Back in 1943, when A. E. Van Vogt was just beginning his career as a science fiction writer, Van Vogt wrote a fantasy story for Unknown Worlds. The setting was a depleted planet Earth 200 million years in the future (with the same tone as Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth stories). Ptath, summoned from a previous time line, arrives in this future with an impaired memory. Through trickery, Ptath is manipulated into disarming several of the guardian spells that keep the forces of Evil at bay. Ptath, like many of Van Vogt’s characters, operates with fragmentary information and has to figure out what the Truth is. Even in this early work, plenty of Van Vogtian plot and character devices are at work. You can see the signs of Van Vogt’s future greatness in The Book of Ptath.