, in other words, signifying nothing.

Also, the back story for the human/slan/tendril-less slan conflict is childishly simple, mawkish and unconvincing.

Yes, there is some charm in being returned to a world of 1940's technology, and its silly future-tech vision; but the novelty wears off quickly, and the whole story seems merely wildly naive.

I do hope Van Vogt will not be associated too closely with this garbage, because it displays none of the importance of his mature work.

Let's just say I've been a big AE Van Vogt fan for 25 years and this "sequel" was a very poor effort. I was really hoping for at least a passable imitation of one of Vogt's books complete with his usual ultra competent loner type protagonists. This book had cardboard cutouts. If you *HAVE* to read it for goodness sakes get it at a library.