Book Review: The World of Null-A by A.E. Van Vogt

The World of Null-A by A.E. Van Vogt

paperback, 272 pages

Published October 2002 by Orb Books (first published 1945)

Retro Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel (1996)

Some times a book, a film or a band is more important for who they inspired, and I went into this book for that reason. Of course, Van Vogt was a name I had seen on spines on the shelf as a Science Fiction reader/shopper many times but I am sad to say I never read him before this. My original inspiration to buy the book was our Philip K Dick podcast. PKD himself credited Van Vogt as his biggest influence even going as far as to say that his debut novel Solar Lottery was derivative of Null-A. That made me curious. Since then I was invited to be on a panel for the SFF Audio podcast about This book. I will add a link when that is available. Keep in mind it was Van Vogt at a convention that told PKD in the fifties "You ain't gettin' nowhere writing short stories kid." I am sure he didn't sound like Jimmy Cagney or call him kid but I like to believe that he said it that way.

The history of this novel is interesting, it was published in Astounding magazine August through October of 1945, starting the month that the first atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and finishing a month after they surrendered. That means that the Canadian author was writing this novel during the events of World War II and at a time when the events were still in doubt. The novel I read now had been revised in both 1948 and slightly again in 1970 but when the book is filled with Roboplanes and weapons called the Vibrator it is clear that the novel maintains the wonderfully 40s ness at the heart.

It is the story of Gilbert Gosseyn (pronounced go sane) who wakes up in his second body on the eve of the Machine Games, this is a lawless month when players compete in various ways to earn a spot living on a Venus colony. That colony you see has grown into The Null-A system - a lawless utopia that sounded like an anarchist activist's idea of post-civil war Spain. The plot is complicated, something as a reader of PKD I am used to. The story on the surface looks to be like The Purge or Hunger Games but it goes into immortals and space opera later. There are wars with Galatic empires, massive AI's and lots of crazy weird elements.

You see the influence in the paranoid 'who and what am I?' nature of Gosseyn. He has died and is not sure who he is and finds out there are more copies of him running around. It was written for Campbell in the 40s so there is a supermen plot, Gosseyn, and his foes wonder if he can keep moving his mind and became immortal. That is not all the novel,, it is a vehicle to explore political ideas that was clearly an influence not just on PKD but the genre as a whole.

Van Vogt has said that the serial version published in 1945 was flawed and that each edition he was more comfortable with. He also admitted during this time he was writing the novel similar to the style to how PKD wrote High Castle. He didn't consult the IChing, but in the same way he let his dreams dictate the direction of the story. This prompted the criticism of author Damon Knight in his critical study of the genre to say that Null- A "abounds in contradictions, misleading clues, and irrelevant action...It is [van Vogt's] habit to introduce a monster, or a gadget, or an extra-terrestrial culture, simply by naming it, without any explanation of its nature."

The World of Null-A is a flawed novel by today's standards but you can't into reading a genre novel that is almost 80 years and not give it a certain amount of leeway. Considering when it is written it is delightfully weird. In many ways, it is all over the place. I think it is important to remember the science fiction novel as we think of it was not nearly as established. For decades still, novels from even giants in the field were still being serialized in magazines.

This is a must-read for true scholars of the field because the influence it had was so intense and deep. Is it a timeless masterpiece? No, but it is a great example of the evolution of the genre. It also has a great ending, fun action, crazy twists and most importantly tons of weird ideas that are made weirder by how out of date it is. Thumbs up from me.