Alfred Vogt, who later adopted the name A. E. van Vogt, was born on April 26, 1912, in the small Russian Mennonite community of Edenburg, Manitoba, Canada. This community, located east of Gretna, Manitoba, within the Mennonite West Reserve, played a significant role in his early life. He was the third of six children born to Heinrich “Henry” Vogt and Aganetha “Agnes” Vogt (née Buhr), both of whom were native to Manitoba and had grown up in immigrant-heavy communities.

During his early years, until the age of four, van Vogt primarily spoke Plautdietsch, a Low German dialect, at home. These formative experiences in a Mennonite community and a bilingual upbringing likely had a lasting impact on his cultural and linguistic background.During the first twelve years of his life, A. E. van Vogt’s father, Henry Vogt, who worked as a lawyer, relocated the family multiple times within western Canada. They moved to various places, including Neville, Saskatchewan; Morden, Manitoba; and finally settled in Winnipeg, Manitoba. These frequent moves were challenging for Alfred Vogt, and he later reflected on the difficulties they posed.

Childhood was a terrible period for me. I was like a ship without an anchor being swept along through darkness in a storm. Again and again, I sought shelter, only to be forced out of it by something new.

In the 1920s, the Vogt family resided in Winnipeg. Alfred’s father, Henry, worked as an agent for a steamship company. However, the 1929 stock market crash caused financial hardship, making it impossible to send Alfred to college. During his teenage years, Alfred took on various jobs as a farmhand and a truck driver. By the age of 19, he was employed at the Canadian Census Bureau in Ottawa.During the tough years of 1931 and 1932, A. E. van Vogt enrolled in a correspondence writing course at the Palmer Institute of Authorship. He achieved his first story sale in the fall of 1932. His early published works were stories in the style of magazines like True Story, which featured personal and emotional narratives. Many of these stories were published without his name, and they often presented first-person accounts from people, frequently women, in extraordinary and life-altering situations.

After a year in Ottawa, A. E. van Vogt returned to Winnipeg. There, he sold advertising space in newspapers and continued to write. While still crafting melodramatic “true confessions” stories until 1937, he also began writing short radio dramas for local radio station CKY. He conducted interviews that were published in trade magazines.

Sometime in the mid-1930s, he added the middle name “Elton” to his name. In 1937, one of his confessional stories, “To Be His Keeper,” was sold to the Toronto Star, but they misspelled his name as “Alfred Alton Bogt” in the byline. Soon after, he added the “van” to his surname, and from then on, he used the name “A. E. van Vogt” both personally and professionally.

Everything I do is me. I don’t like taking ideas from people unless they’re the G.O.A.T.

A Boogie wit da Hoodie

In 1938, A. E. van Vogt made a big change in his writing and decided to switch to science fiction, a genre he loved reading. He got inspired by a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction, specifically the August 1938 issue. In that issue, he came across John W. Campbell’s novelette “Who Goes There?” (which later inspired movies like “The Thing”). This inspired van Vogt to write his own science fiction story called “Vault of the Beast,” which he submitted to the same magazine.John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding, rejected “Vault of the Beast” but encouraged van Vogt to keep trying. So, van Vogt sent in another story called “Black Destroyer,” which got accepted. This story was about a dangerous alien hunting the crew of a spaceship and later influenced movies like “Alien” (1979).

A revised version of “Vault of the Beast” was eventually published in 1940. This marked the beginning of van Vogt’s career as a science fiction writer. In 1939, while he was still living in Winnipeg, A. E. van Vogt married Edna Mayne Hull, who was also from Manitoba. Edna had previously worked as a private secretary and later became van Vogt’s typist. She even wrote some science fiction stories of her own in the early 1940s and was credited as the author of these works.

When World War II started in September 1939, A. E. van Vogt’s life changed. He couldn’t join the military because of his poor eyesight, so he took a job as a clerk with the Canadian Department of National Defence. This job required him to move back to Ottawa, where he and his wife lived for about a year and a half.

While he was in Ottawa, A. E. van Vogt’s writing career continued to thrive. His second published story, “Discord in Scarlet,” even became the cover story. It had illustrations by Frank Kramer and Paul Orban. This story marked van Vogt’s and Kramer’s debut in the issue of Astounding Science Fiction that some consider the start of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. During this time, one of his most famous works, “Far Centaurus,” was published in the January 1944 edition of Astounding Science Fiction. A. E. van Vogt’s first full-length novel, and one of his most famous works, is “Slan.” Campbell serialized it in Astounding Science Fiction from September to December 1940. The novel revolves around a nine-year-old superhuman living in a world where regular humans are trying to kill his kind, which becomes a recurring theme in van Vogt’s writing. “Slan” was later published as a complete book by Arkham House in 1946.

After his first story, some recognized A. E. van Vogt’s talent, and in May 1941, he made a big decision. He decided to become a full-time writer and left his job at the Canadian Department of National Defence. This change allowed him to move away from Ottawa. He and his wife initially lived in the Gatineau region of Quebec before relocating to Toronto in the fall of 1941.During the years from 1941 to 1944, A. E. van Vogt was incredibly productive. He wrote many of his famous short stories and novels during this period. Some of his novels, like “The Book of Ptath” and “The Weapon Makers,” were initially published in magazines as serials and later turned into books after World War II. Additionally, several of the stories that eventually made up novels like “The Weapon Shops of Isher,” “The Mixed Men,” and “The War Against the Rull” were written and published during these years.

California and post-war writing (1944–1950)

In November 1944, A. E. van Vogt and his wife, Hull, relocated to Hollywood, California. This move marked the beginning of his lifelong residence in California. He had already been using the name “A. E. van Vogt” for some time in public, and as part of his process to become an American citizen in 1945, he officially changed his legal name from Alfred Vogt to Alfred Elton van Vogt. Among his friends in the California science fiction community, he was commonly known as “Van.”

A. E. van Vogt took a break from publishing new fiction for nearly 12 years until 1962. During this hiatus, he didn’t immediately return to science fiction but wrote a mainstream novel, “The Violent Man” (1962), set in Communist China. This novel was influenced by his concerns about totalitarian police states that emerged after World War II. In “The Violent Man,” van Vogt delved into his perspective on the “violent male type,” describing them as individuals who needed to be right and instantly attracted women, often influencing the world. While contemporary reviews of the novel were lukewarm at best, van Vogt subsequently resumed writing science fiction.

From 1963 through the mid-1980s, van Vogt began publishing new material regularly, although he also reworked and repackaged older material. Some of his later novels included “The Beast” (1963), “Rogue Ship” (1965), “Quest for the Future” (1970), and “Supermind” (1977). He also expanded previously published short stories into full-length novels, such as “The Darkness on Diamondia” (1972) and “Future Glitter” (1973). In the 1970s, he started writing novels that were not serialized magazine pieces or fix-ups, which was a change from his earlier works. Some of these original novels included “Children of Tomorrow” (1970), “The Battle of Forever” (1971), and “The Anarchistic Colossus” (1977).

Although van Vogt promised many sequels to his classic works, only one, “Null-A Three” (1984), was published. Some of his later books were initially published in Europe, and some were only available in foreign language editions and were never published in their original English.