F/SF

Interesting. Fast paced, surprises, ties up satisfactorily in the end. Reminded me of a small scale Dune with various schools of training and people of special ability fighting over control of a galactic empire. Plotting, intrigue, philosophy, psycology, religion but Dune took it to a larger scale with a more worked out background and more characters and groups involved.

Still, a good experience. Golden age SF with rational and superior hero triumphing in the end. ( )

There’s a Brian Aldiss story called ‘Confluence’ which is little more than amusing dictionary definitions of phrases from an alien language. One phrase is defined as “in which everything in a book is understandable except the author’s purpose in writing it”, and its converse, of course, is “in which nothing in a book is understandable except the author’s purpose in writing it”. The Pawns of Null-A fails both definitions. I have no idea what van Vogt thought he was writing about and nothing in the novel makes the slightest bit of sense. It is nominally a sequel to The World of Null-A. Gilbert Gosseyn prevented the conquest of Earth by the Greatest Empire in that novel, but in this one he finds himself bouncing around the heads of various characters in the Greatest Empire in an effort to either stop it or prevent it from defeating the League of Galactic Worlds. Gosseyn finds himself caught in a trap and transported into the brain of the heir to the Greatest Empire’s leader. He surmises some other powerful player is doing this in order to hone Gosseyn as a weapon, but the reader is bounced from one unexplained situation to another, with a remarkable level of faith in the reader’s attention, certainly to a greater extent than any modern-day author would be able to get away with. Gosseyn stumbles across a planet of “Predictors”, who seem to be chiefly responsible for the Greatest Empire’s victories, but since Gosseyn – and by extension van Vogt – seem to have little idea what’s going on, there’s little point in the reader trying to figure it out. Damon Knight famously performed a hatchet job on this novel’s prequel, The World of Null-A, but later retracted it when he learnt van Vogt documented his dreams and used them as plots. That’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation, certainly, but “oh he plotted while he was asleep” does not suddenly make a book no longer open to criticism for shit plotting. I loved van Vogt’s novels as a teenager, but virtually none have survived adult rereads. And with good reason: he was a fucking shit writer. Damon Knight was right. He just wasn’t honest enough – something which has plagued the genre since its beginnings. The Pawns of Null-A is badly-written, has no real plot to speak of, and its past popularity should be considered an accurate indictment of past sf fans’ taste… ( )

Not really so good. There's some interesting concepts -- the ability to 'similarize' and the 'cortico-thalamic stop.' The use of the latter (and indeed the entirety of the Null-A philosophy) makes it less of a surprise that Van Vogt was an early collaborator on Dianetics. The plot rather unravels towards the end. This is common in science fiction and fantasy, but more marked than usual here. ( )

Continuano, con questo capitolo secondo, le avventure di Gilbert Gosseyn, l'uomo con molteplici vite e cervelli.Chi era l'Inseguitore ? Gosseyn sapeva che la creatura minacciava di distruggere interi sistemi solari. Ma nemmeno la sua mente portentosa allenata alla logica del Non-A poteva prevedere i suoi piani. Originariamente pubblicato come un serial in quattro parti sulla storica rivista Astounding Stories da Ottobre 1948 a Gennaio 1949 .