In the 1940s, the Golden Age of science fiction flowered in the magazine Astounding . Editor John W. Campbell, Jr., discovered and promoted great new writers such as A. E. van Vogt, whose novel SLAN was one of the basic works of the era. SLAN is the story of Jommy Cross, the orphan boy mutant, outcast from a future society prejudiced against mutants, who grows up to be a superman and to represent the next stage in human evolution. Throughout the forties and into the fifties, SLAN was considered the single most important science fiction novel, the one great book that everyone had to read. Today, it remains a monument to pulp science fiction adventure, filled with constant action and a cornucopia of ideas.