As part of our Countdown to Hallowe’en, our SFFWorld Horror expert, Randy M., gives us his take on the A.E. Van Vogt SF/Horror classic:
On and on Coeurl prowled!
Coeurl hunts for id-creatures across the length and breadth of his world, but he and his species have hunted the planet barren, until only Coeurl remains.
And then a space ship lands.
The humans from the ship largely ignore Coeurl, an apparently friendly alien, vaguely reminiscent in looks and actions to a large cat. In exploring the planet, they find the ruins of a great city and speculate that Coeurl is a descendant of those who built it. Except Coeurl is not a descendant and now he plays a cat and mouse game of ingratiating himself with his new source of nutrition, looking for ways to learn their secret of space flight and move on to worlds filled with more id-creatures.
Van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer”, though written from the alien’s point of view still reads like a variation on Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (link HERE.) Instead of the alien coming to us, we go out and find the alien; both aliens show some telepathic abilities; a group of men have to find ways to defend themselves and save mankind, and the scenes of isolation aboard the space ship are well-played for suspense, though not quite as effective as Campbell’s Antarctic. One of the story’s points of interest is the sense that Coeurl has devolved over time and only now, with the challenge of mankind, is his intellect fully awakening.
I haven’t read a lot of Van Vogt – a couple of stories and a novel – but my impression is that those who read Van Vogt don’t read him for the beauty of his prose or the neatness of his plotting and story-construction but rather for the (sometimes daffy) ideas he radiates and his energetic (maybe even frenetic) story-telling, which is said to have influenced Phillip K. Dick. This story is no exception and like Campbell’s novella is a cornerstone of the American pulp science fiction as it developed in the 1930s and 1940s.
“Black Destroyer” was later incorporated in Van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle.
Of related interest from Van Vogt: “Asylum” (1942; Away and Beyond, 1977; Adventures in Time and Space, 1946)
Maybe the ultimate alien in spaceship movie: Alien (1979)
