Van Vogt's plots are always intricate and often confusing. Readers often complain that his transitions from one scene to the next are abrupt and bewildering. For instance, a character at one moment may be looking at a docked spaceship and the next be landing it at some faraway planet — with no explanation of how he got in the spaceship and how he piloted it. Van Vogt explains that such gaps are meant to be filled in by his readers. Such gaps are understandable because of van Vogt's focus on the development of ideas rather than on plot; but the absence of coherent transitions nonetheless shows a lack of consideration for the reader.

Perhaps the awkward and sometimes nonexistent transitions stem from van Vogt's adherence to a pattern of plot development propagated by John W. Gallishaw in Only Two Ways to Write a Short Story (1912). The pattern consists...