I used to read a lot of van Vogt in my mid-teens. He was one of the authors I fastened onto when I started reading science fiction (for the record, the others were EE ‘Doc’ Smith, James Blish and Clifford D Simak). I remember there was one van Vogt novel where a giant starship had to split into thousands of small ships after encountering some sort of storm in space — I think it was Mission to the Stars (1952, Canada). In another, the villain was called Grannis and only ever appeared as a figure made out of shadow — which might be The Universe Maker (1953, Canada), but I may have mangled a few details. And then there’s The Undercover Aliens (1950, Canada), originally published as The House that Stood Still, which I actually rate quite highly, even after several rereads. I once described it as “if Philip Marlowe and Flash Gordon had a baby, it would be this novel”, and I stand by that.
Whatever the reason, I read a lot of van Vogt back then. Many of his books I may have confused and conflated in the decades since, and certainly my opinion of van Vogt’s writing is considerably lower than it once was… Despite all that, I’m not entirely sure I read his Null-A novels, The World of Null-A (1948, Canada) and The Pawns of Null-A, until much later. I own a copy of The World of Null-A apparently purchased in the mid-1980s, but I didn’t buy The Pawns of Null-A until 2006.
But then it’s difficult to be sure of anything with van Vogt’s novels. He would expand short stories into novels. The same stories might appear, in slightly different form, in several novels. Novels serialised in magazines would be edited and altered before being published as books, sometimes under a different title. Which might change several years later.
His bibliography is a mess.
He also based his writing on the advice given in a “how to write” book. It advocated writing in 800-word blocks, each of which should end on a cliffhanger. And all too often he’d write himself into a corner, and plainly have no real idea of how to resolve the cliffhanger and start the next 800-word section.
The Players of Null-A (1956, Canada) is a good example. It was originally serialised in Astounding Stories between October 1948 and January 1949 in four parts as ‘The Players of Null-A’, but not published as a book until seven years later, under the title The Pawns of Null-A (1956, Canada), before returning to its original title in 1977. It is the sequel to The World of Null-A.
In the first novel, Gilbert Gosseyn discovered he had an extra brain (yes, really), and through the power of non-Aristotelian logic (“null-A”), which to me sounds like a total misunderstanding of Boolean logic, is able to sense and alter energy flows, especially electrical ones. He can also “similarize”, i.e., by memorising the atomic structure of a place, he can materialise himself, or other things, to that spot. Oh, and he has several bodies stashed about the place, so if he dies he’ll wake up in one of them.
The Players of Null-A follows on from The World of Null-A. Gosseyn has successfully defended the Solar System from annexation by Enro the Red, head of the Greatest Empire, with the help of the Null-A community on Venus. But he’s not convinced Earth is safe, so he tries to broker a deal with the Galactic League, who are at war with the Greatest Empire.
Before he can persuade the League of the usefulness of Null-A, Gosseyn is kidnapped by the Follower, who appears as a figure made of shadow — just like Grannis in The Universe Maker; van Vogt has a tendency to recycle ideas. However, instead of appearing in the Follower’s jail, Gosseyn find himself occupying the brain of Prince Ashargin, who has been plucked from a life of abuse at the Temple of the Sleeping God, to be, er, some sort of figurehead legitimising Enro’s rule.
A few days later, after witnessing Enro’s military campaign from his headquarters, Gosseyn is back in his own body. In a jail cell in the Follower’s camp. Which is on a planet where an elite race of “Predictors”, who can see into the future, live in the lap of luxury in travelling aerial houses, waited on hand and foot by slaves. The Follower has recruited the Predictors for Enro’s fleet, and their ability is why his military campaign is proving so successful.
Gosseyn wants to safeguard the Solar System, help the League defeat Enro, and stop the Follower, whose real identity is unknown.
Unfortunately, it’s not clear by at least halfway through the novel that van Vogt knows how to resolve any of these objectives. There is, for example, mention early on of devices, which allow the Follower to manifest as an insubstantial shadow, buried under the floor where he appears; but these are later forgotten, and it transpires his ability was gifted him by… the AI of an alien spaceship buried under the Temple of the Sleeping God — which is the exact same central conceit as The House That Stood Still.
Even the Follower’s real identity shifts and changes throughout the novel as van Vogt desperately tried to impose some sort of order and coherence on his plot. Leader of the Null-A Venusians, Eldred Crang, flips from hero to chief suspect several times as van Vogt’s 800-chunks demand. Even “similarization”, Gosseyn’s special superpower, turns out to be how the FTL drive of the Greatest Empire and the Galactic League works.
There are occasional moments when The Players of Null-A does that that thing which made 1940s and 1950s science fiction so compelling at the time: those wild shifts in scale, where battle fleets comprise hundreds of thousands of warships, and journeys cover thousands of light-years in a single hop. It’s horrendously implausible… but never quite manages to break suspension of disbelief. It’s a technique sf no longer uses, perhaps because these days the genre uses tropes differently, often uncritically, with no real knowledge of their meaning or history. But that’s an argument for another day.
Reading The Players of Null-A, I was bemused at how easily I’d been taken in by van Vogt’s writing as teenager. The two Null-A books, and a later sequel, Null-A Three (1985, Canada), are predicated on general semantics, a quack “behavioural system” proposed by Alfred Korzybski, as was “non-Aristotelian logic”, in the book Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics (1933, USA). It’s complete nonsense, a sort of self-help by-your-own-bootstraps perversion of Kant’s “ding an sich” — which is given a far, far better fictional treatment in Adam Roberts’s The Thing Itself (2015, UK).
Not content with subscribing to general semantics, van Vogt also throws in the crackpot physics of Felix Ehrenhaft, even using the phrase “There’s old Ehrenhaft wagging his tail again” as a scaffold for one of his nonsensical info-dumps…
Such as, for example, “degravitated air”. WTF is “degravitated air”? Air that floats like, well, air? I have no idea what it means. I suspect van Vogt didn’t know either. It just sounded science-fictional.
Its appearance in the novel is followed by:
On earth, the graviton tube was known as a member of a group that was said to possess ‘radiation hunger’. Lacking the gravitonic particle, it craved stability … It sent out radiations of its own to search for normal matter. Every time it touched an object, a message was dispatched to the tube. Result: excitement. (p62)
I have no idea what any of this means. It’s not science — and it’s not as if the Null-A novels are big on science in the first place. And it occurs to me that as a young teenager I swallowed this whole, as some sort of intellectual scaffolding which seemed to suit the story, despite the fact any resemblance, or lack thereof, it had to real science was non-existent.
Then I consider the Mission Impossible and Fast and Furious film franchises… And while you expect stunts that seem to stretch the laws of physics, unlike MCU films, which completely disregard the laws of physics because superpowers — but even with the Fast and the Furious movies there’s a point at which no amount of suspension of disbelief is going to make a particular stunt shot credible…
Van Vogt’s novels, it strikes me, are sort of like that — except their audience is practiced in suspension of disbelief. And yet still he manages this weird authorial sleight of hand in which the most egregious bullshit is delivered completely deadpan, and accepted by the reader, because alongside it is that amazing zoom, to coin a term, on which old sf was so reliant, and so practiced at deploying.
It would be a stretch to describe any of van Vogt’s novels as good, although he was at one point one of the “Big Three” of science fiction authors. He’s no longer relevant, and even describing his novels as historical documents is doing them a favour. His penchant for crackpot science, dream-inspired plotting, and narrative structures imposed by a how-to-write book do not lend themselves to quality, or indeed enjoyable, reads.
Occasionally, he transcended his methodology, and produced some real sense of wonder, at least for a passage or two — remember that giant spaceship splitting into thousands of smaller ones? — but he never managed to sustain it for more than a coupe of hundred words. There are a few passages like that in The Players of Null-A. But the crap you have to wade through to find them!
It’s seriously is not worth the effort.
Don’t go into his books with an open mind, go into them with your critical shields at full power. You may find something worth the effort, you may not.
Which is, I suppose, true of a lot of science fiction.
