Out of the Unknown

by A.E. van Vogt

A collection of 6 short stories by van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull, husband-and-wife team. Van The Sea Thing (1940) The Witch (1943) The Ghost (1942) E. Mayne The Wishes We Make (1943) The Ultimate Wish (1943) The Patient (1943)

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Horror

126 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

Alfred Elton van Vogt was a Canadian-born science fiction author regarded by some as one of the most popular and complex science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century—the "Golden Age" of the genre.

van Vogt was born to Russian Mennonite family. Until he was four years old, van Vogt and his family spoke only a dialect of Low German in the home.

He began his writing career with "true story" romances, but then moved to writing science fiction, a field he identified with. His first story was "Black Destroyer", that appeared as the front cover story for the July 1939 edition of the popular Astounding Science Fiction magazine.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a somewhat unusual husband-and-wife collaborative book; it's a collection of six stories, with three of them credited individually to each author. All of the stories originally appeared in John W. Campbell's fantasy magazine, Unknown, in the early 1940s. That's another thing that's unusual, since van Vogt was known almost exclusively for his science fiction. The first story, The Sea Thing, was van Vogt's third published story, and was used for a variant title for at least one later edition of this collection. It's a pretty good story about a group of men on a secluded island faced by a monster (a shark god in this case), reminiscent of Sturgeon's Killdozer, or even Campbell's Who Goes There? The Witch is good chiller that was adapted as an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery. The Ghost is another good one about crime about temporal confusion. The three stories by Hull are shorter. The Patient is quite short and not particularly noteworthy. Two of them, The Wishes We Make and The Ultimate Wish, are typical but clever Monkey's Paw-style stories of the consequences of being granted wishes. I found the latter one quite thought-provoking and disagreed vehemently with the conclusion to which the story arrived, but haven't come up with a better one yet. It's a good collection of fantasy from the golden age of pulps and of the genre itself.

[Redsteve · Rating 2 out of 5]

Collection of horror/supernatural-themed science fiction/fantasy by husband and wife A. E Van Vogt and E Mayne Hull, with tales featuring a sea witch, a prophesizing ghost, a murderous Polynesian shark god, and several demons. Except for "The Wellwisher", all of the demon stories are more Genie granting three wishes that have terrible consequences than actual deal with the devil stories. Not a terrible collection, but kind of dated. Two stars. Maybe 2.5.