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The World of Null-A

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"The World Of Null-A" is a tremendously influential work in the SF genre. It was first published in August - October of 1945 in "Astounding Science Fiction", however that version is quite a bit different from the version which was published in book form in 1948. A final revision was published in 1970, which was very close to the 1948 version.

The core of the story is set in the year 2650, and is told from the point of view of Gilbert Gosseyn, who discovers very early on that all his memories are not real. He is being used as a pawn in a struggle for power.

The story of Gosseyn is interesting and the reader does want to find out what happens to him, but there are problems with the story as well. Key to the plot is the philosophy of Null-A (non-Aristotelianism), which is never clearly defined and thus can easily leave the reader confused. This is the first of three books in this series, so perhaps this problem will be resolved in the other books.

For my tastes, "Slan" was a better example of van Vogt's work. In addition, his Isher series is easier to follow as well. The other two books in the Null-A series are: "The Players of Null-A" and "Null-A Three".

This book changed my brain. The story centers on the 'life' of Gilbert Gosseyn (Go-Sane), a man with a very special brain. As a contestant in the Game, a challenging test of one's ability to master Null-A (non-Aristotelian logic), Gilbert hopes to achieve one of the better prizes, citizenship on Venus or even the Presidency. But a conspiracy of shadowy players and public figures have other plans for Gilbert and his special brain. Gilbert is a surprisingly resilient challenge to their power. And a great surprise to himself, as well. As he discovers more about himself, he also learns more about a larger game being played by hidden masters who control whole galaxies.
At first a humble and unwitting pawn, Gilbert is quickly promoted as he progresses through the ranks in unorthodox and interesting ways.

In addition to the great pulp-style sci-fi story, A.E. Van Vogt adds a lot of interesting semantic theory by beginning each chapter with a quote for Alfred Korzybski's work SCIENCE AND SANITY. "The Map is not the territory it represents" is one of the shorter, and most easily understood. They get progressively more challenging, mirroring Gilbert's story. The Korzybski excepts are worth the price of the book alone. If you're interested in a good old sci-fi tale with conspiracies, space battle and other planets, as well as some thing which actually challenges your own mental processes, check it out.

The World of Null-A (1948) is the first SF novel in the Null-A series. The Earth has been gradually influenced by the principles of General Semantics over several centuries under the direction of the Semantic Institute and the Games Machine. Those who show the greatest comprehension of these principles are transported to Venus to live in a Non-Aristotelian society. Those who don't score high enough to be allowed on Venus are awarded with high offices on Earth.

In this novel, Gilbert Gosseyn has traveled to the city of the Machine to participate in the annual Games. Joining the local self-protection group, his identity is challenged by a resident of his home town. A lie detector confirms that he is not Gilbert Gosseyn, but states that his true identity is not known within his mind.

Ejected by the hotel staff into the crime filled night, Gilbert is bewildered by these events. Without any warning, a young woman runs into him and almost knocks them both off their feet. The woman claims to be pursued by two men, but Gilbert doesn't see them.

Teresa Clark tells him that she has been evicted from her boarding house and lacks a place to spend the night. Gilbert finds them a vacant lot and they settle down amidst the bushes. During their discussion, various things she says and does contradict her story. The next day, he learns that she is actually Patricia Hardie, the woman that he had believed to be his dead wife.

In this story, Gilbert meets various members of a group that has taken over the government of Earth and Venus. Patricia's father is the President of Earth. Thorson is the personal representative of the leader of the Greatest Empire. Elred Crang is the commander of the local Greatest Empire forces and John Prescott is his vice-commander. Dr. 'X' is a gravely injured Earth scientist whose personality has been distorted toward megalomania.

They all seem to be interested in his brain. After his interrogation and examination, Gilbert is carried down, still bound to his chair, into a dungeon and locked up. Later, Patricia releases him and they escape to her room. Then guards come searching for him and he slips out the window. As he is approaching the Games Machine, cars come out of the trees and attack him. He is shot by projectile weapons and burned by energy guns, quickly passing out from the blood loss.

Later, Gilbert wakes up on Venus. He doesn't have any scars or other signs of the wounds and burns, but he still has all his memories, including those of extreme pain. He visits the house of Prescott and Crang, but is then captured and returned to Earth. There he is shown the corpse of Gosseyn I. Apparently he is Gosseyn II, alive and well after the death of his previous body.

This story has several themes, one of which is the practice of General Semantics. This approach to mental discipline, based upon the theories of Alfred Korzybski, is claimed to provide greatly stability and adaptation to change. An introduction to this approach can be found within Science and Sanity, first published in 1933.

Another theme is the transportation of objects by causing them to become similar to within twenty decimal places. Supposedly, such similarity will cause the greater to bridge space to the lesser. Although such transits take finite time, the bridging occurs at speeds much greater than lightspeed. Thus, this principle provides a practical way to travel among the stars.

This novel is first of three in the series. The next volume is The Pawns of Null-A (also entitled The Players of Null-A). Enjoy.

Highly recommended for van Vogt fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of high adventure, political intrigue, and strange talents.

-Arthur W. Jordin

If this book was released today I don't think it would be as critically praised as it has been and regarded as an outright classic of Golden Age SF. It's not that standards were lower back then, but the audience was different and looking for a different type of story, one that audiences today probably aren't as interested in. Of course, keeping in mind that, all nostalgia aside, most of the Golden Age SF, except for a handful of notable authors was mostly derivative crap, this book looks pretty good indeed. It's original, for the most part it's readable and often times fairly exciting. What we have here is a hero who has no idea who he really is fighting against an enemy and being manipulated every time he turns around. Like most novels of the period, Van Vogt wasn't about to let something as simple as plot get in the way of a good story and it shows. The book is supposed to be based around the concept of General Semantics which I admittedly know nothing about and didn't learn much from the book itself . . . the concept is never really fully explained except for general asides and most of the stuff "fully null-A people" would do strikes me as mostly common sense (attack an army at night? it takes a logical system of thought to figure that out) so I suspect there's more to it than Van Vogt shows us. The best way to read this book is as quickly as possible, preferably in one sitting . . . plots shift gears and scenes change so quickly and ideas are tossed out with such uncaring glee that when you're immersed in the story, it's great fun. But when you take a step back to think about it, you're not so pleased. But the ideas and the feelings are what make this story work and explains why people still read it fifty some odd years after its publication . . . it's certainly not for the sophisticated writing or the depth of charactization but simply because it's a fun book that at best will get you interested in General Semantics and at worst will simply entertain you.

As a classic Sci-Fi novel it reads pretty good. Much of the futuristic speculative science is not yet either obsolete nor proven impossible 60 years later. Some of the high-tech foreseen by Vogt includes a society run by a mega-computer which selects leader based on a mental discipline and philosophy called "Null-A." Our hero enrolls in the annual selection by the computer after some years of study. Selected winners are sent to an imaginative colony on Venus. Everything in perfect order, until he finds out that his brain has been tampered with, he isn't who he thinks he is, and nothing is as it seems. The Earth is a pawn in a galaxy wide political plot wherein one evil dictator is planning to destroy Earth and Mars as and use it as justification to start a huge interstellar war. Our hero finds out that his brain has been genetically augmented to give him extra abilities, and his body is being cloned and the clones receiving his mental patterns so that when he is killed the clone takes over without loss, a sort of immortality. Typical of early sci-fi the characters are mostly cardboard cutouts. There is a woman in the plot, and he almost but not quite manages a relationship. In Vogt style it ends when he gets tired of writing without the reader finding out what ever became of the space war. Still, it's an entertaining read on a lazy afternoon.

It is difficult to review the books of A.E. van Vogt. In fact, even during his time, he was difficult to review by the professional reviewers. His books, I think it can be said, are different from anyone else's. There wasn't anyone like him during his prime years (the 1940's), nor has there been anyone like him since.

He is not everyone's cup of tea. His stories are often illogical and are filled with loose-ends that do not get tied up. They have often been described as dreamlike, and there is the paradox. For their power lies in their dreamlike intensity, wild ideas and concepts, and roller-coaster plots. If they were more logical, and more carefully plotted and constructed, they would lose much of their power and intensity.

Of all of his books, this is the one that is the most powerful and the most memorable, in my opinion. In fact, 30 years after reading it for the first time, I still consider it the most unforgettable book I have ever read. You are hooked from the outset, and you must find out - as the main character must find out - who is Gilbert Gosseyn? It is exciting, spell-binding, confusing, mind-bending and totally absorbing. And along the way, you will be introduced to this thing called General Semantics. If you are like me, you will have to know more about it, too.

The sequel, The Players of Null-A, is also a great read. Together, these two books are among my two favorite series of all-time, rivaled only by Dan Simmons' Hyperion and Endymion books.

Although van Vogt returned to Null-A with a third book in the 1980's (Null-A Three), this third book is a weak entry and does not really continue the story in a meaningful way. For a better return to the Null-A universe, try John C. Wright's Null-A Continuum (published in 2008). Wright does something I thought impossible - he emulates van Vogt's style - not just in the way he uses the language, but also by the roller-coaster plot and the vastness of the ideas and concepts. In some ways, Wright's book becomes almost incomprehensible - but, then, so do many of van Vogt's books! Wright's ending is great, as it takes the books full circle, right back to where it all began...with the World of Null-A.

A.E. van Vogt's "The World of Null-A" has been controversial since it was first published in Astounding Science Fiction in the 1940s. It has always been popular; it was one of the first sci-fi novels to go from magazine serialization to be published in book form, and has remained in print for more than 60 years. But it has also always had its critics; noted Sci-Fi writer/critic Damon Knight wrote a scathing review of it in 1945, and this Kindle edition includes an introduction van Vogt wrote in 1974, in which he is still stung by Knight's criticism.

Knight was absolutely right that the novel is a failure if judged by conventional literary standards. The plot is convoluted, the characterizations facile, the prose often weak, and the handling of technological progress (the work is set in the year 2560) is inconsistent. But the book somehow works despite all of those flaws; all of its failures of logic only serve to create a sort of accidental surrealism, presaging the works of 1960s science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick. (Dick did that on purpose, and it is not clear if van Vogt was as conscious of what he was doing, but van Vogt's influence on Dick is still obvious.)

The plot involves repeated reversals-- a character is revealed as a villain, then as a hero in disguise, then as a villain masquerading as a hero masquerading as a villain, and on and on, wheels within wheels. This may have all been planned out, but, given the numerous loose plot threads van Vogt never ties up, I suspect he was making it up as he went along. Ultimately, it doesn't matter; you keep turning the pages whether you can follow the plot or not. As the protagonist reflects at one point, "this was life itself he was experiencing. Life in which nothing was ever finally explained."

New plot elements are introduced haphazardly, whenever the story needs them, without any advance warning. At the beginning of the book, the only planets we hear about are Earth and an earth colony on Venus. Midway through the book, we suddenly hear about a threat from the "Galactic Empire." The reader goes, "WHAT Galactic Empire?", but van Vogt just sails on. The philosophy of "Null-A" (non-Aristotelian thinking) is never adequately explained, but it can always be counted on to get the hero out of a fix (except when the plot needs to get the hero into a fix, in which case it doesn't work).

In much of the book, the characters use 1945-era technology (cars, airplanes, radios), except when the plot demands a method of interstellar travel or the like. At one point, the hero picks up an "atomic flashlight" (!) to see in the dark; the device is never mentioned again. This kind of thing drove Damon Knight crazy, and with good reason, but it also adds to the dreamlike atmosphere.

Ultimately, this book cannot be judged by the standards of conventional literature. You read it as if in a fever dream, action rushing past heedless of logic. Judged on its own terms, the book is a legitimate classic of science fiction.

I have not received it yet. I bought the book specifically for my 21 year old grandson but he drowned in a boating accident 12 days ago. I haven't thought about it until just now. The review is based on my recollection when I read it many years ago.

Gene

This book is more than "just another science fiction novel". It comes with a message: to get further in life, you have to get yourself to thinking sane. As a solution, consider "non-aristotelian thinking". Several chapters of this book start with "quotes" of this "null-A" thinking, sometimes referring to Korzybski's book "Science and Sanity" (yes, it's available from Amazon)!

Actually several SF fans I encountered, including Denis Bridoux, my co-author for the English version of "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence", got intrigued in this "general semantics" thing. In fact, if it weren't for this book, I would never have met Denis. As such, we should have mentioned Van Vogt in the Acknowledgements of our book. Given the age of this book, it is still refreshing reading: a real SF classic that kept its quality despite its age. Indeed, the whole idea of nul-A thinking is still ahead of our times, despite that the principles were stated more than 68 years ago! Of course, for those wanting to learn to think in a null-A manner, there are now more accessible books, such as "Drive Yourself Sane, Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics" by Susan Presby & Bruce Kodish. And our own book also includes the principles that Van Voght refers to, given that it helps to increase your emotional intelligence.

Patrick E.C. Merlevede, MSc -- co-author of "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003AKZAOI/ref=cm_cr_rev_prod_img

Okay, so I stole my title from another critic's comment. But that's what all the Null-A books are about, and I will be grateful all my life that I read the Null-A books when I was young enough to grok them, not just understand them. The word is not the thing. The map is not the world. If anybody can remember these two things, the thalamic pause, which I never did understand, isn't necessary to hold onto sanity with both hands as the world collapses around one. The sooner Kindle gets all the Null-A books and all the Weapon Makers books, the happier I will be. Van Vogt is a seriously underrated writer now, and too many people know nothing of the age in which he was writing except for Heinlein's deservedly remembered books. But this book is great, although its being published by Kindle before the earlier books handicaps the reader, who should be able to read this series in order--a problem hard to solve, as Van Vogt repeatedly rewrote the same material and republished it. He was very fond of revision. But his work is worth the extra work on the part of both the writer and the reader.