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> Summary of Changes Made
> Oct 24 | Another news item
> Oct 21 | News item
> Oct 6 | 6 new covers, 9 new illustrations
> Sep 18 | 13 new cover scans, 5 new illustrations
> Sep 7 | 12 new scans added to the covers page
> Aug 31 | Brief news update
> Aug 27 | 8 new items to the covers section
> Aug 15 | 2 new covers and 8 new illustrations
> Aug 1 | Storysource version 4; added 4 new covers and 4 new illustrations
> July 12 | News & links pages updated
> June 18 | Publication of Slanology announced
> June 13 | 1 new cover, 3 new illustrations
> May 31 | New information on the SFBC's 2-in-1 Slan volume
> Apr 27 | New photo, Storysource version 3, and new covers
> Apr 3 | New covers and a news update
> Mar 23 | All illustrations now as digitally-restored black & white images
> Mar 6 | Two reviews of Slan Hunter
> Feb 25 | More illustrations and book covers
> Feb 10 | More new covers and illustrations, and a news update
> Jan 28 | New covers and illustrations
> Jan 22 | Storysource updated to Version 2
> Jan 18 | Slan Hunter news update
> Jan 10 | News updates

> October 24th, 2007
> Two more brief news items added about Null-A Continuum.

> October 21st, 2007
> One brief news item added about Null-A Continuum.

> October 6th, 2007
> 6 new scans have been added to the Covers page. This includes the 1972 Panther edition of Destination: Universe! (front and back covers, and spine) and three magazines: Astounding Science Fiction, February 1950 (containing "The Sound"), Fantasy Book #2 (containing "Ship of Darkness"), and Fantasy Book, December 1981, front cover and table of contents (an unrelated publication containing the first U.S. appearance of van Vogt's rare short story "Death Talk"). The 9 illustrations accompanying these stories have also been added. All but "The Sound" were captured using a digital camera, so the usual apologies regarding image quality apply.

> September 18th, 2007
> 13 new scans have been added to the Covers page. This includes the 1986 NEL edition of Computerworld (front cover and a wrap-around panorama) and the first edition of Planets for Sale (various bits of the inside and out), as well as 4 covers from magazines. The issues in question are Astounding Science Fiction, April 1940 (containing "Repetition"); Other Worlds, May 1950 ("War of Nerves") and July 1950 ("Enchanted Village"); and Planet Stories, March 1951 ("The Star-Saint"). 5 new pictures have been added to the Illustrations page, the artwork that accompanied "Enchanted Village," "Repetition," "The Star-Saint" and "War of Nerves" upon their first magazine publication. All these were taken with a digital camera in order to avoid damaging the delicate pages and binding. Because of this, the proportions aren't as exact as scanned images, so I offer the usual apologies. After digging through Hewlett-Packard's labyrinthine website, I was finally able to find and buy the OS X version of the software and drivers for my scanner. So far I haven't encountered the problems I mentioned earlier, so I'm guessing it was just a glitch of the OS 9 software running in Classic... I hope. I'm keeping my fingers crossed anyway just in case.

> September 7th, 2007
> 12 new scans have been added to the Covers page. This includes various bits from The Mating Cry (1960), Planets for Sale (1965), The World of A (Easton Press), and the issue of Spaceway containing the first appearance of van Vogt's short-short story "Him." Needless to say, my scanner is behaving itself for the moment...

> August 31st, 2007
> The News page has been updated with some information about Null-A Continuum finally moving closer to publication.

> August 27th, 2007
> I've added 8 new items from 2 books to the covers page — the 1951 Simon & Schuster edition of Slan and the 1950 Grosset & Dunlap edition of The World of A. This includes the covers as well as a variety of goodies from the inside and outside. Sadly, my venerable scanner has been acting up lately — sometimes it will work fine, and other times it decides that every scan needs to be bright green and made out of Lego blocks. But this scanner has served me well for the past five years and I'm loathe to give it up for a number of reasons, including expense, the reluctance to learn new software, and (of course) plain old-fashioned sentiment. And I've done a bit of looking and haven't found a likely candidate to replace it with. So if no new scans appear here in the next few weeks you'll know that my scanner has finally gone completely Picasso on me. In other news, a few days ago I finally got around to entering the 21st Century by getting high-speed internet. It's a fair bit more expensive than dial-up (about $40 a month compared to $20) but well worth it. I held back on switching for so long mainly because of the expense. But when I considered that the internet plays an increasing role in our lives, and that files keep getting bigger and bigger and software updates are more important than ever, and that I run a bloomin' website for Pete's sake, I had to remind myself that the only way to get some of the nicer things in this life is to grit your teeth and just pay for them. And now that I have it I can say with full assurance that it is well worth it. The difference in speed is amazing and I can enjoy things now that I automatically and unconsciously discounted as impossible when using dial-up, where download speeds topped at 5 KB per second. (You know, things like quickly downloading music from the iTunes Store, or exploring the Starcraft II website, or chuckling over the Monk "webisodes" on USA's website, or looking at my roof on Google Earth, or even just to see all of the thumbnail images load within my lifetime on the Slan page over at Magnus' site.) I've been able to explore the internet as if it were brand-new all over again. The convenience is extraordinary — no more manual connecting and disconnecting, no more tying up the phone line while I'm online, and even the most media-intensive pages load like a snap. I can download huge files in minutes instead of hours, saving myself precious time, and downloading software updates is no longer a hassle. If there are any you out there who are still muddling along with creepy-crawly dial-up as I have for the past six years, I highly recommend switching. I am fully aware that I am one of the last people in the Western world to upgrade to broadband, so my comments here are directed to the three of you who haven't. If even one person finds my comments helpful, I'm happy. The rest of you can just smile down on my antiquated advice with sweetly patronizing benevolence. With apologies to Mr. Spock, the good of the few outweighs the mirth of the many. For those of you who may be confused about the different types of high-speed internet, here's a brief explanation of what I now use, DSL, which is probably the easiest to install and least expensive kind of broadband. I was totally clueless about all this until a couple of weeks ago (now I'm only mostly clueless) so I hope this basic description will be helpful for those who are as intimidated as I was by the sheer mass of information and cross-eyed gobbledegook out there. DSL means "Digital Subscriber Line." But what does this actually mean? DSL internet is brought to your house over your telephone line. (I was astounded to learn that the theory for doing this was first worked out in 1948. Yes, that's right, 1948.) Your internet service provider works with your phone company (unless they're one and the same, such as Verizon or AT&T) to set up the phone line to your house to carry two signals instead of one: a low-frequency signal you will use to talk on the phone, and the high-frequency DSL signal that will talk only to your computer. Each telephone in your house will require a special filter, a little box that you plug into your phone jack in the wall, which then in turn plugs into your phone. A filter is also required on the phone line between the wall and your computer. This is done to keep your phone signal and DSL signal from interfering with each other. I did a bit of experimenting just out of curiosity, and without the filters installed the phone signal is very weak and filled with static, and the DSL signal is degraded so much that the data-transfer speed with your computer is reduced to a mere fraction of what it would be capable of otherwise. Even if none of your phones are in use at the moment, just having a telephone sit there with an unfiltered signal will mess up your DSL. I don't know why, but then again this all seems like voodoo magic to me anyway. One final bit of equipment is required: a black box about five inches square and about two inches tall, that connects your filtered phone line to your computer. Although it's called a modem, you shouldn't confuse it with the modem in your computer — they work on the same principles, but this is sort of a hefty "Hulk Hogan" version, a modem on steroids. This box is then connected to your computer using not a telephone cord, but an "ethernet" cable. But don't worry, you don't have to schlep all over town looking for these arcane devices. When I signed up for DSL I knew that my provider, Earthlink, would be sending me a self-installation kit, containing all the equipment and instructions to set things up and perform general troubleshooting. The kit arrived via UPS about 8 days after I upgraded, and everything was very simple to set up and things were up and running within 20 minutes or so. One thing to be aware of when shopping for high-speed internet is that the advertised speeds can be up to 10 times greater than what you will actually get. My DSL was advertised as 1.5 MB per second, but I knew to scale that estimate way down. I figured I would be happy with even 50 KB per second, so I was very pleased when it ended up actually being about 150 KB per second, 30 times faster than the dial-up I had before. (Needless to say, the first time I tried to load a large image in my browser I was truly astonished at the difference in speed.) Another thing to keep in mind is that upload speeds — i.e., what I do to put files on this website — are often much slower than download speeds. (I've read an explanation for this phenomenon, but as with most high-tech stuff it flies over my head squaking like a cranky seagull.) So if you expect to do a lot of uploading, go ahead and pay the little extra to get an even faster DSL connection to get the faster upload speed. When uploading numerous or large files even a "small" difference in speed can make a big difference as the minutes accumulate. Anyway. I've been surfing the 'net like the Californian dude I am virtually non-stop these last few days (truth to tell, it's the only kind of surfing I've ever considered doing), and hope to tear myself away long enough next month so I can celebrate my birthday with my family. One of the things I'm having fun with is tuning in to streaming radio stations. I've been listening to more Space Station Soma than is appropriate for someone who isn't on a three-day party binge in a techno-themed nightclub in downtown Moscow. And I downloaded a 50 MB game only to discover after installing it that it was all in German, something which the game's download page strangely failed to mention. But since it only took 6 minutes to download I didn't lament the lost time. (I probably spent more than 6 minutes scrutinizing the game's splash screen, hoping I could deduce the cognates common to English and German so I could find the "start" button and figure out the rest as I went along.) Besides, the grand vistas of profligate time consumption are quite majestic from here. Wasting time and downloading junk is part of the fun. And most of this junk is free, which is quite nice considering how much I'm already paying to download it so fast.

> August 15th, 2007
> I've added 2 new covers and 8 new illustrations, for the original magazine appearances of "The Rull" and "The Green Forest." These illustrations are at a larger scale (about 20% bigger) than my previous scans. This is something I wish I had done from the very beginning but didn't due to webspace limitations — apart from having more space now, I've done some experimenting with different compression rates and found the image quality to be pretty good at surprisingly high compression. Anyway, from now on all the new illustrations will appear at this larger size. Over the next couple of weeks more book covers will be added, including some lovely first editions I recently acquired.

> August 1st, 2007
> The Storysource has finally been updated to version 4. It has some fascinating new goodies, so be sure to take a look. And as always, all the contributors are credited in the "Version History" section at the end of the document. I've added four new covers and four new illustrations. Apart from the front and back covers of the new Slan & Slan Hunter omnibus, all of them are associated with the original magazine appearances of the two ezwal stories, "Co-Operate — Or Else!" and "The Second Solution." And I'll be putting up more covers and illustrations in the weeks to come.

> July 12th, 2007
> The News page has been updated (Slan Hunter released, three more reviews linked to) and I've restructured the Links page, adding six new sites in the process (each marked with "New!" in red letters). I hope to have another update to the Storysource up by the end of the month.

> June 18th, 2007
> I'm excited and proud to announce that BookLocker.com has just released Slanology: An In-Depth Guide to A.E. van Vogt's Most Famous Novel, which is available only as a ebook download priced at $5.95. This is a booklet I've been working on since January, and is designed to be read as a companion to the novel. Slanology is an offshoot of a major new project I'm working on, which is discussed in more detail in the introduction. To learn more about Slanology — and even buy it! — go to the book's purchase page. As with all the other works sold through BookLocker, a free excerpt is available. Many of you will remember BookLocker as the publisher who released H.L. Drake's book A.E. van Vogt: Science Fantasy's Icon at the end of 2001. I'd like to extend a special "thank you" to Mark McSherry. Without his excellent advice and encouraging words over the last few months, Slanology would be sitting as an incomplete and abandoned file on my hard drive instead of being my very first published work! Regarding the Icshi site itself, the Plot Summaries section has been reformatted and updated.

> June 13th, 2007
> I've added one new cover scan (the cover to the Summer 1952 issue of Fantastic Story Magazine) and three new illustrations (Virgil Finaly's drawings that accompanied a magazine reprint of Slan).

> May 31st, 2007
> Thanks to Mark McSherry, the News page has been updated with some new information about the Science Fiction Book Club's upcoming release of Slan and Slan Hunter in a single hardcover volume.

> April 27th, 2007
> There are 11 new coverscans from 5 books: The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind-Benders (Paperback Library, 1971) — front & back covers Slan (Ballantine, 1961) — front & back covers, and title page Slan (Berkley, 1983) — front & back covers Transgalactic (Baen, 2006) — front & back covers, and spine Empire of the Atom (Manor, 1976) — front & back covers A scan of the front cover was previously available, but was from a copy in rather bad shape. Both the front and back cover are now available, done from a copy in very good shape this time. I've added a new photo, a candid snapshot from the 1970s taken of van Vogt during a visit to the Ackermansion. I've also redone the Photos mainpage to make it look nicer, adding thumbnail images. And lastly, my bibliography of A.E. van Vogt's work, the Storysource, has been updated to version 3. For a list of all the changes for this version, download the file and look at the "Version History" section.

> April 3rd, 2007
> There are 10 new coverscans from 5 books. This includes the front and back covers of Away and Beyond (Avon, 1953), The Beast (Macfadden, 1964), Earth Factor X (DAW Books, 1976), and The Mind Cage (Avon, 1958) as well as the front cover of Slan (SF Book Club, 1978) along with a special close-up wallpaper from that cover. I've also updated the News page to include a link to a review by Don D'Ammassa of Slan and Slan Hunter. (Thanks to Michael McKinney for sharing this link.)

> March 23rd, 2007
> All of the existing illustrations and a few of the photos are now in digitally-restored black & white. Over a year ago I enhanced all of the photos, covers, and illustrations using iPhoto. I now know more about using this program and decided to experiment with the "convert to black & white" option for some of the drawings. I was also able to enhance the contrast, making the black black and the white whiter, to create a more vivid and dramatic picture, more akin to what the artist envisioned than what is apparent in these yellowing pulp pages. I've also manually edited out most of the dark gutter margins that appear in these images — these were present because when I originally scanned in these drawings I avoided laying out the pulp magazines flat, which breaks the spines. Instead, I merely opened the magazine as wide as I dared to get the entire picture. However, I was unable to eliminate these dark margins in all images since in some instances these darker regions extended into the image itself. At any rate I hope you are as pleased as I am with these sharper, purer images than the dark-gray & yellow illustrations that were previously present. Here's a before-and-after example that demonstrates this vast improvement: Slan: Illustration #1: ORIGINAL VERSION RESTORED VERSION

> March 6th, 2007
> The two reviews of Slan Hunter that were announced in January are now available. Both can be found via the new Reviews Index Page. And please note that owing to the nature of the reviews, Mark's is free of spoilers while Isaac's contains many.

> February 25th, 2007
> There are nine new illustrations: Charles Schneeman's drawings for the 1940 serial of Slan. I've added five new covers: four from the issues of Astounding that contained each installment of Slan, and a special textless JPG of Bruce Jensen's painting for the cover of the upcoming Tor edition of Kevin J. Anderson's Slan Hunter, kindly sent to me by Jensen himself. Jensen also told me he did not do the cover for the Caroll & Graf edition of The Universe Maker. Previously, I had tentatively attributed this painting to him. I'd like to thank Bruce for sharing this information, as well as for giving me permission to post the beautiful art he did for the upcoming Slan sequel, so visitors to this site can enjoy it in its pure form without any distractions or visual clutter. Both the illustrations and covers page have been tinkered with to make them easier to use. Alphabetical links are now given under the FICTION heading to quickly jump to titles beginning with a specific letter, and a list of magazines under the MAGAZINES heading. I've also updated the News page to include a link to a new interview with John C. Wright.

> February 10th, 2007
> I've added new scans to the Book & Magazine Covers (Other Worlds Sept. 1950, and If Feb. 1965) and Illustrations ("Automaton" and "The Replicators") sections. The new items are also listed at the top of their respective pages for easy reference. I've also updated the News page. The Verdana font is now being used more prevalently throughout the site, as I find it to be far easier on the eyes than Times New Roman. (Later switched to the more usable Geneva font.)

> January 28th, 2007
> I've added some new scans to the Book & Magazine Covers section — the covers for the September 1969 and February 1971 issues of Galaxy magazine. The cover to the 1969 issue is especially interesting, so both the front and back covers have been uploaded along with some related material. These issues of Galaxy contain two of van Vogt's stories, "Humans, Go Home!" and "The Reflected Men." The Illustrations to these tales have also been added to the site. This includes a notable two-page spread of informative text that goes with "Humans, Go Home!" that was never reprinted. I've also done some redesigning and restructuring with these two sections of the website, including giving the Favorite Covers page more of an elegant "art gallery" look.

> January 22nd, 2007
> The new Storysource bibliography has been updated to Version 2. See the "Version History" section at the end of the document for details on what's new.

> January 18th, 2007
> The News page has been updated with more information on the upcoming Slan Hunter.

> January 10th, 2007
> The News page has been updated with various bits of information, some of them old, some of them new. Also, the Favorite Cover page spotlighting Colin Hay's cover for The Gryb has been updated to include information (and a scan, Jan 28th) provided by Simon Jones about the appearance of this painting on a different book. I've also continued to do some more redesigning throughout the site.