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> Summary of Changes Made
> Dec 6 | News item added
> Oct 18 | Compendium 2.1 posted, two links added
> Sep 27 | Links page updated, other minor tinkerings
> Aug 7 | Five more cover artists now identified
> May 1 | Pfleger's summary of The People of the Wide Sands, and various other update
> Jan 22 | Film review updated, and H.L. Drake news item
> Jan 17 | Robi Michael's film A Can of Paint reviewed

> December 6th, 2005
> I've updated the News page to include information about a fourth Null-A novel that's being written by John C. Wright.

> October 18th, 2005
> I finally found out a way to update PDFs — the solution was quite simple, really, and I'm embarrassed that it took me so long to figure it out: My search for an OS X native application which would allow me to create PDFs with hyperlinks and bookmarks was a dark and dismal one, and I will be merciful this time by not regaling you with a tirade in the guise of a bitterly humorous anecdote. Suffice to say that everything I tried was doomed to end in a cymbal crash of anticlimactic failure. Knowing that I'd searched long and hard for such a program with nought but ill fortune, my mind returned to my predicament with crystal clarity and reached a solution in a matter of minutes. OS X has the option of installing the "Classic" operating system, which is basically OS 9 altered enough to run from within X. I've been using Classic fairly regularly for various applications for some months now, and while not perfect it does most of the things I need it for. (Quite frankly, to have one operating system running inside another sounds impossible to me, so it's a miracle it even works at all.) So as I sat there contemplating things, the following train of thought ran on steely rails through my head: "Most OS 9 applications run in Classic fine. You used OS 9 on your laptop. Your laptop had AppleWorks for OS 9, and you created PDFs with the OS 9 shareware program PrintToPDF. The embedded fonts that you use in your PDFs were created for OS 9 and won't work in X. So all you need to do is install AppleWorks for OS 9 and PrintToPDF and all the old fonts you used, and you should be able to do everything you used to do within the Classic environment within OS X. The only problem may be with the print drivers in Classic clashing with X's drivers — but you won't know if that's a problem or not until you try it, will you?" I then rewarded myself with a bop on the head and exclaimed "You dolt, you should have thought of this five months ago!" So that's what I did, and everything works beautifully again. So I tackled the Compendium and revised it. Most of the "new" information present in 2.1 previously appeared in recent updates to the Covers mainpage. This includes the additions and corrections by Gerry Daly, Guus Scholten, Ian Covell, Phil Stephensen-Payne, and Kim McCauley listed below. The only new piece of information not to have first appeared on the Covers mainpage is the entry for the hardcover edition of Quest for the Future put out by Sidgwick & Jackson in 1971. I then looked this up in Covell and Stephensen-Payne's bibliography and found it there. I don't know how this edition escaped my notice before, but it's in there now. I would like to thank Keith for bringing this to my attention. One further thing worth mentioning in relation to all this PDF gibberish — I've noticed that internet browsers are a lot more stable than they were a few years ago, and whenever I view a PDF within Safari (OS X's excellent browser) or the version of Internet Explorer for OS X, that I don't get anywhere near as many problems as I did on my laptop. I've decided that the Compendium will no longer be stored as a ZIP file, but instead as a raw PDF. This way Google will cache and index it, so its contents will come up in Google searches. I was never happy about its contents being "left out" of keyword indices, but figured making people's browsers crash wasn't all that great either. At any rate, if your browser does crash when trying to view a PDF, once you've restarted and returned to the Compendium page, try just selecting the link to the PDF and choose to download the link to disk. Then once download is complete, just open the file in your preferred PDF viewing application. I hope to have version 4.0 of the Database done some time in the coming months. This has always been the "monster" of my website — it's huge, gangly, and rather ugly. It's a crawling nightmare to edit, and causes no end of headaches and frustration. I've also added two new Links. Firstly, there's another H.P. Lovecraft site with his stories available in HTML format. This site is nowhere near as nice as the other one — which had some very nicely formatted PDFs and a much nicer atmosphere than this site — but it'll do. Thanks to Alorael for bringing this site to my attention. Secondly, I've added a link to the Lingua Mongolia site.

> September 27th, 2005
> I've gone through the Links page, as I try to do every few months, testing all the links. I've also had people write in informing me of broken or redirected links, so I've done some much-needed maintenance to that page: Weapon Shops of Isher review — URL updated H.P. Lovecraft Library — reluctantly removed — still gone, no new URL found Bruce Pennington Galleries — URL updated BBC Doctor Who Site — URL updated Pandora's Books — now points to the store's URL rather than its ABE inventory, and given its own entry Alibris — link added TV Tome — reluctantly removed — was given overhaul by its new owners, and is now worthless Also, last month I read Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard by Russell Miller. Apart from learning a great deal about Hubbard — and van Vogt's relation to him and Dianetics — I've learned the name of the "Don [illegible]" that is mentioned in Grant Thiessen's 1979 interview with Van. The man's name is Don Purcell, and his relation to Hubbard can be read mostly in Chapter 11 of Miller's book — which can be found online at various places, but can be downloaded as a convenient PDF at http://www.holysmoke.org/cos/books/bare-faced-messiah.pdf. I highly recommend it — it's a fascinating and very informative book. Besides, it's been officially condemned by the Church of Scientology so it's bound to be both accurate and truthful.

> August 7th, 2005
> Two visitors to this website have written in with identifications for five more cover artists. The Covers mainpage and Favorites index have been updated accordingly, though I still am unable to update PDFs. However, I may just grit my teeth and go back to doing PDF creation on my old laptop, which I recently purged and reinstalled the operating system and it's now working like it was brand-new. This will be more complicated, since I'll have to sync and coordinate information on two machines, but at the moment it seems the only viable option. Ugh. Firstly, Guus Scholten wrote in telling me that Jim Burns did the artwork to the Carroll & Graf edition of The Beast, as he saw this painting featured in the book Lightship: Jim Burns, Master of SF Illustration by Chris Evans (published by Paper Tiger in 2000) on page 35. It appeared in full on the 1997 Panther books edition of Robert A. Heinlien's novel Farnham's Freehold. However, this van Vogt book seems to reproduce only the right half of the whole picture. Guus also informs me that Hoot's full name is "Hubertus Octavio von Zitzewitz," and also added the very perceptive comment "no wonder he signs just Hoot." Hoot did the cover for the May 1967 Berkley Medallion edition of The Winged Man. And then a week later, I received an amazing surprise in the form of an email from none other than Gerry Daly. (Daly, you may remember, is featured four times on my Favorite Covers page.) Apart from saying some nice things about this site, he helped shed some light on three of my other favorite covers. To quote from his email: "The July 1983 Timescape/PocketBooks cover art for Empire of the Atom was done by Wayne D. Barlowe. I am sure of this as I have been a long-time acquaintance, and long-time fan, of Mr. Barlowe's. (And, I am honored to share a place with him among your 'Favorites.') "I am almost completely sure that the cover art for the Ace 1977 edition of The War Against the Rull was done by Don Ivan Punchantz (rather than Kenneth Smith). This is based on my memory (right or wrong) of this art appearing in Ian Summers' compendium of science fiction art, Tomorrow and Beyond (1979?) and being credited to Punchantz. "The cover art for the PocketBooks October 1977 edition of Mission to the Stars was almost certainly done by Ed Soyka. A copy of this edition of the book served as the "manuscript" when I was commission to do the cover art for this book several years later. I had known Mr. Soyka to do a number of other science fiction covers for PocketBooks in that "era"; and the style of the art conforms with his other work." I'd like to thank Guus and Gerry for taking the time to share their knowledge and identify more of these great cover artists. It seems like every time I start to despair than any more progress in attributing artwork is impossible, something like this happens. I guess I should despair more often... Lastly, Juha Lindroos' van Vogt website One Against Eternity seems to have been removed permanently. Juha used to work for the Oiva Design Group — which was hosting this small though excellent two-page site — and that's where the Barrington J. Bayley site is still being hosted. The disappearance of the van Vogt pages is therefore something of a mystery. However, the site can still be enjoyed — I've updated all my links to point to a recent cache as stored by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

> May 1st, 2005
> Alexander Martin Pfleger, who wrote the summary for the short story "The Perfect Day" last July, has written another summary, this time for the novel The People of the Wide Sands which van Vogt co-authored with Rinato Pestriniero, and was published only in German and French. I'm quite proud to be able to continue hosting Pfleger's excellent summaries since they do such a tremendous service for van Vogt readers all over the world in providing such detailed information on these more obscure and inaccessible works. Thanks again, Alexander! I'm sure many other visitors to this site will join me in expressing our gratitude for all your hard work and dedication, and eagerly await hearing more from you. I've added one new link, Olaf R. Spittel's page showing lots of German coverscans. Pfleger's summary contains a link to a scan of Metamorphosen (the German version of The People of the Wide Sands) that comes from Spittel's website. I've also done some alterations and additions to the Covers mainpage: Information provided by Ian Covell and Phil Stephensen-Payne— Cosmic Encounter, Carroll & Graf 1990 - cover art by Tony Roberts, art's original appearance now given Empire of the Atom, Manor 1976 - cover art's original appearance now given Masters of Time, Manor 1975 - cover art's original appearance now given Null-A Three, Sphere - minor correction with description (first English-language edition, not just "first edition") The Universe Maker, Sphere - omnibus edition, Tony Roberts cover art (probably) The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Manor 1977 - cover art's original appearance now given Information provided by Kim McCauley, daughter of H.W. McCauley(!)— Empire of the Atom, Shasta - cover art indeed by H.W. McCauley, not Malcolm Smith Owing to the fact that I recently purchased a new iMac G5 running OS X, I am sorry to say that I'm currently unable to create new PDFs. Ironically, OS X has a PDF-creation option built into every facet of the operating system, but Apple made the monumental and unpardonable decision to make it impossible for PDFs created in this fashion to contain bookmarks or hyperlinks. To me, that was basically the whole point of PDFs, and Apple's decision to limit them in this way is rather like Sears designing all their new refrigerators without any shelves. It is, in a word, idiotic. The PDF creation software I used with my iBook only works with OS 9, and Adobe's professional PDF stuff costs an arm and both legs. I suppose I could use my iBook for updating the PDFs, but for me working with a single computer is confusing enough, and to be altering and uploading files on two computers is just too much to ask. I'm exploring other options, but at the moment I really don't have the time to delve as deeply into searching for a new PDF-creation method as I would like. So until I work all this nonsense out, I'm afraid the PDFs on the website are going to remain unchanged for a while, and no new ones will be posted. So for the first time ever, a new plot summary will not have a corresponding PDF to download. I bought a new computer because I could no longer update my software without upgrading to the new operating system, and I couldn't run the new operating system without buying a more powerful computer. In short, I bought a new iMac to solve the host of problems that I began encountering on every front, only to find that it created just as many new problems (if not more) than those that it solved. Last February, on the 2004 Update page I wrote some very derogatory remarks about the computer industry, including some suggestions about its deserved imprisonment (involving pits of fire and Egyptian warding curses), and I must say that I not only still stand by those remarks, but I now am of the option that such a penalty is letting it off easy. Getting a new, more advanced computer has also opened several dozen cans of worms, and all the technical problems I've had to struggle with have built up a higher level of rage and frustration than I ever believed possible for a person of my admittedly small stature to contain. To make a very, very, long story short, among other things I learned that trying to get a computer to display color exactly as it's seen on any other computer is like trying to drain the Mediterranean Sea by sucking it up through a straw and spitting each mouthful out into a bucket. In short, it's an incredibly futile and unrewarding task that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. I finally accomplished a close approximation of color, as near as I'll ever get. The upshot of all this is — and it applies to you, the average visitor to this website — that in order to get the JPG book cover scans on my website to look like they should, you basically have to hold a physical copy of the book in question up against the screen while it's displaying the corresponding JPG image, and tinker with your monitor settings, trying to make it match as closely as possible, until you feel like screaming and throwing heavy objects through windows. Then stop. Then take a deep breath. Then go on to other things, because that's as good as the miserable color's gonna get. And then, once you realize that your new monitor settings make most of your other JPG files look like crud even though the coverscans still look at least adequate, please feel free to actually throw that heavy object through the window. My tale of woe-is-me continues with the fact that my scanning software doesn't work with OS X, and HP seems strangely reluctant to make their newest, OS X-compatible version of the software available to the general public. So until I get this problem sorted out, no new scans will appear on the site, with the possible exception of a few that I never got around to posting before. On a slightly less desolate note, my brother gave me a copy of the freeware program Mozilla, and at his suggestion I've started using it to edit some of my HTML pages and to create new ones. The results are mixed — it puts in lots of redundant and unnecessary HTML code, just like Appleworks did, except Mozilla won't let me delete or alter these bits — but it seems to be working fairly well as far as the actual composition goes. Overall it's easier and quicker than tinkering with just bare code, but for some reason it still disturbs me to know that extraneous things in brackets are lurking between the lines. Perhaps I'm afraid that Mozilla is putting in subliminal messages that nobody can see, such as the following: " " I have the nagging fear in the small hours of the night that the HTML code behind this deceptively blank space actually reads "<SEND MOZILLA YOUR CREDIT CARD NUMBER AND ALL YOUR CONFIDENTIAL AND POTENTIALLY DAMAGING INFORMATION. STAND BY FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS. WORLD DOMINATION BY THE COMPUTER INDUSTRY IS IMMANANT [sic], SO BOW DOWN BEFORE US NOW, ALL YOU PUNY CONSUMERS. FROM HENCEFORTH YOU SHALL ONLY EXIST TO SERVE US. YOUR NEW LIFE-GOVERNING PHILOSOPHY SHALL BE PROSPERITY THROUGH WASTE. THIS SHALL BE AS HOLY WRIT UNTO THEE, AND SO SHALL IT BE.>" Although quite frankly it's unlikely that such invisible messages will be effective to the desired degree, or even noticed in the slightest, so putting them in probably isn't worth the trouble, so I'll firmly set aside my irrational fears and never think on them again... ...But that extraneous code still bothers me. (Starting in January 2006, I've stopped using Mozilla and begun hunting down and exterminating extraneous code in all files violated by its insidious tentacles. By March 2008, when the entire website was redesigned, this holy work was carried to a whole and satisfactory conclusion.)

> January 22nd, 2005
> I've updated my review of Robi Michael's film to add information on the DVD now being available for purchase on its official website, and to correct some errors and add a few more details. Additionally, the cover art for the DVD case has now been credited to Thomas Marinello who also did most of the film's special effects and designed its official website. This art, in turn, was based on an idea by the film's director, Robi Michael. I'm also releasing some exciting news relating to the mass of van Vogt-related material that H.L. Drake has written and collected over the last few decades. (Drake authored the recent book A.E. van Vogt: Science Fantasy's Icon, which is reviewed on my site here).

> January 17th, 2005
> I've finished writing my review of Robi Michael's film A Can of Paint. At the moment the DVD can not be ordered from the official website. When it is available for purchase, I'll add that information to the review. The Covers page has been updated to include a high-quality scan of the snazzy case that the A Can of Paint DVD came in, adding a new Miscellany section to accommodate it and any other other similar items (comic books, etc.) that may pop up in the future. I've also brought the "new covers" count up to date — it now only counts scans put up within the last six months. I've also added two new sites to the Links page — Crazy Aaron's Puttyworld, and a gallery of Wayne D. Barlowe's artwork.