The Weapon Shops of Ishur--A.E. Van Vogt

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A. E. Van Vogt--"The Weapon Shops of Ishur"

This is "hard" sf from the Golden Age, a book I've read several times, by one of my favorite authors. I sometimes think that Van Vogt was the model for Kurt Vonnegut's fictional sf author, Kilgore Trout. The wooden characters, the space opera plots, the frequently dazzling brilliance of ideas that reflects from every surface. At their best his books achieve a dream-like quality, not surprisingly, since I recently learned that Van Vogt arranged to be awakened every two or three hours so that he could write down his dreams. Philip K. Dick, arguably our best sf writer, admired him greatly, and acknowledged his influence on his own work.

So what is "The Weapon Shops of Ishur"? First, I suppose it's a feast for fans of the 2nd Amendment.

A Chicago reporter, c. 1940, sees a shop suddenly materialize on the street he's in. Its window is filled with weapons the like of which he's never seen; there's a strangely revolving sign glowing with the words "The Right To Bear Weapons Is The Right To Be Free". He steps inside, and he, and the shop, are instantly whisked to the future. He is pushed at once into a specially insulated suit and told that he is to be one end of a fulcrum, the other being the gun platform that the Imperial Empress is building to obliterate the weapon shop, the last bastion of freedom. It cannot fire while it is being moved through time, and while it will only move a little, he, being lighter, will move a great way. So the reporter moves farther and farther into the past and future while the plot plays out, far away from him.

These are the first pages, and the rest--it is not a long novel--are plotted with equal intricacy. Van Vogt ends it with one of his more brilliant coups de theatre, a particular specialty, and pleasure, of his writing. What is a coup de theatre? It is bringing all the themes of the novel together in a single stunning, quite brief, climax, and Van Vogt is its master.

Unfortunately, this book is no longer in print, but you can probably find copies on amazon or abebooks.com. "Slan" and "Voyage of the Space Beagle", are, I believe, still in print. They're both pretty good novels, but I don't like them quite as much as "Weapon Shops of Ishur".