Intermezzo: A.E. Van Vogt's The Weapon Shop and the 2025 Election

 

As the holidays creep closer, I am gradually slipping into one of my sci-fi moods. I don't know why, but there is something about the cold days, dark nights, and light-up decor that makes me feel like I am living in a space station on the "blackest sea", as one sci-fi author put it, whose name is long forgotten to me. As such, I begin to binge on science fiction like a drunk during happy hour.

Recently, I have found myself exploring the world of audiobooks. I have found them to be wonderful diversions as I engage in my seasonal ritual of scouring the house from top to bottom in my unquenchable desire to rid my interior life of all traces of the most obnoxious season of all, summer. Audible recently introduced me to an excellent science fiction compendium entitled The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Vol. 1, 1929 - 1964.  As the name suggests, this has proven to be an excellent collection of some of the greatest tales to come out of the rightly titled "golden age of science fiction." One story that recently caught my attention was A.E. Van Vogt's The Weapon Shop. If there was ever a story written for these dark days of America under the fascist boot heel of MAGA, it is this tale. 

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A. E. Van Vogt—or more formally, Alfred Elton van Vogt—was a Canadian science fiction writer who helped define the genre’s golden age with his surreal, fragmented narratives and his obsession with personal liberty versus authoritarian control. It’s this latter theme that animates The Weapon Shop, later expanded into the novel The Weapon Shops of Isher.

Briefly, The Weapon Shop follows Fara Clark, a small-town shopowner living under the rule of Empress Innelda Isher, an absolute monarch whose power spans the solar system. Fara is a loyal subject, one who exhibits a fervent devotion, reminiscent of the Cult of the Emperor in Warhammer 40K, to the Empress. One day, a mysterious storefront materializes in his town, offering “The Finest Energy Weapons in the Known Universe”. Fara is incensed by the shop's arrival, as he had already heard tales about how these weapon shops are instrumental in arming the resistance to the Empress and her imperial authority.  With the fury of a crusader, Fara gains entry to the shop, intent on crushing the shopkeep with righteous indignation, if not actual violence.

Things, however, do not go to plan. Fara expected to find the shopkeeper to be some sort of rebellious roughneck, but instead is greeted by a kindly shopkeeper. Expecting to have lethal weaponry thrust into his hands with abandon, he is instead told that all the weapons in the shop come with careful safeguards to limit their use for self-defense only.  This was not what Fara expected!

Fara's consternation soon deepens into outright bewilderment when the shopkeeper freezes him in place and begins conversing with an unseen partner. They comment on Fara's innate honesty and good intentions, as if evaluating him for some higher purpose. In an effort to shake his faith in the Imperium, they whisk him away on an impossible journey, one that grants him access to the inner chamber of Empress Innelda Isher’s council.

To his shock, Fara discovers that the Empress is not the icon of rationality and beneficence he imagined. She is petty, impulsive, and prone to fits of rage over trivial matters—even ordering the death of ex-lovers in moments of pique. But Fara, his faith unbroken, dismisses the entire scene as propaganda, an elaborate scandal meant to test the faithful.

Upon his sudden ejection from the shop, Fara’s life begins to unravel. The weapon shop management issues a false statement claiming Fara was its first customer, one who left completely satisfied with his purchase. It’s a total fabrication, and Fara denounces it with righteous indignation. But in a society organized around a cult of personality, truth matters less than appearances.

Friends and colleagues abandon him. His motor repair shop was repossessed under fraudulent pretenses. Even his mother-in-law—a woman he once respected for her wealth and social standing—refuses to help. Instead, she encourages him to commit suicide, suggesting it would spare her daughter the embarrassment of being married to a man so publicly disgraced.

Like the biblical Job, Fara lost everything because of his faith. 

Coming full circle, Fara finds himself back at the weapon shop, this time to purchase a weapon with which to end his life. What follows is classic Van Vogt: a plunge into the surreal. Upon exiting the shop, weapon in hand, Fara is magically transported to what can only be described as an alternate reality, where the mysterious powers behind the weapon shops set right the wrongs inflicted on their customers.

Fara, whisked along on this dreamlike journey into the inexplicable, watches as the many injustices he suffered under the Imperium he once worshipped are not only corrected but overcompensated. His losses are restored, and then some. It’s a cosmic audit with interest paid in full.

Once again, Van Vogt channels the biblical Job, whose faith, once tested, was rewarded by God. Fara experiences something similar, but with a twist. His faith in the Empress was tested by the cruelty of her rule, and he failed that test. But he passed another test: despite the state-imposed injustices inflicted upon him, Fara never wavered from his innate sense of honesty and incorruptibility. He didn’t give in to blind rage, nor abandon his principles. Even when his ne’er-do-well son conned him into mortgaging his shop to escape legal trouble—the very act that would later allow the bank to seize his livelihood—Fara refused to abandon his own flesh, despite even his wife urging him to do so. 

His trials, like fire purifying gold, revealed his true religion: not loyalty to a ruthless empire, but human decency, and for that, the weapon shop rewarded him.

Fara, upon being whisked back to the weapon shop, learns that many of the largest and most profitable businesses and banks are merely fronts for the Empress herself, hence why many citizens under her rule find themselves in situations similar to Fara, which is to say having their own successful enterprises seized under fraudulent circumstances as soon as they run afoul of the empress."The amazing, the unforgivable thing, was that all his life, he had watched the march of ruined men into the oblivion of poverty and disgrace and blamed them," Fara recollects. "I've been like a madman," he groaned.

The kindly gentleman explains to Fara that over a period of thousands of years, the proprietors of the weapon shops have "Watched the tide of government swing backward and forward, between democracy under a limited monoarchy, to complete tyranny. And we have discovered one thing: people always have the kind of government they want. When they want to change, they must change it." 

If the majority of The Weapon Shop allegorizes The Book of Job, the latter portion is reminiscent of Saul's conversion to Paul. His eyes were opened to the error of his previous faith. Fara now embarks on a new journey of faith, one of resistance to the prevailing corrupt regime, a resistance not of violence (permissible, according to the rules of the shops, only in extreme cases requiring self-defense), but of principled non-compliance with the Empress's injustice.  

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This story resonated with me.  In a time where the White House, or what is left of it, to be precise, is occupied with a self-styled emperor, one as invested, literally and figuratively, in the corrupt world of Big Business and Big Banking as was the empress, the similarities with Vogt's fictional realm of Empress Innelda Isher were all too familiar.  As with the awakened Fara, I feel the boot of oppression that others who remain in the thrall of MAGA remain blind to.  

Having said that, the wise words of the shopkeeper are worth recalling:

And we have discovered one thing: people always have the kind of government they want. When they want change, they must change it. 

Roughly a year ago, 49.5% of the American voting public wanted Trump back in the White House. But just ten months into his return, the American people triggered an election night landslide by voting for candidates who opposed Trump and his Republican party, and even passing California’s Proposition 50, a measure designed to counter Texas’s partisan redistricting efforts. It was a stunning repudiation of Trump and his agenda.

As the weapon shop proprietor said, “When they want change, they must change it.” The recent electoral results, combined with October’s historic “No Kings Day” turnout across the nation, suggest that change is not only desired—it’s underway. And best of all, it’s being achieved in harmony with the ethos of the weapon shop: not through violence, but through peaceful non-compliance, operating within the rules of civil society.

Science fiction is known for its auteurs’ uncanny ability to predict the future. Van Vogt’s The Weapon Shop fits that mold—not in its visions of science and technology, but in its understanding of tyranny’s brittleness. Vogt showed how authoritarianism can be shattered with small, persistent acts of defiance that expose the rot beneath the regime’s gleaming façade.

Van Vogt's The Weapon Shop is not just a thoroughly entertaining science fiction tale, one that well-earned its place in a science fiction "hall of fame" collection, but it is also as timely as ever.  In an age where truth is bartered like currency and power is cloaked in spectacle, Van Vogt reminds us that resistance need not be loud to be effective. Sometimes, the most radical act is simply refusing to comply. 

And in Fara Clark, Van Vogt reminds us that sometimes that defiance comes not from a hero waiting in the wings, but rather from those who were once blind to the crimes of the regime. These themes are evergreen, ensuring A. E. Van Vogt's The Weapon Shop remains a looking-glass for times of political peril.  And during those times of peril, sometimes the most dangerous thing you can do is dare to look because you might not like what you see.

This past Tuesday, millions of voters dared to look and, like Fara, found clarity in the ugliness. And they chose change via resistance.

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