The Egoist on Non-Aristotelian Venus by Dr Lauren Kair PsD
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| Thanks to Live Science |
Author: Dr Lauren Kair PsD
Publisher: Not known
Source book: The World of Null-A by AE Van Vogt
I have read The World of Null-A several times but still have very little idea what it’s actually about. My brain doesn’t seem to be built for philosophy so the obsession with Aristotelian versus Non-Aristotelian completely passes me by. The SF part of the plot makes a whole lot more sense.
After apparently being shot to death on Earth, Gilbert Gosseyn wakes up on Venus, oddly wearing different clothes. A roboplane, an Agent of the Games Machine that seems to control everything, takes him from the house of a John and Amelia Prescott, to the forest house of Eldred Crang, which is inside a giant tree. No one is home, and after a bit of snooping around he picks a book from the shelves in the living room. He reads The Aristotelian and Non-Aristotelian History of Venus.
It told the story of the first men to walk on Venus in the late twentieth century. It described how the boiling hell of that atmosphere was tamed as early as the first quarter of the twenty-first century, of how ice meteorites from Jupiter were coasted into a close orbit around Venus, and of how as a result it rained for thousands of days and nights.
The ice meteorites ranged in size from ten to a hundred cubic miles; and when they had melted their huge volume of water down on the surface, and into the atmosphere, Venus had oceans and oxygen in its atmosphere. By 2081 the Institute of General Semantics, just then entering its governmental phase, realised the null-A potentialities of the bountiful planet. By this time, transported trees and other plants were growing madly. The Machine method of selecting colonists came a hundred years or so later, and the greatest selective emigration plan in the history of man began to gather momentum.
The book said the population of Venus as of 2560 was 119,000,38 males and 120,143,280 females. What a strange way to phrase it.
Gosseyn took The Egoist on Non-Aristotelian Venus to bed with him. A note in the frontispiece explained that Dr Lauren Kair, the author, would be practicing on Earth in the city of the Machine from 2559 to 2564. Gosseyn started reading a chapter titled Physical Injuries and their Effects on the Ego.
Also on the bookshelf were The Machine and Its Builders, and Detectives in a World Without Criminals.
The World of Null-A was written in 1948. SF writers were very optimistic back then.
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| Venus by National Geographic |
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