he War Against the Rull is a novel that consists of seven
short stories, six of which originally appeared in Astounding
Science Fiction Magazine between 1940 and 1950. The seventh
and final story was originally published in 1978, in the
collection Pendulum.
The stories trace humanity's battle with the Rull, a
belligerent race of alien shapechangers who have the ability to
manipulate light. In the first section, scientist Trevor
Jamieson is trapped on the planet Eristan II with an ezwal, a
huge, telepathic, six-limbed creature from Carson's Planet.
Jamieson has discovered that ezwals are intelligent, a fact
they've been trying to hide from humans in order to prevent their
world from being colonized. The ezwal is determined to kill
Jamieson to protect the secret. The stakes are raised when a
Rull warship lands nearby, and the ezwal decides to give Jamieson
to them. Instead, Jamieson ends up rescuing the ezwal and returning him
to Carson's Planet. But the human military council on Carson's is
not willing to start treating the ezwals as sentient beings.
They concoct a plan to kill Jamieson to prevent him from spreading his
message. Instead he turns the tables again and saves the life of the woman chosen for the job.
On Earth, shape-changing Rulls, disguised as humans, have
infiltrated the military. The military creates increasingly
sophisticated methods of detecting Rulls, but security breaches
continue. Humanity is being overrun. Jamieson sets
about trying to convince the military machine that the ezwals'
telepathy will be useful in the battle against the Rull.
There's only one problem, which Jamieson is keeping quiet about: ezwals
cannot read the minds of Rull beings. While Jamieson is battling
the bureacracy, Rulls capture his nine-year-old son. Does
Jamieson have a plan to save his child, much
less the whole human race?
"Ah, careless, rapturous van Vogt!" --Barry N. Malzberg
The War Against the Rull clearly displays its pulp SF
roots. Energetic and inventive (though not particularly grounded
in science), it's a microcosm of the attitudes of the American
'50s. The jungle of Eristan II is "repellent" and "treacherous," and fauna are "monstrous things...mewing and slavering in feral
desire." Because the ezwals are unwilling to be subject to a
human agenda, Jamieson judges them too primitive for true
intelligence. They and other races are confined without their
permission and treated as clever helpmeets. A woman who acts
decisively is said to be displaying an "unfeminine firmness." The
"wormlike" bodies of the Rull are described with revulsion.
It's a worldview that's at base xenophobic and misogynist.
But a good artist matures; The War Against the Rull
illustrates that. Because it spans 38 years, it's possible--and
fascinating--to see attitude shifts. Even in the earlier
stories, women are active in positions of authority, which was somewhat
revolutionary for fiction of the '40s. Jamieson treats
ezwals much more like equals by the second encounter with them.
By the middle of the novel, the Rulls, though enemies, are
described as brave fighters.
As is inevitable though, Van Vogt's writing continued to
mirror his society; the final story, set on a university campus
in the '70s, describes a female commune member whose male
"leader" has instructed her to have sex with their physics
professor so that the whole commune gets A's. The bizarre notion
of what a commune is was perhaps colored by media hype about
"free love" and by the Charles Manson gang, whose killings were
still fresh in everyone's minds at the time of the story's publication.
This Orb edition of Rull is the first time that all the Rull stories
have been collected in one volume. It's a valuable artifact by a
prolific writer who challenged himself continually, and who also
wrote Slan, the classic SF novel about racial hatred.
