Renaissance

by A.E. van Vogt

In a future world women are the dominant sex and men wear chemically treated spectacles to keep them in line. One man has discovered a flaw in the lenses, an unnoticeable crack that can liberate him from the female tyranny.

Yet every moment he is being monitored by underground revolutionaries who need his powers for the overthrow of their extra-planetary masters....

A shattering novel of the Earth's ultimate revolution from the grand master of imaginative fiction.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Dystopia, Science Fiction Fantasy

159 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Alfred Elton van Vogt was a Canadian-born science fiction author regarded by some as one of the most popular and complex science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century—the "Golden Age" of the genre.

van Vogt was born to Russian Mennonite family. Until he was four years old, van Vogt and his family spoke only a dialect of Low German in the home.

He began his writing career with 'true story' romances, but then moved to writing science fiction, a field he identified with. His first story was Black Destroyer, that appeared as the front cover story for the July 1939 edtion of the popular "Astounding Science Fiction" magazine.

Reviews

[Denis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve never taken any creative writing courses, but I imagine they might go something like this:

Teacher: Here is a topic for all of you: In the near future, aliens come to Earth. Lets call them... ah, “the Utt”. So, these Utt have come and have decided that all of Earth's social problems are caused by the males of this world because of their primal tendency towards violence. They then impose a solution which is that all men must wear rose-tinted eye glasses that, by way of light refraction of some kind, suppress these primal urges...

Student: What the...

Teacher: Now go to it!

Class: Utter dumbfounded silence...

Teacher: Oh and by the way, men are also no longer permitted to drive automobiles as these machines are extremely dangerous, therefore, they must take the bus...

Student: My God, this mad-person is making this up as she is going along.

Teacher: Now, I want your story to be a minimum of 60 000 words...

Student: And she wants a whole novel from this crazy... From this!? Really​​?

Well, if this student was the 69 year old A.E. van Vogt, the novel would be “Renaissance”.

The premise (the first five chapters) with the rose tinted glasses was published in 1979 as "Femworld: Before the Revolution" in the June/July issue of Galaxy Magazine. As far as the next twenty-two chapters, the story is completely outrageously written the way only van Vogt could. When you read “Renaissance”, as always with his work, you must accept his weird world as if playing pretend games with a child.

Isaac Walwyn of the excellent http://icshi.net/seagram site has written a summery of the entire novel (http://icshi.net/sevagram/summaries/r...) and a review: -"This is certainly the single worst encapsulation of van Vogt's idiotic Dianetics-influenced musings on gender relations, a topic he seemed obsessed with throughout the 1970s. Renaissance is a monstrously bad novel that is embarrassing to read.
But no matter how dreadful the book as a whole may be, Chapter 27 is a masterpiece, conveying the powerful impression of the sheer alienness of the Orsolite's homeworld. Gerald Grace did a fantastic painting of this scene on the cover of the 1980 New English Library edition."

I, personally, know the book was completely nuts and is probably the worst sci-fi idea ever published by a major author of the golden age. I would have loved to have been born a decade or two earlier just so to have followed these authors’ careers from the start. Between 1979 and say 1987, van Vogt puts out this mess, Heinlein publishes the far out crazy “The Number of the Beast”, T. Sturgeon “Godbody” and L. Ron Hubbard, for the first time in thirty years, out of nowhere, publishes a megabrick titled, “Battlefield Earth”! At least A.C. Clark was trudging along with his Odyssey, Asimov was doing the Foundation and Robot thing, while Jack Williamson, starting a decade before all of them, a practical immortal, along with Frederick Pohl, went on with their thing until the mid two thousands! But I digress.

This is not without some premise. In 1962, van Vogt published a non-genre novel titled, “The Violent Man” as well as a non- fiction work titled, “A Report on the Violent Male”. This is a much too late attempt at putting these ideas into a science fiction novel.

The thing is, for some reason I can’t explain, Even while cringing in disbelief, I enjoyed “Renaissance’s” just the same. Van Vogt’s books, for the most part, are for me a guilty pleasure. I would never aggressively defend the merits of his work, but there are real thought-gems in all of of his stories that could come from none other than he alone.

[Lostaccount · Rating 2 out of 5]

Earth is taken over by an alien race called The Utt, who decide in their Godlike wisdom that Man (or more specifically the male sex drive) is the cause of all the world’s troubles, so they have to “psychically castrate” males. To create harmony on Earth they emasculate all men with a drug (given at puberty) that renders them nearsighted (so they can’t see the boobs, more or less) – “The Utt chemical method”. Pretty ridiculous. But anyway. Men are effectively made impotent by being deprived of their aggressive sexual instincts. Utts are obviously followers of Freud. Men are then forced to wear rose-tinted spectacles, to prevent certain male optic nerves from being stimulated! I swear I’m not making this up. All property is owned by women, men are not allowed to drive cars and have to take the bus, men have to hand over all pay to their wives, and every married woman becomes “Mrs Unchallengeable” – the writer’s phrase not mine. Women are not allowed to be scientists though ... errm, because that’s the writer’s fantasy, so there.

So much for the set up. Now for the plot. Ugh, I’ll give it a go:

Grayson works for Haskett labs as a physicist or something. Not sure what he does exactly except sit at his desk. One day his goggles (the rose-tinted ones Utt make men wear) break and he sees his female boss, Miss Haskett, as a sexual being. Without his glasses, he’s free to be a man, aggressively sexually assertive, and this makes Miss Haskett interested in him – you can see where this is going – male fantasy affair with female boss. This effect on women extends to his wife (a cold frigid fish who sleeps in another room) when he gets home so that she becomes “willing” but (and get this) only because she’s scared of his unleashed maleness (which is naturally aggressive). Nothing happens because she’s a cold fish, like I said. Grayson has an affair with Miss Haskett, his boss, instead, and we get one of the most ridiculous sex scenes ever, as if written by a virgin:

“The moments glided by. Skin writhed against skin. Lip pressed against lip. And all was optimum.”

All was optimum? Give me a break. And all that skin writhing against skin, ooh the chafing! This book is at times so badly written it’s criminal.

Anyway, back to the plot: Grayson gets ambushed by a member of The Revolution (against the Utt, obviously) on his way to work. Sent by his boss, apparently – probably because she wants more of that “optimum” sex. Haha. Grayson is given a contact number by The Revolution. He has to see an eye doctor to get his glasses fixed, told he has to see an Utt Commissioner (cos them goggles are made of unbreakable polymer, see, and it’s mighty s’spicious they got broke). A shit-scared Grayson calls The Revolution number to have the eye surgeon killed before he can report him to the Utt. At home again, his wife seems to be cheating on him by going off every evening, but they sleep together (first time in twenty years) when she gets back. And now the second worst sex scene ever:

“Yet, though it took time, he presently completed the act. Whereupon, exhausted, impervious to what may have happened to Mila [his wife, poor cow] during all these minutes, he rolled over and went to sleep”

What a lovely, thoughtful human being. At another point when he sleeps again with his boss, he calls it a “transaction”. I couldn’t stop laughing.

So naturally Grayson’s thinking “this is pretty cool, got two women on the go, why screw it up” and decides he wants nothing to do with any revolution, stuff all that, he’s having nothing more to do with them twats. Next day from work he tries to track down The Revolution HQ by calling them and using some idiot device he invented to hypnotise (“capture the mind of”) the guy who answers over the phone. It's so contrived it’s laughable. He gets the address out of him and goes there to a normal-appearing house, searches it, finds nothing much. Great. After this, it’s not worth going on with the plot much. Grayson figures out how the glasses were broken, gets attacked, gets a summons to see the Utt (eye doctor reported it after all before being assassinated), goes to the Utt HQ and then the book descends into ‘Utt’er nonsense ... see what I did there?

The book started out okay and I was willing to forgive its glaring fault, its awkward prose style, but that awkwardness turns into unreadability as the book progresses, to the point where I didn’t know what the hell was going on half the time, or care. It’s the books biggest failing. If a computer learned to write novels, this is how I imagined it would write:

From the book: "It would be a little difficult, he argued to himself, where behaviour was one hundred percent automatic, to disapprove one automatic aspect of it more than any other automatic."

"Large thoughts bounded around his head" (Yeah I’ve had some of those once)

Overall, started okay, turned into claptrap.

[Eva · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just the first page lets you know you’re getting into something you’d find on ASSTR. As someone who’s seen a lot of braindead and/or offending arguments from both the feminism and MRA sides, I wasn’t keen on reading this. “But hey, maybe it’s just laughably bad, right?”

Other reviews already explain how silly the premise is: some Utt aliens came to govern the earth and dictated that all men were uncontrollable rampaging monsters and so they all had to become artificially near-sighted so they’d all be forced to use rose-tinted glasses that turn them into doormat betas (they have to wear those even in bed). But Grayson’s randomly break and he becomes the alpha chad he was meant to be. No, I’m really not exaggerating. Also, despite women being technically in control of men in this scenario they still act like helpless omega sheep. I don’t like using A/B/O stereotypes but this is seriously the best way to explain how everyone’s written.

So when his glasses break he no longer can concentrate on anything but the women around him. He looks at his boss and thinks that “her lonely life cried out wordlessly for love and affection. And who else should answer that call but [himself]?”. He becomes able to smell his wife’s “profound state of sexual stimulation” because “she sees I’m not wearing the glasses that keep a man TAMED”. He reasons that, to his wife, he (without glasses) would “be as frightening as meeting suddenly some wild animal”. She voices being afraid he’d hurt her and he legit goes “you won’t be hurt as long as you do what I say”. This sounds like bad powerplay fanfiction. Is this how Fifty Shades is written? However, it is implied that their marriage was bad and that she treated him kind of like shit (sexual abuse included; also by law he has to hand over all his salary to her) which I guess does explain his resentment so it really doesn’t bother me all that much since it’s just the result of such an unhealthy relationship.

It’s claimed that women are naturally sexless (*le sigh*) and thorough the book the idea that all women are weak sitting ducks and all men are some violent sex monsters persists. The Revolution movement accepts new recruits only when they acquire and fuck a mistress up to 48h after their glasses get broken. Which Grayson did, it was his boss. Also he randomly loses it and strangles his maid? And there’s some OP hypnotism device he just randomly builds up in his lab and no one knows of it and it can insert memories into other people just through a phone call??

Anyway he does that because he gets contacted by The Revolution and decides Fuck Them I Just Want To Live A Quiet Life so he goes to their HQ and wiretaps it. Then he gets a summons to be questioned by the Utt about his glasses and just goes and wakes up in a prison cubicle after getting there. Turns out the prisoners gather once a week in a theatre with a door to "hell" to watch executions? Anyway he leaves and gets caught by The Revolution who wants him to become their leader since he punched one of their guys and is clearly a smart man so he knocks them all out and leaves the whole prison place, and gets caught by some other anti-Utt group who also want him to be their leader because he’s smart and managed to run away from them before. This time he accepts and for a bit things go well, he gets a bunch of mistresses and has a lot of sex “probably to make up for 35 years of nothing” and is happy that his peepee works.

At this point I must admit I no longer know how old Grayson is. Sometimes it sounds like the book is saying he’s 30, others, 50. The writing itself often omits details until it no longer can do so, and a lot of things that ask for some sort of setup have none, other times the wording itself makes me misread a paragraph or so, and for this I stopped caring about details like age.

One day his boss, aka Mistress#1 tells him that an Utt is there to see him at the office so he does the logical thing and leaves the building and decides to follow his wife with the aid of a police officer he hypnotized with some hidden gas apparatus that I’m sure didn’t exist in the book until he used it. Anyway, his wife goes to some “heaven” building where he disguises as a woman to enter and one thing leads to another and they end up in a spaceship holding a religious ceremony (the christian kind). Btw the entirety of the book is played straight. He decides to go fuck around and it is at this point, past over half the book, that we’re informed that technology in this world has progressed so much to the point of being virtually invisible. So I could finally put to rest all the doubts I was carrying regarding how the fuck is he firing a laser gun and no one noticing, or hiding 13546 convenient deadly gadgets on his body at all times. And can I add that the book claims this guy is some amazing scientist when all we see him do is sit around all day in his office taking calls, and he knows some info (that shouldn’t be exactly unknown) about blue star cores, and randomly builds a hypnotising device. What the actual fuck kind of scientist is he? What does he do??

Anyway, Grayson then has an existential crisis as he ends up transportalised somewhere where there’s a rising red sun and a tentacle alien and realises he’s no longer on Earth. Like, full on fetal position kind of crisis. The alien then explains it’s from the super technologically advanced species that is backing up the Utt and then transportalises him back to his own office where the Utt wants to talk to him. He then convinces the creature to piss off for the time being and allow men to have as many mistresses as they want because of the hypnotising mirror installed in his office.
And that’s it. Yup.

I’ll say the one thing that’s gotten right it’s the pacing. With this pacing and this setting you could actually make a half decent B film. But maybe don’t make it so that all men only want to fuck and all women start crying and acting super submissive any time a man talks to them? Because the underlying oppressive matriarchy setting does have some potential and could’ve been better explored. In a more humane way, rather than in a more sex/power fantasy way. All in all I did read the whole thing so 2 Utts out of 5 for keeping me entertained for 190 or so pages.

[Susanna Neri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Non so cosa pensare di questo libro, mi ha fatto ridere moltissimo l'idea perchè al contrario del racconto dell'ancella è sviluppato in maniera leggera, ironica e spesso ingenua, sembra un YA ma forse risente degli anni passati dalla sua pubblicazione. Una critica alla religione, alla dittatura e alla censura, la soppressione delle pulsioni e delle libertà, anche se per un (ipotetico) nobile scopo porta sembre ad una sopraffazione e a tensioni sociali.

[Isabel (kittiwake) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although this story is set in the future at a time when women are the dominant sex, it turns into a male wish fulfilment fantasy by the end. It was okay, but it was only 159 pages long, and if it was much longer I probably wouldn't have bothered finishing it.

[Peter Dunn · Rating 2 out of 5]

A great premise that quickly descends into relentless misogyny and an understanding of male and female interaction that is even more warped than that shown by the book’s alien Utt. Add to that a plot resolution built round a handy hypno mirror and you have in short one of Vogt’s worst novels.

[João Sousa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book so I could get a glimpse of the author's work. It is somehow difficult for me to write a review on a book I didn't like. I always tend to assume that a given book has a target where I am not included, rather than analysing its content and getting involved in a personal evaluation of it.

Anyway, "scifi" literature does not have to be closely related to soft (pulp? light?) content. But "Renaissance" is in my opinion anything but a fast paced action story, with some interesting premisses but not much more than that.

[SciFiOne · Rating 4 out of 5]

1981 grade B+

[Phil Giunta · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the year 2023, a revolution is building against the alien overlords of Earth known as the Utt. Forty years prior, after their swift and peaceful subjugation of every world government, it had been the Utt’s conclusion that most of planet’s tribulations had been the fault of men. Thus, the Utt enacted laws that made women the dominant sex. All men are required to undergo a procedure that leaves them nearsighted and are forced to wear chemically treated glasses that somehow leaves them emasculated.

However, when Peter Grayson, a physicist for a chemical company, finds both lenses of his rose-tinted glasses cracked, he uses a special transparent tape to repair them—and quickly discovers that his simple repair nullifies the submissive power of the glasses and liberates him from the oppression of his domineering wife.

Shortly after, Grayson finds himself embroiled in the male revolution against the Utt, a situation which he attempts to manipulate for his own personal gain…

I found Renaissance to be the weakest of all Van Vogt books I’ve read so far. Published in 1979, the quality was nowhere near his earlier work. The concept is preposterous and served as little more than an opportunity for a plot laden with blatant and cringeworthy male wish fulfillment. Worse, the prose was clunky and riddled with awkward sentence structure, inelegant wording (ex: “From that very first moment, being scientifically trained, Grayson did his trying-to-understand-with-his-knowledge.”), and scenes that served little to no purpose. Some plot elements that held the promise of an ultimate climax never paid off in the end.

If you want to explore the best works of Van Vogt, avoid Renaissance and read his earlier work such as Slan, The World of Null-A, Voyage of the Space Beagle, The Twisted Men, The Weapon Shops of Isher, and The Weapon Makers, to name a few.

[Christian Butler-Zanetti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok, just because of the subject matter of this book I feel compelled to qualify my difficult-to-reason affection for Van Vogt.
In a certain sense this is Van Vogt at his best, which is also to say his worst. His prose is not merely awful; it is awful in its own very odd, highly idiosyncratic way. How this stuff ever got published is beyond me. Van Vogt was, though, to his credit, an 'ideas writer' and while I doubt he plucked the central theme of this one from the pages of any of the great philosophers, it is emblematic of the condition he was writing from - a male, white, self educated, mid-20th Century American, with all of the misogyny, entitlement, power obsession and higher-thinking pseudoscience that entails.
As usual, Van Vogt here, rather than pursuing his idea in any coherent fashion jumps all over the place in scene upon scene of baffling illogical digressions, all the while hammering you over the head with the assertion that clear-sighted logic is directing the actions of - Van Vogt's favourite archetype - the clear-thinking, intelligent man. (Incidentally I can't help but see the influence of Van Vogt's friendship with L Ron Hubbard whenever he invokes this type.)
What you get at the end of the day is a story so absurd that it functions concurrently as satire; a preposterous broth of awkward jargon, alien threat, teleportation, some deeply problematic male/female relations and - another Van Vogt fixture - lots of looking around empty rooms. And I can't get enough of it.

[Sir Blue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rienasance another van vogt masterpiece
Science fiction god and mastermind
We find Peter grayson
Your run of the mill evry man
Spinning out working at the factory.
Drunk at strippers does surprise sex.
Chix dig him they want his nuts.
Then he loses it all and is imprisoned
He roids out and gets tuff
Plays sports likes girls
Then society at its apex
The rienacassance of alien invasion
Aliens descend on earth the utt
Purple pulsating brains that melt your mind
They can summon spirits with there mind
Esp and pyro kinetic
They can enter your mind control u
They seek to force a dictator to rule
Then Peter grayson excapes
The aliens leave due to space orders
They leave because earth is spared
By intergalactic councils
Earth will except dictater is spared
Grayson excepts god

[Carina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just finished Renascence by A.E. van Vogt. An entertaining read with an intriguing start and some fun science elements that weren’t too heavy. I was curious about the premise of a woman-dominated world—but honestly expected to see more actual agency from the women. Instead, they often came across as naive or dependent on men. The ending really flattened it all out for me, like the whole point was just to justify why men should get multiple women. 😅

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A. E. Van Vogt. That's a name from my early sci-fi days!
This one was a newer story, from the late 70s. Sex was a big topic. Gender relations were questioned. New tech solved most problems. The Orsolite had discovered matter transfer. And Grayson has a big ego. Sci-fi at its best.

[Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://gnomeship.blogspot.com/2018/05...

[Socrate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fizicianul Grayson auzi de două ori neobişnuitul clinchet sec, în ritm rapid. Piing… Ping…
Cam aşa.
Foarte uşor.
Dar ceea ce urmă fu foarte evident. Textul tipărit pe care-l citea se înceţoşă pe loc.
Grayson scutură enervat din cap şi apropie contractul de ochelari. Pe pagină jucau nişte pete.
Oftă, se lăsă pe spătarul scaunului şi închise ochii. Când îi deschise, înţelese care era problema.
În fiecare „sticlă” transparentă a ochelarilor săi apăruse câte o crăpătură subţire, orizontală, chiar la nivelul pupilei.
Rămase un pic surprins. Ciudată coincidenţă. Cele două sticle se spărseseră – acum îşi aminti clinchetul şi se gândi că probabil acela fusese momentul – una la o jumătate de secundă de cealaltă. Având un spirit înclinat către statistică, consideră foarte pe scurt probabilitatea unor spargeri atât de apropiate în timp. Cifrele care-i veniră în minte erau atât de astronomice (şi bineînţeles imposibile), încât renunţă la idee.
În linişte, îşi scoase ochelarii stricaţi şi-i puse pe birou. Apoi, prin ceaţă, răscoli într-unul dintre sertare până găsi o rolă de adeziv transparent; era, fireşte, un adeziv de acea calitate perfectă ce se fabrica în Laboratoarele Haskett, după norme ştiinţifice specifice. Până acum nu-i trecuse niciodată prin cap să folosească acest adeziv la reparatul ochelarilor şi, evident, nu-l folosea pentru acest scop neprevăzut decât în aşteptarea unei perechi noi de ochelari, venite de la opticianul lui.

[Matteo Pellegrini · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tutto il potere è femminile, gli uomini (che non possono neppure entrare in un bar se non sono accompagnati da una donna) hanno perso ogni aggressività, ogni baldanza, e perfino gran parte dei loro stimoli sessuali. E tutti questi spenti maschi devono portare per legge certi occhiali dalle lenti leggermente rosate. Poi un giorno, a uno di loro, uno scienziato, accade una cosa strana: le sue lenti s'incrinano quasi nello stesso istante... ping... ping... Un caso davvero insolito, un incidente fuori da ogni norma statistica, che apre due sottilissime e fatali fessure nella sua vita, nei suoi rapporti con gli altri, nella sua visione del mondo, nel capovolto sistema che è stato instaurato sulla Terra.

[DavidO · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book starts with an interesting premise. Aliens took over earth and took away men's aggression, basically making them entirely subservient to women. On one guy the device to do this gets broken, so he starts acting more aggressive and sexual. From there, however, it doesn't go so well. It becomes a story about a man fighting aliens with his xcrazy inventions, eventually defeating them with his inventions. To me that feels like it got off track. It started as a study of what men are like without aggression and turns into science fiction pulp.

[Nick Heyns · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in French. My mother, who reads no French, bought me a copy when she was on holiday in France. She picked it because the cover looked like Science Fiction. Like a lot of Science Fiction books, the cover had nothing to do with the story. It was an interesting story nonetheless.

[Brett]

Science Fiction

[Babete · Rating 3 out of 5]

( A última revolta na Terra )