When I tell you that The World of Null-A deals with cultural conflicts over the validity of Aristotelian logic, you might assume that author A.E. van Vogt has given us a novel of ideas. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rarely have I read a story in which so little is happening at an intellectual level, and where action is presented with such meager assistance from those vital handmaidens of narrative fiction: psychology, perception and intellection. The Indiana Jones films come across as positively Dostoevskian by comparison.
But perhaps that is A.E. van Vogt’s goal here. His utopian vision is based on a rejection of Aristotelian logic, partly inspired by the theory of general semantics formulated by Alfred Korzybski—which in turn contributed to van Vogt’s buddy L. Ron Hubbard’s formulation of Scientology. Ideas themselves are held as suspect here—not just bad ideas or false ideas, but any logical-conceptual framework that tries to serve as a guide to comprehension and behavior. So should we be surprised that our protagonist in this novel, Gilbert Gosseyn, rushes from scene to scene without much help from inductive or deductive thought processes, not to mention prosaic plot supporters such as motivation or coherence? In this novel, the bad guys are the ones who act the most rationally and unemotionally. For van Vogt, that is an essential part of their badness.
Certainly our author has adopted the external trappings of the novel of ideas, complete with pithy epigraphs to start some of the chapters, and grandiloquent bits of dialogue. Instead of beating up the captive and taciturn hero, villains here are likely to say things like: "Ah, silence…the null-A pause, I suppose. Any moment now, your present predicament will have been integrated into control of your cortex, and semantically clever words will sound forth." Characters remind us, borrowing from Korzybski , that "the map is not the territory….the word is not the thing." And if we forget these commandments from on high, they will be repeated at a later point in the text.
An early chapter of the book even opens with an extended world-historical diagnosis taken straight from Korzybski: "Our tragedies began when the ‘intensional’ biologist Aristotle took the lead over the ‘extensional’ mathematical philosopher Plato, and formulated all the primitive identifications, subject-predictivism…into an imposing system, which for more than two thousand years we not allowed to revise under penalty of persecution." And so on and so forth.
By now you have probably figured out why Hollywood is not clamoring to make this sci-fi book into a film.
Yet these rare attempts to create a philosophical context for the action-packed pulp fiction tale fall flat. If van Vogt is trying to sell us on General Semantics here—just as, a few years later, he was trying to sell people on Hubbard’s Dianetics—then he hasn’t closed the deal, not by a longshot. His hero Gosseyn comes across as a dunderhead—despite having an extra brain, according to one of the many subplots here. He rushes into fights, into dark tunnels, into the line of fire, into enemy hands, into almost anywhere….with the persistence of a moth heading toward the flame—usually without rhyme or reasons (ah, those stultifying Aristotelian bugbears!). Even our hero begins to fear, midway through the book, that he is just a pawn being manipulated by some higher power behind the scenes.
Yet, I cannot deny a certain appeal to van Vogt’s “act now, think later—or maybe never” approach to storytelling. I have rarely encountered a novel with so many big plot ideas in so few pages—alas, very few of them are developed, but most of them are captivating. Time and again, this author sets in motion some exciting story line, only to abandon it a few pages later, as he moves into his next phase.
The opening of The World of Null-A sets out one of these grand van Vogtian schemes. A thirty-day competition is being held in the city of the Machine, and the results determine nothing less than people’s future careers and financial prospects. Thousands of people are participating, and each day the contestants are tested in a series of games set by the massive computer that runs the city. With each passing day, more and more contenders are eliminated, and only a small cadre remain, battling for the spoils.
Sounds intriguing, huh? Too bad, we never find out what happens in these games after day one—van Vogt is already bored with the thirty-day games, and on to his next big plot twist. Now we are treated to a story about a man who dies a violent death, and then comes back to life on a different planet, with no explanation on how it happened, except for a letter from an anonymous source saying that the next time this person dies, he will come back again, in an even more powerful third body. This new organism will represent the future evolutionary state of humankind. Sounds pretty interesting, no? But don’t get too interested, because you will never get to see that third body come to life—van Vogt has moved on again.
Another subplot deals with a periodic “legal holiday” in which all laws are annulled—so citizens must defend themselves until the policeman’s vacation comes to an end. Supposedly this social anarchy is imposed to determine how well people might adapt to a more Utopian future society free from institutions of enforcement and punishment. But since van Vogt never follows up on this promising opening gambit, we never find out much more than this. And how about a story about a man whose memories have been tampered with by a mysterious higher power, and only after submitting to a lie detector test does he realize that even the most basic things he believes about his past life are untrue? How about a story about the daughter of the President pretending to be a homeless woman living on the streets? How about an account of a devious global operative willing to betray his evil genius boss in order to get his hands of the secret of immortality? All these plots show up—ever so briefly—in The World of Null-A , but don’t expect to find any of them fleshed out to any degree.
Oh, did I mention that the largest war in galactic history is taking place, and that the bad guys have the most advanced weapons in the universe, but are defeated by humans who are completely unarmed and almost as wedded to pacifism as Gandhi himself? That could easily make for a whole novel in itself, but van Vogt tosses it off in a few paragraphs. Of course, it’s just a small thing of five thousand spaceships and twenty-five million men mounting a surprise attack. But for this author, that is hardly worth more than passing mention.
Do you get the picture? Has any author ever been more profligate in coming up with curious stories and then abandoning them in their infancy? But at least give Mr. van Vogt credit for the inexhaustible riches of his imagination.
The World of Null-A stands out as one of the best known and most controversial novels of the so-called Golden Age of science fiction. Due to its prominence, when it was first published in book form back in 1949, as the first significant trade hardcover sci-fi release, the book found a large crossover audience, and was probably the first work of speculative fiction read my many of its purchasers. It developed an especially ardent following overseas, and was the best-selling science fiction book of its time in France.
But the book was also savagely attacked—understandably so, given its many peculiarities. In a famous putdown, Damon Knight proclaimed that A. E. van Vogt was “not a giant as often maintained. He's only a pygmy using a giant typewriter." Knight’s full frontal attack was so severe, that van Vogt felt compelled to revise the book—and the version we read today is substantially different from the one that appeared in serial form in Astounding Science Fiction in 1945. At every stage, the author took out passages explaining plot elements and, especially, the thought processes of his protagonist. So the dizzying pace of the novel in its current form is very much the end result of a ruthless revision and compression, one that intentionally created these periodic disjunctions in the narrative and a prevailing tone of action without thought or motivation.
You can’t call the book a success, at least by any of the conventional standards by which people judge novels. But it is a grand, even extravagant failure. And, to van Vogt’s credit (or shame), it comes dangerously close to realizing the author’s dreams of a non-Aristotelian story, in which our traditional notions of logic and coherence play only the most marginal roles. And that is an honor that even van Vogt’s harshest critics would be hesitant to wrest away from him.