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> Summary of Changes Made
> Nov 3 | Summary of Cosmic Encounter posted
> Oct 12 | Various tinkerings
> Oct 4 | 7 new coverscans and 5 taken down, Compendium corrected
> Sep 19 | Website restructuring, and many pages redesigned
> Sep 17 | 6 new coverscans added, Covers mainpage tinkered with
> Sep 15 | Various corrections and tinkerings
> Sep 1 | Compendium 1.9, The Shadow Men cover and illustrations, "Haunted Atoms" synopsis
> May 29 | Various tinkerings
> Apr 30 | The Three Worlds of Null-A, Database 3.4, 1957 photo
> Apr 10 | Put up 54 new coverscans (!)
> Feb 28 | Synopses converted from PDF to HTML, Links page tinkered with
> Feb 11 | Orban illustrations (part 3)
> Jan 17 | Various tinkerings, link added
> Jan 10 | Compendium 1.8
> Jan 1 | Compendium 1.7, Book of Ptath illustrations, & News

> November 3rd, 2003
> Well, a funny thing happened. I intended to write summaries for "Death Talk" and "The Wellwisher", but found myself re-reading his 1980 novel Cosmic Encounter and summarizing that instead. I really enjoyed it this time around, and as a result my comments — usually just a couple of paragraphs — ended up being three pages. I also created a nifty little chart that lays out the complex time-twisting plot, partly as an aid for people who may read it someday, but mainly for my own benefit to get the story straight in my head! To those of you who may be interested in reading it in the near future, I recommend you do so before reading my synopsis to keep from spoiling the surprises. Though it may be helpful to read my summaries of the chapters as you finish reading each one to get a clearer picture of what is going on. And I think the chart will be a definite aid for better comprehension. It's a very complex book, and I just wish I'd had a better idea of what was going on when I first read it!

> October 12th, 2003
> Thanks to Hervé Hauck, the artist who did the cover for the 1978 Zebra edition of The Gryb has been identified as Colin Hay. This is one of my favorite covers, so I figured such exalted status warranted its own update. The Compendium file has also been corrected to include this new information.

> October 4th, 2003
> Added seven new coverscans, all in mint condition. I also think this is the best bunch of scans I've ever done, with Barlowe's cover for The Silkie being perhaps the best of the best. The Battle of Forever (DAW 1982) — Canadian printing, has same cover as US The Beast (DAW 1984) — Canadian printing, has same cover as US Null-A Three (Sphere 1985) — the first English edition, very rare. I posted the back cover as well, since this edition is rarely seen and the blurb is pretty good too. The Silkie (DAW 1982) — Canadian printing, has same cover as US Two Hundred Million A.D. (Paperback Library 1971) — rather rare The War Against the Rull (Ace 1977) — very hard to find I've also decided to take down five magazine covers. This was done for two reasons: (1) I really don't care much for them, (2) They were taking up half a MB of space that could've been used for something I actually like, and (3) They don't illustrate a van Vogt story. (All right, three reasons.) (Note: As of February 2004 these have all been put back up, since I have much more space now that I've moved the site to Earthlink.) Astounding Science Fiction (October 1945, Part 3 of World of Â) Astounding Science Fiction (November 1946, "The Chronicler") Astounding Science Fiction (December 1948, Part 3 of The Players of Â) Astounding Science Fiction (January 1949, Part 4 of The Players of Â) Startling Stories (January 1950, The Shadow Men) I've updated the Compendium to include more accurate information about four books: Battle of Forever — 1982 Canadian edition printed in August, at $2.50 Cn Beast — 1984 Canadian edition printed in February, at $2.95 Cn Silkie — 1982 Canadian edition printed in January, at $2.50 Cn Two Hundred Million A.D. — the 1971 Paperback Library edition is 50 cents, not 75 I've also finally got around to adding links to Yutaka Morita's new van Vogt site, on my Covers and Links pages.

> September 19th, 2003
> Did some major, long-overdue restructuring of the site, as well as redesigning several pages. Most importantly, I've split the large "Update.html" file into three smaller ones so they will load faster — 2003.html, 2002.html, and 2001.html. I've also discovered two wonderful HTML tags — "VSPACE" and "HSPACE." As a result, my review of Drake's book, as well as all the photo pages, now look much nicer. I've tested these newly aligned pages in both Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape 6, but I can't guarantee they'll look right in earlier versions of these browsers, or indeed in any other browsers. I also added a new picture of Van from 1953, and moved the page about the 1954 picture (on the front page of the site) from the Photos folder to the main directory as just AEvV-c1954.html — this way the picture will load as part of the page. I don't know why I didn't think of that before! (Note: As of December 9th, 2004, I redid all my internal links using relative path commands, so this sort of convoluted shuffling skullduggery is now totally unnecessary.) The front page has also been altered — the contents order has been reshuffled to be more logical and better reflect which sections of the site are more important, and I've also done a few tinkerings to make it easier to read. Virtually every page of the site has been gone over and made ever so slightly better, though I doubt anyone but myself will even noticed what's been done!

> September 17th, 2003
> Put up 6 new coverscans — The Beast (Manor 1978), Computerworld (DAW 1983), the front and back covers of the very rare Computer Eye (DAW 1985), The Empire of Isher (Orb 2000), and The Mind Cage (Timescape 1981). I also tinkered with the Covers mainpage, rewriting the introductory text to make it easier to read, more informative and up-to-date. I also noticed, to my horror, that Netscape turned my beautiful HTML into puréed garbage — and presumably has since day 1. So I've had to go through the page and explain very carefully and very slowly to Netscape exactly what it is I want it to do. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, knew exactly what I wanted and displayed it correctly. I just cringe with shame when I wonder what all you Netscape people must think of my webpage-creating skills for all these months!

> September 15th, 2003
> Just a few odds and ends, mainly maintenance and a few corrections: Firstly, the artist who did the illustrations for The Shadow Men has been identified as Stephen Lawrence, thanks to Yutaka Morita and Robert Weinberg — to quote Mr. Weinberg: "The artwork in question is by Lawrence Sterne Stevens, who sometimes used the pen-name, Stephen Lawrence. Actually, he and his son, Peter Stevens, both did work under the name Stephen Lawrence, though Peter mostly did covers, while his father [. . .] did both covers and interiors." Secondly, the ever-helpful Michael McKinney pointed out to me that for all these months I've been consistently misreading the title of the new van Vogt short story collection Transfinite as Transinfinite, erroneously adding an "in" to "finite". It would seem that nobody else in the whole wide world had any trouble reading it correctly, while I was merrily typing away, meticulously propagating this error throughout my website. You people must got them sharpie eagle eyes! However, I've been able to come up with a convenient explanation for this mistake — for quite a while the publisher's working title for this book was Approximately Infinity, so when they changed it to the similar-sounding Transfinite I merely carried over the keyword "infinity." I've corrected the News page, as well as the Compendium and Database files, to account for this misread title. But, all in all, I must say that my misread title is better than the real one! Thirdly, I also corrected the publication information for "Haunted Atoms" in the Database, as well as providing correct data on "A Lone Yank in China's Brainwash City" — thanks to Yutaka Morita, it has now been identified as an abridgment of the 1962 novel The Violent Man, and that the issue of Men it appeared in was printed in August 1964, and not the more ambiguous "Fall". I also did a few other corrections to the Database, token tinkerings that allow me to yet again postpone the reformatting and thorough double-check I've intended to do since last summer. Trouble is it's such a gargantuan file that the mere prospect of it makes me giddy, so I do these periodic maintenance motions to pacify my overactive bibliographer's conscience and placate the imaginary teeming masses that are clamoring loudly for a still more accurate and readable document.

> September 1st, 2003
> The Compendium has been updated to 1.9, thanks in large part to corrections and additional information provided by Hervé Hauck. Here's a rundown of what's new: Away and Beyond— #13's cover artist added The Book of Ptath— #12's ISBN corrected; #4's price corrected (60 cents, not 50 cents) Darkness on Diamondia— #3's cover artist corrected (Tim White, not Bruce Pennington) Destination: Universe!— #18's ISBN corrected and cover artist added Futures Past— #1's month and page count added, ISBN corrected; #2's month added, ISBn corrected The Man With a Thousand Names— #5's price, ISBN, and cover artist corrected The Mind Cage— #5's month added, page count corrected, cover art description added The Moonbeast— 1984 printing added The Pawns of Null-A— page count added for #4 and #5, cover artist added for #5 Slan— #9's page count corrected and cover description added (photomontage) Transinfinite— format, month, price, ISBN, and page count corrected/added The Voyage of the Space Beagle— c. 1978 printing added, cover artist added for Panther editions c. 1973 - 1979 The Weapon Makers— information on various NEL editions corrected and added The Weapon Shops of Isher— #8's ISBN corrected The World of Null-A— there is still a great deal of confusion on my part about the Sphere printings in the mid-'80s. Apparently there is a 1985 printing with an ISBN of 8816-1, although the '81 is stated as the 5th printing and the '86 is stated as 6th. I've made a new entry for the '85, choosing to ignore the stated printing numbers as they are often wildly inaccurate, and made 8816-1 the ISBN for the '81 and '86 printings, since all three feature the same Pennington cover and have similar prices — therefore suggesting merely reprints rather than new editions (starting in the '70s most publishers only assigned new ISBNs to new editions). So be warned that information on these three printings is still a bit hazy. I've also scanned in and put up the five (well, four-and-a-half, really) illustrations by an unknown artist (now identified as Stephen Lawrence, as of 9-15-03) that accompanied the novel The Shadow Men in the January 1950 issue of Startling Stories. This novel is the first version of the book that was expanded in 1953 as The Universe Maker. I've also posted the front cover (done by Earle Bergey) on the Covers page. I've also finally written a summary of the short story "Haunted Atoms". It took me a year and a half years to get around to it, but only about four hours to actually do it! I think there's a lesson there for all of us. (Incidentally, I've discovered that some of the information in the Database about "Haunted Atoms" is inaccurate — I'll be sure to correct it when I update it to 3.5.)

> May 29th, 2003
> Thanks to Don Erikson, the artist who did the excellent cover painting for the Jove/HBJ edition of Destination: Universe! has been identified as Steve Hickman. Minor corrections have been made to the Three Worlds of Null-A file, thanks to Don Ketchek (providing information on the Easton and Ariel editions) and Michael McKinney (reporting bad links); I've also added information on the novel's publication in the 1959 omnibus Triad.

> April 30th, 2003
> The Three Worlds of Null-A, my comparative study of the three versions of The World of Null-A (the 1945 serial, the 1948 rewrite, and the 1970 revision) has finally been completed, after 10 months of work. The Database has also been finally updated to 3.4, after almost a year of sitting on the back-burner of my hard drive (if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor), while I diddled with other projects. This time around, I'd like to thank Grant Thiessen for providing information on A Report on the Violent Male (c. 1961), "Rebirth: Earth" (1971), and, through the 1979 interview he conducted with Van, Supermind (1977) and To Conquer Kiber — sorry I took so long to make these changes! There have also been a few tinkerings with various bits of the document. Also, added a new photo of Van from 1957.

> April 10th, 2003
> I added 54 new coverscans! I now have 10 MB, compared with the 5 I previously had, on the server and can therefore put up the great majority of the scans I've made during the past 7 months from my own collection. As a result, I've done some rearranging, the upshot of which is that the old covers page has been renamed FavCov.html and still lists just my ten favorites, while Covers.html is now the index for the "ordinary" covers. The individual pages for my favorite covers have been renamed, and in some instances slightly tinkered with. With luck there will be another big update at the end up April, to include my somewhat enormous (book-length) Three Worlds of Null-A study.

> February 28th, 2003
> Worked on the Plot Summaries area, mainly because it's something I've been meaning to get around to for several eons now. There aren't any new ones, however, it's just housekeeping activities. But there will be a nice new synopsis sometime in April which I hope you'll all find interesting. I've restructured the directory containing the plot synopses (it is now "/~icshi/Summaries/" with a capital S rather than lower case, just because I like consistency and all the other directories have capital letters), as well as tinkering with the synopses themselves. I've converted them all from PDF format to HTML, in some instances making corrections and adding extra comments. I did this for several reasons. For one, it is now much much easier to read the summaries online. Secondly, Google will now make a better cache of the pages to index. Thirdly, I now know enough about HTML code to make this possible - before, I relied too heavily on PDFs because I didn't know much about HTML. (Some of you would say I still don't — and I'd be forced to agree!) Please note that the PDF-Summaries.zip file, which contains all the summaries for easy download and offline reading, contains new PDFs of the summaries which are easier to read and use than the old ones, as well as having been corrected to match the contents of the new HTML pages. [As of February 12th, 2006, all summaries are available only as online HTML documents.] I've also disposed of the summary for "Femworld," since that story is just the first five chapters of Renaissance, and I now realize that having a separate summary for that was ridiculously redundant. I also tinkered with the format of the Links page, and added a few new sites.

> February 11th, 2003
> Added Paul Orban's illustrations to World of Â Part Three.

> January 17th, 2003
> Did various bits of overdue tinkerings (including a correction on the photo of Van and Lydia, thanks to Brian Forbes), and added a link (SciFan site).

> January 10th, 2003
> Created Compendium 1.8 to eliminate errors that insinuated themselves into 1.7, and added Hubert Rogers as cover artist to the TOR edition of Slan.

> January 1st, 2003
> Added all six of A.J. Donnell's illustrations to The Book of Ptath to the Magazine and Book Illustrations page. Also updated the Compendium to 1.7 — I've not yet finished the update to 2.0, which is progressing slowly. Yet I've gathered quite a bit of information about his main corpus of works (novels, collections, omnibuses, non-fiction), so I figured I'd alter a copy of the incomplete 2.0 file to include just the main corpus entries thus making a 1.7. Regarding the progress of 2.0 — I'm about 50% completed with the anthology section and have not yet even begun the magazine section. There are far more anthologies containing Van's stories than I had previously thought and scrounging up information on all the various printings of each one is taking a far greater amount of time than anticipated. I'm also up to my eyebrows in other projects, some of them involving van Vogt, others not. Here's a rundown of all the new information in 1.7: In previous versions of the Compendium, the artist Bart Forbes was erroneously listed as "Burt Forbes" — I apologize for this error. Jove editions now listed as "Jove / HBJ" The Book of Ptath — added 1975 Garland facsimile edition The Changeling — #4, #5, and #6 have 128 pages, not 90; the cover art for these three printings also is the same as the cover to the June 1970 New English Library's printing of The Weapon Makers — cover art commonly attributed to Bruce Pennington, but these Manor editions of The Changeling credit the "cover design" to Tony Destefano — make of that what you will Destination: Universe! — add Jove Canadian printing ($1.50) Empire of the Atom — added cover artist guess for Timescape printing (#14) Enchanted Village — interior illustrations by Joan Hanke Woods Futures Past — cover by Michael Dashow The House That Stood Still — added Canadian printing by Pocket Books in October 1980; also discovered the Pocket Books' text is actually The Mating Cry (1960) and not the original 1950 text Hypnotism Handbook --Borden 1965 2nd Masters of Time (omnibus) — added information on interior illustrations by Edd Cartier "The Mind Cage --Avon 1958 cover is by Richard Powers, not "A.F.I." as stated in Stephensen-Payne; added cover artist for 1982 Timescape printing (Vincent Di Fate, same as 1978 cover) Mission to the Stars — added cover artist guess for Digit printings (Ed Valigursky — same art as for a late 60s Ace edition of Simak's City, H-30) The Pawns of Null-A — added 1970 Sphere edition The Silkie --1974 printing, date confirmed, and is $1.25 Two Hundred Million A.D. — 1978 Zebra edition was printed in June Transinfinite — planned for February 2003; cover design by Alice N. S. Lewis; Rick Katze now added as co-editor Tyranopolis --1979 Sphere printing added Universe Maker — price, cover artist added for #4 (4th Ace printing) The Violent Man — #3 and #5 cover artists added (educated guess) The Winged Man - added 2nd DAW printing (85 is 3rd) World of Null-A — 1970 Berkley edition has cover by Richard Powers; added more information for the 2002 TOR edition