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The World Of Null-A (2002)

The World of Null-A (2002)

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Rating
3.75 of 5 Votes: 4
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ISBN
0765300974 (ISBN13: 9780765300973)
Language
English
Publisher
orb books

About book The World Of Null-A (2002)

This a novel from the 'golden age' of SF, when galaxies could be crossed in a matter of days in fully electric rocket ships and no one thought to explain how. Such innocence!Gilbert Gosseyn arrives in the City of the Machine in the year 2650 planning to take part in The Games in order to have a crack at going to live on Venus. He's home and dry so long as he can demonstrate that he's assimilated the null-A philosophy.But Gilbert isn't who he thinks he is. In fact his head is stuffed with false memories which have tied him into intimate connections with the daughter of the Earth President, which collapse quicker than a failed soufflé. Life gets complicated.Null-A is complicated as well - very important to the story, but terribly complicated. It's sufficient to know that it's founded on the principle that no two things are the same, the mind has to integrate with its circumstances, and we don't need police forces to boss us around. Sounds good to me.Venus is a planet full of adept null-A-ers. They live in trees and fly around in roboplanes that pop up when you need them like taxi cabs. Through the expediency of getting killed Gosseyn finds himself on Venus and is able to establish that the closest thing is has to leadership - 'detectives' - have largely sold out to a Greater Galactic Empire which has a point to make against its inter-planetary rivals. But Gosseyn asks himself - 'What has all this got to do with me?'Good question. But over the next few days he keeps bumping into all the main conspirators who are colluding with the Greatest Empire in support of an invasion and take-over of Venus. He finds he has special, but for the time-being, dormant powers, which hint at the fact that he might be some sort of an immortal. The conspirators are curious and desist from doing the obvious - having another go at bumping him off - in order to see what happens....By various means Gosseyn puts a spanner in the works of their nefarious plan, even if he doesn't always know quite what he is doing. Nevermind: he is proceeding by stages to find out who, and what, he truly is.Eventually he gets there, and its the virtue of SF circa 1948 that he doesn't detain the reader too long in the helter-skelter rush to get to the last line. In stories like this the last line is really important because it explains just about everything that ever went before it.Except in this case, what exactly is null-A? Why did the Emperor Enro and his minions so dislike it? What became of the lovely Patricia Hardy anyway? But hey, this is 1948 and you are looking for a pacey story and electric rocket ships in your SF - not deep philosophy. But there is just enough in this novel to suggest that at some point people would look to SF for something approaching deep philosophy and the following generations of writers would spend more time filling in the gaps. That makes it something of a trail-blazer and worth three stars - with an extra one for the cover, which is pure Astounding Tales.

An extremely strange occurrence. Many years ago, when I was in my early teens, I read A.E. van Vogt's World of Null-A, which is about as good as most of A.E. van Vogt's oeuvre - that is to say, not very good at all. I was however struck by his preface, where he boasted that this novel, all by itself, had more or less established the French SF market. Even at age 14, I was puzzled. Why?Much later, I discovered that van Vogt's unimpressive book had in fact been translated by Boris Vian, author of the immortal L'Ecume des Jours, and a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Perhaps some Vian scholar has found out why he did it (money trouble?) and if so I would be interested to hear the story! Whatever the explanation, this is one of those very rare occurrences where the translation is better than the original - the writing is perfectly OK, and even goodish in places. Since the original plot was in fact quite interesting (A.E. van Vogt always had ideas, he just couldn't write them down), the final result is a decent piece of work, and my 35 year old curiosity about how this could have been such a success was finally satisfied.Vian had a wicked sense of humour, and loved teasing people. It's little short of miraculous that Sartre, at least according to what I've read, wasn't offended by the "Jean-Sol Partre" character in L'Ecume des Jours and appreciated the joke. I have this fantasy of Vian giving his translation of van Vogt to some lion of the French literary world as a Christmas present, just to see how they would react. "Here you are, Albert, I thought you would like it!" "Oh, thank you, it's... ah... quite different from the things I usually read, but I'm sure I will!" Probably never happened though :)

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An extremely strange occurrence. Many years ago, when I was in my early teens, I read A.E. van Vogt's World of Null-A, which is about as good as most of A.E. van Vogt's oeuvre - that is to say, not very good at all. I was however struck by his preface, where he boasted that this novel, all by itself, had more or less established the French SF market. Even at age 14, I was puzzled. Why?Much later, I discovered that van Vogt's unimpressive book had in fact been translated by Boris Vian, author of the immortal L'Ecume des Jours, and a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Perhaps some Vian scholar has found out why he did it (money trouble?) and if so I would be interested to hear the story! Whatever the explanation, this is one of those very rare occurrences where the translation is better than the original - the writing is perfectly OK, and even goodish in places. Since the original plot was in fact quite interesting (A.E. van Vogt always had ideas, he just couldn't write them down), the final result is a decent piece of work, and my 35 year old curiosity about how this could have been such a success was finally satisfied.Vian had a wicked sense of humour, and loved teasing people. It's little short of miraculous that Sartre, at least according to what I've read, wasn't offended by the "Jean-Sol Partre" character in L'Ecume des Jours and appreciated the joke. I have this fantasy of Vian giving his translation of van Vogt to some lion of the French literary world as a Christmas present, just to see how they would react. "Here you are, Albert, I thought you would like it!" "Oh, thank you, it's... ah... quite different from the things I usually read, but I'm sure I will!" Probably never happened though :)_________________________________For people (I am a typical example of the species) who require at least one bit of useless trivia each day, I will reveal that this book is referenced in Georges Perec's La Disparition, under a transparent pseudonym. Page 220 of the French edition:Un roman? Anton Voyl n'avait-il pas dit un jour qu'un roman donnait la solution? Un flot brouillon, tourbouillonant d'imaginations s'imposa soudain à lui: Moby Dick? Malcolm Lowry? La Saga du Non-A, par Van Vogt?La Saga du Non-A... geddit?
—Manny

The book brings back to me the 1950s. Names like Eldred Crang and Hari Seldon (this from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series), Intergalactic wars. Highly advanced devices with tubes like an old Emerson TV set. Planets in our solar system that could sustain life. Take, for instance, this description of Venus:Gosseyn said, "Doctor, what is Venus like -- the cities, I mean?"The doctor rolled his head sideways to look at Gosseyn, but did not move his body."Oh, much like earth cities, but suited to the perpetually mild climate. Because of the high clouds, it never gets too hot. And it never rains except in the mountains. But every night on the great verdant plains, there's a heavy dew. And UI mean heavy enough to look after all the luxuriant growth...."One of the side-effects of space exploration is the death of dreams of life on the Moon, on Mars, and on Venus. As a teeneager, I loved A E Van Vogt, and I loved novels like The World of Null-A, Slan, The Empire of the Atom, and The War Against the Rull. I do plan to re-read more of him, because I could see the young me at every turn, following the story with rapt attention and belief.Now the belief is gone, but what remains is a well written and conceived story. The fact that I could never quite believe, however, does remove a star or two from my rating. No matter. I am rediscovering myself and rather enjoy the experience.
—Jim

I'm inclined to give Vogt the benefit of the doubt because he's written such classics as Slan, and Voyage of the Space Beagle was ripped off not once but twice for James Cameron movies (the alien and the T-1000 terminator.) This book is a classic in the sense that it was popular during the heyday of SF in the 1940s, but is very dated today.The book covers the idea that humanity can develop superhuman powers of concentration and ability through development of non-Aristotelian thought - that is, examining the meaning behind words and a person's own thoughts. It's amusing to see how this basically Buddhist idea took root in several forms in Western society, and this book is one example. It gets a little less amusing to think that ideas such as this led to the rise of weird ideas like Scientology.The plot is decent enough for the 40s, following a person whose identity is not tied to any specific body. It's not particularly interesting, though, and General Semantics did not achieve the breakthrough Vogt foresaw, so it takes on the feel of an extended diatribe. I started calling it "World of Dull-A" halfway through the book.Damon Knight attacked Vogt over this, and spent a good deal of time savaging Vogt's writing. I find that really unnecessary. SF/F is about ideas and they deserve expression in the marketplace of ideas. We're all adults and don't need ideas suppressed by other writers. For that reason alone it can be worth reading World of Null-A, to see what the fuss was about. In the end, there's nothing really objectionable about the book, so it seems Knight's vitriol was wasted. It just wasn't all that great a book either. Choose Slan and Voyage of the Space Beagle first. Also, note that this book is a cliffhanger, and the followup book gets even stranger.
—John (Taloni) Taloni

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