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 works of the era.
Slan is the story of Jommy Cross, the orphan mutant outcast from a future society prejudiced against mutants, or slans. Throughout the forties and into the fifties, Slan was considered the single most important SF novel, the one great book that everyone had to read. Today it remains a monument to pulp SF adventure, filled with constant action and a cornucopia of ideas.
This edition has a new introduction by Kevin J. Anderson.

A.E. van Vogt's profile page

A. E. Van Vogt was a SFWA Grand Master. He was born in Canada and moved to the U.S. in 1944, by which time he was well-established as one of John W. Campbell's stable of writers for Astounding Science-Fiction. He lived in Los Angeles, California and died in 2000.

“Over fifty years on from when it first saw print, van Vogt's Slan is still one of the quintessential classics of the field that other SF novels will inevitably be measured against.” —Charles de Lint
“Van Vogt was creating the mythology of science, writing stories of science as magic or magic as science.” —James Gunn
“Along with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein--and to a lesser extent L. Sprague de Camp and L. Ron Hubbard--he seemed nearly to create, by writing what Campbell wanted to publish, the first genuinely successful period of U.S. SF; only in this 'Golden Age' did it begin to achieve [success], in literary terms....” —The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction