A.E. van Vogt The Pawns of Null-A (1956)
It turns out to be six years since I read The World of Null-A, to which Pawns is sequel, and I've read a ton of van Vogt in that time so you would really think that I might have got to grips with it by now, wouldn't you? By it, I mean general semantics, as developed by Alfred Korzybski - not so much a philosophy as a mental technique with which van Vogt was very much preoccupied for most of his writing career, and which seems to inform a great many of his novels, arguably none more so than the Null-A trilogy.
I'd prefer to avoid repeating myself, but for anyone yet to receive the memo, van Vogt is not an easy writer by any description, and his novels may initially read as weird, disjointed, and amateurish if you don't realise that he's doing what he's doing on purpose, so initial impressions may sometimes be tantamount to looking at a Jackson Pollock and announcing that a child could have done it. A typical van Vogt narrative will be speckled with seemingly random, disorientating swerves described in harsh, angular sentences which deliberately leave out some of the information you might hope to find because the author is expecting his readers to do at least some of the work. These characteristics are partially informed by van Vogt's fascination with general semantics, so he's usually trying to do more than just tell a story about rockets and space monsters, although it's not always clear what that may be.
I've read up on general semantics, and it seems to amount to simple critical thinking based on an awareness that language should not be mistaken for reality. Although there appear to be certain elements in common with Ayn Rand's Objectivism, I'm not convinced it doesn't directly contradict Rand's assertion that reality exists independently of consciousness, and in any case, Korzybski never tried to pass it off as a philosophy. Unless I've misunderstood, most of Debord's Society of the Spectacle could be considered consistent with general semantics, and it seems significant that van Vogt reminds us that the map is not the territory on more than one occasion in this novel. My problem is that the Null-A of the title stands for non-Aristotelian logic, and that we are told this is a non-Aristotelian tale about a non-Aristotelian detective, and van Vogt clearly believes this to represent a great intellectual leap forward with a fervour which remind me unfortunately of all the claims Hubbard once made for Dianetics. It's a whole new way of seeing, we are told, and it could make the world a better place; and yet I'm fucked if I can work out what it is that I'm supposed to have noticed here. It might be argued that critical thinking itself was revolutionary in the time this novel was written, an era during which America was still very much segregated and not so long after Adolf Hitler had built a war on a massive pile of invented shit; although it could also be pointed out that we haven't really come that far, and that we currently have a president who, much like Hitler, just makes shit up because he likes the sound of it - and it should therefore probably still seem revolutionary in 2018, whatever it is. So I'm all for critical thinking - assuming that to be the core of general semantics - but I still don't understand how it figures in this novel, or at least how it figures in this novel in particular.
Our tale follows Gilbert Gosseyn, our Null-A detective, across the galaxy as he attempts to defuse the somewhat ambiguous plans of a potential universal dictator named Enro. The text is typically dense, requiring that the reader keep any number of subsidiary elements in mind as events unfold on the understanding that they'll probably come in handy later; and whether or not they do probably depends on the reader's concentration and how much work they feel like putting in. Personally, I found myself sagging around the half-way mark, so I suppose I could have enjoyed this one more than I did. There are some pleasantly peculiar ideas here, and the narrative grips in most of the right places, and we don't have to sit through any of Alfred Elton's weird ideas about sexual inequality; and it was mostly respectable, but maybe just not so good as I felt it should have been.
It turns out to be six years since I read The World of Null-A, to which Pawns is sequel, and I've read a ton of van Vogt in that time so you would really think that I might have got to grips with it by now, wouldn't you? By it, I mean general semantics, as developed by Alfred Korzybski - not so much a philosophy as a mental technique with which van Vogt was very much preoccupied for most of his writing career, and which seems to inform a great many of his novels, arguably none more so than the Null-A trilogy.
I'd prefer to avoid repeating myself, but for anyone yet to receive the memo, van Vogt is not an easy writer by any description, and his novels may initially read as weird, disjointed, and amateurish if you don't realise that he's doing what he's doing on purpose, so initial impressions may sometimes be tantamount to looking at a Jackson Pollock and announcing that a child could have done it. A typical van Vogt narrative will be speckled with seemingly random, disorientating swerves described in harsh, angular sentences which deliberately leave out some of the information you might hope to find because the author is expecting his readers to do at least some of the work. These characteristics are partially informed by van Vogt's fascination with general semantics, so he's usually trying to do more than just tell a story about rockets and space monsters, although it's not always clear what that may be.
I've read up on general semantics, and it seems to amount to simple critical thinking based on an awareness that language should not be mistaken for reality. Although there appear to be certain elements in common with Ayn Rand's Objectivism, I'm not convinced it doesn't directly contradict Rand's assertion that reality exists independently of consciousness, and in any case, Korzybski never tried to pass it off as a philosophy. Unless I've misunderstood, most of Debord's Society of the Spectacle could be considered consistent with general semantics, and it seems significant that van Vogt reminds us that the map is not the territory on more than one occasion in this novel. My problem is that the Null-A of the title stands for non-Aristotelian logic, and that we are told this is a non-Aristotelian tale about a non-Aristotelian detective, and van Vogt clearly believes this to represent a great intellectual leap forward with a fervour which remind me unfortunately of all the claims Hubbard once made for Dianetics. It's a whole new way of seeing, we are told, and it could make the world a better place; and yet I'm fucked if I can work out what it is that I'm supposed to have noticed here. It might be argued that critical thinking itself was revolutionary in the time this novel was written, an era during which America was still very much segregated and not so long after Adolf Hitler had built a war on a massive pile of invented shit; although it could also be pointed out that we haven't really come that far, and that we currently have a president who, much like Hitler, just makes shit up because he likes the sound of it - and it should therefore probably still seem revolutionary in 2018, whatever it is. So I'm all for critical thinking - assuming that to be the core of general semantics - but I still don't understand how it figures in this novel, or at least how it figures in this novel in particular.
Our tale follows Gilbert Gosseyn, our Null-A detective, across the galaxy as he attempts to defuse the somewhat ambiguous plans of a potential universal dictator named Enro. The text is typically dense, requiring that the reader keep any number of subsidiary elements in mind as events unfold on the understanding that they'll probably come in handy later; and whether or not they do probably depends on the reader's concentration and how much work they feel like putting in. Personally, I found myself sagging around the half-way mark, so I suppose I could have enjoyed this one more than I did. There are some pleasantly peculiar ideas here, and the narrative grips in most of the right places, and we don't have to sit through any of Alfred Elton's weird ideas about sexual inequality; and it was mostly respectable, but maybe just not so good as I felt it should have been.
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