F&SF Reviews NULL-A CONTINUUM
and gives it more praise than it deserves. The reviewer is named Chris Moriarity, and was obviously in a good mood when he (the correct pronoun when the sex of the antecedent is unknown) read my humble work. Here is the link. Here is the verdict:
A. E. van Vogt’s pulp classic The World of Null-A ranks right up there with Asimov’s Foundation novels and Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game on my list of books to recommend to really smart teenagers. Not that they aren’t fun for kids of all ages. But teenagers take a special joy in books that come complete with their own self-contained philosophical systems.
John C. Wright was clearly one of the smart kids who devour such books. And he obviously stumbled on The World of Null-A at exactly the right moment. The result is The Null-A Continuum.
The book’s back cover copy is a pulp geek’s dream, complete with claims that Wright (better known for his hard sf “Golden Age” trilogy than for his pulp credentials) “has trained himself to write in the exciting pulp style” so that readers can “return again to the Null-A future.”
Happily, it’s all bunk.
Null-A Continuum is no slavish copy. In Wright’s hands, the pulp original turns into a pulp-meets-hard-sf meditation on cosmological evolution. Purists may howl, but in my opinion this is a good thing. Van Vogt was a short story virtuoso: a master of the firefly-bright idea that flashes and flickers and can be worked through in a dozen brilliant pages. His novels often feel a bit freeze-dried in the home stretch, as if he’s lost interest in his characters and just wants to get the whole ordeal over with.
Wright, in contrast, is a born novelist. And Null-A Continuum is a novelist’s novel, bristling with ideas and characters that demand novel-length treatment. It’s also a thoroughly modern piece of work, heftier and yet more disciplined than the original Null-A books. The writing is smoother, the characters more developed, the science more rigorous, the…oh, why go on? What it all boils down to is that the original Null-A novels were pulp of the first water, while Wright’s book is an erudite homage to the pulp tradition by a twenty-first-century hard-sf master.
Wright has retooled van Vogt’s characters, plot, and science for today’s readers. And though his love for the master is evident, he hasn’t hesitated to put his own stamp on the Null-A universe. The science of the original Null-A books centered around the characteristic science ideas of the 1940s: the threat of nuclear war, the vision of vast, centralized bureaucracies run by ENIAC-style thinking machines, the hope that hypnosis could unlock the hidden powers of the human mind. In contrast, Wright’s scientific concerns are those of today: the cosmological implications of new discoveries in physics and astronomy; the untrustworthiness of memory; the extreme pressures placed on humans as we leave behind the environment to which our evolution has adapted us.
How you feel about Wright’s book will depend on how you feel about the differences between the pulp of yesteryear and the hard sf of today. If you’re looking to relive the experience of reading van Vogt for the first time, you’ll just have to settle for reading van Vogt a second time. But if you’re interested in what one of the smartest hard sf writers of our generation has to say about the universe of Null-A, then Wright’s Null-A Continuum will let you get your geek on.
“Wright is a born novelist … one of the smartest hard sf writers of our generation”
Kull Wahad! You could not get praise like this for coins or kisses. I’m blushing.
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.
