The War Against the Rull
First edition
AuthorA. E. Van Vogt
Cover artistRonald Clyne
CountryUnited States of America
LanguageEnglish
GenreScience fiction
Published1959 (Simon & Schuster)
Media typePrint (Hardback)
Pages244 (Hardback edition)
OCLC661127

The War Against the Rull is a science fiction novel by Canadian-American writer A. E. Van Vogt, first published in 1959 by Simon & Schuster. The novel is a fixup made from six (after 1999, seven) short stories and two connecting chapters.

Contents

The novel consists mainly of six short stories, all originally published in Astounding Science Fiction:

  • Chapters 1-4: "Co-Operate - Or Else!" (April 1942)
  • Chapter 5: new material, bridging the gap between the first and second stories
  • Chapters 6-7: "Repetition" (also known as "The Gryb": April 1940)
  • Chapters 8-13: "The Second Solution" (October 1942)
  • Chapters 14-16: "The Green Forest" (June 1949)
  • Chapters 17-19: "The Sound" (February 1950)
  • Chapter 20: new material, bridging the gap between the fifth and sixth stories
  • Chapters 21-25: "The Rull" (May 1948)

A seventh story, "The First Rull" (first published in the 1978 collection Pendulum), was included as a 26th chapter in the 1999 reprint and all subsequent editions.

Plot

1-4: Trevor Jamieson is stranded in a deadly jungle on the planet Eristan II with an ezwal, a 3-ton, six-legged, telepathic saurian-like creature that dislikes humans and wants to drive them off his homeworld, Carson's Planet. Having bailed out of a crashing spaceship, Jamieson and the hostile and contemptuous ezwal must cross hundreds of miles of jungle to make their way to the wreckage, in hopes that they can call for help. The ezwal and Jamieson need each other to survive, but the former cannot allow the latter to leave Eristan II alive, as he is the only human to know that ezwals are intelligent as opposed to merely animals. Their journey is interrupted by the appearance of a cruiser belonging to the Rull, worm-like creatures who are implacably hostile to all intelligent life. A Rull landing party capture the ezwal, who gives up on his plan of enlisting them against humans after meeting them face to face. An Earth battleship appears and engages the Rull cruiser; after a semi-intelligent carnivorous plant kills the Rull, Jamieson allows the ezwal into their shuttle and flies the two of them to safety.

5: Jamieson returns the ezwal to Carson's Planet, vital as a base to the human war effort. As they part, the ezwal rejects Jamieson's request that the ezwals develop a mechanical civilization capable of fending off the Rull. Jamieson finds a similar intransigence in the human settlers, all of whom have had family members killed by ezwals, and who are angered by his suggestion that the planet be returned to its native species. One young woman tells him that Carson's Planet's habitable moon could be used as a base instead, and offers to take him to see it.

6-7: On Carson's Satellite, Barbara Whitman attempts to kill Jamieson, leaving them stranded in hostile wilderness. During the hike back to safety, Jamieson uses his wilderness-survival skills to obtain food for them and save them from a blood-sucking gryb. Several days later, his battleship finds and rescues them.

8-13: Jamieson had ordered a female ezwal and her cub to be taken to Earth. Damaged in battle, the ship carrying the ezwals crashes in Alaska; a crewman kills the mother ezwal, who kills him in turn before dying. The cub manages to escape and is pursued over the landscape by men who believe he is merely an animal. Jamieson arrives as the men are closing in and manages to convince the young ezwal that he needs to cooperate with humans in order to make them understand that ezwals are intelligent beings.

14-16: Jamieson is organizing a project on the planet Mira 23 to obtain a fluid from a native lifeform in order to create a bioweapon against the Rulls. Kidnaped by Rull agents, he is taken to Mira 23, where they plan to frame the project's leader for his murder. He is left in the forest for the planet's lethal fauna to kill him, but the Rull agents are killed by a menace they did not anticipate and Jamieson is rescued by the project's leader.

17-19: In Solar City on Earth, a giant spaceship is being built in a highly-secure facility known as the Yards. As is customary for the city's children, Jamieson's nine-year-old son Diddy leaves home to spend the night exploring the Yards, to find the source of an all-pervasive sound emanating from them. During the all-night quest, he is waylaid by Rull spies and saboteurs, who use him to gain access to sections of Yards supposedly protected from Rulls by the biological weapons obtained from Mira 23. With the aid of counterintelligence agents communicating with him telepathically via the ezwal cub, he lures the Rulls into a building in which they cannot use their organic weapons, and kills them all with a gun provided to him.

20: With the ezwal cub accompanying him, Jamieson goes to the planet Ploia to capture one of the natives. Made up entirely of electromagnetic fields, the Ploian sends electrical systems into a frenzy, so Jamieson must use purely mechanical devices to control his ship. Through the ezwal's telepathic ability, he makes contact with the Ploian, which agrees to help him in return for a promise to return it home.

21-25: Jamieson has gone directly from Ploia to Laertes III to make a preliminary survey of the planet as a base of operations against the Rull. A Rull survey boat disables his lifeboat but is itself shot down. Jamieson must then engage the Rull in a battle of wits for ten days. In that time, he manages to condition the Rull with a subconscious belief that the war is futile. At the end the Rull captures him, but the Ploian frees him and they go home in a Rull lifeboat. The Rull Jamieson confronted turns out to have been a Prime Leader of his species and does, indeed, move to de-escalate the conflict.

26: At an Earth university before the outbreak of the war, a Rull infiltrator works to retrieve a piece of lost Rull technology while also sabotaging experiments, murdering students, and generally sowing chaos and confusion, before departing the planet with a low opinion of humanity in general and college life in particular.

Continuity

In compiling his short magazine fiction into novel-length fixups, van Vogt often modified plots or transplanted protagonists to fit originally unrelated works into a single continuity; The War Against the Rull is highly characteristic in this regard, as three of the six constituent stories were (as initially published) wholly unrelated to the Rull series, and only two of the six had originally featured the novel's overall protagonist, Dr. Trevor Jamieson.

The oldest of the stories, 1940's "Repetition," had - in its initial form - contained no intelligent aliens at all, being set on the Jovian moon of Europa before humanity had ventured outside the Solar System, during a period of political tension between Earth and a human-colonized Mars. The 1959 rewrite moved the action to a satellite of the fictional Carsons's Planet, and replaced the original protagonist with Dr. Jamieson. (Van Vogt also forgot to remove the original story's references to Europa's colonial cities and mines, creating an inconsistency, as Carson's Satellite had earlier been specified to be uninhabited.)

The Rulls were introduced in "Co-Operate - Or Else!" (1942), where they served largely as a narrative device driving the story's primary plot: the human attempt to secure the cooperation of the ezwals, a non-technological species pretending to be non-sapient in an attempt to frustrate human colonization of their homeworld. The fixup version had only a few changes; it made the ezwal less murderous toward humans, but also altered the ending to make it definitively refuse to cooperate with them.

"The Second Solution" (also from 1942) only involved humans and ezwals. It was substantially expanded for the fixup, with more scenes of an ezwal dealing with Earth wildlife; the original protagonist, Dr. Jamieson's assistant Caleb Carson, was replaced with Jamieson himself.

The 1948 novella "The Rull" is the only component of the fixup in which a human and Rull actually confront each other directly, and is also the only one told partially from the Rull perspective, revealing them to be an extragalactic species whose own name for themselves is "Ria" and who believe themselves to be the perfect organism (all other intelligent life being therefore "unnecessary.") This story and "Co-Operate - Or Else!" describe the Rulls as bone-white, muscular, carnivorous worm-like beings who either slither or ambulate with the aid of with numerous suckers (which also serve as mouths), and a feeding habit which involves paralyzing large prey (including humans) before burrowing into a carcass and consuming it from the inside. They possess a very high metabolism, and a sufficient understanding of psychology to compel humans to commit suicide via hypnotic suggestions encoded into simple images. The fixup incorporated the Ploian alien from the preceding interpolation into the plot, and expanded the ending, promotin Dr. Jamieson to the equivalent of a secretary-general of the UN-like Galactic Convention.

The original versions of "The Green Forest" and "The Sound" (1949 and 1950) took place in an unrelated continuity, during a conflict between humanity and a very different enemy, the Yevds. Unlike the implacably hostile Rulls, the Yevds had previously exchanged ambassadors with humans, and were presently engaged in a relatively low-intensity territorial war with them. They were also physically quite unlike the Rulls, being tall, angular, and black, with many reticulated arms and legs. Incapable of hearing without mechanical assistance, they communicated via modulated light and had an organic, chameleon-like ability to project holographic disguises and fire energy blasts. (These qualities were partially transferred to the Rulls in the fixup, considerably altering their nature.)

The 1978 story "The First Rull" is a prequel describing the activities of a Rull infiltrator on Earth before the outbreak of the war. Its semi-satirical and sexually-frank tone is very different from the rest of the series.

Publication history

  • 1959, USA, Simon & Schuster, Pub date Sep 1959, Hardback (244 pp)[1]
  • 1959, USA, Simon & Schuster Science Fiction Book Club, Pub date Dec 1959, Hardback (192 pp)[1]
  • 1960, Italy, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore (Urania #238), Pub date Sep 1960, Paperback digest (128 pp), as Tutto bene a Carson Planet (All's Well on Carson's Planet)[1]
  • 1961, UK, Panther Books Ltd. (#1168), Pub date Feb 1961 (also Oct 1962), Paperback (156 pp)[1]
  • 1962, USA, Permabooks (#M-4263), Pub date Oct 1962, Paperback (187 pp)[1]
  • 1963, Germany, Heyne Verlag (Heyne Allgemeine Reihe #254), Pub date Oct 1963, Paperback (171 pp), as Der Krieg gegen die Rull (The War Against the Rull)[1]
  • 1963, France, Fleuve Noir (Fleuve Noir - Anticipation #223), Paperback (191 pp), as La guerre contre le Rull (The War Against the Rull)[1]
  • 1963, Spain, E.D.H.A.S.A. (Colección Nebulae #91), Paperback (264 pp), as La guerra contra los Rull (The War Against the Rull)[1]
  • 1965, Brazil, Livros do Brasil (Argonauta #91), Paperback (216 pp), as A Guerra Contra o Rull (The War Against the Rull)[1]
  • 1969, UK, Panther Books Ltd., ISBN 0-586-02800-5, Pub dates May 1969 (also 1970, Sep 1973, Sep 1975, and Jun 1978), Paperback (156 pp)[1]
  • 1970, USA, Ace Books (#87180), Pub date Feb 1970, Paperback (221 pp)[1]
  • 1970, Italy, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore (Urania #539), Pub date May 1970, Paperback digest (168 pp), as Tutto bene a Carson Planet (All's Well on Carson's Planet)[1]
  • 1972, USA, Ace Books (#871814), Pub date Nov 1972, Paperback (221 pp)[1]
  • 1972, France, J’ai Lu (J’ai Lu - Science Fiction #475), ISBN 2-277-12475-3, Pub dates 1972 (also Mar 1976, Oct 1978, Feb 1985, Jan 1989, and Mar 1992), Paperback (307 pp), as La guerre contre le Rull (The War Against the Rull)[1]
  • 1976, The Netherlands, Meulenhoff (M=SF #111), ISBN 90-290-0853-9, Paperback (497 pp), as Oorlog Tegen de Rull (War Against the Rull), along with Maanbeest (Moon Beast) and Het Gestolen Brein (The Stolen Brain)[1]
  • 1977, Italy, Editrice Nord (Cosmo Serie Oro. Classici della Narrativa di Fantascienza #26), Pub date Feb 1977, Hardback (x+228 pp), as La guerra contro i Rull (The War Against the Rull)[1]
  • 1977, USA, Ace Books, ISBN 0-441-87183-6, Pub date Aug 1977, Paperback (221 pp)[1]
  • 1979, Italy, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore (Millemondi #15), Pub date May 1979, Paperback (139 pp out of 432 pp), as Tutto bene a Carson Planet (All's Well on Carson's Planet), along with La casa senza tempo (The House That Stood Still) and Il cervello trappola (The Mind Cage)[1]

Reviews

The book was reviewed by

  • Damon Knight at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (Jan 1960)[1]
  • S. E. Cotts at Amazing Science Fiction Stories (Jan 1960)[1]
  • Frederik Pohl at If (May 1960)[1]
  • P. Schuyler Miller at Astounding/Analog Science Fact & Fiction (May 1960)[1]
  • Floyd C. Gale at Galaxy Magazine (Jun 1960)[2]
  • John T. Phillifent at Vector 11 (Spring 1961)[1]
  • P. Schuyler Miller at Analog Science Fact - Science Fiction (Jun 1963)[1]
  • Gérard Klein at Fiction #115 (1963, France)[1]
  • Charlie Brown at Locus #50 (1970 Mar 19)[1]
  • Bernard Blanc at Fiction #242 (1974, France)[1]
  • Lester del Rey at Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact (Jul 1978)[1]
  • Don Webb at The New York Review of Science Fiction (Nov 1999)[1]
  • Paul Di Filippo at Asimov's Science Fiction (Aug 2000)[1]

References


Sources

  • Clute, John. "van Vogt, A E." The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Eds. John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 12 May 2016. Web. 5 Aug. 2016. <http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/van_vogt_a_e>.
  • Holdstock, Robert, Ed., Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, London: Cathay Books, Pg. 107, ISBN 0-86178-186-4, 1978.
  • Tuck, Donald H. (1974). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Chicago: Advent. pg. 432. ISBN 0-911682-20-1.
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