1940 in science fiction: Slan

I picked up A. E. Van Vogt's Slan at the library. Classic scifi can be fun, and although it did keep me engaged, man this was bad. Since it was his first novel I guess I should cut him a break, but his narrative style was just terrible... he produced some of the most stilted prose imaginable: this guy was to smooth narrative as Jack Kirby was to life drawing.

And all through one almost endless week a snug-fitting, leech-shaped metal monstrosity hugged inch by inch over the surface of the ship, straining with its frightful power the very structure of the atoms, till the foot-thick walls of the long, sleek machine were ten-point steel from end to end.

Slan Chapter 12, ¶ 13

Here he exercised remarkable restraint by leaving two nouns desolate without the comforting presence of powerful adjectives. Elsewhere he also showed off his shiny new verb actuate with the insistence of a four-year-old showing off his shiny new wagon.

But seriously, it's pretty easy to take potshots at atom-age scifi, which was marketed mostly to teenagers and didn't exactly have a great deal of critical editorial talent applied to it. The ideas in the book certainly were groundbreaking at the time: nuclear energy, genetics, and even information science. The Library Journal says "essential for all libraries" and although that's a bit of a stretch, it's a worthy read for a true scifi fan.