Null-A Three

A.E. van Vogt Null-A Three (1985)
I'm struggling to find anything to say about this one that I didn't already say about The Pawns of Null-A back in September. Null-A Three is the third and final part of what became a series following the exploits of Gilbert Gosseyn, a non-Aristotelian detective whose adventures serve as a platform from which van Vogt evangelised at length about Korzybski's General Semantics; and I still fail to see what's so special about General Semantics or that it amounts to anything more profound than not judging books by their covers.

'Hey—' excitedly— 'is that what you mean by an assumption? You didn't see it yourself. So you have to assume that people who did see it, are giving you the facts?'

'That's part of it. But the assumptions you should really be interested in are those that you've got sitting deep down inside, and you don't notice that they're there, or what they are. But in life situations you act as if they're true.'

See, this seems obvious to me, but I suppose the results of the last presidential election speak for themselves regarding assumptions and gullibility. From the viewpoint of the reader, my problem is that it's hard to really see how Gosseyn's ability to distinguish between map and territory really gives him any advantage, which leaves van Vogt to bang on about something with seemingly negligible influence on the thrust of the narrative, and it all starts to sound a little like Tom Cruise.

Being a Scientologist, when you drive past an accident, it's not like anyone else, it's, you drive past, you know you have to do something about it. You know you are the only one who can really help. That's what drives me.

You know you are the only one who can really help? More so than the emergency services? The only one? Really?

'You haven't noticed anything?'

Gosseyn had already done a swift, mental survey of his actions since awakening; and so General Semantics did something for him now, when the direct question was asked: He had no need to re-examine what had already been evaluated. He simply shook his head.

Sounds like an assumption to me, but never mind. I think what van Vogt is trying to get at here is something closer to the weirder end of quantum theory, but it's unfortunately not very well expressed.

It was an event in space-time so colossal that, finally, it seemed to him only that General Semantics could offer a conditional answer. With that thought, he said, carefully, 'There is a possibility that at the base the universe is a seeming, not a being; and that if, by any means that seemingness is triggered, the nothingness momentarily asserts. During such a split-instant, distance has no meaning.

The fact of Gilbert Gosseyn being a single individual apparently inhabiting multiple bodies must figure in there somewhere, but this detail feels more like a typically peculiar science-fiction trope than part of whatever van Vogt was trying to describe.

Nevertheless, Null-A Three begins well with Gosseyn feeling his way through an unfamiliar environment, and van Vogt telling only half of the story so as to leave us guessing. This third iteration of Gosseyn wakes in the court of a society ruled over by a boy king, whom he engages by thinking outside the box with a challenge to see which of them can hold their breath the longest. Then follows a brief hint at van Vogt's views on sexuality - whatever the hell they were by this point - in terms of the boy king's royal mother, something about the two of them going into a room for about an hour and locking the door mutter mumble…

Sadly, after about a hundred admittedly moderately gripping pages of this, I lost my way, and spent the rest of the book struggling to get a grip on what the hell was happening and why - which tends to be a common problem with van Vogt.