In this story of three conflicting cultures, a Korean war veteran is suddenly whisked 400 years into the future to be executed for an accidental murder. One of the premier writers of the Golden Age of science fiction, Van Vogt is best known for The World of Null-A, the first science fiction book to be printed by a mainstream publisher.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
When You Don't Have a Designated Driver...,
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This review is from: The Universe Maker (Paperback)
The inside cover of the Ace edition of A.E. van Vogt's _The Universe Maker_ quotes Forrest J. Ackerman as saying that the novel "fascinatingly fictionalizes some of the startling concepts of Scientology". Well, perhaps. The novel was published in book form in 1953, and by that time L. Ron Hubbard was using the term Scientology in connection with Dianetics. And van Vogt _was_ an early convert to Dianetics. But the first version of _The Universe Makers_ was a novella entitled "The Shadow Men" in the January, 1950 issue of _Startling Stories_. This was roughly five months before Hubbard began publishing the first of his Dianetics articles. So I suspect that the main content of _The Universe Maker_ is simply a variation on van Vogt's superman story as seen in _Slan_, the early Null A novels, or "Recruiting Station". Any content concerning Dianetics or Scientology was probably just a bit of icing on the cake.The story involves a fellow named Captain Morton Cargill who is involved in an automobile accident that kills a young woman. A year later, he is presented with some compromising photographs and is then shanghaied into the distant future. There are three factions hunting Carville for slightly different reasons: the Floaters, a loose nation of hillbillies with aircars; the politically ambitious and aristocratic Tweeners; and the Shadow Men, superhumans without any visible substance. Van Vogt reveals details of his world as he has Cargill dash back and forth from one faction to another. Farms have collapsed and decayed, and the wilderness has pretty much spread out again. The population is down. The Soviet Union has collapsed, only to be replaced with a set of primitive religions designed to keep the masses in their place. Van Vogt looks upon most of these details with alarm. But I must admit that a growth of wilderness and a decrease in population don't sound too bad to me. It is in some of the technological sections of the novel that the writing shows a spark of the old van Vogtian imagination: the kitchen of a Floater home, a series of dreams (or _were_ they dreams?) under an education machine, the battle tactics of a futuristic air force... and the rather elaborate grand finale to the novel. Van Vogt frequently wrote his share of absolutely awful novels (such as _The Beast_ and _Rogue Ship_). _The Universe Maker_ is better than those. But it does not have the imaginative pizazz of _The World of Null A_, _The Weapon Shops of Isher_, or _The Book of Ptath_. It is passable space opera; but it is, when all is said and done, mostly nonsense.
3.0 out of 5 stars
To the future, and beyond!,
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This review is from: The Universe Maker (Paperback)
The Universe Maker by A.E. Van VogtThis was a pretty good caper, about a Korean war vet in the 1950s who gets transported to the future and embroiled in various conspiracies between competing factions of people there. Van Vogt sketches out an interesting history of the second half of the 20th century and of the 21st (this story was first published in 1953), and the future world he describes is certainly entertaining. Van Vogt also unleashes some quasi-mystic mumbo jumbo on us, some pop psychology and lots of expanded mental powers stuff, as he usually does. As the story progresses the scale of the action grows larger and larger until mysteries are solved and the Universe Maker of the title is revealed. In its structure the story reminded me of Bester's The Stars My Destination. I read the 1976 Sphere (a British publisher) paperback. I like the yellow cover painting of a space ship traveling past a colossal brain; appropriate for Van Vogt, at least symbolically. This edition also includes the short story "Proxy Intelligence." In "Proxy Intelligence" an ordinary working class man who never reads books, the interplanetary equivalent of a truck driver, is visited by an alien life form, and given super intelligence. While he is still trying to figure out how to use this intelligence, he becomes a pawn in a struggle between extrasolar aliens, one group devoted to peace and order and another made up of ruthless vampiric criminals. Not bad.
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