(urth) Van Vogt. (Was: Re: I Claudius)
Andy Robertson
andywrobertson at clara.co.uk
Thu Sep 7 11:03:30 PDT 2006
Jesper Svedberg writes:
> Andy Robertson skrev:
> I read Van Vogt's _The Book of Ptath_ a few years back, and it struck me
> as very similar to BotNS, both in it's mixture of far future sf and
> mythical elements and in it's voice (of course, Van Vogt isn't as good a
> writer as Wolfe, but I think he's better than his reputation and better
> than many of his more famous contemporaries). I haven't read anything
> else by Van Vogt, so I don't know how similar _Ptath_ is to his other
> works, but I felt that Wolfe seems to echo many of the concepts in this
> book, and since it almost was a dying earth it really felt like a
> potential source for inspiration for Wolfe. (And even if _Ptath_ isn't
> an inspiration it would seem likely that Wolfe read a lot of Van Vogt
> when he was young, since Van Vogt was a huge name back then.)
I'd be astonished if Wolfe had not read Van Vogt. I cannot say if any of
VV's work was an inspiration to Wolfe, but I think that merely setting it in
the distant future is not enough.
TBOTNS is a "Dying Earth" story - a story set in a future in which the Sun
(and therefore creation itself) has become senile, and reality frays.
This theme descends (like all SF does, I believe) from ancient Indo-European
religious and cultural forms, in this case the idea that the Universe is
cyclically renewed through flood and flame.
VV, as far as I know, never wrote in this vein. In fact VV was really
writing, and wrote again and again (to the point of wearying at least this
reader), about quite another ancient Indo-European theme - the idea that a
man can effectively become a god.
hartshorn
http://www.thenightland.co.uk
01273-488272 / 0777-214-9545
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