SF&F encyclopedia (V-V)"V" 2 US tv miniseries followed by a series. NBC. The 1st miniseries (1983), 2 100min episodes, was titled "V" and created/written/dir Kenneth Johnson. The 2nd miniseries (1984), 3 100min episodes, was titled V: The Final Battle and dir Richard T. Heffron, written Brian Taggert, Peggy Goldman, from a story by Lillian Weezer, Goldman, Faustus Buck, Diane Frolow, Harry and Renee Longstreet. The series (1984-5), titled "V", had 19 50min episodes, prod Dean O'Brien, Garner Simmons; dirs included Gilbert Shilton, Kevin Hooks, John Florea; writers included David Braff, Brian Taggert, Simmons, David Abramowitz. The main cast members throughout were Marc Singer as Mike Donovan, Faye Grant as Julie, Jane Badler as Diana, Blair Tefkin as Robin, Michael Ironside as Ham Tyler, Robert Englund as Willy, Jennifer Cooke as Elizabeth.Kenneth Johnson's track record included The INCREDIBLE HULK and The BIONIC WOMAN , so it was surprising that "V" started as well as it did. He based the story on Sinclair LEWIS's It Can't Happen Here (1935), about a fascist takeover in the USA, but substituted alien invaders - at first seemingly friendly, but actually after our water, and ourselves for food - for the fascists. The carnivorous, saurian invaders, as in the tv series The INVADERS (1967-8) and many films, are disguised to look just like us, but with jackboots. A resistance movement grows, whose "V" (for "Victory") is daubed on walls everywhere, but many humans become collaborators; SCIENTISTS become objects of persecution (the comparison being with Jews under the Nazis); some aliens are worse than others.The first half of the initial mini-series was quite good, but afterwards the series became an object lesson in US tv's remorseless appetite for CLICHE - especially in its programmes for younger viewers - and its reduction of all controversial issues to moral stereotypes: the latter half of this miniseries lost direction; the second miniseries was absurd; and the series was infantile hackwork and cancelled before the story was completed. The two mini-series were expensive and - especially the first - had quite spectacular sets and special effects. [PN] VACCA, ROBERTO [r] ITALY. VADRE, LESLIE L.P. DAVIES. VALDEZ, PAUL Alan G. YATES. VALE, RENA (MARIE) (1898-1983) US writer who began publishing sf in 1952 with the novella "The Shining City" for Science Fiction Quarterly, and with her first novel, The Red Court: Last Seat of National Government of the United States of America (1952). She subsequently restricted herself to novels, like Beyond the Sealed World (1965), based on the 1952 novella, and Taurus Four (1970), which combines SATIRE with SPACE OPERA in a story containing hippies lost on another planet, a sociologist and an alien INVASION. In The Day After Doomsday: A Fantasy of Time Travel (1970) 12 selected survivors of a nuclear HOLOCAUST are lectured by their saviours, the race which bred humans on Earth in the first place. [JC]Other works: Beyond these Walls (1960); The House on Rainbow Leap (1973).See also: CITIES. VALENTINE, VICTOR (? - ) UK writer whose Cure for Death (1960) features a ray that not only cures cancer and ageing but also dissociates its patients from their own past lives. [JC] VALIGURSKY, ED(WARD I.) (1926- ) US illustrator. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Academy of Arts before graduating from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. He began as an associate art director for ZIFF-DAVIS in 1952 and became art director for Quinn Publishing, publisher of IF, in 1953. From 1954 he freelanced, though most of his magazine work was for those 2 companies; he painted 49 covers for AMZ and 32 for Fantastic, mostly in the 1950s, and many book covers (often unsigned) for ACE BOOKS in the 1950s and 1960s - notably the Ace Doubles - and for many other book publishers, including Avon and Dell. His work sometimes looks hurried, but he was proficient at menacing ROBOTS and his characteristic needle-nosed SPACESHIPS. Like many sf illustrators of the period, he found other markets that paid better, and moved into advertising, general-fiction magazines like COLLIER'S, and nonfiction magazines featuring aviation and aerospace subjects. [JG/PN] VALLEE, JACQUES [r] UFOS. VALLEJO, BORIS (1941- ) Illustrator, born in Peru probably around 1947 and trained there in graphic design; moved to the USA in 1964. BV, who signs his work "Boris", began working in the sf/ FANTASY genre with Warren Publications' magazines and comics in 1971, then shifted to MARVEL COMICS, where his covers for The Savage Sword of Conan soon caused him to be tagged "the next Frazetta"; work in this vein won him a reputation in heroic-fantasy ILLUSTRATION second only to Frank FRAZETTA's, though perhaps BV's work is smoother and less vigorous. His book-cover work in this genre since 1975 has been primarily for BALLANTINE BOOKS and DEL REY BOOKS. His erotic fantasies of male power and female bondage were a natural accompaniment to the Gor novels of John NORMAN, for 7 of which he did covers in 1976; he also painted the covers for Ballantine's reissue of 24 of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's Tarzan books in 1977. BV's work is almost a compendium of alternate sexual fantasies, moving easily from men like a homo-erotic musclebuilder's dream to lush-breasted, dominatrix whip-wielding women. Much of BV's later output is in the form of books and pictorial calendars, often featuring previously unpublished work. There are at least 10 calendars, starting with The Tarzan Calendar 1979 (1978). The books include The Fantastic Art of Boris Vallejo (1978), Mirage (1982), overtly erotic original art with poems by BV's wife, Doris Vallejo, Enchantment (1984), further erotic art with stories by Doris Vallejo, and Boris Vallejo's Fantasy Art Techniques (1985). [PN/JG]Other Works: The Boris Vallejo Portfolio (1994); B.V. (1994); Bodies: His Photographic Art (1994). VALLEY OF GWANGI, THE Film (1969). Morningside/Warner-Seven Arts. Prod Charles H. Schneer. Dir James O'Connolly, starring James Franciscus, Gila Golan, Richard Carlson, Laurence Naismith. Screenplay William E. Bast, with additions by Julian More. 95 mins. Colour.Cowboys discover a hidden valley in Mexico where surviving dinosaurs still live. They capture Gwangi, an allosaur, roping it like a steer, and take it back to civilization to put it on display in a stadium; but, like KING KONG, Gwangi escapes and goes on the rampage, until finally cornered in a church. TVOG had been a pet project of Willis O'BRIEN, who had wanted to make it in 1942. Ray HARRYHAUSEN, O'Brien's special-effects protege, finally brought it to life, and, although usually rated a poor film, it is one of the more cheerful and entertaining showcases for Harryhausen's stop-motion animation - the cowboy vs dinosaur scenes comprise one of the great sequences of B-movie lunacy. But it flopped. [PN] VAMPIRES SUPERNATURAL CREATURES. van ARNAM, DAVE Working name of US writer David G. van Arnam (1935- ) who began publishing sf with Lost in Space * (1957) with Ron Archer (Ted WHITE), a novelization from the tv series LOST IN SPACE. Sideslip (1968) was also written with White, who this time used his own name. Further routine sf adventures by DVA are Star Gladiator (1967 chap dos), Star Mind (1969) and Greyland (1972). The Zantain fantasies - The Players of Hell (1968 chap dos) and Wizard of Storms (1970) - are well constructed and occasionally vivid, as are the Jamnar fantasies, Star Barbarian (1969) and Lord of Blood (1970). [JC] van CAMPEN, KARL [s] John W. CAMPBELL Jr. VANCE, GERALD ZIFF-DAVIS house name (1941-58), used by Roger P. Graham (Rog PHILLIPS), by Randall GARRETT in collaboration with Robert SILVERBERG, and on 35 stories whose authors have not been identified, many perhaps by Chester S. GEIER. [PN] VANCE, JACK Working name of US writer John Holbrook Vance (1916- ), who was educated at the University of California first as a mining engineer, then as a physics major and finally in journalism, though without taking a degree. During WWII he served in the Merchant Navy, being twice torpedoed and writing his first story, "The World Thinker", published in 1945 in TWS. In the late 1940s and early 1950s JV contributed a variety of short stories (one time using the pseudonym John Holbrook) and novels to the PULP MAGAZINES, primarily STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES. These included the Magnus Ridolph series, chronicling the adventures of a roguish interstellar troubleshooter, assembled as The Many Worlds of Magnus Ridolph (coll 1966 dos; exp 1980; further exp vt The Complete Magnus Ridolph 1984). But nothing of this early work, dependent as it was on pulp conventions, prefigured the mature JV.The change began with his first published book, THE DYING EARTH (coll of linked stories 1950), comprising 6 previously unpublished tales set on Earth in the FAR FUTURE, at a time, long after the wasting away of science, when MAGIC has become the operating principle. This Dying Earth venue derived its languid colours and its florid architecture from the romances of Clark Ashton SMITH, and the tales are the first mature examples of that form as adumbrated by Smith; but, unlike his mentor, JV told his stories in an ironical tone, uniquely distanced and serene, that itself became an integral part of any definition of a Dying-Earth tale. Cruelties and nostalgias, picaresque flashes of plotting, adjurations of melancholy: all were enveloped in the musing voice. JV's only real failure in THE DYING EARTH - it would dog him throughout his career - lay in his inability to conceive narrative structures capable of sustaining his vision for more than novelette length. His later full-length Dying Earth volumes were all made up from shorter units; they included The Eyes of the Overworld (fixup 1966), Morreion: A Tale of the Dying Earth (1973 Flashing Swords #1, anth ed Lin CARTER; 1979 chap), A Bagful of Dreams (1979 chap), The Seventeen Virgins (1974 FSF; 1979 chap), Cugel's Saga (coll of linked stories 1983) and Rhialto the Marvelous (1984). (This last is not to be confused with Rhialto the Marvelous * [anth 1985], a SHARED-WORLD book containing also "Basileus" by C.J. CHERRYH and Janet E. MORRIS. Before that, in A Quest for Simbilis * [1974], Michael SHEA wrote a direct sequel to The Eyes of the Overworld, territory later covered in conflicting terms by Cugel's Saga.) The influence of JV's articulation of the tone and venue of the Dying Earth was widespread, affecting both fantasy and sf writers, and helping authors such as Michael MOORCOCK to define the characteristic ambience of SCIENCE FANTASY. It would not be until The Book of the New Sun (1980-82) by Gene WOLFE - who amply acknowledged JV's central influence - that a new paradigm for the Dying-Earth tale would appear, one more tightly tied to narrative revelation but no more entrancing than its model.JV's second original contribution to the sf/fantasy field was his sophistication of the PLANETARY ROMANCE in Big Planet (1952 Startling Stories; cut 1957; further cut 1958; full text restored 1978), to which Showboat World (1975; vt The Magnificent Showboats of the Lower Vissel River Lune XXIII South, Big Planet 1983) forms a retroactively conceived sequel. Before 1950 and THE DYING EARTH, the planetary romance had been generally restricted either to tales which replicated, palely, the work of Edgar Rice BURROUGHS or to pulp-sf adventures set on worlds which might be colourful but which were at the same time conceived with a fatal thinness. What was lacking was any form of enabling premise. In Big Planet JV provided an sf model for the planetary romance which has been of significant use for 40 years. The planet of this novel is a huge though Earthlike world, with enough landmass to provide realistic venues in which a wide range of social systems can operate, and, significantly, is low in heavy-metal resources (a fact that both explains its relatively low gravity and requires the wide range of societies that flourish to be low-tech ones). As is usual with JV, these societies are all of distant human origin, though they have become exceedingly variegated in ways open to description in the ethnographical style he developed to tell this tale, and upon which he depended for his best and truest effects over the next decades ( ANTHROPOLOGY; SOCIOLOGY). The world of the JV planetary romance might occasionally be linked notionally to Earth by conventional sf trappings (generally of little actual relevance), but basically it is a venue, placed far into the future though without foregrounding any common dating or other device that might tie it too tightly to any Future History.His other titles from this period were less ambitious but contained some interesting incidental invention; they include Son of the Tree (1951 TWS; 1964 dos), Slaves of the Klau (1952 Space Stories as "Planet of the Damned"; cut 1958 dos; text restored, vt Gold and Iron 1982) and The Houses of Iszm (1954 Startling Stories; 1964 dos). None of these were particularly well organized books - nor for that matter are THE DYING EARTH and Big Planet - but the development of IMMORTALITY themes in the far-future DYSTOPIA depicted in To Live Forever (1956) is more impressive, and The Languages of Pao (1958) interestingly espouses the Whorfian hypothesis ( LINGUISTICS) that language creates PERCEPTION, rather than the reverse. The main thrust of JV's work, however, as in such stories as "The Miracle Workers" (1958), continued to lie in increasingly ambitious explorations of the planetary-romance theme of LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS. THE DRAGON MASTERS (1963 dos), a short novel which won JV his first HUGO, clearly illustrates this tendency. Set on a distant world in the far future, it is a story grounded in GENETIC ENGINEERING, but the science is so far advanced that it could equally be considered magic.As JV's created worlds became richer and more complex, so too did his style. Always tending towards the baroque, it had developed by the time of THE DRAGON MASTERS into an effective high-mannered diction, somewhat pedantic, and almost always saturated with a rich but distanced irony. JV's talent for naming the people and places in his stories (a mixture of exotic invented terms and commonplace words with the right resonance) contributed to the sense that dream ethnographies were being carved, almost as a gardener would create topiary. Three novels, similar in structure, show these talents at their fullest stretch: The Blue World (1964 Fantastic as "King Kragen"; exp 1966), EMPHYRIO (1969) and The Anome (1971 FSF as "The Faceless Man"; 1973; vt The Faceless Man 1978) each follow the life of a boy born into and growing up in a static, stratified society, with which he comes into conflict, being driven eventually into rebellion. The invented world in each is particularly carefully thought-out. Both EMPHYRIO and The Anome additionally feature some piercing SATIRE of RELIGION.As his professional career developed, JV began to initiate various sequences - with mixed results, for he often gave the impression that, once the setting had been fully established, his interest began inexorably to wane. Later books in his series are often inferior to their predecessors, and far more likely to depend for their effects upon plotting routines extracted - none too competently - from the dawn of pulp. This is the case with the earlier vols of the Demon Princes series, an interstellar saga of vengeance comprising The Star King (1964), The Killing Machine (1964), The Palace of Love (1967), The Face (1979) and The Book of Dreams (1981), though the last two titles are of more interest; with the Planet of Adventure series, comprising City of the Chasch (1968; vt Chasch 1986), Servants of the Wankh (1969; vt Wankh 1986), The Dirdir (1969) and The Pnume (1970), all assembled as The Planet of Adventure Omnibus (omni 1985 UK); and with the Durdane trilogy, comprising The Anome, The Brave Free Men (1973) and The Asutra (1974), all assembled as Durdane (omni 1989 UK). In contrast, the Alastor Cluster sequence - Trullion: Alastor 2262 (1973), Marune: Alastor 933 (1975) and Wyst: Alastor 1716 (1978) - arguably improves from beginning to end. Most of these novels are planetary romances, and can be read in isolation from their fellows; at the same time, most embody mild hints - for example, the Demon Princes series is set in the far past of the Cadwal Chronicles (see below) - that they belong to the same tenuously knit future Gaean Reach Universe, most clearly described in the Demon Princes series. But this background never governs the reader's perception of individual tales.JV has written comparatively little short fiction. Apart from those stories already mentioned, the best include "Telek" (1952), "The Moon Moth" (1961) and the novella THE LAST CASTLE (1967 dos), which won JV a NEBULA and his 2nd Hugo. "The Moon Moth", one of JV's most elaborate stories, features the use of MUSIC as a secondary form of COMMUNICATION. Music and other ARTS feature in several other JV stories, including Space Opera (1965), EMPHYRIO, The Anome and Showboat World. Many of JV's best short stories are in Eight Fantasms and Magics (coll 1969; with 2 stories cut, vt Fantasms and Magics 1978 UK) and The Best of Jack Vance (coll 1976). The latter is also notable for containing informative commentaries on the stories included, as JV is renowned for his reticence concerning himself and his stories, maintaining such a low profile that a rumour that began in 1950 that he was another Henry KUTTNER pseudonym was still being perpetrated in some quarters 20 years later, notwithstanding Kuttner's death in 1958.The 1980s saw some slackening in JV's production, though this might not have been evident to the casual observer, as it was now that much of his earlier short fiction was finally brought out in book form. Beyond continuations of earlier series, his most interesting work in this decade was restricted to 2 new series. One was the Lyonesse sequence of fantasies about Tristan's birthplace off the coast of France, now sunk into the wide funnel of the English Channel: Suldren's Garden (1983; rev 1983; vt Lyonesse 1984 UK), Lyonesse: The Green Pearl (1985; rev vt The Green Pearl 1986) and Lyonesse: Madouc (1989; vt Madouc 1990). Of greater sf interest are the Cadwal Chronicles - to date Araminta Station (1987), Ecce and Olde Earth (1991) and Throy (1992) - expanding the planetary-romance idiom into very long books with a sophisticated, newly plot-wise leisureliness which almost fully warrants their length. Interestingly, the planet Cadwal - the main character of the sequence, in a fashion typical of JV - is a nature reserve.JV also wrote mystery novels, mostly during the 1960s - one of the best of them, The Man in the Cage (1960), won an Edgar - and scripts for the tv series CAPTAIN VIDEO. None of this work lacks competence, but none has the haunting retentiveness in the mind's eye of his planetary romances or his Dying Earths. As a landscape artist, a gardener of worlds, JV has been for half a century central to both sf and FANTASY. He has a genius of place. [MJE/JC]Other works: The Space Pirate (1950 Startling Stories; 1953; cut vt The Five Gold Bands 1962 dos; text restored 1980); Vandals of the Void (1953); Future Tense (coll 1964; vt Dust of Far Suns 1981); The World Between (coll 1965 dos; vt The Moon Moth dated 1975 but 1976 UK); Monsters in Orbit (1952 TWS as "Abercrombie Station" and "Cholwell's Chickens"; cut 1965 dos); The Brains of Earth (1966 dos), assembled vt Nopalgarth with The Houses of Iszm and Son of the Tree in Nopalgarth (omni 1980); The Worlds of Jack Vance (coll 1973); Green Magic (coll 1979), not to be confused with Green Magic (1963 FSF; 1979 chap), which contains only the collection's title story; Galactic Effectuator (coll of linked stories 1980); Lost Moons (coll 1982); The Narrow Land (coll 1982); Light from a Lone Star (coll 1985); The Dark Side of the Moon: Stories of the Future (coll 1986); The Augmented Agent (coll 1986); Chateau d'If and Other Stories (coll 1990); When the Five Moons Rise (coll 1992).Non-sf, some as John Holbrook Vance: Take My Face (1957) as by Peter Held and Isle of Peril (1959) as by Alan Wade, both assembled (the latter vt Bird Isle) as Bird Isle/Take My Face (omni 1988); A Room to Die In (1965) as by Ellery Queen; The Four Johns (1964; vt Four Men Called John 1976 UK) as by Ellery Queen; The Madman Theory (1966) as by Ellery Queen; The Fox Valley Murders (1966); The Pleasant Grove Murders (1967); The Deadly Isles (1969); Bad Ronald (1973); The House on Lilly Street (1979); Strange Notions (1985); The Dark Ocean (1985).About the author: Jack Vance, a Fantasmic Imagination: A Working Bibliography (last rev 1990 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE; The Jack Vance Lexicon: From Aluph to Zipangote (1992) ed Dan Ternianka; The Work of Jack Vance: An Annotated Bibliography & Guide (1994) by Jerry Hewett and Daryl F. MALLETT.See also: ALIENS; ASTEROIDS; COLONIZATION OF OTHER WORLDS; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; CYBORGS; ECOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GAMES AND SPORTS; GOTHIC SF; LEISURE; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); MATTER TRANSMISSION; MONEY; SPACE HABITATS; SPACE OPERA; SUPERMAN; SWORD AND SORCERY; TABOOS; TERRAFORMING; THRILLING WONDER STORIES; TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA; VILLAINS. VANCE, STEVE (1952- ) US writer who has since the late 1980s concentrated on horror novels, but who began writing with some unremarkable but competently conceived sf adventures, including Planet of the Gawfs (1977), All the Shattered Worlds (1980) and The Hybrid (1981). Later novels include The Hyde Effect (1986) and The Asgard Run (1990), about a shipwrecked crew of alien scientists encountered in the mountains of Wyoming. [JC]Other works: The Abyss (1989), Spook (1990) and Shapes (1991), all horror. van DONGEN Working name of US illustrator Henry Richard van Dongen (1920- ). Entering the sf field in 1950 with a cover for SUPER SCIENCE STORIES (Sep 1950), vD soon dominated the covers (and the interiors) of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, with 46 covers Aug 1951-Sep 1961. He seldom worked for other magazines, but did 3 covers for SCIENCE FICTION ADVENTURES, including #1 (Nov 1952). His style was very distinctive, with muted colours and gaunt, angular people. He left the genre in 1961 for the more lucrative commercial-art field, returning in 1976 as a result of a chance conversation with Lester DEL REY at BALLANTINE BOOKS. For the next decade he did covers for Ballantine and DAW BOOKS in a style similar to his 1950s magazine work but with much brighter colours. He retired in 1987 with nerve problems related to injuries suffered in WWII. [JG/PN] van DYNE, EDITH L. Frank BAUM. van GREENAWAY, PETER (1929-1988) UK lawyer who began writing full-time in 1960; though he never became known as a genre writer, much of his work was sf, including his 1st novel, The Crucified City (1962), a post- HOLOCAUST story set in a devastated London after a nuclear bomb has been dropped, and his 2nd, The Evening Fool (1964), which carries its protagonist into an unviable UTOPIA. The Man who Held the Queen to Ransom and Sent Parliament Packing (1968) features a NEAR-FUTURE coup attempt in the UK, told in the astringent, side-of-the-mouth pessimistic voice which became a trademark. In later novels - like Judas! (1972; vt The Judas Gospel 1972 US), The Medusa Touch (1973), Take the War to Washington (1974), Suffer! Little Children (1976), The Dissident (1980) and Mutants (1986) - this dubiety about the human animal became visibly more inflamed. Manrissa Man (1982) makes savage play with the ape-as-human ( APES AND CAVEMEN) theme; and in graffiti (1983), another post-holocaust tale, survivors of a nuclear war revenge themselves upon its perpetrators. The increasingly solitary, evasively narrated, uncompromisingly dark work of his later years made it unlikely that PVG would ever be read with comfort as a genre writer. [JC]Other works: Doppelganger (1975); A Man Called Scavener (1978); Edgar Allan Who - ? (coll 1981); The Immortal Coil (coll 1985); The Killing Cap (1987). VANGUARD SCIENCE FICTION US DIGEST-size magazine. 1 issue June 1958, published by Vanguard Science Fiction; ed James BLISH. VSF made a promising debut: it included the much-anthologized "Reap the Dark Tide" (vt "Shark Ship") by C.M. KORNBLUTH and what were intended as regular features by L. Sprague DE CAMP and Lester DEL REY. However, the decision to fold the magazine was made before #1 even appeared. [MJE] VAN HELLER, MARCUS Zach HUGHES. van HERCK, PAUL (1939- ) Belgian (Flemish) writer whose Sam, of de Pluterdag (1968; trans Danny De Laet and Willy Magiels as Where Were You Last Pluterday? 1973 US) is a SATIRE of a society in which the higher classes have access to an extra day of the week. Van Herck also wrote a collection of ingenious short stories, De Cirkels ["The Circles"] (coll 1965). [JC]See also: BENELUX van HERP, JACQUES [r] FRANCE. van HOLK, FREDER [r] GERMANY. van LHIN, ERIK Lester DEL REY. van LOGGEM, MANUEL [r] BENELUX. van LORNE, WARNER Pseudonym, probably of US writer Nelson Tremaine (1907-1971), author under that name of a number of stories in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION 1935-9. "The Blue-Men of Yrano" (1939) is probably the best remembered. WvL's identity has remained undetermined, although certainly F. Orlin TREMAINE wrote at least 1 WvL story. The remainder have been ascribed to his brother, Nelson Tremaine, but it remains possible that they were all the work of the former. [MJE] VAN LUSTBADER, ERIC (1946- ) US author who graduated from Columbia University, majoring in sociology, and worked for a time in the rock-music industry. His published sf/fantasy work began with the Sunset Warrior trilogy: The Sunset Warrior (1977), Shallows of Night (1978) and Dai-San (1978), to which Beneath an Opal Moon (1980) is a coda with a different hero. This was remarkably vivid SWORD AND SORCERY with sex and violence, and imaginatively rendered: the first book is true sf, set in an underground post- HOLOCAUST society which has almost forgotten the technology that keeps it alive, and to which the surface is a distant memory, but subsequent volumes make no great attempt to cleave to the sf premise. EVL then turned to the bestseller genre with The Ninja (1979), the first of the Nicholas Linnear trilogy, whose other titles are The Miko (1984) and White Ninja (1990). These blend Oriental mysticism with martial-arts adventure and sex, and contain (especially the 3rd) many fantastic elements, though more magical than scientific. EVL maintained a string of bestsellers through the 1980s, and is now an important commercial writer. His work is florid and intense, with a sadistic streak, and mostly set in Asia; his more recent books are generally signed Eric Lustbader. Some of his other novels also contain fantastic elements. [PN]Other works Sirens (1981); the China Maroc sequence, comprising Jian (1985) and Shan (1987); The Black Heart (1986); Zero (1988); French Kiss (1989); Angel Eyes (1991); Black Blade (1992). van SCYOC, SYDNEY J(OYCE) (1939- ) US writer, active in the Unitarian Church, who began publishing sf with "Shatter the Wall" for Gal in 1962 and afterwards contributed stories regularly to the magazines, though she soon became best known for her novels, beginning with the impressive Saltflower (1971), in which aliens seed Earth to produce a new breed of "men". Assignment Nor'Dyren (1973) depicts a DYSTOPIAN Earth and a complexly rendered alien planet in trouble. Starmother (1976) and Cloudcry (1977) are both set in a Galaxy dominated by humanity but on alien planets which offer fundamental challenges to the human senses of order and rightness, and which ultimately reward attempts to transcend, in a sometimes lukewarmly oceanic fashion, human hierarchies and failures of empathy. The Sunstone Scrolls sequence - Darkchild (1981), Bluesong (1983) and Starsilk (1984), all assembled as Daughters of the Sunstone (omni 1985) - also combine an alien setting, a variety of characters and species and an ultimate sharing of transcendence, here occasioned by the symbiosis-engendering starsilks. Drowntide (1987) could again be described as fusion sf, depicting the slow coming to communion of a land-based race and an ocean-based race through the agency of a hybrid offspring. SJVS's predilection for one-word titles continued in Featherstroke (1989) but was rested in Deepwater Dreams (1991). Though her tales are sometimes damaged by narrative longueurs, SJVS's capacity to evoke a sense of the deep strangeness of the Universe - and her iterated attempts to craft tales that persuasively espouse marriages of species and venues - make her work sometimes compelling. [JC]Other work: Sunwaifs (1981).See also: PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS. VANSITTART, PETER (1920- ) UK writer best known for his densely written historical novels. His first novel, I Am the World: A Romance (1942), generalizes its politically speculative plot by placing it in an allegorized and unnamed country, where a dictator creates an ambiguous UTOPIA; The Game and the Ground (1956) covers similar territory. The Story Teller (1968) offers no sf explanation for the longevity of its central character - who lives over 500 years and the stages of his life are analogous to the development of northern European civilization - but the novel's narrative and linguistic powers deserve notice from the sf readership. In 3 further novels of IMMORTALITY - Lancelot (1978), The Death of Robin Hood (1981) and Parsifal (1988) - which share a polymathic density of language and a complexly ambiguous mythopoeic attentiveness to the cultural icons of their titles, PV again provided models of human history as a sequence of incessantly reiterated tales whose casts, although they may metamorphose, do so only to return. Robin Hood in particular prefigures the entangled chthonic worlds of sf fantasists like Paul HAZEL and Robert P. HOLDSTOCK. [JC]Other works: The Dark Tower: Tales from the Past (coll 1965) and The Shadow Land: More Stories from the Past (coll 1967), juveniles which retell myths and legends of Britain. van VOGT, A(LFRED) E(LTON) (1912- ) Canadian-born writer who moved to the USA in 1944 after establishing his name as one of the creators of John W. CAMPBELL Jr's GOLDEN AGE OF SF with a flood of material in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION, starting with "Black Destroyer" (1939), though he had been active for several years in various other genres. In 1939 he married E. Mayne HULL, and produced several stories with her until she stopped writing in 1950. With his conversion to DIANETICS - also in 1950 - AEVV became virtually silent for several years. After the early 1960s, however, a second, smaller spate of new material came from his pen.In 1939-47 AEVV published at least 35 sf stories in ASF alone, some of novel length, and it was the work of these years, much of it not to be published in book form until long afterwards in reconstructed versions, that gave him his high reputation as a master of intricate, metaphysical SPACE OPERA. Along with Isaac ASIMOV and Robert A. HEINLEIN, and to a lesser extent L. Sprague DE CAMP and L. Ron HUBBARD - he seemed nearly to create, by writing what Campbell wanted to publish, the first genuinely successful period of US sf; only in this "Golden Age" did it begin to achieve, in literary terms, what the writers of US GENRE SF had eschewed 20 years earlier when they had found that PULP MAGAZINES not only wished to publish sf but were their only consistent market. Although AEVV catered for the pulps, he intensified the emotional impact and complexity of the stories they would bear: his nearly invincible alien MONSTERS, the long timespans of his tales, the TIME PARADOXES that fill them, the quasimessianic SUPERMEN who come into their own as the stories progress, the GALACTIC EMPIRES they tend to rule and the states of lonely transcendental omnipotence they tend to achieve - all are presented in a prose that uses crude, dark colours but whose striking SENSE OF WONDER is conveyed with a dreamlike conviction. The abrupt complications of plot for which he became so well known, and which have been so scathingly mocked for their illogic and preposterousness - within narratives that claimed to be presenting higher forms of logic to the reader - are best analysed, and their effects best understood, when their sudden shifts of perspective and rationale and scale are seen as analogous to the movements of a dream. It is these " HARD-SF dreams", so grippingly void of constraints or of the usual surrealistic appurtenances of dream literature, that have so haunted generations of children and adolescents.AEVV's first novel, and perhaps still his best known, is SLAN (1940 ASF; 1946; rev 1951). Its HERO, the young Jommy Cross, is a member of a MUTANT race, the Slans, originally created to help mankind out of its difficulties but long driven into hiding because of the jealousy of normals. Jommy's powers ( CHILDREN IN SF), which include ESP, physical superiority to normals (he has 2 hearts) and extraordinary INTELLIGENCE, enable him to survive the mobbing, arrest and offstage death of his mother and to escape from sight into an adolescence and young manhood during which he begins to sense his true powers. As a man he becomes involved with Earth's mysterious dictator, with defective Slans, and with various intrigues centring on new sources of energy. Matters are cleared up only at the book's close with the revelation that the dictator is himself a secret Slan, that the girl Slan with whom Jommy is in love is the dictator's daughter, and that Jommy is in line for the succession. SLAN is a much imitated model for the creation of wish-fulfilment stories.However, it was in the 2 Weapon Shops books-THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER (1941-2 ASF, 1949 Thrilling Wonder Stories; fixup 1951) and The Weapon Makers (1943 ASF; 1947; rev 1952; vt One Against Eternity 1955 dos), assembled as The Weapon Shops of Isher, and The Weapon Makers (omni 1988 UK) - that AEVV's mixture of hard-sf dreams, enormities of complication, and transcendent superheroes was most hypnotically presented. The main protagonist of the 2 books, the immortal Robert Hedrock ( IMMORTALITY), has not only in the dim past created the WEAPON Shops as a LIBERTARIAN force to counterbalance the imperial world government long dominant on Earth, but also turns out eventually to have literally begotten the race of emperors and empresses who rule that government in traditional opposition to the mysterious Shops, which are invulnerable and sell weapons to anyone. To cap this dream of omnipotence, Hedrock unwittingly passes a Galactic initiation test at the end of the 2nd book, the test having been designed to select the next rulers of the "sevagram". The word "sevagram" appears only once in the series, as the very last word of The Weapon Makers; in its placing, which seems to open universes to the reader's gaze, and in its resonant mysteriousness, for its precise meaning is unclear, this use of "sevagram" may well stand as the best working demonstration in the whole of genre sf of how to impart a SENSE OF WONDER.The 2nd major series of AEVV's prolific decade-the Null-A sequence comprising The World of A (1945 ASF; rev 1948; rev vt The World of Null-A 1970) and The Pawns of Null-A (1948-9 ASF as "The Players of A"; 1956; rev vt The Players of Null-A 1966), plus Null-A Three (1984 France [in French]; 1985 UK) - may have appeared weightier in its attempts to present its arguments in terms of "non-Aristotelian" thought ( GENERAL SEMANTICS), a claim which might seem ominously to prefigure a rationalization of the effortless dream logic of the earlier stories; but in the event tends to stumble into excessive tangles of complication. The protagonist, Gosseyn (go sane), lacks humour even more decidedly than his superman predecessors, and his rapid, confusing, nearly emotionless shifting from one Gosseyn body to another, in a kind of cloning ( CLONES) without the concept of cloning to sustain it, makes his eventual supremacy so peculiarly disorganized as to be almost without effect on the reader. By this time AEVV was nearing the end of his association with ASF, after an extraordinarily productive decade, and would soon stop writing entirely; perhaps The Pawns of Null-A, which in magazine form stretched to 100,000 words, was about as far as he could go without an extended breather. Certainly his 3rd series from this period-the Linn sequence comprising Empire of the Atom (1946-7 ASF; fixup 1957; cut 1957 dos) and The Wizard of Linn (1950 ASF; 1962) - is considerably less intense. James BLISH argued of this series about superscience and palace politics that its plot and characters closely resemble those of Robert GRAVES's Claudius novels: it would have been a brave critic who, with equal persuasiveness, found AEVV's earlier series to resemble any previous work of world literature.During this first decade of his career, AEVV contributed material also to ASF's sister magazine, Unknown, most notably The Book of Ptath (1943 Unknown; 1947; vt Two Hundred Million A.D. 1964; vt Ptath 1976), a FAR-FUTURE epic in which a reincarnated god-figure must fight to re-establish his suzerainty. Some of the independent stories of these years were collected in Destination: Universe (coll 1952) and Away and Beyond (coll 1952; with 2 stories cut rev 1959; with 1 story cut rev 1963 UK). The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1939-43 ASF and 1950 Other Worlds; fixup 1950; vt Mission: Interplanetary 1952) marshalled several early stories into a chronicle depicting various ways in which a "Nexialist", Elliot Grosvenor, by using a response to ALIENS and their environments that synthesizes different fields of knowledge, copes with divers monsters. The book incorporates AEVV's first 2 sf stories; and Nexialism itself, which involves a system of intensive psychological training, interestingly prefigures L. Ron HUBBARD's Dianetics, with which AEVV was to become so closely involved. This involvement was the culmination of his persistent interest in all training systems which purport scientifically (or pseudo-scientifically; PSEUDO-SCIENCE) to create physical or mental superiority and awaken dormant talents, an interest which generated not only the 3 General-Semantics novels described above but also Siege of the Unseen (1946 ASF as "The Chronicler"; 1959 dos; vt as title story in The Three Eyes of Evil coll 1973 UK), in which, inspired by the Bates eye-exercise system, he dramatized the curing of eye problems through partly mental means.In the autobiographical Reflections of A.E. van Vogt (1975), AEVV uses the term "fix-up" (or FIXUP) in the sense which we have adopted for this encyclopedia: a book made up of previously published stories altered to fit together - usually with the addition of new cementing material - the end product being marketed as a novel. It is possible that AEVV invented the term for, although fixups are not unknown outside sf, the peculiar marketing circumstances of the genre in the USA encouraged their creation, and certainly AEVV wrote (or compiled) more fixups than any other sf writer of stature. It was during his time of relative inactivity as a creator of original material - the 1950s and early 1960s - that he began producing these numerous fixups, including of course THE WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER, perhaps the most successful and ingenious of all. Fixups incorporating Golden-Age material include The Mixed Men (1943-5 ASF; fixup 1952; cut vt Mission to the Stars 1955), The War Against the Rull (1940-50 ASF; fixup 1959), The Beast (1943-4 ASF; fixup 1963; vt Moonbeast 1969 UK) and Quest for the Future (1943-6 ASF; fixup 1970).The Silkie (1964-7 If; fixup 1969), though technically similar, was the first to use substantially contemporary material - and may have been the first whose component parts were all written with the end result in mind. It signalled the beginning of AEVV's 2nd period of productivity, with Children of Tomorrow (1970) being his first completely new sf novel since The Mind Cage (1948 Fantasy Book as "The Great Judge"; exp 1957) - although he had also published a political thriller about the attempted brainwashing of Westerners in contemporary communist China, The Violent Man (1962). The most sustained effort of this 2nd wave of titles was perhaps The Battle of Forever (1971), in which the enhanced-human protagonist, Modyun, leaves the refuge where his kind have for eons dwelt in seclusion and undertakes a far-future odyssey through a decadent world and Galaxy, battling against aliens and gradually coming to full stature as a superman. Compared to the fixups of the previous decade or so, the story is well paced and emotionally coherent, though the oneiric flow of arousing event and imagery is damaged by a sense of self-consciousness. Further novels do not live up to this promise of partial renewal, and have not been well received.Critics such as Damon KNIGHT - in an essay reprinted as "Cosmic Jerrybuilder" in In Search of Wonder (critical coll 1956; rev 1967) - have tended to treat the typical AEVV tale as a failed effort at hard sf, and have consequently tended to describe stories others have written in the modes he developed - like Philip K. DICK, Charles L. HARNESS and Larry NIVEN-as "improvements" on the original model. In some ways, of course, these writers have built upon the complexity of AEVV's worlds and have significantly rationalized his convulsive shuffling and reshuffling of every element of his stories. But AEVV's space operas, as noted, are at heart enacted dreams which articulate deep, symbolic needs and wishes of his readership. Because there is no misunderstood science or cosmography or technology at the very heart of his best work, there is no "improving" AEVV. [JC]Other works: Tomorrow on the March: The Text of the Speech Delivered July 4, 1946 at the PACIFICON by the Guest of Honor (1946 chap); Out of the Unknown (coll 1948; exp 1969; vt The Sea Thing and Other Stories 1970 UK; with 5 of the 6 original stories under original title, cut 1970 UK) with E. Mayne Hull, 3 stories by each writer; Masters of Time (coll 1950), comprising 2 stories later published separately as The Changeling (1944 ASF; 1967) and Earth's Last Fortress (1942 ASF as "Recruiting Station"; 1960 dos; vt Masters of Time 1967); The House that Stood Still (1950; rev vt The Mating Cry 1960; text restored vt The Undercover Aliens 1976 UK); The Universe Maker (1949 Startling Stories as "The Shadow Men"; rev 1953 dos); Planets for Sale (1943-6 ASF as by Hull alone; fixup 1954) with Hull alone credited; the 1965 ed credits both authors; Rogue Ship (1947 ASF, 1950 Super-Science Stories and 1963 If; fixup 1965); The Twisted Men (coll 1964 dos); Monsters (coll 1965; vt The Blal and Other Science-Fiction Monsters 1976); The Winged Man (1944 ASF as by Hull alone; exp 1966) with Hull; The Far-Out Worlds of A.E. van Vogt (coll 1968; vt with added stories as The Worlds of A.E. van Vogt 1974); More than Superhuman (coll 1971); The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders (coll 1971; with 1 story cut and others retitled but unrevised, rev vt The Gryb 1976); M-33 in Andromeda (coll 1971); The Darkness on Diamondia (1972); The Book of Van Vogt (coll 1972; vt Lost: Fifty Suns 1979); Future Glitter (1973; vt Tyranopolis 1977 UK); The Secret Galactics (1974; vt Earth Factor X 1976); The Man with a Thousand Names (1974); The Best of A.E. Van Vogt (coll 1974 UK), a different selection from The Best of A.E. Van Vogt (coll 1976); Supermind (fixup 1977; The Anarchistic Colossus (1977); Pendulum (coll 1978); Enchanted Village (1950 Other Worlds; 1979 chap); Renaissance (1979); Cosmic Encounter (1980); Computerworld (1983; vt Computer Eye 1985).Omnibuses include: Triad (omni 1959) assembling The World of A, The Voyage of the Space Beagle and SLAN; A Van Vogt Omnibus (omni 1967 UK) assembling Planets for Sale, The Beast and The Book of Ptath; Van Vogt Omnibus (2) (omni 1971 UK) assembling The Mind Cage, The Winged Man and SLAN; Two Science Fiction Novels (omni 1973 UK) assembling Siege of the Unseen (as The Three Eyes of Evil) and Earth's Last Fortress; The Universe Maker and The Proxy Intelligence (omni 1976 UK).About the author: "A.E. van Vogt" in Seekers of Tomorrow (1966) by Sam MOSKOWITZ; "The Development of a Science Fiction Writer" by AEVV in Foundation #3, 1973; The World beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (1989) by Alexei and Cory PANSHIN.See also: ADAM AND EVE; ANTIMATTER; ARKHAM HOUSE; CANADA; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; COSMOLOGY; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FRANCE; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GENERATION STARSHIPS; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GODS AND DEMONS; HISTORY IN SF; HISTORY OF SF; ILLUSTRATION; INVASION; LIVING WORLDS; LONGEVITY (IN WRITERS AND PUBLICATIONS); PARANOIA; PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS; PERCEPTION; PHYSICS; POLITICS; PSI POWERS; PSYCHOLOGY; REINCARNATION; RELIGION; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SERIES; SUSPENDED ANIMATION; THRILLING WONDER STORIES; WAR. VARDEMAN, ROBERT E(DWARD) (1947- ) US writer whose ruthless productivity - he has written about 50 books since his first sf novel, Pleasure Planet (1974 as by Edward E. George; vt Outer Space Embrace 1978 as by Monica Mounds; vt Janet's Sex Planet 1980 as by Carrie Onn; vt Intergalactic Orgy 1983 as Obie Khan; vt Sexual Coquette 1985 dos as by Marv Elous; vt Playing with Desire 1986 as by Fred Sparkrock) - has yet to give birth to any memorable work. As well as some further pseudonymous titles, including 2 fairly marginal sf adventures as Nick CARTER - The Solar Menace * (1981) and Doctor DNA * (1982) - 2 Star Trek ties - The Klingon Gambit * (1981) and Mutiny on the Enterprise * (1983) - and a number of fantasy sequences, he has produced several series for the sf market, including: the Weapons of Chaos sequence, comprising Echoes of Chaos (1986), Equations of Chaos (1987) and Colors of Chaos (1988), all assembled as The Weapons of Chaos (omni 1989); the Masters of Space sequence, comprising The Stellar Death Plan (1987), The Alien Web (1987) and A Plague in Paradise (1987), all assembled as Masters of Space (omni 1990 UK), which was advertised as resembling E.E. SMITH's work but lacked any similar conviction; and the Biowarriors sequence, comprising The Infinity Plague (1989), Crisis at Starlight (1990) and Space Vectors (1990). Singletons include The Sandcats of Rhyl (1978), Road to the Stars (1988), Ancient Heavens (1989) and Deathfall (1991). [JC]Other works: Fantasies, mostly in series form, including: the War of Powers sequence, all with Victor MILAN, comprising The Sundered Realm (1980), The City in the Glacier (1980) and The Destiny Stone (1980), all assembled as The War of Powers (omni 1984), then The Fallen Ones (1981), In the Shadow of Omizantrim (1982) and Demon of the Dark Ones (1982); the Cenotaph Road sequence, perhaps his best, comprising Cenotaph Road (1983), The Sorcerer's Skull (1983), World of Mazes (1983), Iron Tongue (1984), Fire and Fog (1984) and Pillar of Night (1984); the Jade Demons sequence, comprising The Quaking Lands (1984), The Frozen Waves (1985), The Crystal Clouds (1985) and The White Fire (1986), all assembled as The Jade Demons Quartet (omni 1987 UK); the Swords of Raemllyn sequence, all with George W. PROCTOR, comprising To Demons Bound (1985), A Yoke of Magic (1985) and Blood Fountain (1985), all 3 assembled as Swords of Raemllyn Book 1 (omni 1992 UK), plus Death's Acolyte (1986), The Beasts of the Mist (1986) and For Crown and Kingdom (1987), all 3 assembled as Swords of Raemllyn Book 2 (omni 1992 UK); the Demon Crown trilogy, comprising The Glass Warrior (1988). Phantoms on the Wind (1989) and A Symphony of Storms (1990), all assembled as The Demon Crown Trilogy (omni 1990 UK); the Peter Thorne psychic detective sequence comprising The Screaming Knife (1990),A Resonance of Blood (1992) and Death Channels (1992). A singleton is The Keys to Paradise (1986 UK; vt in 3 vols, all as by Daniel Moran, The Flame Key 1987 US, The Skeleton Lord's Key 1987 US and Key of Ice and Steel 1988 US as by Moran); The Accursed (1994 UK); Deathfall (1994). VARDON, RICHARD [s] David Wright O'BRIEN. VARDRE, LESLIE L.P. DAVIES. VARGO STATTEN BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE VARGO STATTEN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE. VARGO STATTEN SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE UK magazine. 19 issues 1954-6, published by Scion, London, for the first 7 issues, then Dragon Publications; ed "Vargo Statten" (Alistair Paterson for 7 issues, then John Russell FEARN). The last 2 issues were undated. #1-#3 were PULP-MAGAZINE size, then DIGEST size to #11, then pocketbook size. Intended to be a monthly, it 7 times skipped months. The magazine was retitled Vargo Statten British Science Fiction Magazine vol 1 #4-#5, The British Science Fiction Magazine vol 1 #6-#12, and finally The British Space Fiction Magazine from vol 2 #1 to the end.VSSFM owed its existence to the success of Scion's paperback-book line, which included many sf novels written by Fearn and published as by Vargo Statten. A magazine under Statten's name seemed a good financial bet, given the popularity of the books. The policy of aiming stories at younger readers may have alienated some UK authors; the low rates of payment, finally 12s 6d per 1000 words for world rights, cannot have helped. Barrington J. BAYLEY made his debut here, and E.C. TUBB often appeared both under his own name and under pseudonyms, but Fearn was forced to use many of his own stories, sometimes old ones slightly rewritten under various pseudonyms, to fill up the issues. [FHP] VARLEY, JOHN (HERBERT) (1947- ) US writer who entered the sf field with "Picnic on Nearside" for FSF in 1974 and who was soon thought to be the most significant new writer of the 1970s. He was fresh, he was complex, he understood the imaginative implications of transformative developments like cloning ( CLONES), many of his protagonists were women, and most of the stories he told were set within an overall background Universe whose centre of geography had been startlingly displaced - in a manner characteristic of the finest sf - from Earth itself. It may have been the case that many previous SPACE OPERAS, especially those claiming galactic scope, were set far from the home planet (which was often "forgotten"), but JV's innovation was twofold: to bring the displacement close to the present day, which NEAR-FUTURE setting made it more vivid, and to present a subsequent Solar System whose own complexity seemed to mark a genuine evolutionary shift - in fictional terms - from the old geocentricity. The image of an incessantly humming Solar System - it is central to books like Michael SWANWICK's Vacuum Flowers (1987) - owes as much to JV as it does to the idioms of CYBERPUNK. Urgent and risk-taking, the stories assembled in THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION (coll 1978; vt In the Hall of the Martian Kings 1978 UK) and The Barbie Murders (coll 1980; vt Picnic on Nearside 1984) seemed to announce the shape of sf's response to the end of the 20th century. JV's shorter works have brought him 3 HUGOS - for "The Persistence of Vision" in 1979, "The Pusher" in 1982 and PRESS ENTER (1984 IASFM; 1990 chap dos) in 1985 - and 2 NEBULAS - for "The Persistence of Vision" and "PRESS ENTER".This sense of currency was also a feature of JV's first - and perhaps finest - novel, THE OPHIUCHI HOTLINE (1977), set 500 years into his future HISTORY - it is sometimes called the Eight Worlds sequence - at a time when humanity has been long exiled from Earth by immensely superior, indifferent "Invaders". Bioengineered and variously cloned, humans now subscribe to social and sexual codes - and live within perspectives and according to processes - that differ radically from those of their flesh-bound, planet-bound ancestors. The protagonist is in fact several successive clones of the same person, the original dying only a few pages into the text and new versions of that original - clone bodies with pre-recorded mind-tapes of the original plugged in at the point of arousal - taking over when needed. The sense of ongoing process - and of an identity-dissolving taste for metamorphosis - is incessant. The eponymous hotline, which is operated by similarly displaced interstellar exiles, beams data through the Solar System, the last item being a message that humanity will soon be banned from its home system, and will be doomed to wander the stars, homeless, for ever. This happens.JV then composed the Titan or Gaean sequence - Titan (1979), Wizard (1980) and Demon (1984) - which begins exuberantly with a mission to explore the largest satellite of Saturn. But Titan turns out to be a sentient artifact (or BIG DUMB OBJECT) called Gaea and to contain within its entrails a veritable POCKET UNIVERSE of trapped individuals and species. The female protagonist of the series becomes Gaea's agent, intimate and enemy. Although this was technically an interminable template, the series was kept decorously to trilogy length, but did not fully escape the charge that the libidinous solipsisms of the plot had a VIRTUAL-REALITY resonance. Millennium (1977 IASFM as "Air Raid" as by Herb Boehm; exp 1983) - filmed as MILLENNIUM (1989) - is a TIME-TRAVEL novel in which humans from a devastated future extract contemporary accident victims at the moment before their deaths because, being still genetically whole, they can be used in a project to repopulate the Earth, with the aid of an AI. Like JV's best work, the book was smoothly muscled, manipulative and ruthless. His output of the 1980s was, nevertheless, less strikingly innovative than had been hoped - and, perhaps unfairly, expected - of him. The stories assembled in Blue Champagne (coll 1986) - Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo (1989 chap) reprints an original story from the collection - show no technical decline but lack some of the exploratory dangerousness of his first work. Similarly, Steel Beach (1992) demonstrates through its huge length a virtuoso control of sf themes, presented through many of the kind of compulsive narrative hooks employed by Robert A. HEINLEIN in his ruthless prime; but the story itself, set in the Eight Worlds universe about 200 years after humanity's expulsion from Earth, lacks dramatic urgency, despite many cleverly conceived (but sidebar) episodes full of action. The title itself, however, may well become established as a tag for the evolutionary impasse humanity may soon face: like a lungfish struggling to breathe on a Pacific beach, JV suggests, humanity could soon find itself struggling for breath on the steel beach that is all the home it has, after the final death of Nature. [JC]See also: BLACK HOLES; CHILDREN IN SF; ESCHATOLOGY; ESP; FANTASY; GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION; GENETIC ENGINEERING; ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE; LINGUISTICS; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MAGIC; MARS; NEW WAVE; OUTER PLANETS; PASTORAL; SCIENCE FANTASY; SEX; SPACE HABITATS; TIME PARADOXES; WRITERS OF THE FUTURE CONTEST. VASOVA, ALTA [r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF. VECTOR The journal of the BRITISH SCIENCE FICTION ASSOCIATION (BSFA). There have been 181 issues to Nov/Dec 1994.V has been published since the foundation of the BSFA in 1958, fairly regularly since the 1970s. E.C. TUBB was its first editor (#1), and it has had 32 editors since then, including, briefly, Michael MOORCOCK (#6-#7). Both production and literary quality have fluctuated severely from editor to editor, and V has appeared variously as an association newsletter, a typical FANZINE and an academic journal. It had a strong period under the editorship of Roger Peyton in the mid-1960s (#26-#39), and has been much more consistent ever since 1972 when Malcolm EDWARDS took over (#59-#68), his successors including Christopher J. Fowler (#69-83), David WINGROVE (#84-#94), Geoff Rippington (#108-#123), David V. Barrett (#126-#150), Boyd Parkinson and Kev McVeigh (#151-#160), and Kev McVeigh and Catie Cary (#161-#165) and by Cary alone (#166-current). The page-size varied between large and small for many years, but since 1984 (#122) it has been large-format A4. Since the late 1970s, when some of V's functions were hived off into other BSFA publications - paperback-book reviews in Paperback Parlour (soon renamed Paperback Inferno, and then incorporated into V from #169), fan news in Matrix, and advice for new writers in Focus - V has sometimes looked less useful than it once was, but it has continued to print good interviews, major articles and substantial reviews, often approaching professional standards, but equally often lapsing into fannish polemic, which is quite proper, since its function is to act as a kind of central clearing house for UK FANDOM. Almost every UK sf writer of note has appeared in its pages, and many US writers too. [PN/PR] VEIS, JAROSLAV [r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF. VEJDELEK, CESTMIR [r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF. VEL'D (vt The Veldt) Film (1987). Uzbekfilm. Dir Nazim Tulyakhodzhaev, starring Igor Beliayev, Nelly Pshonnaya, Georgy Gegechkori. Screenplay Tulyakhodzhaev, based on stories by Ray BRADBURY. 90 mins. Colour.The second attempt by a talented Uzbek director to transfer the mood of Bradbury's GOTHIC prose onto the screen proved not so successful as the first, the short animated movie There Will Come Soft Rains (1982), had done. This full-length feature is a poetic adaptation of several Bradbury stories, such as "The Garbage Collector" (1953),"Hail and Farewell" (1953) and "The Dragon" (1956), along with some episodes from Dandelion Wine (1957), all combined into a single, if rather dissolving, plot, for which the title story, "The Veldt" (1950), serves as a bar or pivot. The baroque atmosphere evoked by the unique Bradbury mixture of horror, pathos and sentimentality is well maintained, and visually some episodes are excellent. But the director's lack of feeling for narrative or plot means that he does not create a main focus for the film; it is as if he has forgotten what he wished to say. However, it still stands as a good example of the new Soviet horror film. [VG]See also: RUSSIA. VELDT, THE VEL'D. VELIKOVSKY, IMMANUEL (1895-1979) Russian-born US pseudo-scientist and writer. He is primarily known for a series of books putting forward, with a vast amount of documentation and argument, a theory of Earth's history which proposes that comparatively recent large-scale changes in the Solar System had catastrophic effects on the Earth, and that historical evidence (in the form of legends, MYTHOLOGY, the Bible and other accounts) exists for these. The books are Worlds in Collision (1950), Ages in Chaos (1952), Earth in Upheaval (1955) and Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960). In particular, Velikovsky claimed that the planet VENUS was a recent addition to the Sun's retinue, having been spat out by Jupiter in biblical times and then having swooped close to the Earth on several occasions before coming to rest in its current orbit: one effect of these near-misses was to make the Earth flip over on its axis. Making planets flip over in this way is extremely hard to do because of the gyroscope effect, and it was soon proven that his basic mechanism was infeasible. Nevertheless, the books are probably the most significant in 20th-century PSEUDO-SCIENCE.An apparent attempt by scientists to have IV's work censored is recounted in The Velikovsky Affair (anth 1966) ed Alfred de Grazia. A collection of essays defending IV's science and pointing to the accuracy of many of his predictions (while, it has to be said, ignoring the inaccuracy of others) is Velikovsky Reconsidered (anth 1976) ed by the editors of Pensee. The proceedings of a scientific conference to discuss the affair are found in Scientists Confront Velikovsky (anth 1977) ed Donald Goldsmith. An over-friendly overview of Velikovskianism is given in Doomsday: The Science of Catastrophe (1979) by Fred Warshovsky.In the early 1980s there was a flurry of renewed interest in Velikovsky's ideas when it was proposed that flipping the Earth over on its axis might not be so difficult as had been thought. Various writers pointed to the childhood toy called the tippe-top which, when spun, easily turns over to stand on its head, apparently defying the gyroscopic effect. Probably the most significant book in this vein was The Reversing Earth (1982) by Peter Warlow, which described the tippe-top effect (and much else in support of IV's ideas) in persuasive detail. The flaw in the argument is (to simplify) that the tippe-top effect works only if the tippe-top is placed on a surface (e.g., a table-top) in an appropriate gravitational field.Orthodox scientists have themselves proposed some quasi-Velikovskian ideas since the 1960s, reflecting a recognition that catastrophic changes caused by cosmic events may have played a greater part in our planet's history than hitherto recognized; in particular, it is now generally accepted that the extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago was the result of one such event. A type example of a disproved theory of this sort is supplied by The Jupiter Effect (1974) by John GRIBBIN and Stephen Plagemann, which predicted dire consequences from an unusual planetary alignment and a peak of solar activity in 1982; Beyond the Jupiter Effect (1983) is rather more muted.IV's dramatic scenario of planetary near-misses parallels many of the catastrophic events described in sf; a notable fictional precursor is When Worlds Collide (1933) by Philip WYLIE and Edwin BALMER. Some of the few interesting sf novels in the Velikovskian mode (there are countless bad DISASTER novels) are THE WANDERER (1964) by Fritz LEIBER, in which a singleton planet enters the Solar System, The HAB Theory (1976) by Allan W. ECKERT, in which the Earth flips on its axis, Lucifer's Hammer (1977) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry POURNELLE, in which the Earth is struck by a small comet, and Nemesis (1989) by Isaac ASIMOV, which focuses on the threat to Earth of a dwarf star on course for a close encounter with the Solar System. [PN/JGr]See also: ADAM AND EVE. VENEZUELA LATIN AMERICA. VENGEANCE (vt Ein Toter Sucht seiner Morder; vt The Brain) Film (1963). CCC/Stross/Governor. Dir Freddie Francis, starring Peter Van Eyck, Anne Heywood, Cecil Parker, Bernard Lee. Screenplay Robert Stewart, Phil Mackie, based on Donovan's Brain (1943) by Curt SIODMAK. 83 mins. B/w.This West German/UK coproduction is the 3rd and least successful film version of Siodmak's novel: the others are The LADY AND THE MONSTER (1944) and DONOVAN'S BRAIN (1953). This gory remake retains the plot absurdities of the earlier versions but lacks their eerie atmosphere. [JB] VENNING, HUGH Pseudonym of UK writer Claude van Zeller (1905-1984), whose The End: A Projection, Not a Prophecy (1947) envisages, in AD2050, a DYSTOPIAN (though scientifically advanced) England surrounded by a worse world under the dominion of 666, who rules the Greater Roman Empire and is defeated at the last moment (HV was Roman Catholic) by the hosts of the Lord. [JC] VENTURE SCIENCE FICTION US DIGEST-size magazine. 16 issues, published by Fantasy House (a subsidiary of Mercury Publications) Jan 1957-Mar 1958 and by Mercury Press May 1958-Aug 1970, as a companion to The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION . 10 bimonthly issues Jan 1957-July 1958 ed Robert P. MILLS; the title was revived a decade later for 6 quarterly issues May 1969-Aug 1970; ed Edward FERMAN. After the 1st series finished, the contents-page masthead in FSF was altered to read "including Venture Science Fiction". VSF put a higher priority on action-adventure sf than did its companion. In its second incarnation it featured a cut novel in every issue. Notable stories include C.M. KORNBLUTH's "Two Dooms" (July 1958), James TIPTREE Jr's "The Snows are Melted, the Snows are Gone" (Nov 1969) and Edward WELLEN's short novel Hijack (May 1970; 1971).The UK edn was a monthly digest magazine published by the Atlas Publishing and Distribution Co., Sep 1963-Dec 1965 (28 issues). It reprinted most of its material from the 1st series of the US magazine, but also used stories from FSF, some from the 1950s, and some which had appeared after FSF's UK edn had folded in June 1965. [BS/PN] VENUS Because Earth's inner neighbour presented a bright and featureless face to early astronomers, it became something of a mystery planet. 19th-century astronomers and early-20th-century sf writers generally imagined that, as the featureless face was a permanent cloud layer, the surface beneath must be warm and wet; the Venus of the imagination became a planet of vast oceans (perhaps with no land at all) or sweltering jungles. In the 1960s, however, probes revealed that Venus has no liquid water at its surface, and that its clouds - mostly composed of carbon dioxide - create a greenhouse effect in the lower atmosphere which generates temperatures of several hundred degrees Celsius.Early planetary tours to take in Venus - including Athanasius KIRCHER's Itinerarium Exstaticum (1656), Emanuel SWEDENBORG's The Earths in our Solar System (1758) and George GRIFFITH's A Honeymoon in Space (1901) - were influenced by the planet's longtime association with the goddess of love: its inhabitants were frequently characterized as gentle and ethereal, after the fashion of Bernard le Bovyer de FONTENELLE's Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes habites (1686; trans J. Glanvill as A Plurality of Worlds 1929). The first novel concerned specifically with Venus was Achille Eyraud's Voyage a Venus ["Voyage to Venus"] (1865). A winged Venusian arrived on Earth in W. LACH-SZYRMA's A Voice from Another World (1874), and was later the protagonist of an interplanetary tour in the form of a series of 9 "Letters from the Planets" (1887-93). A detailed description of a Venusian civilization is featured in History of a Race of Immortals Without a God (1891 as by Antares Skorpios; vt The Immortals' Great Quest as by James W. BARLOW). Early SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES set on Venus include Gustavus W. POPE's Romances of the Planets, No. 2: Journey to Venus (1895) and John MUNRO's A Trip to Venus (1897). Fred T. JANE's early SATIRE on the interplanetary romance was To Venus in Five Seconds (1897), and Venus was also the world visited by Garrett P. SERVISS's A Columbus of Space (1911). A brief vision is featured in "Venus" (1909) by Maurice Baring (1874-1946). Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's chief imitator, Otis Adelbert KLINE, set his principal series of exotic romances on Venus - a trilogy comprising The Planet of Peril (1929), The Prince of Peril (1930) and The Port of Peril (1932; 1949). Burroughs's own Venusian series, begun with Pirates of Venus (1934), is weak self-pastiche. Other PULP-MAGAZINE romances set on Venus include Homer Eon FLINT's "The Queen of Life" (1919; in The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life, coll 1966) and Ralph Milne FARLEY's series begun with The Radio Man (1924; 1948; vt An Earthman on Venus). The early sf pulps made abundant use of Venusian scenarios. Notable examples include John W. CAMPBELL's "Solarite" (1930), Clark Ashton SMITH's "The Immeasurable Horror" (1931) and John WYNDHAM's story of COLONIZATION, "The Venus Adventure" (1932 as by John Beynon Harris). Stanton A. COBLENTZ used Venus as the setting for his satire The Blue Barbarians (1931; 1958) and for the more sober The Planet of Youth (1932; 1952). Some of Stanley G. WEINBAUM's best stories of LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS are set on Venus, including "The Lotus Eaters"(1935) and "Parasite Planet" (1935). Clifford D. SIMAK used Venusian milieux imaginatively in "Hunger Death" (1938) and "Tools" (1942), as did Lester DEL REY in "The Luck of Ignatz" (1939) and Robert A. HEINLEIN in "Logic of Empire" (1941).The image of Venus as an oceanic world was extensively developed in the 1940s, most memorably by C.S. LEWIS in Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to Venus), in which ISLANDS of floating vegetation serve as a new Garden of Eden for a replay of the myth of ADAM AND EVE. The most enduring pulp image of the same species was that provided by Lawrence O'Donnell (Henry KUTTNER and C. L. MOORE) in "Clash by Night" (1943) and its sequel Fury (1947; 1950). Here mankind lives in the submarine "keeps" of Venus after Earth has died, and is faced with the terrible task of colonizing the inordinately hostile land-surface; a more recent sequel to "Clash by Night", incorporating the earlier story, is The Jungle (1991) by David A. DRAKE. The notion that Venus might be an appropriate home for mankind after Earth becomes uninhabitable had earlier been advanced in J.B.S. HALDANE's visionary essay "The Last Judgment" (1927), and was taken up from there by Olaf STAPLEDON in LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), where humanity spends an ecstatic period of its future history as a winged creature on the Venusian floating islands. Other stories deploying the watery image include Isaac ASIMOV's Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (1954 as by Paul French; vt The Oceans of Venus) and Poul ANDERSON's "Sister Planet" (1959). The alternative image of Venus the jungle planet, perpetually beset by fierce wet weather, is featured in Ray BRADBURY's "Death-by-Rain" (1950; vt "The Long Rain").Although MARS was much more popular as a setting for exotic romances, Venus had the advantage of being rather more versatile: the clouds of Venus could hide exotic wonders. For this reason, some of the gaudiest romances of GENRE SF are set on Venus: C.L. Moore's "Black Thirst" (1934), Leigh BRACKETT's and Ray Bradbury's "Lorelei of the Red Mist" (1946), Brackett's "The Moon that Vanished" (1948) and "The Enchantress of Venus" (1949; vt "City of the Lost Ones") and Keith Bennett's "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears" (1950). The other side of the coin was that there never grew up a consistent "Venusian mythology" comparable in power to the MYTHOLOGY of Mars.As with Mars, during the 1950s there was a change in the main concern of stories about Venus, so that it was more often seen as a tough challenge to would-be colonists. In THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953) by Frederik POHL and C.M. KORNBLUTH it is the "Gravy Planet" which has to be "sold" to the public by high-pressure advertising; Pohl continued the story in The Merchants' War (1984), having earlier presented a somewhat different image in "The Merchants of Venus" (1971). Other stories of colonization from the 1950s are Heinlein's Between Planets (1951), Chad OLIVER's "Field Expedient" (1955) and a trilogy by Rolf Garner (Bryan BERRY): Resurgent Dust (1953), The Immortals (1953) and The Indestructible (1954). Philip LATHAM's Five Against Venus (1952) is a Venusian ROBINSONADE.Since the discovery of the true nature of the Venusian surface the interest of sf writers in the planet has waned considerably. The new Venus shows its intimidating face in Larry NIVEN's "Becalmed in Hell" (1965), contrasting poignantly with Roger ZELAZNY's florid farewell to the world of the great ocean, "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" (1965) and with Thomas M. DISCH's brief jeremiad "Come to Venus Melancholy" (1965). The idea that Venus might be terraformed ( TERRAFORMING) has, however, renewed interest in the notion of colonization, and such a project is celebrated on an appropriately massive scale in a series of novels by Pamela SARGENT begun with VENUS OF DREAMS (1986) and continued in Venus of Shadows (1988).2 theme anthologies are The Hidden Planet (anth 1959) ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM and Farewell, Fantastic Venus! (anth 1968; cut vt All About Venus) ed Brian W. ALDISS and Harry HARRISON. [BS]See also: UNDER THE SEA. VERCORS Pseudonym used by French artist, illustrator and writer Jean-Marcel de Bruller (1902-1991) for all his publications from 1942 on, including his first novel, Le silence de la mer (1942; trans Cyril Connolly as Put Out the Light 1944 UK); to publish this he founded the French Resistance press Les Editions de Minuit. After WWII he wrote several moral fables in a manner influenced by Albert Camus (1913-1960). Les Animaux denatures (1952; trans Rita Barisse as You Shall Know Them 1953 US; vt Borderline 1954 UK; vt The Murder of the Missing Link 1958 US) deals with the discovery of a new species of ape-man ( APES AND CAVEMEN) and the deliberate murder of an infant by its human father to provide a test case in which he hopes to establish the rapidly uplifted species' claim to human status; he wins, and is acquitted of murder as the act preceded the declaration of humanity. Coleres (1956; trans Rita Barisse as The Insurgents 1957) deals with the search for IMMORTALITY by a man who attains it at great personal cost. Sylva (1961; trans Rita Barisse 1962 US) is an inversion of David GARNETT's Lady into Fox (1922): here a vixen is changed into a woman by an English bachelor but eventually reverts. V's postwar allegorical fictions, though thought-generating and occasionally moving, never challenged the fame of his first novel, which is somewhat unfairly the only one for which he is remembered outside France. As an illustrator - which work he signed as Bruller - he showed a rollicking good humour; his illustrations for Andre MAUROIS's Patapoufs et Filifers (1930 chap; trans Norman Denny as Fattypuffs and Thinifers 1941) appear in both French and English versions. [JC]See also: SUSPENDED ANIMATION. VERDE, CAMPO Irving A. GREENFIELD. VERN, DAVID David V. REED; Don WILCOX. VERNE, JULES (GABRIEL) (1828-1905) French playwright and novelist, generally thought of as one of the 2 founding fathers of sf - the other being H.G. WELLS - though neither claimed this status for himself or for the other, and nor did either of them claim to be originating a new genre. As sf scholarship began to emphasize only in recent decades, both Wells and JV wrote consciously within traditions of popular literature that already had large though diffuse reading publics; both were adept at picking up hints from inferior or earlier writers and turning out definitive versions of sf themes later to become central to the field as it took on shape with the 20th century, and both excelled in the imaginative density and (in Wells's case, certainly) the shapeliness of their tales. Like Robert A. HEINLEIN for a later generation, they brought the instruments of sf into the home world.In some other ways as well, the linking of the two writers as founding fathers is deceptive. JV was a pragmatic, middle-class entrepreneur of letters, and at least during the first part of his career wholeheartedly espoused the clear-eyed optimism about progress and European Man's central role in the world typical of high 19th-century culture. Born almost 40 years later, and to lower-middle-class parents, Wells in his early work exuded and helped to define the doom-laden fin-de-siecle atmosphere of the old century's hectic, premonitory climax. It should be noted, however, that JV was by no means insensible to moods of change, and that the novels of his last decade were much darker in texture and more pessimistic in implication than the novels for which he is best remembered today, all of which were written by 1880.JV was born and raised in the port of Nantes, and it is probably no coincidence that the sea appears in a large number of his best and most romantic novels. His father was a successful lawyer and assumed that JV would eventually take over his practice, but from an early age the child rebelled against this form of worldly success (though, true to his time, his rebelliousness did not express itself in disdain for the things of the world). His first declaration of independence was an attempt to switch places with a ship's cabin-boy; he was extricated only after the vessel had actually left harbour. By young adulthood, however, JV's romantic flamboyance took a more productive course. He went to Paris on an allowance and, under the influence of such writers as Victor Hugo (1802-1885) and Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-1895), wrote a good deal of drama (about 20 plays remain unpublished), romantic verse and libretti, several of which were produced, as well as engaging in mild, unsuccessful flirtations. (JV was never at ease with women, and his works are notably free of realistic portrayals of them; his Catholicism, which did not sit well with the Bohemian lifestyle he tried to imitate, may have contributed to this.) He soon discovered the works of Edgar Allan POE, somewhat misreading his solitary melancholy as a kind of romantic adventurousness, and under this influence published his first tale of sf interest, "Un voyage en ballon" ["A Voyage in a Balloon"] (1851) - which was eventually republished in Une fantaisie du Docteur Ox (coll 1872; part trans George H. Towle as Doctor Ox and Other Stories 1874 US; different trans anon as Dr Ox's Experiment, and Other Stories 1874 UK) as "Une Drame dans les airs" ["A Drama in the Air"] and then in book form under this latter title (1874). Also in Dr Ox's Experiment was the more interesting early story "Maitre Zacharius" ["Master Zacharius"] (1854), an allegory about time, a clockmaker and the Devil. Both stories demonstrate from how early a date JV developed his characteristic technique of inserting quasiscientific explanations into a simply told adventure imbued with the romance of geography. This story-telling method proved from the first to be a singularly appropriate tool, legitimizing the love of adventure (or more specifically of travel, in this first age of the tourist) by infusing it with the sense that scientific progress (and hence national virtue) was being encouraged along with the thrill of voyaging.But, despite these early hints of the course he was to follow, JV felt himself only marginally successful as a writer and bon vivant, and with his father's help he soon turned to stockbroking, an occupation he maintained until 1862, when his singularly important association with Jules Hetzel (1814-1886), a successful publisher and writer for children, began. JV had come to him with a narrative about travelling in BALLOONS (it was apparently couched in semi-documentary form); when Hetzel suggested that he properly novelize his story, JV did so eagerly and swiftly, and the renovated tale, published as Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; trans "William Lackland" as Five Weeks in a Balloon, or Journeys and Discoveries in Africa, by Three Englishmen 1869 US), began the long series of Voyages extraordinaires ["Extraordinary Journeys"] which the firm of Hetzel published under that rubric from then until the end of JV's career. In this first tale, which was still comparatively primitive, 3 colleagues decide to try to cross Africa in a balloon, have numerous adventures as they go, and learn a great deal about Africa. But Five Weeks in a Balloon lacks the hectic, romantic intensity of JV's best work, those stories whose displacement from normal realities allowed him to transcend the element of illustrated travelogue which occasionally domesticated-in a negative sense - his fiction.His next novel, Paris au XXe Siecle ["Paris in the 20th Century"] (written 1863; 1994), caused a considerable stir on its eventual discovery in manuscript form and subsequent publication. Set in 1960, and depicting a dystopian corporate dictatorship in unrelievedly grim terms, the tale is remarkable on several counts. It contradicts any sense that JV's cultural pessimism came from the disappointments of old age, or that it was the whole-cloth creation of his son, Michel Verne (1861-1925), who was indeed wholly or partially responsible for stories like"In the Year 2889" (1889 The Forum), originally published in English and variously modified, as described by Arthur B. Evans in"The 'New' Jules Verne" (1995 Science-Fiction Studies). The novel was also noteworthy for the wide range and accuracy of its predictions - 1960 Paris boasts automobiles, pneumatic tube-trains, computers and faxes - all the more surprising, given the wide assumption that JV's almost total refusal to set his stories in the future demonstrated his inability to make proper sf extrapolations. Its 1994 publication also roused some suspicions about the date and actual authorship of the text; these suspicions are acutely analyzed by Evans, who treats them as natural but, in this case, unfounded. JV's next published novel, Voyage au centre de la terre (1863; exp 1867; trans anon as Journey to the Centre of the Earth 1872 UK), not only abandons futurity, but is the first to convey what became the trademark Vernean thrill - a congenial admixture of 19th-century moral clarity, the safety of numbers (multiple protagonists were usual), and a sense of coming very close to but never toppling over the edge of the known; in this novel 3 protagonists take part variously in an expedition into the core of a dormant volcano which leads them eventually into the dark hollow heart of the Earth itself. JV's highly visible wonderment at the world's marvels in tales of this sort goes far to explain the success he was beginning to achieve by this time; the Vernean thrill was conveyed with a childlike exuberance and clarity that give traditional PROTO-SCIENCE-FICTION devices, like the HOLLOW EARTH of this tale, an intensely memorable shape; and his tripartite division of protagonists (one a SCIENTIST, one an intensely active, athletic type, the third a more or less ordinary man representative of the reader's point of view) sorted out didactic duties and narrative pleasures remarkably well.In the meantime, Hetzel was planning a children's magazine and JV seemed an ideal collaborator. There has been some misunderstanding about the contracts under which JV supplied material for Le Magasin d'Education et de Recreation, which Hetzel founded in 1864, and to which JV began contributing with Les adventures du Capitaine Hatteras (in 2 vols as Les anglais au pole nord [1864; trans anon as The English at the North Pole 1874 UK] and Le desert de glace [1866; trans anon as The Desert of Ice 1874 US; vt The Field of Ice 1875 UK]). He was required by Hetzel to provide a certain number of vols a year - initially 3, eventually 2 - but a single volume did not necessarily make a novel, some taking 2 or even 3 to run their course. JV's production, therefore, while large, was not phenomenal; he tended to publish about 1 novel a year, writing 64 in all, many of them not sf.JV's techniques for merging wonderment and didacticism became more refined with the books - his most famous - of the next decade. These include: De la terre a la lune (1865; trans J.K. Hoyte as From the Earth to the Moon, Passage Direct in 97 Hours and 20 Minutes 1869 US) and its sequel, Autour de la lune (1870; both trans Lewis Mercier and Eleanor King as From the Earth to the Moon Direct in 97 hours 20 minutes, and a Trip Around It 1873 UK; new trans Jacqueline and Robert Baldick 1970 UK); Les enfants du Capitaine Grant (1867-8; trans anon as In Search of the Castaways 1873 US); Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; trans Lewis Mercier as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas 1872 UK; vt Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea 1873 US; new trans Emanuel J. Mickel as The Complete Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea 1991 US), with its sequel, L'ile mysterieuse (1874-5; trans W.H.G. Kingston as The Mysterious Island 1875 UK); and, perhaps best known of all, Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours (1873; trans Geo. M. Towle as Around the World in Eighty Days 1874 US). These were the books of JV's prime, written with what one might call jubilant flow, but as a whole they were execrably translated, cut, bowdlerized and travestied. The reputation he long had in English-speaking countries for narrative clumsiness and ignorance of scientific matters was fundamentally due to his innumerate and illiterate translators who - along with the publishers who commissioned their work - remained impenetrably of the conviction that he was a writer of overblown juveniles and that it was thus necessary to trim him down, to eliminate any inappropriately adult complexities, and to pare the confusing scientific material to an absolute minimum. There are some newer translations, though even recent versions of these books are not untroubled by cuts and incoherence.A dominant and abiding note in the novels of JV's prime is a powerful sense of the ultimate rightness of the course of the 19th century, a note only strengthened by their author's fundamentally conservative, pragmatic imagination, for he almost never trespassed into futurity and never actually carried his protagonists off the edge of the known. His tales are geographies, not extrapolations. From the Earth to the Moon may seem an exception, with its huge cannon in Florida blasting passengers into space, but (questions of acceleration aside) the science of the story was firmly conceived, and the Moon, once safely circumnavigated, was left to its own resources. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (the vt is now universal) may likewise seem to stand somewhat outside the normal canon, though it is perhaps JV's most deeply felt novel; carefully and slowly composed, it introduces Captain Nemo and his elaborate submarine, the Nautilus, in a tale whose easy, exaggerated sombreness agreeably conflates the domesticated Byronism of the time and expressive marvels of science. Nemo (it turns out in the sequel) is an Indian prince whom British injustice has turned misanthropic, hence his life under the seas in his submarine, amply and comfortingly furnished in Second Empire plushness. But throughout both volumes Nemo's exploits hover just at the edge of the technologically possible; his prophetic gloominess is encased within a narrative frame which clearly represents his mood as aberration and his science as attainable. Around the World in Eighty Days is not sf at all (The Other Log of Phileas Fogg [1973] Philip Jose FARMER's sequel, rectifies this mundanity), for JV conceived his protagonist's journey around the world entirely in terms of travel arrangements then existing, basing Fogg's trip on a real journey by the US entrepreneur, traveller and eccentric George Francis Train (1829-1904).From the 1870s on, JV's work tended to repeat itself in gradually darkening hues, though he never lost the sense of the fundamental usableness of science and technology, a sense vital to much 20th-century sf, where - as with JV - usableness tends to serve as its own justification. It is notable, for instance, that JV's several ROBINSONADES - which include The Mysterious Island, L'ecole des Robinsons (1882; trans W.J. Gordon as Godfrey Morgan: A Californian Mystery 1883 UK; vt Robinson's School 1883 US) and the late, nostalgic Deux ans de vacances, ou un pensionnat de Robinsons (1888; trans anon as Adrift in the Pacific 1889 UK) - all exploit the romantic implications of being cast alone or with a few companions into the bosom of a bounteous Nature; JV's robinsonades are carefully socialized, and their small groups of protagonists always make do very well together. Even so, JV's later work was increasingly painted from a grimmer palette. Robur le conquerant (1886; trans anon as The Clipper of the Clouds 1887 UK; vt Robur the Conqueror 1887 US) and its sequel, Maitre du monde (1904; trans anon as Master of the World 1914 UK), together demonstrate the process. In the earlier book the steely, megalomaniacal Robur, inventor of an impressive flying machine, though rendered less favourably than earlier romantic misanthropes like Nemo, is still allowed by JV to represent the march of scientific progress as he forces the world to listen to him; but in the second book, JV's last work of any significance, Robur has become a dangerous madman, blasphemous and uncontrollable, and his excesses - like those of Wells's Dr Moreau - seem to represent the excesses of an unfettered development of science. Science and a subservient, bounteous Nature are no longer seen-in late JV or early Wells - as benevolently united under Man's imperious control.JV's life was externally uneventful from the 1860s on. He married, prospered mightily, lived in a large provincial house, yachted occasionally, unflaggingly produced his novels for the firm of Hetzel and became an exemplary 19th-century French middle-class dignitary. While his works inescapably reveal the boyish, escapist dream-life of that class, they can also be read as an ultimate requiem for the dream of his astonishing and transformative century, that waking dream of the daylight decades so effectively fleshed in his early work; but in 1900 that vision - that dream that the world was illimitable and obedient, and that Man could only improve upon creation - seemed to have begun to fade, as demonstrated perhaps most clearly in a remarkable post- HOLOCAUST tale, "The Eternal Adam" from Hier et demain (coll 1910; trans I.O. EVANS as Yesterday and Tomorrow 1965 UK), in which a far-future historian discovers to his dismay that 20th-century civilization was overthrown by geological cataclysms, and that the legend of ADAM AND EVE was both true and cyclical. (No manuscript in JV's hand exists of this story, which may have been written by his son, Michel Verne [see above]; but it clearly reflects JV's late state of mind, and has more than once been treated as a thematic summation of his career.)JV's work has always been attractive to film-makers, and as early as 1902 Georges MELIES loosely adapted From the Earth to the Moon to make Le VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE. It was not until JV's work came out of copyright in the 1950s, however, that the real rush started, beginning with Walt Disney's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA in 1954. Other JV adaptations were Around the World in 80 Days (1956), FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON (1958), JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (1959), MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), MASTER OF THE WORLD (1961) and Five Weeks in a Balloon (1962). The Czech film VYNALEZ ZKAZY (1958), released in the USA as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne, was a blend of live action and animation. JV's characters have been revived in various, sometimes embarrassing guises, as in CAPTAIN NEMO AND THE UNDERWATER CITY (1969). [JC]Other works: Here we list those Voyages extraordinaires not discussed above; many are not sf. Most of the better-known titles present a bibliographical nightmare, and unauthorized editions proliferate; we have normally attempted to list first translations only, and have not traced paths through the jungle of (usually pirated) vts.Une ville flottante suivi Les Forceurs de blocus (coll 1871; trans anon as A Floating City, and the Blockade Runners 1874 UK);Aventures de trois russes et de trois anglais dans L'Afrique australe (1872; trans Henry Frith as Meridiana: The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa 1873 US);Le pays des fourrures (1873; trans N. D'Anvers as The Fur Country 1873 UK);Le "Chancellor" (1875; trans Ellen E. Frewer as Survivors of the Chancellor 1875 UK);Michel Strogoff, Moscou-Irkoutsk (1876; trans W.H.G. Kingston as Michael Strogoff, the Courier of the Czar 1877 UK);Hector Servadac (1877; trans anon as Hector Servadac: Travels and Adventures through the Solar System 1877 US);Les indes-noires (1877; trans W.H.G. Kingston as The Child of the Cavern, or Strange Doings Underground 1877 UK);Un capitaine de quinze ans (1878; trans anon as Dick Sand, or A Captain at Fifteen 1878 US);Les cinq cents millions de la begum (1879; trans W.H.G. Kingston as The 500 Millions of the Begum 1879 US; vt The Begum's Fortune 1880 UK) (based on a manuscript by Andre LAURIE);Les tribulations d'un chinois en Chine (1879; trans anon as The Tribulations of a Chinaman in China 1879 US);La maison a vapeur (1879-80; trans Agnes D. Kingston as The Steam House 1881 UK); La Jangada (1881; trans W.J. Gordon as The Giant Raft 1881 US);Le rayon vert (1882; trans J. Cotterell as The Green Ray 1883 UK);Keraban-le-tetu (1883; trans J. Cotterell as The Headstrong Turk 1883-4 US);L'etoile du Sud (1884; trans anon as The Vanished Diamond: A Tale of South Africa 1885 UK; vt The Southern Star 1885 US) (based on a manuscript by Laurie);L'Archipel en feu (1884; trans anon as The Archipelago on Fire 1885 US);Mathias Sandorf (1885; trans anon 1885 US);Un billet de loterie: Le Numero 9672 (1886; trans Laura E. Kendall as Ticket No. "9672" 1886 US);Nord contre sud (1887; trans Laura E. Kendall as Texar's Vengeance, or North Versus South 1887 US);Le chemin de France (1887; trans anon as The Flight to France 1888 UK);Famille-sans-nom (1889; trans anon as A Family without a Name 1889 US);Sans dessus dessous (1889; trans anon as Topsy-Turvy 1890 US; vt Purchase of the North Pole: A Sequel to "From the Earth to the Moon" 1891 UK);Cesar Cascabel (1890; trans A. Estoclet 1890 US);Mistress Branican (1891; trans A. Estoclet 1891 US);Le Chateau des Carpathes (1892; trans anon as Castle of the Carpathians 1893 UK);Claudius Bombarnac (1892; trans anon 1894 UK);P'tit-bonhomme (1893; trans anon as Foundling Mick 1895 UK); Les mirifiques aventures de Maitre Antifer (1894; trans anon as Captain Antifer 1895 UK);L'ile a helice (1895; trans William J. Gordon as Floating Island, or The Pearl of the Pacific 1896 UK);Clovis Dardentor (1896; trans anon 1897 UK);Face au drapeau (1896; trans Mrs Cashel Hoey as For the Flag 1897 UK; vt Facing the Flag 1897 US);Le Sphinx des glaces (1897; trans Mrs Cashel Hoey as An Antarctic Mystery 1898 UK) (also published with its source [by Poe] as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Le Sphinx des glaces [omni 1975 UK]);Le superbe Orenoque ["The Superb Orinoco"] (1898);Le testament d'un excentrique (1899; trans anon as The Will of an Eccentric 1900 US);Seconde patrie (1900; trans Cranstoun Metcalfe in 2 vols as Their Island Home 1924 US and Castaways of the Flag: The Final Adventures of the Swiss Family Robinson 1924 US);Les histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin (1901; trans I.O. Evans as The Sea Serpent: The Yarns of Jean Marie Cabidoulin 1967 UK);Le village aerien (1901; trans I.O. Evans as The Village in the Tree Tops 1964 UK);Les freres Kip ["The Kip Brothers"] (1902);Bourses de voyage ["Travelling Grants"] (1904);Un drame en Livonie (1904; trans I.O. Evans as A Drama in Livonia 1967 UK);L'invasion de la mer ["The Invasion of the Sea"] (1905);Le phare du bout du monde (1905; trans anon as The Lighthouse at the End of the World 1923 UK);Le volcan d'or (1906; trans I.O. Evans as The Golden Volcano 1962 UK);L'agence Thompson and Co. (1907; trans I.O. Evans in 2 vols as The Thompson Travel Agency 1965 UK);La Chasse au meteore (1908; trans Frederick Lawton as The Chase of the Golden Meteor 1909 UK);Le pilote du Danube (1908; trans I.O. Evans as The Danube Pilot 1967 UK);Les naufrages du Jonathan (1909; trans I.O. Evans as The Survivors of the "Jonathan" 1962 UK) (partly by Michel Verne);Hier et demain (coll 1910; trans I.O. Evans as Yesterday and Tomorrow 1965 UK);Le secret de Wilhelm Storitz (1910; trans I.O.Evans as The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz 1963 UK);L'etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac (1919; trans I.O. Evans as The Barsac Mission 1960 US) (mostly by Michel Verne).L'epave du Cynthia (1885; trans anon as The Waif of the "Cynthia" 1886 US) (almost all by Laurie) is an interesting novel not among the Voyages extraordinaires.About the author: Jules Verne (1940) by Kenneth ALLOTT; Jules Verne: une lecture politique (1971; trans as The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne 1972 UK) by Jean Chesneaux; Jules Verne (1973; trans Roger Greaves as Jules Verne: A Biography 1976 UK) by Jean Jules-Verne, JV's grandson, particularly valuable for its bibliography; Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction (1978) by Peter Costello; Jules Verne: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1980) by Edward J. Gallager, Judith Mistichelli and John A. Van Eerde; Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel (1988) by Arthur B. Evans;Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Self (1990) by William Butcher; The Mask of the Prophet: The Extraordinary Fictions of Jules Verne (1990) by Andrew Martin.See also: ANTHROPOLOGY; ASTRONOMY; ATLANTIS; AUSTRIA; BENELUX; BIOLOGY; BOYS' PAPERS; CHILDREN'S SF; DIME-NOVEL SF; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; DYSTOPIAS; EVOLUTION; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; FRANCE; GOTHIC SF; HISTORY OF SF; ISLANDS; LOST WORLDS; MACHINES; MOON; MUSIC; NEAR FUTURE; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; POWER SOURCES; PREDICTION; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; SPACE FLIGHT; SPACESHIPS; TECHNOLOGY; TRANSPORTATION; UNDER THE SEA; WEAPONS. VERNE, MICHEL [r] The STRAND MAGAZINE ; Jules VERNE. VERNON, ROGER LEE (1924-1980) US writer and schoolteacher whose awkwardly routine sf is contained in an assemblage of original stories, The Space Frontiers (coll 1955), and the novel Robot Hunt (1959). [JC] VERRILL, A(LPHEUS) HYATT (1871-1954) US naturalist, explorer and writer, most of whose 100 or so books were nonfiction. He also wrote juveniles, of which the Boy Adventurers sequence is of some sf interest; relevant titles are The Boy Adventurers in the Land of El Dorado (1923), The Boy Adventurers in the Land of the Monkey Men (1923) and The Boy Adventurers in the Unknown Land (1924). The Radio Detectives Under the Sea (1922) is the most sf-like of his Radio Detectives children's sequence. His adult novels explore similar territory. The Golden City (1916) and The Bridge of Light (1929 AMZ Quarterly; 1950) are of interest as typical LOST-WORLD stories; they are set in South America, where AHV did much of his real-life exploration (whose extent he reportedly exaggerated). 9 novels in all appeared in AMZ and AMZ Quarterly 1926-35, though only 2 have reached book form, Bridge of Light and When the Moon Ran Wild (1931 AMZ Quarterly as AHV; 1962 UK) as by Ray Ainsbury (it is not known why this title was thus ascribed). AHV's work shows the marks of a somewhat desultory interest in fiction, and of the PULP-MAGAZINE markets he served, but does vividly dramatize his professional concerns. [JC]Other works: The Trail of the White Indians (1920).See also: ANTHROPOLOGY. VERSINS, PIERRE The name adopted by French scholar, writer and self-styled utopian Jacques Chamson (1923- ), a survivor of Auschwitz. He began writing sf in the 1950s and published 3 novels, En avant, Mars ["Forward to Mars"] (1951), Les etoiles ne s'en foutent pas ["The Stars Care"] (1954) and Le professeur ["The Professor"] (1956), and over 20 stories (some with his wife Martine Thome) while editing Ailleurs (1957-62), a critical FANZINE of high repute. A later novel was Les transhumains ["The Transhumans"] (1971). While resident in Switzerland, where he lived for 33 years, PV also produced Passeport pour l'inconnu ["Passport for the Unknown"], a regular sf RADIO programme for Radio Geneva. He will be remembered more for his scholarship than for his fiction: a keen researcher and bibliographer, he is a foremost authority on early sf and donated his priceless collection of books, magazines and sf memorabilia to the town of Yverdon-les-bains, Switzerland, in 1975, acting for 5 years as the curator of the unique local sf museum thus created, La MAISON D'AILLEURS . PV's major achievement is undoubtedly his massive 1000pp Encyclopedie de l'Utopie et de la sf ["Encyclopedia of Utopia and SF"] (1972), which was given a Special Award at the 1973 Toronto World SF Convention. An invaluable if idiosyncratic volume, particularly useful on sf outside the USA and the UK and prior to 1900, it remains to this day one of the finest reference books on sf; it has not been translated. PV's scholarship was honoured by the SFRA with a PILGRIM AWARD in 1991. [MJ/PN]See also: CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; FRANCE. VERTEX US magazine, slick BEDSHEET format Apr 1973-Apr 1975, tabloid format June 1975-Aug 1975. 16 issues, 13 bimonthly, the last 3 monthly, published by Mankind Publishing, Los Angeles; ed Donald J. PFEIL. Subtitled "The Magazine of Science Fiction", V was a magazine of imaginative layout and much internal illustration, the first "slick" in the sf field. The covers were often semi-abstract. Like most SF MAGAZINES since the 1970s, V ran many nonfiction pieces: interviews with authors and good science-fact articles. Stories were by, among others, Ed BRYANT, F.M. BUSBY, Terry CARR, George Alec EFFINGER, Joe HALDEMAN, William ROTSLER, Robert SILVERBERG and Norman SPINRAD. V was something of a showcase for up-and-coming US authors like Alan BRENNERT, William CARLSON, George R.R. MARTIN, Steven UTLEY and John VARLEY, and in quality was the strongest of the new 1970s sf magazines, but financial problems (at $1.50 it was unusually expensive) and a paper shortage forced a change to newspaper format on cheap paper for the last 3 issues, then closure. [PN/FHP] VESSER, CAROLYN (? - ) US writer whose first novel, Hellwalker (1988), is an sf adventure set on a distant planet. [JC] VETCH, THOMAS Pseudonym of the unidentified UK author of The Amber City: Being Some Account of the Adventures of a Steam Crocodile in Central Africa (1888), a Jules- VERNE-like excursion narrated by the protagonist, Thomas Vetch, who takes his flying ship into a mild-mannered LOST WORLD where people live in houses built of amber. [JC] V FOR VENDETTA Alan MOORE. VIAN, BORIS (1920-1959) French writer in various genres, his collected works amounting to more than 50 vols; he was Transcendental Satrap of the College de 'Pataphysique, and a fine dramatist of the absurd ( FABULATION) who will be perhaps best remembered for his songs ( MUSIC) and for such plays as Equarrissage pour tous (1950; trans Simon Watson Taylor as The Knackers' ABC 1968 US), which savagely mocks the military mind and military punctilio, and Les Batisseurs d'Empire ou le Schmurz (1959; trans Simon Watson Taylor as The Empire Builders 1962 UK), a surreal excursus upon pain. One of the main personalities of the post-WWII French sf scene - though sf made up only a small part of his activities - BV translated writers like A.E. VAN VOGT, William TENN, Henry KUTTNER and Ray BRADBURY, and was himself a writer of speculative fiction years ahead of his time. His first novel, J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946 as by Vernon Sullivan; trans BV and Milton Rosenthal as I Spit on your Graves 1948 as BV), pretended with some success to be a US tough-guy detective novel, and extended only peripherally into the fantastic. But the stories assembled in Les Fourmis (coll 1949; trans Julia Older as Blues for a Black Cat 1992 US) were deeply indebted to sf and Surrealism, as were his later novels, particularly L'Ecume des jours (1947; trans Stanley Chapman as Froth on the Daydream 1967 UK; vt Mood Indigo 1968 US), L'automne a Pekin ["Autumn in Peking"] (1947), a desert utopia set in an ALTERNATE WORLD, L'herbe rouge ["Red Grass"] (1950), a surreal tale which mixes TIME TRAVEL and nostalgia, and L'Arrache-Coeur (1953; trans Stanley Chapman as Heartsnatcher 1968 UK), a fable of metamorphosis. Throughout his career, BV used sf devices to articulate a sense of the world's violent impingement on the self, though sometimes his characters transcended their shackles; in the 1960s his work was particularly influential on writers of the UK NEW WAVE. [JC/MJ]See also: FRANCE. VICKERS, AL [s] Alexander POPOV. VICTOR GOLLANCZ LIMITED GOLLANCZ. VIDAL, GORE (1925- ) US writer, resident for some years in Italy, best known for such satirical works outside the sf field as Myra Breckinridge (1968) and its sequel Myron (1974) and for several vols of essays, from Rocking the Boat (coll 1962) to Armageddon? (coll 1987), whose contents are frequently apocalyptic. Messiah (1954; rev 1965), the sf novel which closed his first, precocious phase of novel-writing, is a dark SATIRE on RELIGION in which a new MESSIAH teaches a defeatedly secular USA how to worship death. A play, Visit to a Small Planet (1956; 1960), filmed in 1960, again satirizes contemporary Western civilization in the story of an ALIEN child, capable of changing the past, who comes close to wrecking our corrupt society before its guardians arrive to take it back. Kalki (1978), a further satirical assault upon one of GV's most persistent betes noires, organized religion, depicts the devastating consequences of its protagonist's belief that he embodies the returned essence of the world-destroying Hindu deity Kalki - devastating because he turns out, in a sense, to be right; the assault on religion is if anything intensified in Live From Golgotha (1992), in which tv crews, taking advantage of a new technology, compete to film the crucifixion. Duluth (1983) is a FABULATION which uses any device available - including sf instruments - to sustain a deeply savage view of US life. GV has been for nearly 50 years a pessimistic, sharp-tongued, knowledgeable critic of his native land; his sf must be read as an attempt to dramatize the long jeremiad. [JC]Other work: A Search for the King: A Twelth Century Legend (1950See also: UFOS. VIDEODROME Film (1982). Filmplan International/Guardian Trust/Canadian Film Development Corp. Written/dir David CRONENBERG, starring James Woods, Sonja Smits, Deborah Harry, Peter Dvorsky, Les Carlson. 89 mins. Colour.Bravely placing his outrageous exploitation movie squarely in the centre of media-theorists' debates about interaction between viewer and screen, Cronenberg here produces perhaps the best (and also the oddest) of his series of sf scenarios of medicine, media, metamorphosis and religion, the emphasis here falling on the last 3. Woods plays the cable-tv-station executive in charge of sex'n'violence programming who stumbles across a private programme called Videodrome. This, on the surface sadistic pornography, metamorphoses him (either mentally or physically), so that a videocassette slit forms in his belly and his hand becomes (naturally) a handgun. This second part of the film, where even the tv set becomes organic and protrudes lips (the Word made Flesh), may also be read as a prolonged hallucination. It is an intricate tale, also featuring a media guru, O'Blivion - modelled apparently on Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) - whose daughter pronounces after his apotheosis into software: "I am my Father's Screen." Too schlocky for the squeamish - especially the scene where talk-back hostess Nicki Brand (pop star Deborah Harry) burns her own breasts with a cigarette - and too intellectual for exploitation-movie fans, the film naturally flopped. But it may have been the most significant sf film of the 1980s, and is certainly - and very early on - the most CYBERPUNK. The novelization is Videodrome * (1983) by Jack Martin (Dennis Etchison [1943- ]). [PN]See also: CINEMA; PARANOIA; SEX. VIERECK, GEORGE S(YLVESTER) (1884-1962) German-born US writer, well known between the Wars as an apologist for defeated Germany, as in The Kaiser on Trial (1937), though his views on Hitler were considerably more guarded. On his refusal to register as a German lobbyist or agent in WWII he was imprisoned, gaining his release only in 1947. His first fiction of interest was The House of the Vampire (1907), a psychosexual fantasy in a late-Decadent style shared by writers like Hanns Heinz EWERS, but he is best remembered for his Wandering Jew trilogy, with Paul ELDRIDGE: My First Two Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew (1928; cut 1956), Salome: The Wandering Jewess (1930; cut vt Salome: My First 2000 Years of Love 1954) and The Invincible Adam (1932). The immortal protagonists ( IMMORTALITY) - the 3rd being a vigorous young masculine figure, Kotikokura, who represents Natural Man - intermingle their adventures through time, and, at times egregiously, symbolize mankind's striving after reality and love. Alone, GSV wrote a kind of pendant, Gloria (1952 UK; vt The Nude in the Mirror 1953 US), ostensibly an espionage thriller set on an ocean liner; but the female spy involved turns out to be, almost certainly, the goddess of love. Didactic and subversively erotic anecdotes about the true nature and history of humanity surface throughout all 4 books. The plot of Prince Pax (1933 UK) with Eldridge conveys similarly undemocratic ironies about the species: a RURITANIAN ruler acquires a high-tech weapon and uses it to commit a surly world to an enforced peace. [JC]See also: ADAM AND EVE; ORIGIN OF MAN. VIGLIANTE, MARY Working name of Mary Vigliante Szydlowski (1946- ), who has also published sf as by Jarl Szydlow; she writes woman-centred tales whose taste for violence has struck from the first a note of ambivalence. Titles include The Ark (1978) as by Szydlow and the Aftermath Books, a post- HOLOCAUST sequence comprising The Colony (1979) and The Land (1979). Also as MV she has published 2 similar tales: Source of Evil (1980) and Worship the Night (1982). Unlike FEMINIST work, her novels seemed to express a sense that the oppression of women could be exhilarating. [JC] VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED Film (1960). MGM. Dir Wolf Rilla, starring George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Martin Stephens. Screenplay Sterling Silliphant, Rilla, George Barclay (Ronald Kinnoch, the producer), based on The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) by John WYNDHAM. 77 mins. B/w.In this faithful but pedestrian adaptation of Wyndham's novel, everyone in a UK village mysteriously falls asleep for 24 hours. During this period all the women of childbearing age are unknowingly impregnated by ALIENS. In due course they give birth to 12 strange children who grow very rapidly and possess powers of telepathy and mind control. Some years later it is realized that the children represent an attempt by another planet to colonize Earth, and they are destroyed by the scientist (Sanders) who has been their friend - with difficulty, since the method of destruction (a bomb) has to be mentally concealed from them. The children, with their glowing eyes, are the most successful feature of the production; their sang-froid is chilling and seems authentically alien. A virtual remake of this film, this time in an urban setting, was CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963). [JB/PN] VILLAINS The division of people into simple archetypes of good and bad, HEROES and villains, has always been stronger in popular literature than in more serious fiction; indeed, the essence of the serious novel of character has ever been to explore the shades of grey between the moral absolutes of black and white. Thus sf's villains are mainly associated with PULP-MAGAZINE sf, not just in the post-1926 specialist sf magazines but in the pulp magazines generally from the 1890s onwards. The history of villainy in popular literature of this sort is sociologically fascinating in the way that it reflects the fears and bigotries of the societies that produced it, especially insofar as commercial fiction is generally written in response to a known popular demand.UK sf during 1890-1920 (and to some extent later) was notably xenophobic: foreigners were not to be trusted. The same was true to a lesser extent in the USA, whose East Coast cities were by now a melting-pot of different national and racial backgrounds, to the alarm of the more conservative. Antisemitic views were expressed surprisingly seldom, although the capitalist villain of George Allan ENGLAND's The Golden Blight (1912; 1916) is a Jew, and M.P. SHIEL's stories often contain Jewish villains, although Shiel himself was ambiguous on the subject, and was sympathetic to Zionist aspirations. Better known are the Yellow-Peril books, and here Shiel figures largely, with The Yellow Danger (1898; rev 1899) and The Dragon (1913; rev vt The Yellow Peril 1929). Floyd GIBBONS's The Red Napoleon (1929) features a Mongol world-conqueror. The most famous Oriental villain of all was of course Sax ROHMER's Dr Fu Manchu, the slant-eyed supermachinator set on world domination.With Fu Manchu we enter the arena of the hero-versus-villain pulp magazines of the 1930s, some, such as DR YEN SIN and The MYSTERIOUS WU FANG , modelled directly on Rohmer's work. By the 1930s the hero-vs-villain confrontation had developed into a simple formula, still popular long after WWII, as in Ian FLEMING's James Bond books. A small group of fighters for right, with the aid of highly trained reflexes and an armoury of superscientific devices, stands off a variety of almost indistinguishable mad SCIENTISTS and/or ambitious businessmen and politicians who plan to conquer all. The best-known sf archetype is DOC SAVAGE, but CAPTAIN HAZZARD, CAPTAIN ZERO, DUSTY AYRES AND HIS BATTLE BIRDS, the SPIDER and The Avenger were all cast in the same mould. Hero magazines were more popular than villain magazines; the latter included Doctor Death, The OCTOPUS and The SCORPION . Although the pulps are dead, the great success of MARVEL COMICS in the 1960s was built on the same formula, with the villains as nasty as ever - although the heroes, in this less straightforward age, were more introspective.The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Dec 1941 may have been seen by some in the USA as a retrospective justification of the Yellow Peril stories - and by cynics, conversely, as the realization of a self-fulfilling prophecy - but pulp sf of WWII and immediately afterwards tended to substitute brutal European-style fascists in place of wily Orientals. Eric Frank RUSSELL wrote many amusing stories of caricature-Teutonic aliens being thwarted in their myopic militarism by nimble-witted heroes working almost alone. Far more interesting were the villains of Cold-War sf in the 1950s, when the USA evinced extreme anxiety over the "communist menace" (many of these stories are discussed under PARANOIA). The day of the individual villain was in decline; he had given way to the group-villain, often symbolized, indeed, in the form of a HIVE-MIND. The fear of communism was frequently expressed as a loathing for an expansionist movement in which individuality was subjugated to the demands of the mass. Thus in Robert A. HEINLEIN's The Puppet Masters (1951) the villains are indistinguishable from one another. In this case they are aliens, and this points up a difference between sf and most other genres: although sf heroes are usually human, the villains may easily be MONSTERS, ALIENS, ROBOTS or SUPERMEN. However, a little analysis of what sort of monster or superman the villain is often shows that there is some readily identifiable human analogue, or at least human fear, involved.The robot destroying everything in its path is usually simply our fear of TECHNOLOGY writ large. It is interesting that, after a long period of quiescence - partly as a result of Isaac ASIMOV's Robot series, in which robots were depicted as decent, occasionally to the point of saintliness - in the 1980s the killer-robot story (and the anti-technology Luddite story generally) returned to the CINEMA, where it gained phenomenal popularity. The cinema is the closest modern equivalent in its values and narrative structures to pulp fiction, and it feeds very much the same appetites, at least at its lower levels. It is in the cinema, in COMICS, on TELEVISION and in HEROIC FANTASY that today's hero-vs-villain stories are mostly found. The return of the anti-technology theme, exemplified by many of the films of Michael CRICHTON and John BADHAM, may represent fears related to those that have brought the rise of ecological factions to a position of importance in world politics.In written sf, the heyday of the sf villain was over by the 1960s-70s. Villains still exist, of course, but they cannot generally be so easily categorized; very often they remain faceless: behind-the-scenes manipulators, politicians, militarists, ad-men, commercial interests, corporate polluters of the environment working at a distance or through bureaucracies. This reflects a growing fear in the real world that we are all filed and docketed on a COMPUTER databank somewhere, and have no way of identifying the enemy out front. In the USA it could be called the Watergate syndrome; after Watergate the number of films about government conspiracies notably increased ( PARANOIA). Invisible pullers of strings need not be grey or boring villains, however, and Jack VANCE's 5 Demon Princes in his Demon Princes series are satisfyingly melodramatic, as are the 9 immortals who run things in Philip Jose FARMER's A Feast Unknown (1969), Lord of the Trees (1970) and The Mad Goblin (1970). A common variant of the unseen manipulator as villain is the AI, as in William GIBSON's Neuromancer trilogy, in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1990 UK) by Gibson with Bruce STERLING, and in Dan SIMMONS's Hyperion books.The type of villains produced in GENRE SF depends to a degree on the type of sf in question. In HARD SF the villains are often those who fear progress and doggedly oppose it, while in the NEW WAVE it was more likely to be the technocrats themselves who were the villains, mindlessly calling for "growth" regardless of the sociological consequences. Individual sf writers are naturally liable to incorporate any sort of personal or political resentment or distaste into their creation of villains - Heinlein often laid the blame on flabby liberals, for example - but no useful generalization can be made about villainy at this level.An occasional amalgam in sf is the hero-villain, an imaginative territory staked out by Alfred BESTER in the figures of Ben Reich and Gully Foyle, the protagonists of his first 2 novels; they are saturnine, vengeful, obsessive malcontents, for all the world like figures out of a 17th-century revenge drama. Villainy generated by the self but unknown to the self has of course been a theme of the HORROR IN SF subgenre since Robert Louis STEVENSON's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), if not earlier. This theme has always remained popular, as in Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit" (1954) and, from the cinema, the Monster from the Id in FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) and the telekinetic superbeing who does not recognize his own malign powers in The POWER (1967). [PN] VILLIERS DE L'ISLE-ADAM... Full name: Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, (Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, Comte de)(1840-1889) French writer - mostly of poetry, plays and short stories - and an extremely impoverished member of the Breton aristocracy. His best-known prose work remains Contes Cruels (coll 1883; trans Robert Baldick as Cruel Tales 1963 UK), a title which itself came to designate a category of the French conte or moral fable which emphasizes the punitive twists of fate, the arbitrary chill of the world. The book contains a number of bizarre fantasy stories, several of them sf, including "Celestial Publicity", in which advertising slogans are projected onto the night sky by electric light. An early translation of VDL-A's work, which also took stories from Nouveaux Contes cruels ["New Contes Cruels"] (coll 1888), was Sardonic Tales (coll trans Hamish Miles 1927 US). Of more direct sf interest is L'Eve future (1886; trans Marilyn Gaddis Rose as The Eve of the Future 1981 US; new trans Robert M. Adams as Tomorrow's Eve 1982 US), in which a handsome young lord despairs when his fiancee turns out to be extremely crass - but a fictional character called Thomas Alva Edison comes to the rescue with an impeccable robot duplicate ( EDISONADE). Seen as an important contribution to the Symbolist movement, the novel is philosophical, ironic and mockingly contorted. Claire Lenoir, which appeared originally as part of Tribulat Bonhomet (coll 1887) and was trans Arthur Symons (1925 US), applies similar ornate twists to a horror tale involving possession and hideous paroxysms of female guilt. VDL-A remains best known for his final work, the ecstatic play and prose-poem Axel (1885-6 Jeune France; rev 1890; trans H.P.R. Finberg 1925 UK; new trans June Guicharnaud 1970 US), whose dramatization of the Symbolist inturning of the imagination inspired Edmund Wilson's famous Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931). The eponymous count - an unimaginably wealthy Rosicrucian savant whose supernaturally impregnable fortress can stave off the armies of the world, and who remains adamant in his refusal to taste the desolations reality imposes on dreams - is a figure who has influenced generations of writers, including almost certainly the 1980s sf and fantasy creators of Dying Earths heavily populated by aesthetic aristocrats weary unto death of vulgar sensation. Axel's near-final declaration - "Live? Our servants will do that for us" - is a brilliant epigraph to the gesture he represents. [JC/PN]See also: ABSURDIST SF; ADAM AND EVE; FRANCE; HISTORY OF SF; HUMOUR; SATIRE; SCIENTISTS. VILOTT, RHONDI Working name of US writer Rhondi A. Vilott-Salsitz (? - ), whose work as RV, and less frequent titles as R.A.V. Salsitz, has been restricted to fantasies (see listing below), but whose work as by Charles Ingrid has been sf. Of the 3 series of Ingrid military SPACE OPERAS, the best is the 1st, the Sand Wars sequence: Solarkill (1987), Lasertown Blues (1988), Celestial Hit List (1988), Alien Salute (1989), Return Fire (1989) and Challenge Met (1990). The Marked Man sequence includes The Marked Man (1989) and The Last Recall (1991); the Patterns of Chaos sequence began with Radius of Doubt (1991). [JC]Other works as Rhondi Vilott: Black Dragon's Curse (1984); Challenge of the Pegasus Grail (1984); The Dungeons of Dregnor (1984); Runesword! (1984); Spellbound (1984); Sword Daughter's Quest (1984); The Towers of Rexor (1984); The Unicorn Crown (1984); Aphrodite's Mirror (1985); Hall of the Gargoyle King (1985); Maiden of Greenwold (1985); Pledge of Peril (1985); Secret of the Sphinx (1985); Storm Rider (1985).As R.A.V. Salsitz: The Dragons sequence, comprising Where Dragons Lie (1985), Where Dragons Rule (1986) and Night of Dragons (1990); The Unicorn Dancer (1986); Daughter of Destiny (1988). VINCENT, HARL Working name of US engineer and writer Harold Vincent Schoepflin (1893-1968) for all his fiction, beginning with "The Golden Girl of Munan" for AMZ in 1928; little of it has reached book form. He was a popular writer in the PULP MAGAZINES of sf's early prime, publishing frequently in The Argosy, AMZ, ASF and other magazines until WWII, stopping then until just before his death, when some further stories appeared, including several reprints, and a novel, The Doomsday Planet (1966), a PLANETARY ROMANCE in the traditional mode. His work was vigorous. [JC]See also: AIR WONDER STORIES; GREAT AND SMALL; PARANOIA; ROBOTS. VINGE, JOAN (CAROL) D(ENNISON) (1948- ) US writer, with a degree in anthropology from San Diego State University; she has been married twice, to sf writer Vernor VINGE 1972-9 and to sf editor Jim FRENKEL from 1980. She began publishing sf with Tin Soldier (in Orbit 14 [anth 1974] ed Damon KNIGHT; 1990 chap dos), whose theme (like much of her later work) is taken from fairy tale or MYTHOLOGY and rewritten in sf terms, the source in this case being a story by Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875).Andersen was also the remote source of her second, very popular novel - it won a 1981 HUGO - THE SNOW QUEEN (1980; rev 1989). Though the title and some of the plot come from Andersen, this is an essay in ANTHROPOLOGY, much of it founded in the pseudo-scientific anthropology of Robert GRAVES in The White Goddess (1947 US), which Brian M. STABLEFORD argued in a review "is rather like a chemistry graduate writing a story whose plot hinges on the phlogiston theory". The broad romantic sweep of the tale, however, carried most doubters with it. A primitive planet with a long year is supported by off-world technology (brought in by transmission via BLACK HOLE) in its long winter, at the end of which the Winter Queen will be supplanted by the Summer Queen, and the offworlders will leave. The Winter Queen plots to renew her reign (via cloning) in summer. The fact that this novel's power rested more in generic dexterity (much of it taken from HEROIC FANTASY) than in conceptual strength may help explain why, after such a strong beginning, JV has not, despite expectations to the contrary, been reckoned one of the major sf writers of the 1980s. The other books in the Snow Queen series are World's End (1984) and The Summer Queen (1991), the latter being very long indeed.Before THE SNOW QUEEN was published JV had already had much success with her short fiction, some of which deals with COMMUNICATION between humans and ALIENS, including the title story of The Crystal Ship: Three Original Novellas of Science Fiction (anth 1976) ed Robert SILVERBERG. JV's early short fiction was collected in Fireship (coll 1978; vt Fireship; and Mother and Child UK) and Eyes of Amber and Other Stories (coll 1979). The 1977 title story of the latter is another good communications story; it won a Hugo for Best Novelette. A further collection of 6 stories was Phoenix in the Ashes (coll 1985).JV's first novel, The Outcasts of Heaven Belt (1978), pits an egalitarian society with strong women against male-dominated, collapsing societies in an ASTEROID belt. The novel belongs to the Heaven Belt series of stories; it was assembled with a novella from the series, Legacy (1980 dos), as Heaven Chronicles (omni 1991). More impetuous is the Cat series, begun with Psion (1982) and continued with Catspaw (1988; vt Cats Paw 1989 UK), the 2 collected as Alien Blood (omni 1988). Psion, which unlike its successor was published as a juvenile, is actually a development, years later, of the first long fiction JV wrote as a teenager. Cat, an orphan (half human, half Hydran, a race despised by humans) with catlike eyes and PSI POWERS, has full-blooded, melodramatic, SPACE-OPERA adventures. None of these books approach THE SNOW QUEEN in scope, and indeed - in what seemed a distinct lowering of her sights - JV spent much of the mid-1980s writing film ties, starting with the juvenile Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: The Storybook * (1983 chap) and including: Tarzan, King of the Apes * (1983); The Dune Storybook * (1984 chap), juvenile; Return to Oz: A Novel * (1985); Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome * (1985); Ladyhawke * (1985); Santa Claus, the Movie: A Novel * (1985); Santa Claus, the Movie Storybook * (1985 chap), juvenile; and Willow * (1988).In an interview JV has said that the first sf she grew to love was by Andre NORTON; it may be as a colourful exponent of the tradition to which Norton belongs (and which Norton did much to establish) - in which mythic themes are patterned into a world that is only superficially sciencefictional - that JV will be best remembered. [PN]Other works: Joan D. Vinge Omnibus (omni 1983 UK), containing Fireship and The Outcasts of Heavens Belt.See also: ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION. VINGE, VERNOR (STEFFEN) (1944- ) US writer and professor of mathematics at San Diego University; married to Joan D. VINGE 1972-9. He began publishing sf with "Apartness" for NW in 1965, and published fairly regularly in ASF, his best work appearing in True Names and Other Dangers (coll 1987), which contains HARD SF responsive to the thrust of technological progress (the title novella had earlier appeared as TRUE NAMES [1981 dos]), and Threats . . . and Other Promises (coll 1988), which includes more diverse material. His first novel, Grimm's World (in Orbit 4 [anth 1966] ed Damon KNIGHT as "Grimm's Story"; fixup 1969; exp vt Tatja Grimm's World 1987), is a colourfully told adventure set on a primitive human planet exploited by interstellar slavers, with intriguingly elaborated detail. It is significantly less anodyne (or RURITANIAN) than its description implies, and the punning title of the book turns out to be not inappropriate. From the first VV combined a feeling for the movement and thrill of humanity's high-tech progress through the Universe, with a sense that individual lives were bleak and often brutish. His second novel, The Witling (1976), repeats a situation basic to the first - intruding humans on a colony planet are confronted by non-humans with heightened PSI POWERS - and confirmed the essential chill of his vision.TRUE NAMES (1981 dos) was the first of his tales to establish his reputation firmly as one of the more interesting writers of the period. It depicts a kind of CYBERSPACE inhabited by hackers intent on creating a VIRTUAL-REALITY environment, but threatened by the incursion of a possibly paranormal (or demented) colleague seeking absolute power over the world. The story is intermittently tangled, but the cyberspace vision was prescient. The Realtime sequence-The Peace War (1984) and Marooned in Realtime (1986), assembled as Across Realtime (omni 1986; with "The Ungoverned" added, exp 1991) - is similarly acute in its presentation of technologies not yet competently handled by sf, from COMPUTERS to GENETIC ENGINEERING, though its use once again of protagonists with seemingly paranormal powers tends to reduce any sense of novelty. The intricately plotted progress of various characters from near to far future, via an inventively deployed stasis-field technology, is narratively arousing, as is the murder mystery they find on an Earth which, like an abandoned playground, has long ago been left behind by an evolving humanity. However, the background to these exhilarated tales is depicted with VV's usual coldness. He is a writer who, while risking the worst of genre sillinesses, remains dangerously acute, as his most recent and longest novel, A FIRE UPON THE DEEP (1992), demonstrates. The tale - which involves converging interstellar quests for a MCGUFFIN "Countermeasure" capable of destroying a dread Power that has been reawakened from 5 billion years' sleep and is destroying millions of civilizations - is set in a complexly visualized Galaxy-wide SPACE-OPERA setting, skilfully designed to give room for human-scale action within a vast canvas, though in fact Homo sapiens is a very minor player in this arena; the information webs which convey near-infinities of information among the myriad worlds of the venue amusingly reflect the telephone-linked computer nets of the 1990s. The tale as a whole is cunningly crafted, deftly told, and bracingly chill in its ultimate implications; it shared the 1993 HUGO Award with Connie WILLIS's DOOMSDAY BOOK (1992) . [JC]See also: GAMES AND SPORTS; LIBERTARIAN SF; TIME TRAVEL; VIRTUAL REALITY; WEAPONS. VINICOFF, ERIC (? - ) US writer whose first novel - after the publication of a short tale, Spacing Dutchman (1978 chap) with Marcia Martin - was Maiden Flight (1988), a post- HOLOCAUST story which, like many from the last decades of the 20th century, sees the destruction of the current world civilization essentially in terms of the opportunities it presents for making a better future. EV's USA, like a great adventure playground, rewards the high-tech citizens of the new order who occupy it, en passant fighting off a local menace before settling into productive relationships. [JC] VINTER, MICHAEL [r] ROBERT HALE LIMITED. VIRTUAL REALITY Since the mid-1980s, a popular item of sf TERMINOLOGY, and for a century or so - in a rather more extended sense - a popular sf theme. In ordinary usage a virtual reality is a computer-generated scenario which seems real (or at least all-encompassing) to the person who "enters" it; one essential quality of virtual reality is that the person who enters it should be able to interact with it. To a degree all computer GAMES, as habitual players well know, already offer a primitive form of virtual reality. In other words, the ever-changing picture on the screen, plus the touch of the fingers on the keyboard, is enough to give the illusion of being"in" the game. But the term is usually reserved for those COMPUTER simulations and games currently being developed in which the "player" wears a helmet and gloves whose sensors are electronically connected to the machine "intelligence", so that a turn of the head or a raise of the hand alters the field of vision or the posture of the player's alter ego within the simulation. A further step, not yet available in the real world but a commonplace in sf, is the use of a direct electronic interface between the human brain and the AI which gives the plugged-in person the illusion of occupying and interacting with a reality whose apparent locations may extend beyond the AI to those of the data-networks of which it is a part. Such - it is the most famous recent example - is the CYBERSPACE envisaged by William GIBSON's Neuromancer trilogy (1984-8), in which hackers can jack into a "cyberspace deck" and project a "disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix". A good popular guide to the meaning of the term in its more limited, scientific application is Virtual Reality (1991) by Howard Rheingold. The term may have grown from the term "virtuality", used by Theodor Nelson in "Interactive Systems and the Design of Virtuality" (Nov/Dec 1980 Creative Computing). The coining of "virtual reality", probably around 1981, is usually attributed to computer guru Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research Inc., the company that markets DataGloves. The first sf usage we can trace is in The Judas Mandala (1982 US; rev 1990) by Damien BRODERICK, a book with many and confusing virtual realities.This comparatively restricted use of the term rapidly became a cliche of the CYBERPUNK movement, but it is only a special case of the larger theme of virtual reality. One reason why virtual realities have been popular so long in sf is the somewhat recursive fact that stories themselves are virtual realities (though we interact with them only in a metaphoric sense); so the notion holds an intrinsic fascination for writers of stories, each of whom is, to a degree, a god creating an imaginary world which is real to the characters within it and partly real to the reader who shares their experience, a notion central to L. Ron HUBBARD's story "Typewriter in the Sky" (1940).Broadly, a virtual reality can be defined as any secondary reality alternate to the character's world of real experience in which the character finds himself or herself, and with which he or she can interact. The purist might insist that such a world be machine-mediated. If it is not (or, less obviously, even if it is) then all sorts of questions of METAPHYSICS instantly intrude. How sure are we that our own world represents the "real" reality? This is not only the sort of question that troubles the protagonists of many novels by Philip K. DICK, including THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH (1965). It has troubled writers since the dawn of Western civilization, including PLATO, who wondered if what we perceive as reality is only the flickering shadows on a cave wall, reflections of a higher, more solid (or Platonic) reality that we cannot perceive with the senses. The idea that our world may, in fact, be only a virtual reality remains intensely popular in fiction and is central, for example, to the situation in which most of Jack CHALKER's characters find themselves. Any virtual-reality world might be assumed to have a creator or programmer, a kind of god, so virtual-reality stories are often stories of god-like or demonic creators ( GODS AND DEMONS and PERCEPTION for further examples). One good example is Daniel F. GALOUYE's Counterfeit World (1964 UK; vt Simulacron-3 US), filmed as WELT AM DRAHT (1973, vt World on a Wire), which contains a receding and potentially endless series of virtual realities. Other examples are listed under POCKET UNIVERSES.The idea of the virtual reality has often been linked with game-playing, and GAME-WORLD stories are often based around virtual realities. An early example (although not machine-mediated) is Lewis CARROLL's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), in which the virtual reality that Alice enters through the mirror is a game-world based on an actual chess game, whose other player is effectively God, and whose puppet-pieces are arguably deprived of free will. The idea, more simply, of plugging into a virtual-reality world for entertainment is also old: E. M. FORSTER's "The Machine Stops" (1909) envisages a world of isolated cells whose occupants derive all their entertainment through plugging into global information networks; Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932) has a future whose people are entertained by "feelies", apparently a kind of cinema that operates on all the senses to give an illusion of reality (but the experience is passive, so the basic element of interaction is absent); in Arthur C. CLARKE's The City and the Stars (1956), an expansion of Against the Fall of Night (1953), occupants of a static UTOPIA (not unlike Forster's) amuse themselves with violent, melodramatic adventure scenarios into which they plug themselves to take part.While this topic has remained a minor constant in sf, it suddenly blossomed into a major theme around the end of the 1970s and through the 1980s. Sometimes the virtual realities of this recent fiction are generated by manipulative superbeings, sometimes by machine intelligences. In John VARLEY's Titan sequence (1979-84) the artificial world is effectively a theme park, whose nature is protean, subject to the whims of its creator. Theme parks themselves can be read as a form of virtual reality, and often appear in sf, as in Steven BARNES's and Larry NIVEN's Dream Park sequence (1981-91) or in the film WESTWORLD (1973). The typical theme-park story has the expected manipulations of a game turned into the nightmare manipulations of PARANOIA.Films and stories in which humans are, or become, trapped in virtual realities, quite often computer-generated, include Hugh WALKER's Reiter der Finsternis (1975; trans as War-Gamers' World 1978), WELCOME TO BLOOD CITY (1977), Vernor VINGE's TRUE NAMES (1981 dos; 1984), Octagon (1981) by Fred SABERHAGEN, TRON (1982), BRAINSTORM (1983), DREAMSCAPE (1984), Gillian RUBINSTEIN's Space Demons (1986), Andrew GREELEY's God Game (1986), Kim NEWMAN's The Night Mayor (1989) and The LAWNMOWER MAN (1992).A popular variant of the theme is the reality generated by one person's godlike will; such are the deliquescing subrealities - rather like hallucinations which others are forced to share - created by the protagonist of Ursula K. LE GUIN's The Lathe of Heaven (1971), filmed for tv as The LATHE OF HEAVEN (1980). Another variant is the computer game seen by the unaware protagonist as only a game (i.e., virtual), which turns out to generate a reality that is often alarming (i.e., real). This is the scenario of Orson Scott CARD's ENDER'S GAME (1977 ASF; exp 1985) and of the film WARGAMES (1983), in both of which a war-game turns out to be war itself, the gaming computer being actually in a position of military command. A computer game is used to entice the young hero of The LAST STARFIGHTER (1984), his virtual-reality skills being required for the waging of a real galactic war.A final variant is found in those stories in which (normally for purposes of psychotherapy) one person enters another's mind and interacts with what he or she finds there, a classic of this genre being THE DREAM MASTER (1965 as "He Who Shapes"; exp 1966) by Roger ZELAZNY. One mind, in this instance, becomes a virtual reality for the other, and in these stories the transfer is typically machine-mediated, as in Greg BEAR's Queen of Angels (1990), in which the reality entered is a malign landscape generated by the mind of a murderer. Many more stories of this type are listed under PSYCHOLOGY.Because of the metaphorical power of virtual-reality stories to examine the processes of creation (and, rather differently, to conjure up paranoid visions of manipulation) it is likely that they will remain popular. [PN] VIRUS FUKKATSO NO HI. VISIAK, E.H. Working name of UK poet, critic and novelist Edward Harold Physick (1878-1972). His fiction - like The Haunted Island (1910), a complex tale featuring ghosts, MAGIC and piracy - is essentially fantasy, although Medusa: A Story of Mystery (1929), an almost surreal FANTASTIC VOYAGE into unknown seas, gives the eponymous South Pacific sea monster an sf-like rationale. "The Shadow", a good surrealist ghost novella, appeared in Crimes, Creeps and Thrills (anth 1936) ed John GAWSWORTH. As a friend of David LINDSAY, EHV contributed an essay to The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (anth 1970). [JC/PN] VISION OF TOMORROW Australian/UK magazine, monthly, BEDSHEET-format, 12 issues, Aug 1969-Sep 1970, published by Ronald E. Graham, an Australian sf enthusiast; ed Philip HARBOTTLE from the UK. VOT featured work by many UK writers, including Kenneth BULMER, Michael MOORCOCK and E.C. TUBB, with the emphasis on straightforward action stories, and several posthumous works by John Russell FEARN. Graham vetoed the inclusion of US writers, but encouraged Australian authors, including Damien BRODERICK, Lee HARDING and Jack WODHAMS. Cover artists included Eddie JONES, Gerard A. QUINN and David HARDY, the latter also producing many full-colour illustrations for the inside back cover. VOT was the first English-language magazine to publish a story by Stanislaw LEM: "Are You There, Mr Jones?", in #1. The Impatient Dreamers, a history of UK sf publishing and FANDOM by Walter GILLINGS, E.J. CARNELL and others, ran through all issues. Because of a change of printers, #3 (Nov 1969) appeared before #2 (Dec 1969). [BS/PN] VISSARION, I.C. [r] ROMANIA. VIVIAN, E(VELYN) CHARLES (1882-1947) UK writer of popular fiction, born Charles Henry Cannell but changing his name to ECV in early adulthood, though he wrote some non-genre novels as Charles Cannell. He is now best remembered for the Gees sequence of novels (see listing below), all written as by Jack Mann, about a psychic detective whose cases sometimes involve sf-like phenomena - e.g., travel through other DIMENSIONS - but are essentially fantasies. Much of ECV's prolific output had a mystical tinge. Some of his novels, like Passion-Fruit (1912), had fantasy elements, and several were LOST-WORLD tales, including: City of Wonder (1922), which features Asian survivors from Lemuria; the Aia sequence, comprising Fields of Sleep (1923), in which Babylonian survivors are trapped in a Malaysian valley by a strange plant within range of whose aroma, once inhaled, one must stay or die, and People of the Darkness (1924), set in an underground world inhabited by a tentacled species who were originally slaves in ATLANTIS; The Lady of the Terraces (1925) and its sequel A King There Was - (1926), which feature pre-Incan survivals and further hints of Atlantis; and Woman Dominant (1929), set in Asia, where an aged woman rules a land through the agency of a drug which makes men halfwitted. ECV's most straightforward sf tale, Star Dust (1925), describes an inventor/scientist's attempts to make the world better by indiscriminately transmuting dross into gold; this (he thinks) will make some sort of UTOPIA inevitable. Not one of ECV's books is fully satisfying; not one is without interest. [JC]Other works, all as Jack Mann: Coulson Goes South (1933), marginal; Dead Man's Chest (1934); the Gees sequence, comprising Gees' First Case (1936), associational, Grey Shapes (1937), Nightmare Farm (1937), The Kleinert Case (1938), associational, Maker of Shadows (1938), The Ninth Life (1939), Her Ways are Death (1939) and The Glass Too Many (1940).See also: HISTORY OF SF; MACHINES. VOERMANS, PAUL (? - ) Australian writer whose first sf novel, And Disregards theRest (1992 UK), mixes sf and magic realism into a somewhatspatchcocked tale of NEAR-FUTUREAustralia beset by ALIENS, themetaphysical consequences of an earlier performance of William Shakespeare's The Tempest(written c1611), and much else. The Weird Colonial Boy(1993UK) is set in an ALTERNATE WORLD in which the British Empirecontinues to rule an oppressed Australia, but is opposed by revolutionaries whose raids combinesurreal horseplay and violence. PV continues to grapple with a plenitude of influences; but mayestablish a singular voice. [JC] VOGEL, [Sir] JULIUS (1835-1899) UK politician who spent much of his professional life in NEW ZEALAND and whose sf novel, Anno Domini 2000, or Woman's Destiny (1889), set partly in New Zealand and Australia, treats the dawning 21st century as both benignly prosperous and much obsessed with matters of royalty. The current British Emperor causes much fuss in the USA when he refuses to approve any change in the succession laws which would permit a female to succeed to the throne. But after a war all ends well, with various women achieving their destiny in a series of marriages. [JC] VOGH, JAMES John T. SLADEK. VOID PUBLICATIONS Paul COLLINS; VOID SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY. VOID SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY Australian DIGEST-size SEMIPROZINE, 5 issues 1975-7, thereafter continuing until 1981 as a series, 4 books, 3 numbers per book, which effectively constituted an original-anthology series; published by Void Publications; ed Paul COLLINS. #1-#3 were published from Queensland, the rest from Melbourne. At a time when Australian sf had few local outlets, VSFAF was a brave venture, though in appearance it could be described, in its 1st incarnation, as a fiction FANZINE, with an overcrowded layout on cheap paper. It contained some original and reprint work from the US, but was primarily a platform for such Australian sf writers as A. Bertram CHANDLER, David LAKE and Jack WODHAMS. VSFAF was dated by year only, and only one issue (#2) was numbered. #6-#8 were published in book form as an original anthology, Envisaged Worlds (anth 1977), #9-#11 as Other Worlds (anth 1978), #12-#14 as Alien Worlds (anth 1979) and #15-#17 as Distant Worlds (anth 1981). A further anthology, Frontier Worlds (anth 1983) was offered to subscribers in lieu of #18. [PN] VOINOVICH, VLADIMIR (NIKOLAEVICH) (1932- ) Russian writer known mostly for his mainstream satires. Active in the 1970s, he found himself in confrontation with the Soviet authorities, and finally emigrated in the early 1980s to Germany. All his works display an offbeat and at times heavy-handed fantastication. His only sf tale, Moskorep (1986 France; trans Richard Lourie as Moscow 2084 1987 US), carries a contemporary protagonist 100 years forward by TIME TRAVEL to the redoubled bureaucracy that rules in AD2084, en passant satirizing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918- ). The outlandishness of the sf enactment of VV's conceit is balanced by the grimness of his sense that Soviet bureacracy would almost infinitely worsen. [VG/JC] VOISKUNSKY, EVGENY (L'VOVICH) (1922- ) Russian naval officer, journalist and writer; he wrote in collaboration with Isa Borisovich Lukodianov (1913-1984), a design engineer, until the latter's death. Their first novel was Ekipazh "Mekonga" (1961; cut trans Leonard Stoklitsky as The Crew of the Mekong 1974 Russia), a long but fast-moving HARD-SF examination of 2 intersecting projects: an attempt to increase the surface tension of oil so that it can be sent without needing pipelines; and an investigation of the scientific principles behind an ancient knife whose blade is interpenetrable with matter. En passant, the Caspian Sea is raised. A sequel, Ur, Syn Shama ["Ur, Son of Sham"] (1975), depicts an encounter with ALIENS, who bring the protagonist, an ancient Babylonian kidnapped eons earlier, back to Earth. Tchiorny Stolb (1963), a short novel trans anon as "The Black Pillar" in The Molecular Cafe (anth ed anon Arkady and Boris STRUGATSKI trans 1968 Russia), depicts a NEAR-FUTURE global catastrophe as the result of deep drilling of Earth's mantle. In Otchen' Daliokii Tartess ["Far Distant Tartess"] (1968) ATLANTIS meets its doom when local scientist-priests discover the secret of atomic energy. Plesk zviozdenykh Morei ["Star Seas Lapping"] (fixup 1970) deals with the TERRAFORMING of VENUS, and a long-frustrated but finally successful attempt to initiate interstellar travel. Some short work was assembled in Na Perekriostkakh Vremeni ["At the Crossroads of Time"] (coll 1964); a late novel was Nezakonaia Planeta ["The Illegal Planet"] (1980). [VG/JC] VOLLMANN, WILLIAM T(ANNER) (1959- ) US writer whose debut novel, You Bright and Risen Angels: A Cartoon (1987 UK), is an immense FABULATION whose interweavings of PARANOIA and CYBERPUNK tended to remind critics of the work of Thomas PYNCHON. The war between the villain, who is attempting to control the world through an information web, and the "bugs" caught in his system, who attempt to remain subversively free, is also, in Postmodernistic fashion, a war of words between contrasting methods of defining and controlling "reality". The ongoing sequence entitled Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes- of which The Ice-Shirt (1990 UK) is the 1st instalment, Fathers and Crows (1992) is the 2nd, and The Rifles (1994) is the 6th - attempts to construct out of language and myth and history a new version of the USA. The stories assembled in The Rainbow Stories (coll of linked stories 1989 UK), though they depict extreme states of being, almost entirely eschew fantasy. [JC] VOLNY, ZDENEK [r] CZECH AND SLOVAK SF. VOLTAIRE Pseudonym of Francois-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), enormously productive and successful French philosopher, historian, playwright, belletrist. Of interest to the student of PROTO SCIENCE FICTION is Micromegas (1752 UK; trans anon as Micromegas, a Comic Romance 1753 UK; best new trans W. Fleming as coll vt Micromegas and Other Stories 1989 UK), in which two giants, one from a planet circling Sirius and one from Saturn, visit Earth, where their responses to human life make some satirical points, not least that our species may not be so very important in the much larger Universe that was coming to be accepted at the time V was writing. Candide (1759), the best known of all tales of the innocent abroad, can be seen as a precursor of satirical picaresques from Kurt VONNEGUT Jr to Robert SHECKLEY. Certainly a FANTASTIC VOYAGE, Candide is arguably also an early example of anthropological sf; it was made into a musical comedy in 1957 by Leonard Bernstein. Other contes philosophiques with explicitly fantastic content include Zadig (1747; trans with other tales as Miscellanies [coll 1778 US]; many other trans exist) and Le taureau blanc (1774; trans as The White Bull 1774 UK; new trans with other tales as The White Bull, With Saul and Various Short Pieces [coll 1929 UK]). [JC/PN]See also: FRANCE; GREAT AND SMALL; OUTER PLANETS; RELIGION; SATIRE. VONARBURG, ELISABETH (1947- ) French-born Canadian writer, teacher and critic, in Quebec from 1973. She began publishing sf with "Maree haute" for Requiem in 1978; the tale appeared as "High Tide" in Twenty Houses of the Zodiac (anth 1979 UK) ed Maxim JAKUBOWSKI. Many of her stories (some award-winning) have been assembled as L'Oeil de la nuit ["The Eye of Night"] (coll 1980) and Janus (coll 1984 France), most being set in either of 2 cycles (with great gaps in the published chronology), the more important being the Baiblancaor Mothers' Landseries, in which a semi-decadent society in a far-future Europe sees the gradual appearance of shapeshifting MUTANTS (the "metames"). The series continues in Le Silence de la cite (1981 France; trans Jane Brierley as The Silent City 1988), whose young female protagonist leaves her underground sanctuary and goes to the surface, with its wild tribes, where she begins to transform the benighted world. Revelations of the artificial nature of the feminist governance of Mothers' Land sharpens the rite of passage story at the heart of Chroniques du Pays des Meres (1992; trans [prior to French-language publication] by Jane Brierley as The Maerlande Chronicles 1992; vt IN THE MOTHERS' LAND 1992 US). In the 2nd cycle, a Bridge serves as a door to other universes. EV is a very deliberate writer who brings great care and thought to her work, and to the depiction of characters and background. She was fiction editor 1979-90 and editor 1983-5 ofSOLARIS. [LP]Other works: Comment ecrire des histoires ["How to Write Stories"] (1986); Histoire de la princesse et du dragon ["The Story of the Princess and the Dragon"] (1990); Ailleurs et au Japon ["Elsewhere and in Japan"] (coll 1991); Les Voyageurs Malgre Eux (1994; trans as Reluctant Voyagers 1995.See also: CANADA. von DALIN, OLOF [r] SCANDINAVIA. von DANIKEN, ERICH (1935- ) Swiss writer of a series of purportedly nonfiction books, beginning with Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (1968 Germany; trans Michael Heron as Chariots of the Gods? 1969 UK), which, based on a mass of often suspect and internally inconsistent data, argues that the Earth was visited by at least one ALIEN spacefaring race before and at the dawn of historical time; thus, for example, the Great Pyramid (a CRYOGENIC chamber) and the Easter Island statues (images of the visiting aliens) were quarried with lasers and lifted into place by helicopters. It is central to his thesis - which was far from original to him - that all ancient peoples were moronic, capable only of copying what the spacemen showed them. Scientific howlers abound, and logical flaws proliferate; yet the books sold in their millions and sparked off a host of imitators, some of which - like Mystery of the Ancients (1974) by Craig and Eric Umland, claiming that the Maya are the descendants of stranded explorers from beyond the Solar System - are so entrancingly funny that they may in fact be spoofs. A hagiography of EvD is Daniken Intim (1976; trans David B. Koblick as Disciple of the Gods 1978 UK; vt Erich von Daniken: Disciple of the Gods) by Peter Krassa. A cheerful and detailed demolition is The Space-Gods Revealed (1976) by Ronald Story (1946- ); there is further useful discussion by E.C. Krupp in In Search of Ancient Astronomies (anth 1979; rev 1984) ed Krupp.The vast publicity given to EvD's speculations has had a negative effect on sf, in that the whole notion of ancient astronauts became such anathema, even to those of only moderate scientific literacy, that it became an sf TABOO. It is hard to find a worthwhile sf treatment of the topic in the years since 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), although the idea of an ancient race having "seeded" the Galaxy, populating its worlds or spreading scientific knowledge to assist their primitive indigenous lifeforms, has become almost a CLICHE of SPACE OPERA. [JS/JGr]See also: ADAM AND EVE; COMICS; GODS AND DEMONS; MYTHOLOGY; ORIGIN OF MAN; PARANOIA; PSEUDO-SCIENCE. von GRIMMELSHAUSEN, JOHANN JAKOB CHRISTOFFEL [r] GERMANY. von GUNDEN, KENNETH (1946- ) US writer whose 1st work of sf interest was Twenty All-Time Great SF Films (1982) with Stuart H. Stock, and who came to somewhat wider notice with his 1st novel, StarSpawn (1990), which interestingly introduces an ethically advanced hive race of interstellar explorers into medieval England, though an associated species escapes their ship and causes some havoc. The K-9 Corps sequence - K-9 Corps (1991), K-9 Corps #2: Under Fire (1991) and #3: Cry Wolf (1992) - less engagingly confronts a team of super-dogs with challenges on alien planets. [JC]Other Works: The Sounding Stillness (1993); The Pale Companion (1994). von HANSTEIN, OTFRIED [r] GERMANY. von HARBOU, THEA (1888-1954) German writer, most noted for her novels based on screenplays written by herself and her husband, Fritz LANG, who divorced her after she joined the Nazi Party in 1932; she was co-author of the screenplays for all the films Lang made before leaving Germany in 1933. Neither Metropolis * (1926; trans anon 1927 UK), filmed as METROPOLIS (1926), nor Frau im Mond * (1928; trans Baroness von Hutten as The Girl in the Moon 1930 UK; cut vt The Rocket to the Moon; from the Novel, The Girl in the Moon 1930 US), filmed as Die FRAU IM MOND (1929), has much of the films' symbolic force, and both are thickly propagandistic. [JC]See also: AUTOMATION; CITIES; GERMANY; WOMEN SF WRITERS. VONNEGUT, KURT Jr (1922- ) US writer born in Indianapolis. He was a PoW near the end of WWII in Dresden during the saturation bombing of the city and the subsequent firestorm. He later studied at the universities of Tennessee and Chicago, and began to write for various magazines in the early 1950s, his first sf story being "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" for COLLIER'S WEEKLY in 1950. His first appearance in an sf magazine was "Unready to Wear" (Gal 1953), but KV tried hard to avoid categorization as a GENRE-SF writer. He first became widely popular in the mid-1960s and is now recognized as a major US writer of the post-WWII period.His first novel was the DYSTOPIA of AUTOMATION, PLAYER PIANO (1952; vt Utopia 14 1954), which describes the dereliction of the quality of life by the progressive surrender of production and political decision to MACHINES. The mixture of heavy irony, bordering on black HUMOUR, and unashamed sentimentality displayed in this novel became the hallmark of KV's work, and is progressively exaggerated in later novels. THE SIRENS OF TITAN (1959) is a fine complex SATIRE about the folly of mistaking good luck for the favour of God; it features the first of a number of mock- RELIGIONS that KV would invent - the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent - and concludes with the revelation of the manipulation of human history by Tralfamadorian ALIENS sending messages to one of their kind stranded on Titan. One leading character has an extratemporal viewpoint from which all moments appear co-existent - a theme which crops up again, along with the Tralfamadorians, in KV's novel about the firestorming of Dresden, Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969). Mother Night (1962) is a non-sf novel about the struggle of a US ex-Nazi double agent to discover his "true" identity; several of its characters reappear in later work, helping to connect all his work into a single evolving patchwork. Cat's Cradle (1963) features a confrontation of the opposing philosophies of scientist Felix Hoenikker, inventor of "ice-nine" (which threatens to bring about the END OF THE WORLD), and Bokonon, a rebel against rationality and architect of an avowedly fake religion whose purpose is to protect believers against the harshness of reality. God Bless You, Mr Rosewater (1965) is a non-sf novel about the one man in the world who does not suffer from samaritrophia (chronic atrophy of the conscience), but it is closely allied to much of KV's sf; it contains an oft-quoted paragraph about sf writers, makes much of the misadventures of sf writer Kilgore Trout - who reappears in Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye, Blue Monday! (1973) - and overlaps somewhat with Slaughterhouse-Five, the story of Billy Pilgrim, survivor of the Dresden firestorm, who finds peace of mind after being kidnapped by Tralfamadorians and thus learning that the secret of life is to live only in the happy moments. Most of KV's 1970s work showed a marked decline in vitality - both Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! (1976) verge on lachrymose self-parody and are shot through with shoulder-shrugging, verbal tics-but he recovered a measure of his authority in a series of novels about unfortunate innocents abroad: Jailbird (1979) and Dead-Eye Dick (1982). His most impressive novel of this period is, Galapagos (1985), a darkly humorous apocalyptic fantasy narrated by a remote and happily devolved descendant of the few survivors of the HOLOCAUST; but Hocus Pocus, or What's the Hurry, Sam? (1990), which carries its protrayal of a self-destroying USA through the turn of the century, is almost as compelling.Vonnegut's best sf - which includes some of the short stories first assembled in Canary in a Cat House (coll 1961) and subsequently recombined with new material in Welcome to the Monkey House (coll 1968) -has a unique flavour, not only because of its sardonic Weltschmerz but also by virtue of his consistent refusal to look for scapegoats to blame for the sad state of the world. KV is content to attribute human misery and misfortune to the carelessness of God the Utterly Indifferent; he is full of pity for the human predicament but can see no hope in any solutions, save perhaps for the adoption of actions and beliefs which are absurdly irrational. This is a philosophy very much in keeping with the contemporary Zeitgeist. KV has also written a play with sf elements, Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1973), and had a hand in the production of a tv play based on extracts from several of his works, Between Time and Timbuktu (1972; book version Between Time and Timbuktu, or Prometheus-5: A Space Fantasy 1972). KV's essays, talks and various journalistic oddments are assembled in Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (coll 1974), Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (fixup 1981), and Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s (fixup 1991). A novel attributed to Kilgore Trout, written by Philip Jose FARMER, appeared as Venus on the Half-Shell (1975). [BS]About the author: Much has been written about KV; the following is a selection of books. Kurt Vonnegut Jr (1972) by Peter J. Reed; Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist of Fire and Ice (1972) by David H. Goldsmith; The Vonnegut Statement (anth 1973) ed Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer; Kurt Vonnegut Jr (1976) by Stanley Schatt; Kurt Vonnegut (1977) by James Lundquist; Kurt Vonnegut (1982) by Jerome Klinkovitz.See also: ABSURDIST SF; COMMUNICATIONS; CYBERNETICS; DISASTER; DISCOVERY AND INVENTION; EVOLUTION; FANTASY; GENERATION STARSHIPS; HISTORY OF SF; INTELLIGENCE; ISLANDS; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MERCURY; METAPHYSICS; OUTER PLANETS; OVERPOPULATION; PARANOIA; PERCEPTION; POLITICS; POLLUTION; PREDICTION; RECURSIVE SF; SCIENTISTS; SPACESHIPS; TIME TRAVEL. von NEUPAUER, JOSEPH RITTER [r] AUSTRIA. von TROJAN, KURT (1937- ) Writer born in Vienna but now Australian. His first novel, The Transing Syndrome (1985), uses "transing" ( MATTER TRANSMISSION) to move the plot along in an alternate-world DYSTOPIA; the protagonist worries that his identity may be fading with each transmission, like increasingly obscure photocopies of a photocopy. Bedmates (1987) is set in a future Australia dominated by AIDS and sexual fear: "bedmates" are mindless artefacts always ready for sex. Both novels are effective and sometimes harrowing, but flawed. KVT's best work may be the non-sf autobiographical novel Mars in Scorpio (1990). [BF/PN] von VOSS, JULIUS [r] GERMANY. VORHIES, JOHN R(OYAL HARRIS) (1924-1975) US writer in whose NEAR-FUTURE Pre-Empt (1967; vt The Nathan Hale 1968 UK) a nuclear-submarine captain enforces world peace by dropping a few demonstration missiles on the USA and USSR. Despite the title, the USA does not opt for a pre-emptive strike. [JC] VORNHOLT, JOHN (? - ) US writer known only for 2 STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION ties: Masks * (1989) and Contamination * (1991). [JC] VORTEX UK small- BEDSHEET size magazine. 5 issues Jan-May 1977, published by Shalmead (Jan-Feb), Container Publications (Mar), Cerberus Publishing (Apr-May); ed. Keith Seddon. V was a glossy magazine with some interior illustration in full colour. The first 3 covers, by Rodney MATTHEWS, suggested an orientation towards fantasy which was not evident in the actual magazine. #1-#4 serialized Michael MOORCOCK's The End of All Songs (1976); #5 contained the 1st instalment of The Chaos Weapon (1977) by Colin KAPP. Other stories were for the most part experimental pieces by previously unknown authors, such as Ravan Christchild, who in most cases were pseudonyms of the editor. The circulation never looked like covering the high production costs. [MJE] VORTEX, THE US FANZINE. 2 issues 1947, ed Gordon M. Kull and George R. Cowie from San Francisco. TV is listed in some indexes as a professional SF MAGAZINE, but the fiction in #1 was by unknown amateurs and it was distributed free. It was attractively printed on glossy paper. #2 had name writers like David H. KELLER and Stanley MULLEN, but was mainly mimeographed. [MJE/FHP] VORTEX SCIENCE FICTION US DIGEST-size magazine. 2 issues, May and Oct 1953, published by Specific Fiction Corp., New York; ed Chester Whitehorn. VSF was designed to showcase a large number of very short stories in each issue, achieving this goal in #2, but the idea did not prove popular. Not all the 9 new writers who made their debut in the second issue were doomed to remain unknown: Marion Zimmer BRADLEY had 2 stories there. A later magazine (1954) with the same publisher and editor was SCIENCE FICTION DIGEST.VSF should not be confused with VORTEX or The VORTEX . [FHP/PN] VOYAGE A TRAVERS l'IMPOSSIBLE, LE (vt Whirling the Worlds; vt An Impossible Voyage) Film (1904). Star. Prod/dir Georges MELIES. 30 mins. B/w.This was only the 2nd sf-oriented film to be more than 5 mins long - there had been several around 1 min - made by French cinema pioneer Melies; the 1st was his Le VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE (1902). It involves a newly invented experimental train taking off from the summit of the Jungfrau, travelling through space and crashing into the Sun; its occupants then return to Earth by space submarine and land in the sea. All this was achieved with primitive but ingenious special effects, including stop-motion photography, split-screen, multiple exposures, giant moving cut-outs and live action combined with painted backdrops. It was so popular that Melies added 5 mins to the end, showing the equipment used on the trip being recovered by a giant electromagnet. [JB/PN] VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE, LE (vt A Trip to the Moon) Film (1902). Star. Prod/dir Georges MELIES, who also played the inventor. 21 mins. Tinted.This is the 1st sf film (apart from short subjects lasting only 1-2 mins). French CINEMA pioneer Melies based this amusing spectacle extremely loosely on Jules VERNE's De la terre a la lune (1865; trans as the first half of From the Earth to the Moon 1873 UK) and H.G. WELLS's First Men in the Moon (1901), borrowing a spacecraft propelled by a gun from the former and hard-shelled Selenites from the latter. No attempt is made to depict the flight seriously; the Moon projectile is loaded by a line of grinning chorus girls; the Man in the Moon is shown with the projectile stuck in his eye; the Moon travellers encounter a group of Selenites who explode when tapped with an umbrella; and the travellers safely return home, due to the pull of Earth's GRAVITY, in time to see a statue erected in their honour. The innovatory special effects are naturally primitive, but encompass many techniques still in use today. [JB/PN] VOYAGERS US tv series (1982-3). Universal. Created James D. Parriott, prod Jill Sherman, Robert Steinhauer. Dirs included Virgil Vogel, Bernard McEveety, Allan Levi, Ron Satloff. 20 50min episodes.Phineas Bogg (played by Jon Eric Hexum) and Jeffrey Jones (played by Meeno Peluce) are time-travelling Voyagers who put history right (which is to say, the way we know it to have been). The premise could have been interesting, but remained trivial (reminding the Wright Brothers to invent the aeroplane, helping Babe Ruth hit his 60th home run and, more inventively, saving Jean Lafitte the pirate so that the British do not win the Battle of New Orleans). In the final episode, Jack the Ripper turns out to be a renegade Voyager trying to corrupt history. Not helped by the woodenness of its handsome leading players, V seems to have received very little foreign distribution and to have been largely ignored by the sf community. [PN] VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA 1. Film (1961). Windsor Productions/20th Century-Fox. Dir Irwin ALLEN, starring Walter Pidgeon, Robert Sterling, Joan Fontaine, Barbara Eden, Peter Lorre. Screenplay Allen, Charles Bennett. 105 mins. Colour.The crew of a glass-nosed nuclear submarine has a mission to fire an atomic missile into the Van Allen belts, which have been set on fire by meteors (!) and are melting the icecaps. Despite enemy submarines, a giant octopus and other hazards, the mission succeeds. As with most of Allen's productions, the plot does not survive an instant's rational scrutiny; it is full of astonishing SCIENTIFIC ERRORS. The novelization was Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea * (1961) by Theodore STURGEON.2. US tv series (1964-8). An Irwin Allen Production for 20th Century-Fox TV/ABC. Created Irwin Allen, who was also executive prod. Story consultant Sidney Marshall. Writers included William Welch (34 episodes), Richard Landau, Harlan ELLISON (1 episode as by Cordwainer Bird), Robert Hamner, Rik Vollaerts. Dirs included Leonard Horn, Sobey Martin, Felix Feist, Harry Harris, Sutton Roley, Jus Addiss. Special effects L.B. Abbott. 110 50min episodes. Season 1 b/w, the remaining 3 seasons colour.Based on 1, this series concerned the exploits of the experimental submarine Seaview; it starred Richard Basehart and David Hedison. Early episodes had fairly conventional stories involving secret agents and threats from unfriendly foreign powers, but later the plots became increasingly fantastic: not only were the crew faced with such dangers as giant whales, giant jellyfish, giant octopuses and giant "things", but their submarine was regularly invaded by a variety of esoteric menaces ranging from sentient seaweed to the ghost of a U-boat captain, other uninvited guests including a lobster man, a mummy, a leprechaun, a blob and a mad robot. Throughout, Basehart and Hedison kept straight faces. Abbott's special effects won several Emmy awards. Book spin-offs were VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA* (1965)by Raymond F. JONES and City Under the Sea* (1965) by Paul W. FAIRMAN. [JB]See also: UNDER THE SEA. VOYAGE TO THE END OF THE UNIVERSE IKARIE XB-1. VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF PREHISTORIC WOMEN Roger CORMAN; PLANETA BUR. VOYAGE TO THE PREHISTORIC PLANET Roger CORMAN; PLANETA BUR. VYNALEZ ZKAZY (vt The Diabolic Invention; vt The Deadly Invention; vt The Fabulous World of Jules Verne; vt Invention of Destruction; vt Weapons of Destruction) Film (1958). Kratky film Praha/Studio loutkovych filmu Gottwaldov. Dir Karel Zeman, starring Lubor Tokus, Arnost Navratil, Miroslav Holub, Jana Zatloukalova. Screenplay Zeman, Frantisek Hrubin, based primarily on Jules VERNE's Face au drapeau (1896; trans as For the Flag 1897), but also drawing on sections of his Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870; trans as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas 1872), L'ile mysterieuse (1874-5; trans as The Mysterious Island 1875) and Robur le conquerant (1886; trans as The Clipper of the Clouds 1887). 83 mins. B/w.This Czech film is a charming blend of cartoon animation, puppet film and live action, with the overall style patterned on 19th-century steel engravings. A monomaniacal scientist invents an incredibly powerful new explosive; he and his assistant are captured by a Captain Nemo-like character and his followers. There are various adventures with submarines, BALLOONS, a giant octopus and a vast cannon. At the end patriotism triumphs over unscrupulous technology. Zeman directed a number of excellent films of this sort ( CZECH AND SLOVAK SF). [JB/PN] |