The War Against the Rull - Softcover

A. E. Van Vogt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312852398 ISBN 13: 9780312852399

Publisher: Tor Books, 1999

Synopsis

When A.E. van Vogt wove several of his classic stories of The Rull into a novel, he created a work of enduring popularity in the science fiction field. Now back in print for the first time in the 1990s, this Tor edition includes "The First Rull," a story that postdates the novel and makes this book the first complete edition of the saga of the war between humanity and the alien shapechangers.

About this title

Review:

You might easily mistake a list of A.E. van Vogt's classic stories for the names of bygone rides in Disney's Tomorrowland: Empire of the Atom, Mission to the Stars, Two-hundred Million A.D., Project: Spaceship. This Nebula Grand Master, while still writing well into the 1980s, was a pioneer of sci-fi's golden age, an author that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credits with creating--along with Heinlein and Asimov--"the first genuinely successful period of U.S. SF." A prolific contributor to such early mags as Thrilling Wonder, Startling Stories, and Astounding, van Vogt distinguished himself with his expert pacing, his mind-bending ideas, and--surprising in the starched-lab-coat 1940s--his serious access to weird. (Check out 1945's cult hit The World of Null-A as a prime example.)

The War Against the Rull, assembled from five stories written for Astounding between 1940 and 1950, is classic, keep-you-guessing van Vogt, even if it doesn't quite qualify for must-read status like Null-A and Slan. Our hero is Trevor Jamieson, chief scientist of the Interstellar Military Commission, on the front lines of humanity's war with a shape-shifting race of insectoid aliens known as the Rull. Jamieson may have found the key to victory, but first he must simply survive--marooned on a wild, hostile planet with a 6,000-pound, blue-furred, six-legged, human-hating telepathic bear, Jamieson escapes only to find himself trapped days later in a meteor-carved cave with a woman who wants him dead, armed with only a knife and his wits against a blood-thirsty giant weasel that can claw through solid rock. --Paul Hughes

About the Author:

A. E. Van Vogt was a SFWA Grand Master. He was born in Canada and moved to the U.S. in 1944, by which time he was well-established as one of John W. Campbell's stable of writers for Astounding Science-Fiction. He lived in Los Angeles, California and died in 2000.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0312852398
• ISBN 13: 9780312852399
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288