One hundred and nine years after leaving Earth, the spaceship, Hope of
Man, went into orbit around Alta III. The following "morning" Captain Browne informed the shipload of fourth and fifth generation colonists that a manned lifeboat would be dropped to the planet's surface. "Every member of the crew must consider himself expendable," he said earnestly. "This is the day that our great grandparents, our forefathers, who boldly set out for the new space frontier so long ago, looked forward t...

Earth was helpless after the atomic holocaust—ready prey for the worst threat of all, the invaders from an alien galaxy…WAS MAN DOOMED FOREVER TO SENDING MESSAGES BY SMOKE SIGNALS?The Earth, after the atomic holocaust, had reverted to a strange kind of barbarism where men could build space ships but could not communicate except by the most primitive means.So it was a sickening shock to Lord Clane Linn when he captured one of the alien invader's space ships and discover...

On a December night three days before Christmas, a small-town California attorney takes a call that drags him into the affairs of the richest, strangest estate on the coast. His new client has just stepped off a train under a name that may not be his own, accused of a murder he cannot explain, watched by enemies who know far too much about him.What the lawyer slowly learns is that a stone house brooding above the sea has stood for a thousand years and more — and that the men and wo...

12,000 A.D. The Earth, after the atomic holocaust, had reverted to a strange kind of barbarism, where men could build space ships but could not communicate except by the most primitive means. Alien invaders had been sighted at the edge of the galaxy - but no one took action. Only one man, THE WIZARD OF LINN could save the decadent empire and with his mysterious powers, prevent the Earth's destruction.

With the publication, in the July 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, of the story Seesaw, van Vogt began unfolding the complex tale of the oppressive Empire of Isher and the mysterious Weapon Shops. This volume, The Weapon Shops of Isher, includes the first three parts of the saga and introduces perhaps the most famous political slogan of science fiction: The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to Be Free. Born at the height of Nazi conquest, the Isher stories suggested that ...

Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn: Global war smashed civilization—or so the legends told-but not all of its machines. A caste of "scientists" arose who knew how to repair and operate the ancient machines—but not how they worked—and worshipped at the altars of the atomic gods who were said to make the machines run. Society was a strange mix of the modern and the medieval, with armies riding on horseback into huge spaceships, then ...

Following the success of the stories that formed The Weapon Shops of Isher, van Vogt wrote the novel, The Weapon Makers, in 1943, to enlarge the story of human immortality, the conflict between a controlling government, The House of Isher, the mysterious Weapon Shops and man's place in the universe.The promise of the Weapon Shops' slogan, The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to Be Free, is described thus:Many of these weapons still carried the old names. “Guns” they we...

The alien was deadly, dangerous and inhuman—but he was not the most feared enemy on the ship!Lesbee recognized that his plan to take control of the ship had been discovered. But what other options did he have? What else could he do? And then, of course, there were the aliens that they all had to deal with.

What first reads like a tight noir mystery of a dead woman who won't stay dead, an American soldier paying the price for binge drinking and hooking up with the soon to be victim, quickly escalates into one of the biggest "big-idea" science fiction novels of all time.Not only are the science fiction ideas beyond the leading edge, but van Vogt's descriptions of future culture are eerily accurate.Written in 1953, this novel describes:the electronic cigarettea s...

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Well, Jim Pendrake is about to find out.Little does Jim Pendrake imagine, when he stumbles across an engine the like of which he's never seen before embedded in a hillside near his ranch, that he will soon be sucked into government conspiracies; have a complete memory reboot with a different life and a different wife (all part of the conspiracy); be kidnapped and sent to the moon, barely escaping the Neanderthal who rules the moon colo...

In 1939, World War II had just begun and the Nazis were advancing on all fronts. Fantasy, as a literature, was a rare and not well understood form, mostly confined to short works of horror or drawn from mythology. In that year, the very successful science fiction editor of Astounding Stories magazine, John W. Campbell, launched a sister publication Unknown (later Unknown Worlds). He encouraged his top authors such as Robert Heinlein, A.E. van Vogt, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack WIlliamson, Theo...