World Of Null A

I'm going back to my SF roots looking for novels and stories that I first remember reading as a teenager; they made a great impression on me and I was truly amazed by the depth and breadth of imagination of authors like A.E. Van Vogt and the coterie of American writers whose prolific output at this time laid the basis of modern science fiction. Re-reading this seminal work reminds me what took my fancy and inspired me to take up science and technology. It's a great story and, with its sequels, tells a racy and esxciting story of great imagination about an alternative future for the human race. I highly recommend it to anyone delving tinto the past and formation of science fiction culture.

A bit confusing

Original and amusing. Recommended for sci-fi readers or philosophy fans and an interesting lecture for anyone else. Adventures in a Non-Aristotelian world.

Perfect

Purchased as a gift. As described.

This is, we are told, van Vogt’s masterpiece. “Without doubt one of the most exciting, continuously complex and richly patterned science fiction novels ever written” effuses Groff Conklin on the back of my 1970 paperback edition. “This book changed my brain,” exults one Amazon.com reviewer. Of course, Damon Knight famously didn’t like it (“one of the worst allegedly adult scientifiction stories ever published”) and, on the whole, neither do I.It’s not that it isn’t exciting. Gilbert Gosseyn, a man with implanted false memories of his past, a man who can die and return to fight again, stumbles upon an alien conspiracy to take over our solar system. The people of 26th century Earth have embraced the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski and are now adept at non-Aristotelian thinking, which would seem to make them a logical target for a galactic empire, whose leaders aren’t quite such clever clogs. A convoluted chess game develops between hidden players, in which the pieces constantly switch sides and betray each other. What’s not to like?First we need to remember that, even at his best, van Vogt was a fairly dire writer. Plot and action proceed independently of each other, the latter only occasionally helping to move the story forward. None of the characters display the faintest hint of a personality. There is very little description of the technological marvels of this future earth; van Vogt just mentions planes and cars and cameras and leaves you to work out how they were powered, what they looked like, etc (except every now and then when, out of the blue, everyday items are abruptly labelled “atomic-powered”). Conversely, we get far too much description of the protagonist’s frame of mind, usually in the form of exotic phrases like “His nerves were steady as lead, that stable element” and “Fear must derive from the very colloids of a substance”. And any modern author who voluntarily comes out with a sentence like “The thought in its implications was wide enough in scope to activate the integration ‘pause’ of his nervous system,” needs to be waylaid in a dark alley by half a dozen burly editors and vigorously set right.The story started as a garrulous (or, to quote Knight again, “pretentious, foolish, wildly complicated and self-contradictory”) serial in ‘Astounding’. To turn it into a novel, it was savagely pruned back and rewritten, making it at times incoherent and hallucinatory. A second rewrite in 1970 resulted in a story that does at least make some sense, if only intermittently.But the real problem is with this whole idea that null-A mental processes turn one into a cerebral superhuman. Gosseyn showcases his intellectual skills by constantly failing to spot the obvious, repeatedly getting captured (during which time his enemies helpfully bring him up to speed with what’s happening), occasionally tying up helpless women and being led around by the nose from beginning to end. If you’re going to have a super-intelligent hero, try not to make him such a nitwit. As it is, the only inhabitant of Earth that seems to have noticed the stealth takeover of the planet isn’t human but a computer: “I see you are trying to stop aliens from taking over all the planet’s senior administrative positions. Would you like help with that?” No, it didn’t say that; if only it had.This novel may have stood out in the 1940s, when SF more usually took the form of pulp space operas. It suffers by comparison with the works of writers who flourished in the following decade – Asimov, Clarke, Pohl and Heinlein, et al. It wasn’t Knight who ended van Vogt’s career, as is sometimes claimed; the world of SF simply moved on and left him behind.

In his introduction to the revised edition of this somewhat controversial novel, Van Vogt is refreshingly effusive and proud of one of his most famous works. Among other things, Van Vogt claims that this novel (published in translation around the globe) kickstarted the French Science Fiction scene. He is also magnanimous in his praise for Damon Knight who famously published a review of this book, so damning that the review became almost as legendary as the book itself.Nearly sixty years later, we should ask the question `What was all the fuss about?'Van Vogt's appeal lay in his futuristic settings, the incredible buildings, machines and landscapes. He would no doubt be the first to admit that dialogue was never his strong point. His stream of consciousness approach to plot was also an issue for some readers. Here, however, Van Vogt seems to have given some thought to structure, and although the dialogue is excruciatingly stilted, one can still find much pleasure in this Noir-style adventure.Several centuries hence, Man has adopted the philosophy and logic of Non-Aristotelian thinking (the Null-A of the title). Van Vogt at the time was an advocate of General Semantics and hoped for an age where Humanity would adopt a philosophy of logic and reason (rather Vulcan-like in its conception).Every year, aspirants would travel to the City of the Games Machine to be tested for suitability to join the Human Society on Venus. Only totally integrated Null-A minds are allowed to live on the planet, which has become a pastoral paradise filled with vast trees a quarter of a mile in diameter. Van Vogt uses one of his motifs, the great phallic structure, in that the Games Machine is a self-aware supercomputer, housed in a vast spire of a building.Gilbert Gosseyn goes through the first of the Games Machine questions and is surprised to learn from the machine that he is not who he thinks he is. It would appear that all of Gosseyn's memories have been faked.Subsequently, Gosseyn - in the process of attempting to discover his own identity and purpose - is gunned down in the street and killed. He later awakens, alive and unharmed on the surface of Venus, where he begins to unravel the details of a plan by an extra-solar Galactic Empire to take over the Solar System, beginning with Venus.With the help of a Venusian scientist Gosseyn manages to outwit the agents of the Galactic `gang' and return to Earth. He then discovers that he has an extra `brain', as yet undeveloped and whose powers - it is deduced - will be activated when he is killed and the third clone is automatically awakened.Gosseyn decides to end his life in order that the third body can be awakened, but is stopped just in time when it is discovered that Gosseyn III has been discovered and destroyed. However, renegade parties within the Galactic invaders decide to help Gosseyn train his undeveloped brain - which gives him powers of teleportation.Once more Gosseyn escapes his captors and manages to warn the Venusians who - being sane and logical Null-A adepts - manage to easily repulse the invasion fleet.In most of Van Vogt's work there is a logical, rational hero, and this is no exception. Gosseyn is the embodiment of Van Vogt's obsession with quack mental-development programmes. General Semantics may have been a beneficial training regime, but later the author's involvement with Dianetics and L Ron Hubbard's `Scientology' religion did damage to his writing and indeed his reputation.The ending is a little rushed, but the explanation for Gosseyn's existence is cleverly thought out. The central premise however, of the nature of identity and the question of whether Gosseyns I and II were in fact the same people is the thing which raises this novel above the level of pure Technicolor Space Opera. It addresses the fundamental question of whether we are merely the sum of our memories.Philip K Dick, who has been recorded as claiming van Vogt as one of his influences, was to take this concept and explore it in multifarious ways.Above all, Van Vogt was not only writing a fast-paced action adventure, full of colour, weird science, mile-long spaceships and giant thinking machines. He was postulating a rational future, where we were gradually weaning the race away from irrational beliefs and acts of violence.Interstingly, around the same time, Asimov was doing essentially the same thing with Hari Seldon in his Foundation Trilogy, whose tenet `Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent' could apply just as easily to Gilbert Gosseyn.