Masters of Time, by A.E. van Vogt – 1950 [Edd Cartier]

In the same way that different readers can have utterly disparate evaluations of the same story – whether in terms of an author’s literary style, or, such fundamental elements as plot, theme, and setting – so and even more can different artists depict a story’s events and character by strikingly different visual styles. This is nicely epitomized in the illustrations created by Hubert Rogers and Edd Cartier to present the world imagined by A.E. van Vogt for his tale “Recruiting Station”. First published in the March, 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction…

… the story was reprinted by Fantasy Press as “Masters of Time” in their 1950 book by the same title, the publication also including van Vogt’s unrelated tale “The Changeling“, which originally appeared in Astounding in April of 1944.

Being far-too-far away in time from having read “Recruiting Station” (decades!) to remember the story’s precise details, suffice to say that though the tale doesn’t have the consistency of focus (emphatically not a hallmark of Van Vogt’s writing!) the author anomalously showed in his truly superb 1942 “Asylum”, it displayed the sense leaps of imagination coupled with creative-disconnectedness – of time, place, and sequence events – that made his story-telling fascinating, entrancing, perplexing (and yes, eye-rollingly maddening) at the same time, and, the presence of female protagonists central to the story, I think reflective of his early work as a writer of romances. MPorcius Fiction Log has a thorough evaluation of the story, aptly concluding with the following, “In my opinion, “Recruiting Station” is a good example of what van Vogt is all about. It is also interesting as a product of its time, as I have suggested, and feminist readers might find noteworthy its depiction of a college-educated professional woman who is given the responsibility of saving the universe but who at the same time has a man at the center of her psychological life, a man whose help she needs to succeed in her awful mission and to achieve personal happiness. Students of van Vogt’s long career may find his descriptions of the soldiers in the story as lusty, adventurous men unafraid of death, to be of a piece with his interest in “the violent male.” “Recruiting Station” gets a big thumbs up from this van Vogt aficionado.”

Fantasy Press’ 1950 publication has great cover and full page (just two in the whole book!) illustrations by Edd Cartier, while the chapters are headed by two alternating illustrations.

“Forty feet a day. In a blaze of wonder,
Garson stood finally with his troop
a hundred yards from that unnatural battle front.
Like a robot he stood stiffly among those robot men,
but his eyes and mind fed in undiminished fascination
at the deadly mechanical routine that was the offense and defense.”

(page 69)

(Interesting contrast with Hubert Roger’s cover!)

“The Jeep caught him when he was still twenty feet from the fence.
The cool-eyed women who operated it
pointed the steadiest pistols Craig had ever faced.
A few minutes later, at the house,
Craig saw that the whole gang had been rounded up:
Anrella, Nesbitt, Yerd, Shore, Cathcott, Gregory, all the servants;
altogether forty people were lined up
before a regular arsenal of machine guns manned by about a hundred women.”