Slan

In the 1940s, the Golden Age of science fiction flowered in the magazine Astounding. Editor John W. Campbell, Jr., discovered and promoted great new writers such as A.E. van Vogt, whose novel Slan was one of the works of the era.

Slan is the story of Jommy Cross, the orphan mutant outcast from a future society prejudiced against mutants, or slans. Throughout the forties and into the fifties, Slan was considered the single most important SF novel, the one great book that everyone had to read. Today it remains a monument to pulp SF adventure, filled with constant action and a cornucopia of ideas. This edition has a new introduction by Kevin J. Anderson.

The Slans, a superior race of telepaths, are isolated and persecuted by the "normal" humans. The young Jommy Cross's mother dies in a pogrom and he struggles to survive. With its obvious evocation of the Holocaust, this novel, first published in 1941, made an enormous impression. Van Vogt (1912-2000) was an SFFWA Grand Master.

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Slan, is the story of a young mutant who can read minds, among other powers, fleeing persecution by the society that killed his parents. Although other writers had previously used the superman motif in science fiction stories, declares Sam Moskowitz in Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction," Van Vogt seems to have been the first science-fiction author with the courage to explore the sociological implications of the superhuman race living in and among humans." Slan "is still, after forty years, widely regarded as a classic, and continues the mainstay of [Van Vogt's] fame," says Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Arthur Jean Cox. "By any standard," Moskowitz concludes, "it was a milestone in science fiction."

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.