Science & Tech Quote by A. E. van Vogt

A lot is smuggled into that modest origin story: science fiction as something stumbled upon in a boys' annual, not discovered in a manifesto. Van Vogt is pointing to the genre's old delivery system - cheap, serial, half-accidental - and quietly insisting that this is where imagination actually gets made. Not in the lecture hall, but in the back pages of a mass-market publication aimed at adolescent appetite: adventure, gadgets, danger, wish-fulfillment.

The detail that lands is "old British Chum annual". It's a reminder that early science fiction wasn't born in a sealed national tradition. A Canadian writer who becomes a pillar of American pulp is shaped, at 12, by British print culture. The subtext is portability: the future travels well, because it arrives in disposable formats. The word "annual" carries ritual, too - something you revisit, something that marks time, which is exactly what science fiction obsesses over. It also hints at class and access. Annuals were gifts, school prizes, hand-me-downs. "Old" suggests secondhand reading, the way genre often circulates: not prestigious enough to be curated, too enjoyable to be discarded.

Van Vogt's intent feels less like nostalgia than credentials. He's locating his authority in early, formative contact with the genre's pop bloodstream. The larger context is his eventual reputation for dream-logic plots and idea-over-character velocity. This is the childhood of a writer trained by magazines to prioritize forward motion and speculative shocks - a style that would later be criticized as incoherent and defended as visionary.