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The classic novel of non-Aristotelian logic and the coming race of supermen
Grandmaster A. E. van Vogt was one of the giants of the 1940s, the Golden Age of classic SF. Of his masterpieces, The World of Null-A is his most famous and most influential. It was the first major trade SF hardcover ever, in 1949, and has been in print in various editions ever since. The entire careers of Philip K. Dick, Keith Laumer, Alfred Bester, Charles Harness, and Philip Jose Farmer were created or influenced by The World of Null-A, and so it is required reading for anyone who wishes to know the canon of SF classics.
It is the year 2650 and Earth has become a world of non-Aristotelianism, or Null-A. This is the story of Gilbert Gosseyn, who lives in that future world where the Games Machine, made up of twenty-five thousand electronic brains, sets the course of people's lives. Gosseyn isn't even sure of his own identity, but realizes he has some remarkable abilities and sets out to use them to discover who has made him a pawn in an interstellar plot.
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Kell Wallart
reviewed The World of Null-A (Null-A Series #1) on December 16, 2008
The World of Null-A (Null-A Series #1)
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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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?
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