Another of van Vogt's 'Fixups'. This time several short stories from the 40s, charting the heroics of a character called Artur Blord are bolted together into a rough simulacrum of a novel. Artur Blord is an interstellar entrepreneur with an immense personal fortune, charm, charisma, good looks, flashes of brilliant insight and the morality of a cheap hood. Like a lot of 1940s SF pulp writers, van Vogt's hero types dispense with their opponents in an offhand manner that is very odd to modern eyes. Blord at one point outmanoeuvres his ganster-like opponents and finds them all (in typical van Vogt style) masked at a nightclub. Blord has the place surrounded with his agents. He casually shoots one of the 'bad guys' dead when he starts to question what was going on. Blord delivers an ultimatum to the assembly: do it my way and live. Sign over all your ill-gotten earnings to me and I'll let you go free. A page later it's revealed that after they signed he had them all massacred. And this is the hero! He later, attempting to kill another enemy, has a civilian passenger ship bombed. The bad guy and his henchmen escape - everyone else is killed.

van Vogt's heroes also have superpowers, not only can Blord hypnotise people within moments, he can also perform fantastic feats of physics-bending awesomeness like this, when, trapped in a powerless spaceship ('Lorelei', the dark star off the port bow, is doing unexplained, but not unexpected, energy sucky things to his ship's nuclear pile) Blord plays his emergency Get Out of Jail Free card:

Quote:
'He began to turn a wheel that shoved at a bigger wheel, which shoved at a still bigger wheel, until, under the control dais, a ten-foot wheel with an Earth weight of fifteen tons was spinning at approximately thirty revolutions a minute. At the proper moment, Blord pushed in a clutch, and an electric dynamo began to operate. It was literally an emergency power plant. Electricity was too course an energy to be powerfully affected by the Lorelei [star].'

....which makes you wonder why he didn't just take a couple of batteries with him or even crank the bloody generator himself! I've no idea how to do the maths but just how much 'shoving' would one man have to do to get ten foot (Diameter? Radius? Circumference? Hight?), 15 ton, wheel spinning at 30 rpm?

I once joked that van Vogt so loved secret tunnels that he probably wrote them into spaceships when he could. Turns out I was right, for, having got his emergency power supply going, our hero then moves his ship's pilot seat aside to reveal a secret tunnel leading to a second control room where he sits and listens in on the plot-point dropping conversations of the space pirates who then board his ship. (They have a newly developed super-secret anti-energy sucky thing device on their ship.) ( )

A novel constructed from a string of stories about Artur Blord, originally published in Astounding SF (1943-46) under the pen-name E. Mayne Hull (the name of his first wife, later credited as co-author). Classic pulp stuff, in which attractive yet resourceful females do the bidding of a calm and powerful tycoon in his rivalries with unpleasant thugs and slave-traffickers, and interplanetary businesses are equipped with typewriters and metal filing cabinets. This is the kind of book in which the hero snarls "Go to hell" at a reptilian alien, while the woman he has just rescued finds time to do something to her hair. MB 18-vii-2007

Information credit: A. E. van Vogt Information Site
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~icshi/index.html ( )