Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2021 February 24 • Wednesday

Happy birthday!

A. E. Van Vogt's The World of Null-A is a classic and extremely influential science-fiction novel from the 1940s. I just read it, enjoyed it, but don't really know what it's about.

The first line is “‘The occupants of each floor of the hotel must as usual during the games form their own protective groups...’” and it seems like we’re about to start a Hunger Games sort of story as citizens of 27th century Earth compete in the city of the Machine for positions in the elite levels of government and business.

Quite a bit of time is spent on this but don’t get attached to it. Every chapter of this breathlessly paced novel abandons whatever its main focus was to jump to something else—often quite literally, as our hero, Gilbert Gosseyn bounces between Earth and Venus every so often, and usually in about as much time as it takes to say the word “Venus”.

Many of the chapters are introduced with quotes from texts whose authors are usually identified only by initials. (One such is John W. Campbell, Jr., to whom the book is also dedicated.) Sometimes the quote is a remark or a poem but usually it has the tone of a science or philosophy reference book.

An example: “Even Leibnitz formulated the postulate of continuity, of infinitely near action, as a general principle, and could not for this reason become reconciled to Newton’s Law of Gravitation, which entails action at a distance. H.W."

If that makes easy and immediate sense to you, you’ll probably get this book more than I did.

But it was immensely entertaining, hurtling forward constantly with an ever-shifting plot, a protagonist who can get killed and immediately find himself in another, identical body, memories intact, palace intrigue, inter-galactic war, super powers, genocide, telepathy, blasters, Distorters, hypnosis, brainwashing, poison gas, teleportation, spaceships, robo planes, aliens, a warlord whose name is an anagram of Nero and a memorable description of what it’s like on Venus:

“Because of the high clouds it never gets too hot. And it never rains except in the mountains. But every night on the great verdant plains, there’s a heavy dew. And I mean heavy enough to look after all the luxuriant growth.”

Equally interesting is that there are still evening papers in the 27th century. Are there even still evening papers now?

While I ultimately couldn’t really make heads or tails of this story, it was a wild ride and a lot of fun. It’s also reputed to be a hugely influential work for innumerable authors and other creators and certainly you can see how ripples from this novel from 1945, are still spreading outwards and reaching, directly or indirectly, people’s imaginations today.

Here’s a powerful passage from a hunting expedition on “the planet of beasts”:

It was a bloodthirsty business. There were guns for each type of beast, carried by noiseless machines, one machine for each hunter. The robots were always at hand, holding out just the right weapon, yet they never got in the way. The most dangerous animals were held off by energy screens while the hunters maneuvered for firing positions.

There was one long, sleek, powerful, hoofed animal, gray in color, which realized after one burst of effort that it was trapped. It sat down on its haunches and began to cry. Enro the Red himself put a bullet through its nearest eye.