The social concerns of The World of Null-A are at once sweeping and specific. In it, van Vogt indicts Western Civilization as insane. Before writing the novel, van Vogt had read and absorbed Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity (1933), which outlined the theory of "general semantics." In brief, Korzybski argues that for thousands of years people have made awful mistakes because they have mistaken imprecise words for precise ideas; their language and thought have conveyed views of an unreal world that has been confused for the real one. For instance, the word stone may be used to describe a multitude of individual rocks, but stone does not convey the idea that each object so described is different from all the others. Language implies that there are stones and not-stones. Korzybski called this a "two-valued doctrine" and associated it with Aristotelianism.

Failing to recognize that, as the character...