Over the last couple of years I’ve been rereading some of the books that made powerful impressions on me when I was a beginning reader of science fiction, some sixty years ago—books by Robert A. Heinlein, Jack Vance, Olaf Stapledon, Theodore Sturgeon. Now I come to one that left me utterly baffled, but not unfascinated or undelighted, when I first encountered it back then as a high-school sophomore: A.E. van Vogt’s The World of Null-A. I was less baffled this time around, but less fascinated and less delighted also.
It’s important to note that I imposed a major handicap on myself the first time I read this perplexing novel. It was serialized in three parts in Astounding Science Fiction, the dominant SF magazine of its era, beginning in the August 1945 issue. I began reading Astounding in 1948, and quickly began buying back issues in second-hand bookstores. It happened that I found the September 1945 issue, containing Part II of the serial, before I found the first part. Because van Vogt’s novel was so famous in its day, I couldn’t wait to find the opening segment, but began with Part II, which provided a synopsis of the previous installment that I hoped would help me make sense of the second section.
Reader, it didn’t help me at all. Coming in in the middle as I was, I found that the story was the purest gibberish to my adolescent mind. Lively gibberish, yes, but gibberish all the same.
A couple of months later I found the magazine containing Part I, and read that, and then, soon after, Part III. So I had now read the entirety of this celebrated novel, but I had read the parts out of order. Small wonder that I was perplexed! (I also got Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, the book from which van Vogt had drawn the idea for his novel, from the library. My adolescent mind found it opaque and impenetrable. Later I learned that most older readers have the same reaction.) A year or so later, I acquired the hardcover edition of the novel—Simon & Schuster had published it in 1948, the first time a major New York publisher had reprinted a novel from one of the science fiction magazines—and read it again, this time in proper order. It still didn’t make much sense. And now I have read it for the third, and probably final time. This time around it still seemed pretty nonsensical in some ways—but in others, because of van Vogt’s revisions of the earlier text along the way, it struck me as not being nonsensical enough. I will endeavor to explain.
The World of Null-A was the beneficiary of powerful hype when it first landed on the science fiction audience of 1945. John Campbell, the editor of Astounding and the mightiest figure in the SF world at that time, announced it to his readers with a paragraph describing the arrival of the manuscript at his house while the writers Theodore Sturgeon and George O. Smith were visiting him. “I read the first few paragraphs of that yarn aloud about 11 pm, just before going to bed—so I thought. It’s a van Vogt novel. You know van Vogt’s trick of putting fishhooks in the first few paragraphs—they go in easily, but you can’t back out; you have to go all the way through. . . .Well and securely hooked, we passed pages down the line. I finished the yarn at about 5 am, with Sturgeon and Smith a few pages behind.” He would begin serializing the story in the August issue, and, because of the wartime paper shortages, Campbell pointed out, it would be wise for readers to subscribe to the magazine to be certain of getting every installment, rather than taking their chances finding the issues on the newsstand. “I think most of you know me well enough to know I’m not given to extravagant and unmerited advance encomiums. This is one of the super-stories.”
And a super-story is how it has been regarded over the decades that followed. A reader poll in 1952 rated it the fourteenth greatest SF book of all time. A 1956 poll placed it ninth. A decade later, a similar survey put it in eighteenth place. The Hugo award did not exist in 1945, but when 1945 “retro-Hugo” trophies were voted on fifty years later, The World of Null-A finished second, behind one of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels. Van Vogt wrote two sequels to it, one in 1948 and another many years later, and in 2008 Tor Books published Null-A Continuum by John C. Wright, yet another sequel written with the permission of van Vogt’s estate. It is fair to say that The World of Null-A has had classic status in the SF field virtually from the day of its first publication.
There was one conspicuous dissent from that evaluation, though—published just weeks after the third installment of the magazine serialization. It was the work of Damon Knight, then a twenty-three-year-old science fiction fan, who would go on to become a major SF writer himself as well as an incisive and important critic of science fiction: a lengthy essay published in the November 1945 issue of Destiny’s Child, an amateur SF magazine. Knight’s demolition of the van Vogt novel is still in print in a revised version in In Search of Wonder, that invaluable compilation of Knight’s critical essays. I am grateful to Greg Pickersgill of Wales, a noted collector of the ephemeral mimeographed magazines of SF fandom, for supplying me with the text of the original 1945 piece.
“Demolition” is the right word: “Far from being a ‘classic’ by any reasonable standard, World of Null-A is one of the worst allegedly adult scientifiction stories ever published,” Knight wrote. He promised “to prove that assertion by an analysis of the story on four levels: Plot, Characterization, Background, and Style.” And he devoted thirteen closely packed pages to an onslaught in those four areas, quoting liberally to demonstrate that the plot is “muddled and self-contradictory,” the character portrayals are inconsistent, the background is haphazardly and perfunctorily developed, and the prose itself is “fumbling and insensitive.”
I began my recent rereading of the book aware, of course, of the book’s classic status, of my bewildered reaction to it as a boy, and of Knight’s furious essay. I came away agreeing with Knight’s attack, and yet finding virtues in this odd book nonetheless.
The storyline of The World of Null-A goes something like this:
In the twenty-first century there appears a mutant superman named Gilbert Gosseyn, whose brain has an extra sector that gives him the power of teleportation, among other things. Gosseyn produces three or more clones of himself (the word “clone” wasn’t used in the sense of duplicates in 1945, but that’s what van Vogt means) and hides them in various places as potential replacements or continuations of himself. About the same time, Null-A, a “non-Aristotelian” method of multi-valued thinking, is developed, and, because its use produces superior mental capacities, its practitioners come to dominate the Earth and establish a utopian world government. In addition, Venus, which is habitable by humans, is colonized from Earth by elite candidates chosen by a super-computer, the Games Machine.
The novel takes place in the year 2560, when what van Vogt calls a “gang” of unscrupulous men, some of them agents of a galactic empire, plot to overthrow Null-A, destroy the Games Machine, and conquer both Venus and Earth. As it opens the clone we come to know as Gosseyn I, a Games Machine candidate, discovers that everything he believes about his own identity is false (the paranoid theme that Philip K. Dick would later exploit so successfully). Then he wanders into the clutches of the gang, and several times either escapes them or is inexplicably released by them before he is finally killed, whereupon the Gosseyn II clone awakens on Venus and continues the story. (The fate of Gosseyn III remains unclear.) Eventually, after many an escape and recapture, Gosseyn II and a couple of allies thwart the gangsters and Null-A is saved.
It sounds like pretty silly stuff. It is pretty silly stuff.
Damon Knight documents all the places where the plot contradicts itself, usually because Gosseyns I and II fail to comprehend what’s right under their noses. He points out horrendous stylistic blemishes. (“Gosseyn’s intestinal fortitude strove to climb into his throat, and settled into position again only reluctantly as the acceleration ended.”) He shows how feebly imagined van Vogt’s twenty-sixth century is. (In the twenty-sixth century, one still gets phone numbers from the yellow pages of a printed directory.) He cites nonsense science. Thus, by citing chapter and verse, he shows how misconceived and poorly written this supposedly great science fiction novel is. I could add many more examples of my own. (Gosseyn is given a device made of “Electron steel, the metal used for atomic energy.” Reference is made to characters, and even a Galactic League, that have not previously been introduced. And so on.)
Van Vogt actually read Knight’s acidulous essay, took it in remarkably good spirit (in a replying essay he shrewdly predicted that Knight would go on to a great career writing science fiction himself) and when he prepared the novel for its 1948 book publication he adopted many of the Knight strictures, extensively rewriting the story to strengthen both its logic and its prose. Whole sections were junked, especially in the Venus section of Part II. Great sequences of plot were restructured in the later chapters. Many, though not all, of the passages of dreadful prose singled out by Knight were rewritten. And for a 1970 reissue van Vogt revised it again, not as drastically: for example, by then it was known that Venus is uninhabitable by humans, so the third version noted that in the twenty-first century it had been terraformed (by a notably wacky technique involving the hauling of ice meteorites to Venus from Jupiter and letting them melt) so that Earthmen could settle there. Et cetera, myriads of changes over the years.
And here is where I part company with Damon Knight’s famous attack. I think that every time van Vogt revised the book in the interest of making it make more sense, the worse it got. The original 1945 magazine version of The World of Null-A is, I think, far superior to its two successors of 1948 and 1970.
This is my reasoning:
The first version of the book seems to me to be a goofy masterpiece with no internal logic of plot or character, a kind of hallucinatory fever-dream that carries the reader along on a pleasant tide of bafflement from one Gosseyn to the next. It is a novel best read, as John Campbell did, in one bleary-eyed all-night sitting, without trying to make sense of anything. Taken in that headlong way, it offers a kind of surreal pleasure. The original text has a crazy magic about it, particularly in the discarded Venus section. Any revision in the direction of greater rationality, any attempt to clarify the unclarifiable, dilutes the effect of this fundamentally irrational story. The two revised editions, having had so much of the nonsense combed out of them, are not only still silly, but dull. The first text is the one to read.
Alas, those 1945 magazines that I read in the wrong order are now quite rare. But I see now that I did the right thing back in 1949 by reading the text out of linear sequence. Scrambled that way, it has a strange beauty. The more van Vogt tried to straighten it out, the more ordinary it got.
I think Damon missed the point about the novel’s nonsensicality. There’s poetry in its very incoherence. No wonder it’s been hailed as a classic all these years.
