"The Weapon Shops of Isher" (1949) - a major golden-age novella by A. E. van Vogt never before republished!

This long, well-developed novella, revisiting the saga of the mysterious "Weapon Shops" organization that acts as a check-and balance on the powers of the world-dominant Isher dynasty some 7000 years in the future [1], was first published as the cover story of the February 1949 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.

It has never before been republished! [2].

That state of affairs is perhaps due in part to its considerable length (33,000 words), and perhaps more for commercial reasons, as van Vogt put together a "fix-up" novel of the same name two years later in 1951, with a mix of this and of two other stories in the series, The Seesaw and The Weapon Shop, when readers were buying paperbacks and novels in droves and quite abandoning the vast number of pulp-fiction short-story-format periodicals that had sprung up in the previous two decades.

With the many really excellent original illustrations [3] by Virgil Finlay, and the truly spectacular artwork for the magazine cover by the celebrated forties-period artist Earle Bergey, showing the final confrontation between the brilliant and all-powerful Empress Innelda and the brains behind the scenes in this version of the saga, the Weapons Shop mastermind Robert Hedrock.

An e-book is available for downloading below.

The Weapon Shops of Isher (1949) (e-book)