Teaser

Gilbert Gosseyn has come to Venus for the great games. But Gosseyn is not the man he seems to be. Indeed, not even Gosseyn himself is sure of his true identity . . .

Review

Van Vogt is an author I just can’t seem to stay away from. No matter how convoluted and disjointed his novels are, they’re bizarrely compelling. The man seems to have his own ideas of how form and structure work (I daresay he’d have been a darling of the New Wave if he’d only peaked a few decades later) yet I can’t deny there’s an appeal to his work. Like a tub f jelly beans, I can’t help but make return visits even though I know I’m not getting any nutrition out of the experience.

The most interesting part of this book for me was the introduction. It opens with van Vogt hyping up his own novel. The fun fact that The World of Null-A was Simon & Schuster’s first science fiction hardback is rapidly followed by the incredibly bold claim that it was also the first science fiction book to employ subtext. Now, far be it from me to doubt an author’s account, but I simply don’t think that’s true.

We then get to the core of the matter. The SF critic Damon Knight, himself an author, famously gave a scathing review of this book on its original publication. This edition has apparently been edited to account for some of those complaints. It’s an interesting admission on van Vogt’s part that he determines the opinions of critics to outweigh those of authors. Personally, I find this an unusual form of appeasement. I may complain about books, but I would never suggest an author rewrite an existing text to account for my tastes.

As it happens, Knight’s complaints are largely in line with my own. The plotting is nonsensical, and the narrative over-reliant on shock twists and revelations that come from, and often go, nowhere. When you kill characters only to resurrect them in the very next chapter, it’s hard to believe there are any real stakes.

Some of the ideas here are interesting, though I can’t say I’m wholly sold on van Vogt’s idea of General Semantics. Ultimately however, the flaws on the pacing and delivery of those ideas leaves me underwhelmed.