Van Vogt’s imagination far outstripped his writing ability, which is why so many of his stories started off with a bang, then trailed off into mediocrity.

Many such cases. Some worse. Salvatore can do a good scene, but then he buries it under a hundred pages of hackity-hack and herpity-derp. He also would struggle to make up as much as 3 non-ridiculous names in a row even if his life depended on it.

What he really needed was an editor with a chair and a whip, to keep him focused on the main story line.

What he really needed was a good co-author to cover his weak sides.

The fix-up thing became very annoying when I went through a van Vogt phase, as I kept finding previously read short stories (or pieces of them) in later novels. And later editions of the same book might get revised without any mention on the cover or copyright page, leading to some head-scratching as a re-read fails to match the original.

What he really needed was an editor with a chair and a whip, to keep him focused on the main story line.

Still, while sometimes annoying, he reliably delivered on the “sense of wonder” thing.

He followed a strategy of introducing a new twist or complication every 800 words — a method SF author and critic James Blish called recomplication, and which Damon Knight derided as the “Kitchen Sink Technique.” This approach is both exhilarating and frustrating, and has contributed to the sharply polarized critical response to van Vogt. In the words of Brian W. Aldiss, he was a “genuinely inspired madman.” Philip K. Dick, who ardently defended van Vogt against his critics, asserted that he “influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.” At the other extreme, we encounter Knight, the leader of the anti-van Vogt faction, who — in an infamous fanzine article entitled “Cosmic Jerrybuilder” — almost singlehandedly torpedoed van Vogt’s reputation by famously proclaiming: “Van Vogt is not a giant as often maintained. He’s only a pygmy using a giant typewriter.”

The true pain of those who write is the realization that, “No prophet is accepted in his hometown.”

Another point about A.E. van Vogt is that he was dyslexic and writing was an ordeal for him.