The World of Null-A

Front Cover
Macmillan, Oct 25, 2002 - Fiction - 272 pages

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.

 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
55
Section 2
77
Section 3
87
Section 4
93
Section 5
107
Section 6
117
Section 7
123
Section 8
129
Section 11
193
Section 12
197
Section 13
217
Section 14
221
Section 15
227
Section 16
241
Section 17
247
Section 18
251

Section 9
153
Section 10
183

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2002)

A. E. Van Vogt was a SFWA Grand Master. He was born in Canada and moved to the U.S. in 1944, by which time he was well established as one of John W. Campbell's stable of writers for Astounding Science-Fiction. His books include Slan and The World of Null-A. He lived in Los Angeles, California and died in 2000.

Bibliographic information