(urth) Van Vogt. (Was: Re: I Claudius)

[Jesper Svedberg]

Andy Robertson skrev:
> Russell Wodell writes: 
> 
> 
>>Graves' Claudius novels seem an obvious inspiration for BOTNS.  
>>
>>But I wonder if there isn't an intervening source in a Graves rip-off: A.E. van Vogt's fix-up Empire of the Sun (1957).
> 
>  
> 
> EMPIRE OF THE ATOM.   Gorgeous tripe from AEVV, but having read it recently 
> I doubt there's a close link: the style is all wrong, and VV is really 
> writing about the pains of being a superhuman/subhuman mutant.

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.)


   // Jesper