"The Weapon Shops of Isher" (1951) by A. E. van Vogt – the “fix-up” novel

This was one of the van Vogt’s most famous golden-age novels with its iconic slogan “The Right To Buy Weapons Is The Right To Be Free” and its theme of a secret and scientifically-advanced organisation providing superior defensive weapons to citizens of a far-off future civilization to protect them against encroachments on their liberties by a totalitarian government.

It was the last of the author’s several accounts of the conflict between the four-thousand-year old Isher dynasty and the opposition Weapon Shops organisation, some seven thousand years in the future, after the short story The Seesaw (1941), the novelette The Weapon Shop (1942), the novel The Weapon Makers (1943) and the novella The Weapon Shops of Isher (1949).

This version extensively used the texts of the previous stories in the saga (but not the text of the 1943 novel The Weapon Makers), with a number of modifications and supplementary linking material [1].

(58,000 words)

An e-book is available for downloading below.

The Weapon Shops of Isher – the novel (1951) (e-book)