Book review: The Undercover Aliens

By A.E. van Vogt. On Goodreads as The House That Stood Still or Wiki. Pulp-SciFi from 1950, this is the second time I've read it, I found the story coming back to me but it still rolls along well enough. Like many of his books I get the feeling that it didn't get well edited or revised, or that he changed his mind about the plot half way through but didn't revise the earlier chapters; or just forgot the opening by the time he got to the end; there's a general feel of "this doesn't really make sense".

The plot is a little like the Maltese Falcon in that there's a beautiful girl and it's somewhat attorney-heavy and there's a mysterious thing. But in this case it's not a falcon it is (look away now if you don't want spoilers) an alien space ship. There are no actual aliens though.

The plot (when you get to the end) is this: many years ago, perhaps 2,000, a robot alien spaceship crashed near the coast of California and got buried in a landslide (trope: interstellar ships with engine trouble will always crash on a planet rather than just drift forever in space, as they really would). The spaceship just wants to be loved just wants to get repaired and to this end used its mind reading and writing machinery to get the locals to, errrm, that's where it starts to get incoherent. Because here the plot collides with a rather separate nice idea, what if there were a mysterious mansion that somehow conferred immorality, and had been found by Toltecs and then invading Spaniards but is now in the busy city of Almirante, and was run by a fraternity of immortals? And these immortals have been taught by the spaceship, and given or acquired tech like "needle beams" and somehow some kind of spaceship - despite there being no evidence of any manufacturing base - but made no apparent attempt to repair the original spaceship, which was the entire point. They also have a rather convenient "face mask" system that allows them to impersonate other people.

There's a similarly incoherent sub-plot about bombing a foreign country - with an implausible clearly made-up name - to destroy its stockpile of nukes-to-be, that probably made more sense in 1950 when the Commies were just developing The Bomb that clearly only God-fearing Amerikans should be allowed to possess.

If all this wasn't enough, the fraternity also have a telepath so they can be sure that no-one is cheating, and whose word everyone trusts without reservation to be entirely accurate, because it would confuse the plot otherwise.

Now I've read Goodreads: per my "attorney" comment, this is at least half "mystery" rather than SciFi, which isn't a flaw in itself. The characters are of course wooden, but even so the hero's lack of interest in being knocked out repeatedly is weird.