Players of Ā

Players of Ā (original title: The Players off No one-HAVe ) is a Romance of Science-fiction, written in 1956 by A.E. van Vogt (Canada) and translated into French in 1957 by Boris Vian (France).

The title is generally written to the Players of Ā (sometimes Ã in certain older editions). Ā decides non-A . It is appeared with the Fantastic Ray (No 49) under the title the Adventures of Ā .

This novel, which belongs to the Cycle of Ā, is regarded as a major work of van Vogt. It has a continuation: End of Ā .

The novel is followed of a postface of the author.

Summary

A character with the exceptional capacities carries out a savage fight against a galactic empire which wishes to invade the Earth and to exterminate its inhabitants. This one will be complicated by an unknown entity having the capacity to sometimes incarnate the “spirit” of that one in its “proper body”, sometimes in that of a teenager attending the court of this hostile galactic empire.

Test

This novel is written at the time where van Vogt improves in general Sémantique. With proof, the author strews the novel with epigraph S which describes them results at which it arrived.

He publishes the Players of Ā of October 1948 in January 1949 in Astounding Stories . This novel takes another tangent, it is not a simple prolongation of its predecessor. Gilbert Gosseyn finally solved his existential problems and of personal safety. He discovered indeed his creator (to read the test in the article of the Monde of Ā ) and has the capacity of téléporter at will.

However, the period of lull is only temporary. The failure of the Venus invasion causes the war between the Greatest Empire and the galactic League. Venusian the non-A unites with the League, without however believing that the persons in charge of this one are mentally balanced. For its part, Gosseyn sees its “spirit” projected in the body of a prince coldly promoted at the imperial court of the Greatest Empire. He is only one queen in the play of someone else. He puts himself in the search of this cosmic player of failures whereas the weapons make hear their crash.

In the World of Ā , the search of identity is omnipresent. In the Players of Ā , it changes scale: what is concerned is the origin of humanity and, why not, that of the galaxy itself. In the first novel of the cycle, the author tries to build a rational psychology; in the second, a rational cosmology.

Gosseyn establishes a contact with a machine come from the distances borders of space, original source of the terrestrial life. The atheistic perception professed in the World of Ā reaches a new top.

This machine, partly broken, lost part of its memory, just like the control of the men whom it transported. “And the cosmic part of failures is the whole of the efforts made by the machine to find a repairer, to take again the control of the history men…” (Jacques Goimard, Doors of eternity , p. XLVII)

Principal characters of the novel: Crang, Enro Red, Gosseyn, Reesha and Secoh, just like the billion human which perished in the battles of the sixth decan, are only pawns in the play of this machine. Van Vogt wanted to say to us that, one day, the machines would dominate the human life?

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