The War Against the Rull
Is that a Rull sitting next to you? Now man has conquered all of space and seemingly he is at peace with everone in it. That is, everything except the Rull. Who and what are the Rulls? They are a race so alien and paranoid that they must have originated in another galaxy. In their true form they resemble some sort of dark, large worm with a variety of appendages. But you almost never see a Rull as he really is. The Rull, you see, can change its outward appearance at will, so that even your closest friend or most trusted colleague may suddenly turn out to be a spy in disguise.
Canadian Science fiction, Fiction, science fiction, general
A. E. van Vogt
Alfred Elton van Vogt was born on a farm in Edenburg, a Russian Mennonite community east of Gretna, Manitoba. Early in his career he wrote for true confession pulp magazines like True Story, but in the late 1930s he began writing science fiction, which he was more interested in. His first published SF story, "Black Destroyer" was published in 1939, and is considered to be one of the first works of the Golden Age of science fiction. In 1941 he left his job at the Department of National Defence to become a full-time writer, and he went on to write a large number of short stories. In 1944 he moved to Hollywood, California. In the 1950s he briefly became involved in L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics projects. Although he left Dianetics, he claimed that Hubbard's followers continued to harass him, and he stopped writing for a few years. In the 1960s Frederik Pohl convinced him to start writing again, and he wrote novels (as opposed to short stories that were later developed into novels) until his death in 2000.