Null-A and SF
Here below is a copy of my prepared remarks for a conference given by the General Semantics Institute in New York 16 November 2008. I gave only an abbreviated version of this speech, skipping matter my audience there might have found boastful, controversial or upsetting.
Null-A and SF
I wish to express my gratitude at being invited here to speak today.
More than that, I would like to express gratitude that Alfred Korzybski wrote his seminal work on General Semantics, which, in turn, inspired A.E. van Vogt to write his masterpiece, WORLD OF NULL-A, which did much to popularize those ideas.
In 2006 the opportunity and inspiration came to me to write an authorized sequel to WORLD OF NULL-A, called NULL-A CONTINUUM. That sense of gratitude toward A.E. van Vogt was my primary motivation for writing NULL-A CONTINUUM.
I would like to tell you how I came to write this sequel to van Vogt’s magnificent work, and why I came to write it. To explain the why of it, I need to explain, first, the significance of General Semantics in my own life, second, the significance it should hold in general society, but which has been sadly overlooked, and third, the avenues by which the philosophy of general semantics might be brought to more significant public esteem. It will come as no surprise that I, a science fiction writer, who came across these ideas in a science fiction book, think science fiction is the best avenue to popularize these ideas.
Alfred Elton van Vogt is one of the giants of science fiction, more popular in his day even than Isaac Asimov. He is one of the three paramount writers in the John W. Campbell Junior’s stable of authors said to have ushered in the golden age of science fiction, the third after van Vogt and Asimov being Robert Heinlein. However, van Vogt was more of a philosopher and a dreamer and less of a nuts-and-bolts writer than Heinlein or Asimov, and his work finds less favor among modern generations of SF readers. He is almost forgotten, a state of affairs I find regrettable.
Not to take any glory away from Heinlein and Asimov, but at the same time when Asimov pondered the speculative questions like “What is robots were not mechanical men, but merely appliances, able to function only according to certain rules?” or Heinlein was imagining his famous future history, asking speculative questions about rolling roads, spaceflight, and atomic energy, A.E. van Vogt was speculating about the nature of memory and identity, and asking what the ultimate destiny of the human race might be. There is a grandeur and a scope to van Vogt’s conceptions that is absent from his better known contemporaries. STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, or the FOUNDATION trilogy are landmarks in the history of science fiction that have endured, but, for reasons not clear to me, WORLD OF NULL-A and PLAYERS OF NULL-A and SLAN and WEAPON SHOPS OF ISHER are monuments that have been worn away by the winds and rains of time.
In my own small way, I hope that NULL-A CONTINUUM might sift a little of the sands of time away from the statue of Ozymandias, so to speak, and introduce a new generation of readers to this magnificent legacy.
What started the chain of events was a notice in a trade publication from the Van Vogt estate looking for a writer to assist on a project. In hindsight, I assume this was their search for someone to complete the unfinished manuscript for a sequel to SLAN, a hunt that resulted in Kevin J. Andersen writing SLAN HUNTER. I did not know this at the time, I was merely excited at the prospect of writing something in Van Vogt’s background universe with his characters. I asked my agent to look into the matter, but nothing came of that.
Months later, merely on impulse, I looked up the literary agent for the estate of van Vogt on the Internet. The miracle of the Internet made what would have otherwise been difficult, negligible. I wrote an inquiry letter to Dan Hooker of the Ashley Grayson literary agency. To my surprise and pleasure, he telephoned me back. At that time, I had published five novels and had a sixth in the offing, so I was not entirely an unknown in the field, and one of the novels had been a finalist for a Nebula award, but I was not a big enough name that taking time out to do a project like this would not be cost effective for me. In terms of my literary career, this was the perfect time for a project like this.
Dan Hooker was at first reluctant. While he did not doubt my ability to write a serviceable novel, he did not know if the public, or the publication side of things, would be interested. He was unwilling to let the valuable intellectual property be published by merely anyone. In fact, he said, there was one and only one editor he would trust to treat a van Vogt project with the respect it deserved: that editor was David Hartwell of Tor books. Only Tor books had shown any interest in republishing some of the classic works of van Vogt.
Well, if I had to list my favorite brief moments in my life, that brief moment would be near the top, because it was with infinite pleasure that I was able to tell him that David Hartwell was my editor, and Tor books was my publisher.
I wrote three chapters and an outline, which I submitted both to Tor Books and the Ashley Grayson agency: they began negotiations to hammer out a three-way contract. Long before those negotiations were finished, for the contracts were difficult to write, I was done with my manuscript, for the manuscript was easy to write.
There are times when an author simply is inspired, in the zone, his pen is on fire, and this was one of those. I had been waiting and preparing to write this book since I was age eleven.
Van Vogt is my favorite author. I have read everything he ever wrote, except for his true confessional short stories he wrote before his science fiction career. WORLD OF NULL-A is my favorite of his books. I reread it in my youth more often than any other.
And, putting all modesty aside, I was perfectly suited to write this book. In some way, I am better suited to write a van Vogt book than I am to write a John Wright book. His themes, his style, his particular take on plotting and pacing, come more easily to me and more naturally than when I sit down and try to write something of my own.
This was not a childhood dream come true only because my childhood dreams were not that ambitious.
I never imagined that I, and no one else, would get to decide the ultimate fate of my favorite characters, the amnesiac superman Gilbert Gosseyn, the alluring and dangerous Patricia Hardy, the sinister shadow-being known only as The Follower, or the ruthless dictator of the Greatest Empire in Time and Space, the dread and dreaded Enro the Red.
I was helped by a fellow fan of van Vogt named Isaac Wilcott, who proofread the manuscript and who gave me a copy of the original magazine version of WORLD OF NULL-A. Let me publicly thank him for his services. The magazine version differed in several striking particulars from the novel version published later, due (according to van Vogt himself) to the trenchant criticism of Damon Knight.
I was gratified to learn that more than one plot-twist I had planned for my sequel had been anticipated in the magazine version. Without spoiling a surprise, the true identity of one character turned out to be exactly what van Vogt had in mind: and I had deduced it from the surrounding clues. As it turns out, the magazine version identified the character specifically, but this scene was cut from the novel version. So this acted to confirm that I was paralleling van Vogt’s thinking, at least in some respects.
I showed the first draft of the manuscript to the widow, Lydia van Vogt. I had the great pleasure of speaking with her on the phone. She was not merely pleased, she was overjoyed with the manuscript, and said it read like something her husband might have written. That is one of the most flattering compliments I can ever imagine to receive. Mrs. Van Vogt is simply one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, she is a darling, and she was so enthusiastic about the project, and expressed such firm faith in my work, that I did not lose heart when setbacks arose.
The setbacks arose when the negotiations broke down, and I was told the project could not be completed. Rather than surrender, my agent Jack Byrne made an extraordinary effort to find a common ground between the van Vogt estate and the publisher, and he was fortunate enough to succeed. I am also grateful for his hard work here.
The book itself has met with the same types of reviews that van Vogt’s work received in his lifetime, for apparently I copied his flaws and foibles as well as his strengths. By and large I have been pleased with the reception.
So that was how I came to write it. Let me next mention why I come to write it.
There were several motives, commingled and impure as all human motives are. One was sheer love of story telling for its own sake. One was pride: I wanted to see if I could equal the work of one of the masters of the craft in my chosen field. One was gratitude: NULL-A CONTINUUM is the gushing fan letter to A.E. van Vogt to make up for all the fan letters I never wrote, but should have, while the grandmaster was till alive, may he rest in peace.
My reasons for gratitude are deep. THE WORLD OF NULL-A shaped my character, and I think perhaps I still bear the stamp thereof to this day: my lifelong interest in, and devotion to philosophy can be traced to A.E. van Vogt’s WORLD OF NULL-A.
I read van Vogt’s books when I was eleven, which, as one wag famously observed, is the golden age of science fiction. Whatever you read in youth, when the developing mind is hungry for new ideas, is likely to be formative, and stick with you all the days of your life. The pages of what was basically a pulp fiction space opera showed to me a vision of what the human mind might be capable of, if properly trained.
While I would not be so bold as to call myself properly trained, but I admit, nay, I boast, that many of the basic precepts of Null-A became so ingrained in my thinking that I am well-nigh unaware of them.
To this day, I am shocked and surprised when, in the course of a discussion with some other thinker on a rational topic, I find him unable and unwilling to define his terms, and unable or unwilling to see that the emotional reaction he attaches to the term is based on a merely verbal association in his mind.
Forgive me if this sounds like a boast, but if someone asks me would I like for dinner a succulent steak smothered in savory mushrooms, or a burnt hunk of dead cow flesh covered with fungus, those two ways of phrasing the statement sound the same to me.
If my wife puts on a nice dress, it does not make her one iota more my wife. Likewise, putting a nice dress on a concept does not change the concept.
This habit, as I say, is so ingrained that I have trouble communicating with people who do not share it. The words are not the concept the word points toward, and so changing the word does not change the concept. If A is A and A implies B, it is simply not the case that A ceases to imply B if we merely change the label used to refer to A.
I discovered as I grew a good side and a bad side to this ingrained habit of thought.
The good side was that I found myself relatively immune to propaganda. Both the flattering appeals of Madison Avenue and the fear-mongering appeals of political candidates leave me relatively unmoved.
It is as if I am immune to the songs of the sirens that ensourcel my neighbors. I see them allured to commercial products or political programs they would be ashamed to buy or support if the objects involved were called by their right names. Merely changing the label, merely slapping on a new coat of paint, is sufficient for them to believe something essential is different.
I do not believe you can change reality by changing the word you use to refer to it. I resent attempts to engineer my attitude or the attitude of the public by use of euphemisms or misleading and inaccurate expressions.
In ancient times, magicians thought that if you discovered the true name of an individual, or knew the true name of an object, you could work magic, cursing or blessing the individual, or changing the properties of the object by means of a spoken formula.
I do not believe in magic. I do not believe in verbal voodoo.
One would think this would not be a radical posture.
At times, I fear it is. For the bad side of my upbringing is that this attitude makes me an alien in these modern times, and, I fear an uncouth alien at that. We live in an age where the proper definition and delimitation of words is social anathema: only the emotive character of the words, whether they are found insensitive to the ultra-sensitive nerves of the eternally incensed, need be contemplated.
We live in a time where the use of the word ‘niggardly’— which means miserly or stingy— causes outrage, and the outraged persons are taken seriously instead of scornfully laughed to silence. We live in a time of perpetual, professional outrage, which implies, a time of perpetual, professional passion. It is a vast and arid wasteland where any oasis of dispassionate reasoning is rare.
It is hard to contemplate a wasteland without feeling the impulse to take up a spade and dig a ditch to irrigate it, even if it is only one small green corner or walled garden in the wide and arid desert.
So my final motive for writing a van Vogt novel might be called evangelical.
Because I want people to know about General Semantics, and because I think science fiction is the best vehicle for popularizing a revolutionary notion like this.
Before I say more, a disclaimer: I am a fraud. I have never read a word of Korzybski’s writings. What little I know of General Semantics and its principles comes through the writings of A.E. van Vogt, both his fiction and nonfiction works. I am not a practitioner nor a teacher of neurolinguistic programming, or rational emotive behavior therapy, and I am not a follower of Samuel I. Hayakawa. I am a science fiction writer, not a scientist, linguist or psychiatrist. My knowledge of these fields is superficial and amateurish.
Furthermore, I am not a devotee of non-Aristotelian philosophy: I hold the logical principles as outlined by Aristotle to be sufficient for all normal mental operations of the reason.
I am, in fact, an Aristotelian. You might wonder why I wrote a Non-Aristotelian book.
You might wonder why I am rooting for you, and trying to advertise your wares, when I don’t believe in them myself.
The reason, and I speak without irony, is that to be for or against Null-A is not a black and white, binary, A-or-Not-A choice. I am not a partisan of Null-A, not one of you, but I would far prefer to see the popularization and predominance of any system of clear and rigorous thinking, than to see the culminations of the antithetical trends.
In short, Aristotelians and Non-Aristotelians are not opposites. They share a common enemy. The enemy and opposite of General Semantics is Newspeak. The enemy and opposite of logic is the Doublethink.
Binary Aristotelian logic and Null-A multi-valued logic have the common foe in illogic. Or, to be precise, the enemy is polylogism, which is the philosophical posture that says that the categories of logical thought differ from one races of man, economic category of behavior, or even from individual to individual each according to his preference.
Polylogism was proposed by the national socialists worker’s party of Germany as official doctrine. The Nazis reason that evolution rendered some races more fit tosurvive than others, and would produce the super-man or master race, who would stand above man as man stood above apes. The super-man would have logical categories of thinking we could not appreciate, so ran the theory, so that no communication, no shared categories of reasoning, could mediate between the superhuman and the human. The super-man would be beyond good and evil, free from the constraints of moral behavior. The Nazis used this excuse to justify their dark and hideous crimes.
Polylogism is a core doctrine of Marxist socialism. The theory in this case proposes that when a man engages in particular economic activities, such as investing in capital or earning wages, he becomes a member of a class, and this class identity determines or defines the logical categories of thought in its members. Between members of different classes, there can be no rational communication: the alternatives are re-education camps and extermination camps.
Polylogism is also an implication that loose coalition of dogmas going by the name of cultural relativism or moral relativism, where it is postulated as an absolute rule that there are no absolute rules.
The overarching theme or leitmotiv of polylogism is dishonesty. All of these modern and postmodern philosophies are lies, insolent lies, and are meant to be understood as lies.
They promise the true believer who follows them freedom from his conscience.
Dishonesty in language is both a cause of and an effect flowing from polylogism: propaganda replaces honest talk. Orwell recognized this trend, and coined the terms ‘Newspeak’ and ‘Doublethink’ to capture their essence.
Newspeak is falsehood; Doublethink is illogic.
Falsehood is both causes and is caused by illogic: the two are linked. The dishonesty involved in the Sovietization of language needs no examples from me: if you are familiar with the Twentieth Century, you are familiar with dictatorships calling themselves People’s Republics, mass-murder being called cleansing or called liquidation of undesirables, terrorists fighting with all their being to enslave the minds and lives of their fellow men being called freedom fighters. You have all heard the peace is war and ignorance is strength and one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
An acute insight which springs from General Semantics is that the use of words has a profound effect in the organism, in the mind and body, of the person using the word. The misuse of words has a neurotic effect. The point of polylogism is to arrest the operations of logic in the thinker. The point of the Orwellian abuse of language is to produce an emotional connotation associated with a word and connect it to a word of the opposite denotation: the point is to erect deliberately the type of false-to-facts association that General Semantics attempts to discover and to dismantle.
That the map is not the territory, the word is not the thing the word represents, is a message I wish to preach to the world, and, as I said above, that is one reason why I wrote my novel.
Why is this idea important?
This idea is important for the general world because ideas have consequences. The verbal models we use to manipulate concepts have not only conceptual ramifications, but influence the whole organism, for good or ill.
What other novel, aside from WORLD OF NULL-A or PLAYERS OF NULL-A, has, as its main character, and as its hero, a philosophy? I can think of one or two, but they are rare finds. Usually, philosophers and intellectuals are comedic clowns instories, and enjoy an opprobrium which, I fear, they richly deserve.
But in Null-A novels, the purpose of philosophy to have an actionable model of the universe: principles to live by, not merely to debate.
One basic principle that is not unique to Null-A, but applies to all philosophers worthy of the name, is this: the imperative to seek the integration of the reason with the passions and appetites.
Philosophers of the ancient world would have called this principle virtue, which is a word that means power, and this word refers to the power of the reason to be sovereign over the passions and emotions. The quest of a philosopher is a quest for self-control.
The reason why one might prefer to use the word ‘integration’ is to emphasize that it is not emotionlessness a philosopher seeks, but, instead, the ability to distinguish healthy, apt, proper and sane passions from self-destructive, in appropriate, improper and neurotic ones and to govern them accordingly.
One trivial distinction between Null-A and earlier philosophical systems is the use of clinical and scientific language to express these concepts: Null-A uses a neutral term like ‘neurotic’ rather than a more accurate and non-neutral term like ‘sin’.
My point here is not to emphasize the differences in terminology, but to remark on the similarity of goals and means. The difference between a philosopher and a layman is that a philosopher attempts to discover how best to live through the use of reason. Null-A is the attempt to put that ancient quest onto a modern and scientific footing.
General Semantic proposes that one cannot integrate one’s reason with ones passions and appetites without understanding the role of language in shaping thought. You need to know the map is not the territory and the word is not the thing it represents to avoid making emotional attachments to what are basically word-fetishes, fictional mental constructs. You cannot be sane with an unsane or insane vocabulary, that is, a false-to-facts vocabulary.
The implication for society of that ancient quest for virtue and the modern quest for sanity should be clear, but it bears repeating.
In the modern West we have discovered certain basic principles of political economy unique in history: individualism, individual conscience, liberty, a system of checks and balances, divided government, limited government, the free market. It is the first real attempt to found a society on rational principles. A rational society cannot endure if its members are not sufficiently rational. If the multitudes lack understanding the rules of law and the limits of law, they will not do or will not support the things needed for society to survive. We already see evidences of that lack, which every day become clearer: to anyone with ears to hear, the creaking of the joints as the supporting frame of the edifice as it cracks is plain.
A democracy of free men cannot endure if men lack virtue. The self-discipline required for free men to govern themselves is at eternal odds with the self-indulgence produced by overabundant successes in self-government. To correct these defects, we must return to reason. We must spread the message.
You might wonder why, if I were serious about spreading the message of non-Aristotelian philosophy in particular, I would select so unserious a medium as science fiction. The answer is that I take science fiction seriously.
Let me explain what I think science fiction is, and why I take it seriously.
Science Fiction is a form of literature that never existed in thepast. The fantastic voyages and fantasies from the Renaissance and the ancient world are not science fiction, no matter what some might claim. Science fiction is a literature that grew out of the scientific revolution, which changed the basic way we think about the universe, and out of the industrial revolution, which changed and continues to change the relation of man to nature.
I have seen upwards of fifty definitions of science fiction, none of which satisfy me, and so I hope you will forgive me if I add my own entry into an overcrowded field, and offer my own definition of science fiction.
Specifically, science fiction is the mythology of a scientific age.
Science fiction is the daydreams, ideals, nightmares, speculations, and adventure tales that grow out of the implications, and I mean both the intellectual and the emotional implications, of the scientific revolution and the effect of that revolution on human thought.
One might ask, how I can call a book like NULL-A CONTINUUM science fiction, when it contains such fantasy elements as faster than light drive, time travel, clairvoyance, telepathy, teleportation, life after death, the creation and rebirth of the universe, and so on.
The answer is that science fiction is not science fact and not meant to be. The same witches and enchanted castles and dark knights and dragons and mystical spirits appear in science fiction as in any tale of the King Arthur, except the witches are called bene gesserit witches, and practice psionics, the enchanted castle is an armored battlestation in space called the Death Star, and the dark knights are called Darth; the dragons are aliens from planet Valentia, and the elves are called Organians or Arisians. Science fiction is the effort to place these ancient myths, which reflect the hopes and fears of the human condition, into the world revealed by the scientific world view.
In order to be a story, a story has to contain some element of the essential conflicts of human life, love and war, romance and death, valor, cowardice, honesty, villainy, hate and hope and fear and redemption. In order to be science fiction, however, this story has to grapple with the tremendous influence science and technology, progress and evolution, has had on human society and the human psyche.
Science fiction is about how our lives might change due to science. It is about what our place is in the universe discovered by Copernicus and Newton and Hubble and Einstein. The happy stories of science fiction are about the utopias of our dreams, as we boldly go where no man has gone before, and the tragedies of science fiction are about the Brave New Worlds of our nightmares.
A.E. van Vogt’s WOLRD OF NULL-A is a scientific utopia, a world were sanity has finally triumphed over the forces of unreason, the dark and bloodthirsty beast in every human soul.
It is part of a long tradition in science fiction. From Ralph Bellamy’s LOOKING BACKWARD, to H.G. Wells’ MEN LIKE GODS, to Orwell’s NINETY-EIGHTY FOUR to Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD, science fiction writers have been exploring the future. ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand and A HANDMAIDEN TALE by Margaret Atwood are in this tradition, though I suspect neither of those authors would call herself a science fiction writer, even though both books are speculative diatribes examining the implications of certain ideas.
What Ayn Rand did was ask what would happen in the ideas of Leftist socialism were taken seriously in America, and she wrote a didactic novel to explore the ramifications; Margaret Atwood did the same thing, using the ideas of Rightwing fundamentalism. Both were science fiction because, in order to draw out the implications, you have to set the book in the future.
There is no other way to answer the question “What happens if this goes on?” except to “go on” and look at the future, if only in the imagination; and the question “what happens if this goes on?” is the central question of science fiction, it is the speculation that speculative fiction is built upon.
No other genre aside from science fiction gives the writer the latitude he needs to draw out all the social implications of a change to human society. If we are talking about what might be or what should be, we have to set the tale in a world were things are not as they are now. If the idea is radical, that is, if it offers fundamental rather than superficial change, if your idea alters everything in society from the way you garden roses to the way you wear your clothes, you have to set the tale in some world other than the here and now.
If you set your tale in the future and not in the here and now, and if the changes between your invented world and the real world are profound rather than superficial, you are writing science fiction.
Other genres can deal with less radical ideas. If you are proposing a thought system that changes everything, your fiction needs to be science fiction.
One might ask, if it was my purpose to show my readers what a world based on Null-A principles might be like, why did I not give a realistic portrayal? Why add all the lighthearted spectacle and gee-whiz-wow-gosh of a space opera? Why am I feeding my readers cotton candy if the point is to give them meat and potatoes?
The answer is that science fiction speaks to the imagination, not to the reason. It does not offer a blueprint, but a vision, a daydream. You have to have the fall in love with the castle in the cloud before you sit down with compass and straight-edge to draw the blueprint for your stronghold here on earth.
The other answer is that we each do what we can. To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I am not qualified to draw up a blueprint of what a world where the principles of General Semantics have been put into effect. But I am a dreamer; I am qualified to make such a world seem appealing to any eleven-year-old who reads by little space opera, and, I hope, be lead to read Alfred E. van Vogt, and even Alfred Korzybski.
I doubt I will ever deserve the gratitude from some eleven year old who reads my book as I feel I owe A.E van Vogt; but it would have been ungrateful of me not to try. And that, finally, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole story of why I wrote this book.
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.
