Egads. Steven Masters is thoroughly dislikable. He is arrogant, self-centered, narcissistic, sociopathic, and rich. He uses, abuses, and discards people without a thought. He lies to get his own way without even a genuine understanding that he is lying. His father, even knowing his character, uses his money to bail him out time and again.

On the planet Mittend, Steven Masters encounters a powerful intelligence. It sends his consciousness back to earth into the body of someone he had wronged. So he's back on earth in someone else's body. He keeps getting shunted into new bodies. He manages to contact his father and explain what's going on. Eventually he finds his way back to Mittend and figures out the truth. There's a race of beings there, who have bred themselves to be the perfect race. Unfortunately they are at a dead end: they are all beautiful female creatures, but completely incapable of violence, and now they are threatened with a powerful evil force they need to confront and defeat. So they are searching for someone, anyone, who will meet their standards, to mate with them and give them offspring capable of the violence needed to fight their enemy.

Steven Masters does them one better. He realizes they are just weak women in need of a man to dominate them and give orders. So he does. And they respond: it turns out they are fully capable of the violence needed to defeat their foes, if a strong man orders them to fight.

This book is so ridiculously sexist. It loses a point just for that.

On the other hand, the way van Vogt takes us into the mind of a rich narcissistic sociopath is fantastic—and unnerving. It gains a point for that.