Alfred Elton Van Vogt is much less well known today than he was in my youth, let alone in his heyday in the 40s-50s. However, he had an immense influence on my writing, or at least my writing design process, because he knew, perhaps better than anyone, how to create a sense of wonder and build it into an adventure – perhaps with only the most tenuous logic holding it together.        Van Vogt was the quintessential writer of, for lack of a better word, spectacle-based adventures. His characters were often fairly narrow in [ Continue reading... ]