Alfred Van Vogt is one of the leading authors of the "golden age" of science fiction, a writer awarded the title of Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers Association of America - and, perhaps, the most original and original of the science fiction writers of the famous American "antebellum generation". Van Vogt’s works, no matter what genre they were written in - from “space opera” to dystopia and “black” utopia, are one way or another united by one thing: behind the fascination of a “tightly built”, to the extreme “excited” adventure plot, there is a THOUGHT hidden here . The thought is sometimes shocking, paradoxical, sometimes irrational, almost ridiculous, but always PERFECT. The “cult of the superman” here turns into a kind of “anti-cult”, scientific progress turns against itself, the “twilight of the gods” bears the features not so much of a “new round of evolution” as of an eternal “conflict of generations” - but the THOUGHT sounds, rings like a taut string, - and still excites the reader’s imagination...