"A. E. Van Vogt - The World of Null-A" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Vogt A E)

The World of Null-A
By A.E.Van Vogt
Scanned by BW-SciFi
Scan Date: July, 5 th, 2002
 To John W. Campbell, Jr.

Copyright 1945, 1948, ┬й 1970, by A. E. Van Vogt
All rights reserved
Published by arrangement with the author's agent
All rights reserved which includes the right
to reproduce this book or portions thereof in
any form whatsoever. For information address
SBN 425-02558-6
BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS are published by
Berkley Publishing Corporation
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BERKLEY MEDALLION BOOKS ┬о TM 757,375
Printed in the United States of America
Berkley Medallion Edition, MARCH, 1974
 AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

Reader, in your hands you hold one of the most con-troversial-and successful-novels in the whole
of science fiction literature.
In these introductory remarks, I am going to tell about some of the successes and I shall also
detail what the prin-cipal critics said about The World of Null-A. Let me hasten to say that what
you shall read is no acrimonious defense. In fact, I have decided to take the criticisms seriously,
and I have accordingly revised this first Berkley edition and have provided the explanations which
for so long I believed to be unnecessary.
Before I tell you of the attacks, I propose swiftly to set down a few of The World of Null-A's
successes:
It was the first hard-cover science fiction novel pub-lished by a major publisher after World War II
(Simon and Schuster, 1948).
It won the Manuscripters Club award.
It was listed by the New York area library association among the hundred best novels of 1948.
Jacques Sadoul, in France, editor of Editions OPTA, has stated that World of Null-A, when first
published, all by itself created the French science fiction market. The first edition sold over 25,000
copies. He has stated that I am still-in 1969-the most popular writer in France in terms of copies
sold.
Its publication stimulated interest in General Semantics. Students flocked to the Institute of
General Semantics, Lakewood, Connecticut, to study under Count Alfred Korzybski-who allowed
himself to be photographed reading The World of Null-A. Today, General Semantics, then a
faltering science, is taught in hundreds of universi-ties.
World has been translated into nine languages.
With that out of the way, we come to the attacks. As you'll see, they're more fun, make authors
madder, and get readers stirred up.
Here is what Sam Moskowitz, in his brief biography of the author, said in his book, Seekers of
Tomorrow, about what was wrong with World of Null-A: ". . . Bewildered Gilbert Gosseyn, mutant
with a double mind, doesn't know who he is and spends the entire novel trying to find out." The
novel was originally printed as a serial in As-tounding Science Fiction, and after the final