Customer Reviews

The Universe Maker

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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.