It pains me to to say this about a fellow Canadian, but A.E. Van Vogt is one of the worst writers I have ever come across, and I say this although I read dozens of his novels as a kid. Although a good ideas man, he was always willing to subsume character and story development and pretty well every other aspect of writing to the demands of plot. He had a rigid style of writing, with every book constructed in cookie cutter 800 word scenes without respect of any of the usual considerations of writing.
To put it another way, Van Vogt was the quintessential pulp writer, shaped above all by the absurdly low pay and consequent need to crank the stuff out by the bucketful with no thought of quality, just to keep from starving.
He was also the best friend of L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, during the time Hubbard was coming up with the concept for his cult, which is based on pulp fiction concepts that Hubbard and Van Vogt used to crank out.
In some ways, Frank Herbert is a more literarily accomplished version of Van Vogt. Herbert is a much better wordsmith than his predecessor and much more readable IMO, but his approach is similarly to add in plot complexities until no one, including himself, can keep track. One time as an exercise I start to follow the plot threads of Dune, but the inconsistencies and dropped plot threads became too annoying and knowledge of them interfered with my reading pleasure. So I learned to read Herbert like I do Wiliam Burroughs -- just dive in and read, inconsitencies and confusion be damned!
I would never pick up a Van Vogt book these days, whereas I might venture into the first Dune book again one day to see what I think of it now.
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