Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Pawns of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt The Pawns of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6605e6f2e8a64e0e • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. The Pawns of Null-A by A.E. van Vogt. I doubt that our literary tastes are genetically programmed. Probably, chance events are equally important in influencing our choices. Be that as it may, at age 13 I became a passionate reader of science fiction stories. The triggering event was the birth of a Swedish science fiction magazine, "Häpna!" . (The name means "Be amazed!", no doubt a reference to the magazine "Astounding Science Fiction" .) The first issue in March 1954 contained some riveting stories. In one of them, "Repulsion Factor" by Charles Eric Maine, a scientist has invented teleportation: a physical object is disassembled in a transmitter and sent as information to a receiver where it is reassembled (just as in Star Trek). A murderer uses this device to create a copy of himself by using two receivers, intending to let "his copy" take the rap. - In addition to being an exciting story, it made me thoroughly confused over the real nature of identity and consciousness. (Cf. "The Mind's I" by Hofstadter and Dennett.) It also contained the first installment of a novel by A. E. van Vogt, "Slan" , which described the ruthless persecution of a genetically engineered race of human telepaths. (It may have been inspired by the fate of the European Jews, even though it was written as early as 1940.) - In subsequent issues of Häpna! , van Vogt was a frequent contributor, and I always enjoyed his original stories, often with an unexpected twist at the end. The cover of the first issue of Häpna! in 1954. Note the innovative space suit heat radiators. Reality half a century later: assembly of the International Space Station. That same year I read "Destination Universe" , a collection of short stories, in Swedish. I soon graduated to reading van Vogt's stories in English, at first with some difficulty. I enjoyed such classics as "The Voyage of the Space Beagle" (which much later formed the basis for the movie "Alien" ) , and "The Weapon Shops of Isher" , along with works by Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Robert Heinlein and many others. What set van Vogt apart from the rest was his unfettered imagination, the grandeur of his vision, and his predilection for assigning superhuman powers to his heroes, such as telepathy, immortality, encyclopedic knowledge, teleportation, superior mental capabilities, etc. It sometimes seemed as if he had too many ideas for the scope of his stories, and there are many loose ends in his works. To a timid teenager, it was hard to resist throwaway lines such as: ". made it necessary for Robert Hedrock, Earth's one immortal man, . to make sure . " , or "The seesaw would end in the very remote past, with the release of the stupendous temporal energy he had been accumulating. He would not witness but he would aid in the formation of the planets." ("The Weapon Shops of Isher); "'There is only one such expert aboard', said Grosvenor coldly" ("The Voyage of the Space Beagle" - how often have I had to suppress similar sentiments in committee meetings :-) ); "When he found himself suddenly back on Earth in another man's body, it was more than he had expected" (the backside blurb of "The Man with a Thousand Names"); "I suggested that they turn their attention to other galaxies" ("The War Against the Rull"). My father was especially struck by the cover in the center. It reminded him of the final days of the Third Reich. When I found "The World of Null-A" in a bookshop, I knew that I was in for a good read. "Could just this one man block a cosmic conspiracy?" said the blurb. As usual with van Vogt, the main character, Gilbert Gosseyn had been endowed with superhuman powers - in this case an extra brain that allowed him to achieve the teleportation of objects, including himself. On the other hand, he suffered from amnesia and had no idea who he was or what his purpose was. The plot centered on his struggle to find out. An interesting device was that the story was set in an environment 600 years in the future, where society was built on the principles of General Semantics. There were numerous allusions to this "science", including a reference to "Korzybski Square". Evidently, training in General Semantics was very beneficial in helping a person withstand the shock of being instantaneously transported from Earth to Venus at the whim of some unknown manipulator. Among the actors is a "Games Machine, made up of 25,000 electronic computers". - Wow! (Irony intended!) My father used to make disparaging remarks about my choice of literature. (However, in my Grandfather's memoirs, at age 18 "he only smiles mildly when the conversation turns to Schiller or Goethe.". ) Still, I caught him reading both "The World of Null-A" and its sequel "The Pawns of Null-A". Today, at age 13, my son Christofer devours Japanese Manga comics magazines. Perhaps I should not be too harsh on him :-) The allusions to "the science of General Semantics" piqued my curiosity. I found out that Alfred Korzybski really existed and had written a book called "Science and Sanity" . Evidently, van Vogt was an early admirer of Korzybski. Later he developed an interest in scientology, but was quickly disillusioned. Although some of Alfred Elton van Vogt's admirers like to claim that he had to be an extraterrestrial to be able to write such books, he really was an author of flesh and blood. He was born in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1912, became a fulltime writer in 1941, and moved to Los Angeles in 1944. He died there in 2000, a victim of Alzheimer's disease. A E van Vogt. The author AE van Vogt, who has died aged 87, spearheaded a golden age of science fiction - along with such writers as Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. In his early writing, van Vogt displayed a wild talent, creating stories of vivid imagery and sudden, dream-like twists of plot and perspective that found an appreciative audience in a genre trying to shake off its image of rockets and ray guns. Encouraged by editor John W Campbell, van Vogt brought his interest in psychology and language to traditional science-fiction themes such as alien contact, interstellar war, time travel and its paradoxes, immortality and the superhuman. Although critics often found his plots complex, others saw him stretching the possibilities of the field while retaining the sense of wonder vital to imaginative fiction. AE van Vogt was born in Canada, and educated at var ious schools in Manitoba, graduating to the University of Ottawa in 1928. His first story sales were to "true story" confession magazines in the early 1930s while he was working as a census clerk and representative of Maclean Trade Papers. It was here that he honed a unique style, based on his reading of John W Gallishaw's The Only Two Ways To Write a Short Story, which included what van Vogt called "a hang-up" - some piece of missing information which the reader's imagination had to supply. Later, he developed a system to cope with story problems: he forced himself to wake up every 1 hours to think about a solution, and found that his subconscious would often have the problem resolved by morning. It was after a period of writing plays for Canadian radio that van Vogt rediscovered his early love of science fiction pulps, and, in 1939, he began submitting stories and serials to Astounding Science Fiction. Of his 38 novels, his earliest are still regarded as classics. His first, Slan, dealt with a persecuted race of human-bred mutants and attempts to bring peace between "normals" and their physical and mental superiors; The Weapon Shops Of Isher mixed future politics, immortality and galactic-scale space opera; The World of Null-A, and its sequel The Pawns of Null-A, introduced Alfred Kotzybski's general semantics - a system through which the higher levels of the mind could be accessed via non-Aristotelian (or null-A) teaching - into a galaxy-spanning political intrigue; the four stories that made up The Voyage Of The Space Beagle revolved around "nexialist" scientist Elliot Grosvenor, and how he and the crew of an intergalactic spacecraft coped with a variety of alien attackers. One sequence in this tale is a remarkable foreshadow of the movie, Alien, produced 36 years later. When, in 1948, The World Of Null-A was published in book form, it was the first SF magazine serial to appear in hardcover from a major publisher (earlier titles had appeared from specialist houses). In France, it was translated by surrealist Boris Vian and created a market for science fiction.