Shameless Self-Promotion NULL- A CONTINUUM
Mortgage your house and sell the cat to the lab for medical experiments! You need the money to rush right out and buy NULL-A CONTINUUM, the authorized sequel to the ground-breaking WORLD OF NULL-A by A.E. van Vogt.
It is available for pre-order right now on Amazon.com and from Tor books.
From Rose Fox, book reviewer
I haven’t looked inside the book itself, so I can’t comment there. I’m just a bit croggled that it exists at all, though I suppose it’s no surprise that if someone was going to have the chutzpah to “continue” one of the most influential books in the American SF canon, it would be Wright. The jacket copy claims that he “trained himself to write in the exciting pulp style and manner of van Vogt”. What a terrifying statement. I’m not sure I can bring myself to read the book just yet.Of course, the point isn’t so much to outdo other sequels as to equal the original. It’s also unfair to demand that it be as mind-blowing and groundbreaking as The World of Null-A was in 1949; it seems more honest to see whether Null-A Continuum can match the effect of the original on a present-day reader. I find Wright’s novels contorted and stilted at best, … I suppose at some point I’ll just have to reread The World of Null-A and then see whether Wright’s sequel does at least a good a job of standing up under modern critical examination. Hopefully framing it in those terms willsufficiently reduce my expectations. Hopefully.
She is right, of course. I was terrified to learned I had trained myself to write in an exciting pulp style. I used my Null-A trained double brain to deduce the semantically negative false-to-facts verbiage of purplish prose of Golden Age SF. Hemingway, it is not.
I do not myself much care for Van Vogt so you can imagine the mixed emotions I felt when I realized that Wright’s NULL-A CONTINUUM is a successful attempt by a living author to emulate the style and plotting of a dead author. On the one hand, I could count the number of books where that trick worked on one hand (and I wouldn’t need all my fingers) so Wright gets major points for making it work. On the other, he’s successfully emulated an author whose work I find maddening.
You will think I am kidding if I say this is high praise indeed. I am not. This is what we lawyers call a “statement against interest.” If someone who does not like Van Vogt (a creature unimaginable to me, but there you have it) says I successfully emulated van Vogt’s signature Vanvogtianisms, it is a flattering statement indeed.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
