IT WASN'T A BIRD - BUT IT COULDN'T BE A MAN! Lt.William Kenlon had watched the incredible creature circling the submarine Sea Serpent in the darkness of the night, and he could barely believe what he saw.The giant winged monster was human-and it was intent on some purpose that involved the sub and its crew. Then the creature landed-and suddenly, impossibly, the Sea Serpent was in another world. A world of the far future; where the land was uninhabitable and humanity as Kenlon knew it had died out. A world in which the strange bird-men of the air warred with the even stranger denizens of the sea for domination. And in that bizarre battle for survival, the men from the 20th century were the vital factor! This book is an expanded version of E. Mayne Hull's short story "The Winged Man" which originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in 1944. Apparently it was expanded and revised by van Vogt, who "added 25.000 words, altogether, inserted a new villain, and made better use of some of the characters", to quote a quote from Galactic Central bibliography.
Author
Alfred Elton van Vogt was a Canadian-born science fiction author regarded by some as one of the most popular and complex science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century—the "Golden Age" of the genre. van Vogt was born to Russian Mennonite family. Until he was four years old, van Vogt and his family spoke only a dialect of Low German in the home. He began his writing career with 'true story' romances, but then moved to writing science fiction, a field he identified with. His first story was Black Destroyer, that appeared as the front cover story for the July 1939 edtion of the popular "Astounding Science Fiction" magazine.
