Home > A. E. van Vogt > THE 14 VAN VOGT NOVELS ON THIS SITE, in chronological order > "The World of Null-A" (1945) by A. E. van Vogt
"The World of Null-A" (1945) by A. E. van Vogt
Saturday 2 January 2021, by
First published in monthly installments in the August-October 1945 issues of Astounding Science Fiction [1], this fast-paced and very ambitious blockbuster novel set in 2580 A.D. was A. E. van Vogt’s fourth major novel [2] in that glorious heyday-decade of science fiction, the golden forties.
Regularly reissued ever since in hardcover, paperback and foreign-language translations, it is certainly the author’s most-republished work, and one that, with Slan, established him definitively in the front ranks of contemporary science-fiction writers.
With the original Astounding illustrations by Orban and magazine covers by Timmins.
(64,210 words)
An e-book is available for downloading below.
The World of Null-A (e-book)
[1] The World of Null-A was originally called World of Ā – read “World of Null-A”, where A stands for “Aristotelian” – in the 1945 issues of Astounding. It then became The World of ā for its first hardcover edition by Simon & Schuster in 1948 (shown above), and only first appeared in its easier-to-pronounce and best-known version The World of Null-A in the Ace pocketbook edition of 1964.
[2] after Slan (1940), The Weapon Makers (1943), and The Book of Ptath (1943).