Critical opinion about the quality of van Vogt's work has been sharply divided.One early and articulate critic was then-23-year-old Damon Knight. In a 1945[12] chapter-long essay reprinted in In Search of Wonder,[10] entitled "Cosmic Jerrybuilder: A. E. van Vogt", Knight famously remarked that van Vogt "is no giant; he is a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter". Knight described The World of Null-A as "one of the worst allegedly adult science fiction stories ever published". About van Vogt's writing, Knight said:
In general van Vogt seems to me to fail consistently as a writer in these elementary ways: 1. His plots do not bear examination. 2. His choice of words and his sentence-structure are fumbling and insensitive. 3. He is unable either to visualize a scene or to make a character seem real.
About Empire of the Atom Knight wrote:
If you can only throw your reasoning powers out of gear—something many van Vogt fans find easy to do—you'll enjoy this one.
Knight also expressed misgivings about van Vogt's politics, noting that his stories almost invariably present absolute monarchy in a favorable light. But in 1974, he went partly back on his criticism after finding out about Vogt's working methods about writing down his dreams:[13]
This explains a good deal about the stories, and suggests that it is really useless to attack them by conventional standards. If the stories have a dream consistency which affects readers powerfully, it is probably irrelevant that they lack ordinary consistency.
On the other hand, when science fiction author Philip K. Dick was asked [14] which science fiction writers had influenced his work the most, he replied:
I started reading sf when I was about twelve and I read all I could, so any author who was writing about that time, I read. But there's no doubt who got me off originally and that was A.E. van Vogt. There was in van Vogt's writing a mysterious quality, and this was especially true in The World of Null A. All the parts of that book did not add up; all the ingredients did not make a coherency. Now some people are put off by that. They think that's sloppy and wrong, but the thing that fascinated me so much was that this resembled reality more than anybody else's writing inside or outside science fiction.
Dick also defended van Vogt against Damon Knight’s criticisms:
Damon feels that it's bad artistry when you build those funky universes where people fall through the floor. It's like he's viewing a story the way a building inspector would when he's building your house. But reality really is a mess, and yet it's exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.
In a review of Transfinite: The Essential A.E. van Vogt, science fiction writer Paul Di Filippo said:
Van Vogt knew precisely what he was doing in all areas of his fiction writing. There's hardly a wasted word in his stories... His plots are marvels of interlocking pieces, often ending in real surprises and shocks, genuine paradigm shifts, which are among the hardest conceptions to depict. And the intellectual material of his fictions, the conceits and tossed-off observations on culture and human and alien behavior, reflect a probing mind...Each tale contains a new angle, a unique slant, that makes it stand out.[15]
In The John W. Campbell Letters, Campbell says, "The son-of-a-gun gets hold of you in the first paragraph, ties a knot around you, and keeps it tied in every paragraph thereafter—including the ultimate last one".[9][16]
Harlan Ellison (who began reading van Vogt as a teenager)[17] wrote, "Van was the first writer to shine light on the restricted ways in which I had been taught to view the universe and the human condition".[9]
Writing in 1984 David Hartwell said:[18]
No one has taken van Vogt seriously as a writer for a long time. Yet he has been read and still is. What no one seems to have noticed is that van Vogt, more than any other single SF writer, is the conduit through which the energy of Gernsbackian, primitive wonder stories have been transmitted through the Campbellian age, when earlier styles of SF were otherwise rejected, and on into SF of the present.
The literary critic Leslie A. Fiedler said something similar:[19]
Van Vogt is a test case, ...since an apology for or analysis of science fiction which fails to come to terms with his appeal and major importance, defends or defines the genre by falsifying it.
The American literary critic Fredric Jameson says of van Vogt:
...that van Vogt's work clearly prepares the way for that of the greatest of all Science Fiction writers, Philip K. Dick, whose extraordinary novels and stories are inconceivable without the opening onto that play of unconscious materials and fantasy dynamics released by van Vogt, and very different from the more hard-science aesthetic ideologies of his contemporaries (from Campbell to Heinlein).[20]:315
Nevertheless, van Vogt still has his critics. For example, Darrell Schweitzer writing to The New York Review of Science Fiction in 1999[21] quoted a passage from the original van Vogt novelette "The Mixed Men", which he was then reading, and remarked:
This is the realism, and logic, of a small boy playing with toy soldiers in a sandbox. I'm tougher than you. I’ve got a billion spaceships! They’re brand-new. They only took 800 years to develop.
And this is a story in which most of the cast either have two brains or are really robots...and even the emotions of the human characters are programmed or deprogrammed as part of plots within counter plots. Next to this, Doc Smith was an icy realist. There is no intersection with adult reality at any point, for all van Vogt was able to write was that small boy's sandbox game with an adult level of intensity. This is, I think, the secret of van Vogt's bizarre fascination, as awful as his actual writing might be, and why he appealed so strongly to Philip K. Dick, who managed to put more adult characters and emotions into equally crazy situations. It's ultimately very strange to find this sort of writing so prominently sponsored by supposedly rational and scientifically minded John W. Campbell, when it seems to contravene everything the Golden Age stood for.
Recognition
In 1946, van Vogt and his first wife, Edna Mayne Hull, were Guests of Honor at the fourth World Science Fiction Convention.[22]
In 1980, van Vogt received a "Casper Award" (precursor to the Canadian Prix Aurora Awards) for Lifetime Achievement.[23][24]
The Science Fiction Writers of America named him its 14th Grand Master in 1995 (presented 1996).[25] There had been great controversy within SFWA regarding its long wait in bestowing its highest honor (limited to living writers, no more than one annually[25]). Writing an obituary of van Vogt, Robert J. Sawyer, a fellow Canadian writer of science fiction remarked:
There was no doubt that van Vogt should have received this honor much earlier — the injustice of him being overlooked, at least in part because of damnable SFWA politics, had so incensed Harlan Ellison, a man with an impeccable moral compass, that he'd lobbied hard on the Sci-Fi Channel and elsewhere on van Vogt's behalf.[26]
It is generally held that the "damnable SFWA politics" concerns Damon Knight, the founder of the SFWA, who abhorred van Vogt's style and politics and thoroughly demolished his literary reputation in the 1950s.[27]
Harlan Ellison was more explicit in 1999 introduction to Futures Past: The Best Short Fiction of A. E. van Vogt:[17]
... at least I was able to make enough noise to get Van the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award, which was presented to him in full ceremony during one of the last moments when he was cogent and clearheaded enough to understand that finally, at last, dragged kicking and screaming to honor him, the generation that learned from what he did and what he had created had, at last, 'fessed up to his importance.
... were the same ones who assured me that Van would never get the Grand Master until Damon Knight had gotten it first, because Damon had loathed Van's work and had, in fact written the essay that ridiculed Van and held him up to opprobrium for decades thereafter, and Damon having founded SFWA it would be an affront to him if Van got it first. Well, I don't know if that's true or not, though it is was common coin in the field for years; but Damon got the Grand Master award in 1994. And Van got it in 1995. As they say during sweeps week on television: coincidence or conspiracy?
In 1996, van Vogt received a Special Award from the World Science Fiction Convention "for six decades of golden age science fiction".[24] That same year, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted him in its inaugural class of two deceased and two living persons, along with writer Jack Williamson (also living) and editors Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell.[28]
The works of van Vogt were translated into French by the surrealist Boris Vian (The World of Null-A as Le Monde des Å in 1958), and van Vogt's works were "viewed as great literature of the surrealist school".[29] In addition, 'Slan' was published in French, translated by Jean Rosenthal, under the title À la poursuite des Slans, as part of the paperback series 'Editions J'ai Lu: Romans-Texte Integral' in 1973, this edition also listing the following works by van Vogt as having been published in French as part of this series: Le Monde des Å, La faune de l'espace, Les joueurs du Å, L'empire de l'atome, Le sorcier de Linn, Les armureries d'Isher, Les fabricants d'armes, and Le livre de Ptath.[30]
Damon Knight hated Lovecraft too. Joanna Russ said Knight nearly cried when she told him she was a huge Lovecraft fan.