SF fans: Your opinion of van Vogt's Null-A books

Cafe Society
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On the recommendation of a friend who told me it had been very influential in his life, I have just read The World of Null-A. Now that I’ve finished it, I suspect that he must have been a teenager or younger when he read it. I can see how it might impress a 13-year-old, but as a 52-year-old, I say “meh.”

I’ll pass over the fact that van Vogt imagined that that in the 27th century electronics would still use tubes.

I found his characters poorly drawn, the plot confused, and the conclusion of the story not much of a payoff. (It was only later that I found out that there were sequels. From the synopses I’ve read, they seem even worse.)

One of the things that particularly annoyed me was the whole philosophy of Null-A, or non-Aristotelianism. I have a Liberal Arts degree and have read a fair amount of Aristotle, and I couldn’t make much sense of this supposed philosophy as it was alluded to in the book. It’s described just well enough to make it seem mysteriously interesting and powerful, but not well enough to provide a comprehensive notion of what it really means, or if it’s just a McGuffin of sorts.

(It wasn’t until I had finished reading the book, and looked up van Vogt on Wikipedia, that I found out that he had not made up non-Aristotelianism, General Semantics, or Alfred Korzybski. Was all that well-enough known in the late 1940s that he could have assumed that his readers knew more about it than he outlined in the story?)

In thinking about the book, I recalled how totally impressed I was with Patrick McGoohan’s TV series, The Prisoner, when I was about 13, and how completely cool I thought it was for decades afterward. Now when I watch it, I cringe a little at how trite and silly is, in some respects. (It does still have its good points.)

I suspect that The World of Null-A is something like that: tremendously impressive for a very young person, but not really all that good from a grown-up point of view.

The funny thing is that I don’t feel the same way about Heinlein’s juveniles. I read Have Spacesuit, Will Travel at about 13 or 14, and re-reading it a few years ago I found it much more enjoyable and well-written than The World of Null-A.

But van Vogt is considered one of the masters of the Golden Age. So am I wrong about him? Am I missing something? Not getting it? Or is this just not one of his better works, despite my friend’s opinion?

Humorous aside. The cover of my paperback edition of TWONA has the following promo quote from a review in The New Yorker: “Fine for addicts of science fiction.” That struck me as rather an odd thing to say, so I tracked it down in my DVD set of the complete New Yorker. Here it is in its entirety:

[Emphasis mine.]

I agree.

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I read them a long time ago. Null-A in a sense is fuzzy logic, so he was kind of on to something. The books were based on Korzybski’s (and I’m sure that spelling isn’t right) Science and Sanity, an immense book I actually read in high school. The point is that the tag of something isn’t the thing - a very useful insight but hidden in a giant mess.

Basically I agree with you. Black Destroyer and Slan were good, but by the time van Vogt got to Null-A and the Weapon Shops of Ishtar books his intentional style of writing (intense recomplication) was a mess. I have all the books, but they are not high on my rereading list.

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You’re not the only one who’s not impressed with Van Vogt. Damon Knight once called him a pygmy using a giant typewriter. In other words, he attempts grand themes, but he doesn’t succeed at them.

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Damon Knight did more than make the statement about Van Vogt. He wrote a critique about the first of the Null-A boos that was devastating (and hilarious). It was so influential that it got Van Vogt to revise the book, and influenced the writing of the others. Not enough, in my opinion – he kept writing that kind of thing.

I liked The Weapkn Shops of Isher and several of van Vogt’s short stories, but he had a love of “superman” stories (“Slan” is considered a classic of the genre) that, to me, didn’t really ring true. He intended his hero of the stories that were ultimately collected as Voyage of the Space Beagle to be one of those mentally-superior supermen, but to me he just comes off as an arrogant prick, and he could’ve avoided a lot of pointless confrontation with his fellow crewmembers by just, you know, talking to them. But then you couldn’t have had the big climax where All is Revealed.

Van Vogt was a friend of L. Ron Hubbard, and I suppose it’s not surprising that he got involved in Dianetics and Scientology with its superman aspects and its relationship to Korzybskyism (which some see as one of the roots of Hubbard’s stuff, and which van Vogt was into, too). I think he ran one of the early California orgs. Van Vogt said that L. Ron used to call him long distance from New Jersey and talk for hours – this back in the fifties when long distance calls were ludicrously expensive. i think he eventually got fed up with Scientology and left.

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Van Vogt is a forgotten figure in SF these days and I don’t know of too many people who think his books hold up too well. I did like some of his short stories – they’re nonsensical from a plot point of view, but entertaining. I disliked them a lot until I read Van Vogt saying that his stories were dreams, and that made sense to me.

Slan wasn’t bad, but far from a classic.

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I never did like Van Vogt’s stuff when I began reading SF in the 60s. I think The Weapon Shops of Ishtar was the only one I managed to finish, and I wasn’t impressed with that one. It’s not that they were pulp, I enjoyed good pulp (EE ‘Doc’ Smith, for example), it’s just that his writing style was so flat and lifeless, his characters uninteresting. Compared to the other writers of the time, Damon Knight, Bob Sheckley, Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Asimov, Heinlein, Dick, etc, he appeared second-rate.

Time and the reading of a couple more of his novels (World of Null-A, Voyage of the Space Beagle) have done nothing to alter my opinion.

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I kind of liked his War Against the Rull pastiche when I was a youngster ( don’t know how I’d react to it now ), but yeah he never really did much for me as an author. For the longest time I figured it was just me and my lack of sophistication, him being a classic writer and all ;).

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I’ve read Van Vogt many,many years ago and I found him readable but not exactly Arthur C.Clarke but I think that you are all being a little harsh on him.

In those days there was a lot of genuinely speculative writing posted under the banner of SF,there were many socialogical explorations that quite often didn’t work but when the one in twenty DID work it was interesting and thought provoking.
I give sociology just as one example of the directions writers went in.

Today true science fiction is dead,its what we used to call Space Opera,present day thinking and stories set in the future with a few technical gimmicks.
V V is criticised for thinking that future I.T. would still be using vacuum tubes in the far future ,but its too easy to forget that scientific progress doesn’t follow the same speed of development but as time goes on the RATE of discovery speeds up and as new knowledge is found the rate speeds up even more.

If you look at Star Trek for example the technology seems to be firmly based in the twentieth century as is the mind sets and cultures of the protagonists even if they’re supposed to be aliens.

I am not V V s greatest fan but I do think that we should cut him a bit of slack here.

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Van Vogt is not being criticized in this thread for his bad predictions. (Did you read the OP carefully? commasense said that the fact that Van Vogt had vacuum tubes in the twenty-seventh century was unimportant.) Most predictions made in science fiction don’t happen. Van Vogt is being criticized for writing incoherent books. His books are like dreams. Every few pages something new is thrown into the plot, whether it makes any sense or not. If you want to treat a novel as a dream, where it makes no difference whether the plot makes any sense, you might like his novels. If you need some modest amount of coherence in the plot, you won’t like them.

The problem with Van Vogt’s future science is that he had no idea how present science works. He fell for silly nonsense like Alfred Korzybski’s non-Aristoltean logic and Scientology. There were no interesting predictions in Van Vogt’s works other than things like space travel that were in many other works of science fiction.

Your history of science fiction is wrong, Lust4Life. True science fiction is not dead. Space opera was not the only kind of science fiction, and your definition of it is wrong. There was and is good sociological speculation in science fiction, but I don’t remember any such in Van Vogt’s works.

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Small quibble - the original Black Destroyer didn’t have the hero of Space Beagle, and had no mention of nexialism. Van Vogt rewrote the first two stories to include it. The most accessible place for Black Destroyer is probably Healy and McComas.

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For what it’s worth, John S. Wright has just had published an official 4th book in the series - Null-A Continuum.
Review here… I’ve not seen it myself yet, but I can’t imagine I’ll want to read it - not sure who will!

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It’s John C. Wright, and as it happens, he’s the friend I was talking about in the OP. I went to college with him, and have enjoyed (almost) all of his previous eight books. I’ve started Null-A Continuum, and like the reviewer, I’m impressed at how true to van Vogt he is. I was hoping his book would be more readable than the original, but if he’s done too good a job of mimicking VV, I may not have the will to finish reading this one.

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Of course it is; stupid of me - I’ve got a couple of his books in hardback myself and should really have got his name right…

I read the first Null-A book a couple of times years ago, and the second one once but never got around to the 3rd… I probably will take a look at the new one but only because it’s by Wright, not because it’s by van Vogt.

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Bera in mind that van Vogt wrote most of his stuff in the 1940’s and early 50’s, so i find his stories incredibly dated.
VV was indeed a close firned of LR Hubbard (the $cientology wackjob). In fact, I saw a set of the works of LRH for sale on EBAY 9they were signed by LRH as a gift to van Voght).
Van Vogt was embarrased by his dalliance with $cientolgy-I think he realized how foolish it was!

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I read it back when I was a teenager (and have not had any interest in going back since), and I didn’t find it particularly coherent at the time. It seemed like he was noodling around with a philosophy that I didn’t really understand, and wasn’t all that interested in spending the effort at finding exactly what he was going for. I would have thought that someone with a background in Aristotle would find it more compelling, but I guess not.

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According to the Wiki entry on the “real” Null-A (General Semantics), the philosophy is remote enough from what Aristotle actually said that Aristotle himself might have been a non-Aristotelian. :rolleyes: