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The War Against the Rull | 
 enlarge | Author: A. E. Van Vogt
Publisher: Tor Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.89
You Save: $6.06 (41%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  10 reviews
Sales Rank: 456685
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.8
ISBN: 0312852398
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780312852399
ASIN: 0312852398
Publication Date: August 1, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Expedited shipping is not available for this item. Items are mailed via USPS media mail within 2 business days and should arrive 4-14 business days later.
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Amazon.com
You might easily mistake a list of A.E. van Vogt's classic stories for the names of bygone rides in Disney's Tomorrowland: Empire of the Atom, Mission to the Stars, Two-hundred Million A.D., Project: Spaceship. This Nebula Grand Master, while still writing well into the 1980s, was a pioneer of sci-fi's golden age, an author that the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credits with creating--along with Heinlein and Asimov--"the first genuinely successful period of U.S. SF." A prolific contributor to such early mags as Thrilling Wonder, Startling Stories, and Astounding, van Vogt distinguished himself with his expert pacing, his mind-bending ideas, and--surprising in the starched-lab-coat 1940s--his serious access to weird. (Check out 1945's cult hit The World of Null-A as a prime example.) The War Against the Rull, assembled from five stories written for Astounding between 1940 and 1950, is classic, keep-you-guessing van Vogt, even if it doesn't quite qualify for must-read status like Null-A and Slan. Our hero is Trevor Jamieson, chief scientist of the Interstellar Military Commission, on the front lines of humanity's war with a shape-shifting race of insectoid aliens known as the Rull. Jamieson may have found the key to victory, but first he must simply survive--marooned on a wild, hostile planet with a 6,000-pound, blue-furred, six-legged, human-hating telepathic bear, Jamieson escapes only to find himself trapped days later in a meteor-carved cave with a woman who wants him dead, armed with only a knife and his wits against a blood-thirsty giant weasel that can claw through solid rock. --Paul Hughes
Product Description
When A.E. van Vogt wove several of his classic stories of The Rull into a novel, he created a work of enduring popularity in the science fiction field. Now back in print for the first time in the 1990s, this Tor edition includes "The First Rull," a story that postdates the novel and makes this book the first complete edition of the saga of the war between humanity and the alien shapechangers.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 5 more reviews...
 war against the rull April 1, 2008
The War Against the RullI first read the start of this series in the late 50's and now for the first time i am looking forword to reading the three of them in sequence as they were written. They are not famous for the most indepth plots or a ton of caracter development but they are entertaining and I think will be enjoyed by all except for the most critical.
Od School September 18, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In "The War Against the Rull", A.E. Van Vogt did for me in Sci Fi what Nathaniel Hawthorne did in his "Last of the Mohicans". The central character in each story is a man of courage who goes against societal norms to reach out to members of completely alien cultures, to save those he loves from a common enemy. Here, Trevor Jamieson encounters blind and unyielding hatred from fellow humans for the Ezwal, a creature whom only he knows may hold the secret to humanity's life-or-death struggle with the insectoid Rull, a struggle which until now they were losing. In dealing with this hatred, he teaches those humans with whom he works the necessity of overcoming their fears and prejudices, to build the kind of alliances that would save them. Van Vogt's book begins with Jamieson's efforts to link up with an extremely hostile and dangerous Ezwal, to survive being stranded on Eristan II, a planet inhabited by the most intensely feral life forms in the galaxy. His survival there, his close brush with asassination on Carson's Planet, and his enlistment of his young son in the struggle were all wonderfully enjoyable reading. Make no mistake, the technology in the story may be dated, but so what........ The courage, empathy, fierce determination, and vision are all character traits that are timeless. Now if only we could see this wonderful creature - the Ezwal - come alive in the movies................
Goose-bump city, after all these years. June 19, 2006
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
~
Van Vogt's greatest achievement, I think, was his remarkable emulation of
lucid dreaming -- or 'crazed oneiric intensity', as Paul di Filippo has
it. This was from his weird technique of breaking up the story into
500-word (or so) blocks, each with a new idea or paradigm. Perhaps the
crowning glory of this strange technique is the last "War Against the Rull"
story -- the one with the human and Rull champions, stranded on a high plateau.
Goose-bump city, after all these years.
Needless to say, this didn't always work... [Horrible example: "The
Silkie"].
But my candidate for Van's masterwork is "Enchanted Village", where he
eschews lucid dreaming in favor of an old fashioned, linear, absolutely
marvelous sense-of-wonder-full story. I've read this story at least a
dozen times, each time with pleasure.
And I love the Mixed Men stories (vt Mission to the Stars), with the
great interstellar storms, and Grand Captain Laurr, the Lady Laurr
of Noble Laurr... "Nova O, we call that brightest of all stars; and
there's only one in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, the great and
glorious S Doradus."
What a pity he fell for the Hubbard scientology bullshlt. But he wrote some
marvellous stories!
Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman
Should be a movie March 4, 2006
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have read this book several times and have always thought it should be turned into a movie. The possibilities for special effects, the characters, the story, etc. are about endless, and it IS a highly entertaining story too.
my favourite March 13, 2002
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
My favourite van vogt book. This is the book which got me hooked on to sci-fi. Exciting and gripping till the end.
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