World of Null-A
The classic novel of non-Aristotelian logic and the coming race of supermen Grandmaster A. E. van Vogt was one of the giants of the 1940s, the Golden Age of classic SF. Of his masterpieces, The World of Null-A is his most famous and most influential. It was the first major trade SF hardcover ever, in 1949, and has been in print in various editions ever since. The entire careers of Philip K. Dick, Keith Laumer, Alfred Bester, Charles Harness, and Philip Jose Farmer were created or influenced by The World of Null-A, and so it is required reading for anyone who wishes to know the canon of SF classics. It is the year 2650 and Earth has become a world of non-Aristotelianism, or Null-A. This is the story of Gilbert Gosseyn, who lives in that future world where the Games Machine, made up of twenty-five thousand electronic brains, sets the course of people's lives. Gosseyn isn't even sure of his own identity, but realizes he has some remarkable abilities and sets out to use them to discover who has made him a pawn in an interstellar plot. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
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8recommend
16mentions
15people
2008–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Best novel: Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
Best Scifi: The World of Null-A A. E. van Vogt
Best Childrens: Swallowdale Arthur Ransome
- The first book is actually called “The World of Null-A”. I picked it up at a local used book store last year and enjoyed it. Haven’t read any more of the trilogy yet.
- The World of Null-A: A. E. van Vogt
- Language in Thought and Action by S. I. Hayakawa is an introduction to General Semantics and deals with the limitations of language-oriented mental models, e.g. "the map is not the territory," a reminder that a model is just a model and not reality (or what Joel Spolsky would call "a leaky abstraction"). [0]
The World of Null-A by A. E. Van Vogt is a science-fiction novel with a world that has largely adopted General Semantics. [1]
[0]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/567189.Language_in_Thoug...
[1]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/951290.The_World_of_Null...
- The World of Null-A
I found a yellow-paged first edition on my parents' shelves as a young kid, and was heavily shaped by the idea of a character (and society) that trained themselves to think clearly.
This included years of training on how to channel (and ground) one's emotions, and a constant and deep understanding of "the map is not the territory". Or, in other words, our mental models are just that, and should be discarded or updated as soon as reality differs from them.
This allowed the character to respond with almost superhuman speed when confronted with otherwise traumatic emotional revelations, and the society as a whole to reorganize in response to an incipient alien invasion.
I've been trying to train myself to think like that ever since, and it has probably contributed to the large gap I felt between the thinking of my peers and me as I grew up.
I'm not sure how well the book holds up now, without my nostalgia colored glasses, but I still reread it every few years to remind me of the direction of my thoughts.
- I remember encountering several of these at the start of Van Vogt's sci-fi classic World of Null-A. I couldn't figure out if it was deliberate in any way, or just an annoying accident.
