This is a poor work by Van Vogt. I have read a couple which were good but this is bad. This may have been when he and L. Ron Hubbard went deep into Scientology. ( )

This is the strangest story I have ever read by van Vogt. While I am one of his staunchest admirers this must surely be his weakest book. The plot is certainly complex enough, and the character portrayals are enticing enough, but the concept is bizarre. The gross outline is that an alien race, called Deeans, intends to invade Earth by first, infiltration as genetically replicated humans, and finally by direct attack via spaceship. Meanwhile, there are at least two other alien groups (also infiltrating Earth via genetic replication) seeking to prevent the invasion…even though, philosophically, they don’t really care. These other aliens are, in some vague way, more intellectually and emotionally evolved than Deeans and want to block the Deean’s efforts to expand throughout the galaxy...if it's not too much effort.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…I mean, back to the humans on Earth, there’s some incomprehensible sexual roiling going on with a constant exploration of the differences between human males and females. The lead Deean on Earth posits: “A man’s life revolves around sex, his job, and some kind of masculinity obsession or abdication. If he has any other personality characteristic; for example, if he has a compulsion of some kind, or if he thinks he’s Napoleon, his aberration is instantly apparent to everyone. My own observation is that there’s just one central brain mechanism involved in the normal male’s identity….But a normal woman has at least two, possibly even four identity centers. The confusion that results is not so great as it could be, because she usually operates on one at a time. That one, for Nature’s reasons, holds for a while in a normal woman. If, because of neurosis or over-stimulation from the environment, the shift from one center to another is rapid, people wonder about her and about women in general. But since she herself is not aware when a shift occurs, she personally never wonders. Whichever identity center she’s operating on, seems completely real to her.”

Let me interject here that van Vogt might have stumbled upon Gurdjieff's and Ouspensky's theory of multiple-personalities--and decided to explore some possible ramifications.

The result of these observations goes far to explain why the genetically disguised aliens are baffled by their own reactions to Earth women. The results in the plot-line skew into farce at this point. Add in the fact that the human hero and his estranged wife are Physics Nobel prize winners and that the man has been saved from an unrelated murder attempt by having his brain ensconced in a wheelchair-cum-armored tank and we have one truly Shakespearean comedy of errors---with all the males trying to have sex with as many women as possible and all the females trying to find, via sex, the most robust and protective male to save them from harm.

My first inclination was to rate this book a one-star for its inherent confusion; but after forcing myself to read it to the end, I have to give it 3-stars for its shear audacity of complexity and insanity. ( )

Half a star, because of the unintentionally hilarious dialogue and descriptions throughout the book. (e.g. 'The qualm was utterly convincing." The qualm before the storm, no doubt...) If you can read it for free, or get a copy for 50 cents or so, it might be worth a few laughs. ( )