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A memorable book review on the (lamentably dormant) Strange Words website, titled "Charles Platt, Fun Interviewer" warns us about the Wired scribe's published conversations with famous science fiction writers, Dream Makers (Vols. I and II): that they are full of "creepy voyeurism," and that "Platt seems hell-bent on exposure, rather than the context of a writer's life." I just read my first Platt interview, with A.E. Van Vogt, and boy, they weren't kidding. Van Vogt comes off as a wacko, bore, and self-diagnosing Dianetics disciple, which he was, perhaps, but his fiction is really Out There and he deserves better treatment.
Van Vogt was one of editor John W. Campbell's "Big Three" writers, along with Arthur Clarke and Robert Heinlein. While the latter authors specialized in "hard" sf, Van Vogt was the visionary, specializing in tales of superhuman races and bizarre, alien logic systems. The basic plot of the movie Alien came from Van Vogt's story "The Black Destroyer," incorporated into the novel Voyage of the Space Beagle (after Darwin's HMS Beagle), a larger epic that, 16 years before Captain Kirk, told of a starship Seeking Out New Life and New Civilizations in the galaxies. The chapter where the catlike, tentacled horror is taken aboard the ship is here, and worth a read. Yes, it's pulpy, but it moves at a furious clip, introducing the players and political tensions on the vessel without letting up on the chills for a moment--even during a scene of explosive action. (It does everything but tell you what "Nexialism" is.) Van Vogt describes learning to write from intensive, obsessive study of a single how-to book, and the prescriptions for narrative economy and drive can really be felt in this passage.
Before Platt pulls out the big hatchet, he quotes Van Vogt talking about his own writing "system":
"In science fiction you have to have a little bit of a 'hang-up' in each sentence. Let's suppose, for example: The hero looks up toward the door." Van Vogt gestures toward the sunlit screen door of his living room, leading out onto the veranda. "He hears a sound over there. And something comes in. It looks like a man wearing a cloak. You don't quite know what's going on. Then, you realize this is not a human being. This creature or this being, whoever it is, has a sort of manlike shape. And this creature reaches into what now looks like a fold of its skin. It draws out a gleaming metal object. It points it at you. Is this a weapon? It looks like a weapon, but you don't know that for sure. It's a 'hang-up,' you see. The author furnishes the information, but each sentence in itself has a little 'hang-up' in it."
As he has been talking, almost hypnotically, with an eerie gleam in his eye, he has created such a mood of menace that, for a moment, the California sunshine seems less bright and the dreamlike description is nibbling at the edges of reality. He would say, perhaps, that this is through the power of his system, but I think it has more to do with the power of his personality and his intuitively shrewd choice of words and images. A system on its own is dull and mechanical, without inspiration to fuel it.
Panel from Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Vol. 4) - Hand-(re)drawn on Wacom tablet