"The Book of Ptath" (1943) - A. E. van Vogt’s only fantasy novel

Richard Holroyd, a World War II tank captain who has been blown sky-high by a direct hit from a German dive-bomber, wakes up to find himself in the person of a somewhat amnesic semi-god named Ptath in the far, far, far-off world of 200 million A.D., where the continents have changed shape and whose 80 billion people spread over the three remaining ones are on the point of going hammer and tongs at one another with their spears and bows and arrows and their deadly attacking giant birds, egged on by an evil-minded but very beautiful empress who can switch into whatever (female) body she wants to.

But Ptath and his ally the mysterious (and beautiful) L’Onee have body-changing capabilities too, so the struggle with the rather nasty queen (Zard) Ineznia to head off the war or at least to win it, is a well-balanced struggle whose outcome is quite in doubt right up to the very last page.

First published in the October 1943 issue of the short-lived Unknown Worlds magazine and then in 1947 in hardcover format, this was van Vogt’s third novel, after Slan (1940) and The Weapon Makers (1943).

It was one of his last excursions into the fantasy realm, after the stories The Sea Thing (1940), The Ghost (1942) and The Witch (1943), and was followed by The Ship of Darkness in 1948.

In the February 1948 issue of the magazine Fantasy Book in which the story The Ship of Darkness was published, there’s the following rather interesting review of The Book of Ptath by E. Mayne Hull, van Vogt’s wife and fellow-Canadian, a specialist in the fantasy genre and a distinguished writer on her own account [1], that suggests that she may well have collaborated with him somewhat in the writing of this novel [2]:

THE BOOK OF PTATH by A. E. Van Vogt
Fantasy Press $3.00

It is not often that the wife and, to some extent, the collaborator of the author of a book [3] is asked to review it. The request imposes a more than normal requirement of fairness upon me. I remember THE BOOK OF PTATH extremely well. I read it in its early versions, and there were six of them, before it was printed. I read it in the magazine, and when it was being revised for book publi­cation. I typed both the original and the book manuscripts, and then I read the proofs and the book.
THE BOOK OF PTATH was originally printed in Unknown Worlds, and at the time was a complete break from the traditional fantasy of the magazine. This break from pattern undoubtedly disturbed those readers who like their stories not too different, and so it is only in the slightly revised book version that the full im­pact of the novel is felt, free of its magazine associations.
It is easily the most imaginative work so far written by this author. The jacket copy says of it, in part, "It is fantasy, pure—and not so simple, a strange brew concocted of dreams and star dust, human intrigue and emotions, superhuman personalities and powers... The scene is the Earth—but a world so remote from our own that intervening time has lost all meaning. Seas have disappeared. New continents have arisen. New and strange geologic formations exist—a river of boiling mud, a land of volcanoes, continents of tremendous size—and all of it a stage for the three to whom has been given god power."
For the benefit of the curious, the "P" in Ptath is silent, and the "a" is broad as in father. That is Tawth. The book has been beautifully manufactured, with a particularly excellent jacket illus­tration.

E. Mayne Hull

With the fine original illustrations from the 1947 hardcover edition by A. J. Donnell.

(53,000 words)

An e-book of this unusual novel is available for downloading below.

The Book of Ptath (e-book)