Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/the-year-before-yesterday-by-brian-aldiss/

It is an intriguing book. The main framing narrative has the title “The Mannerheim Symphony”, and the narrator is a famous Finnish composer, in a Hitler-won-the-war universe, who discovers a dead young woman by the roadside and has to negotiate with his suspicious wife and a police detective who is possessed by a reindeer. So far, so weird.

In the dead woman’s belongings, he finds two short science fiction stories show more apparently written by her father, Jael Cracken, and reads them. The joke is that the two stories are in fact real Brian Aldiss stories from 1958 and 1965, and one of them was originally published under the pseudonym Jael Cracken.

The first, “The Impossible Smile”, has a telepathic protagonist trying to find allies and avoid enemies in a transitional dictatorial regime between England and the Moon. There’s a flavour of Alfred Bester about it, but it also has some very Aldiss twists.

The second, “Equator” (originally published as “Vanguard from Alpha”) has Earth dealing with immigration from humanoid aliens, mainly in a vividly depicted Sumatra. There are more chase scenes and a beautiful alien babe, and a memorable climax in a vast mechanical setting.

A lot of readers think that the whole thing is rubbish. I don’t; it’s a guilty pleasure for me, Aldiss returning to his early work and repurposing it for the needs of two or three decades later. The haunted police detective is a little jarring, but the composer trying to distract himself from his unfaithfulness to his wife by escaping into science fiction… well, let’s just say that Aldiss knew what he was writing about.

And there are some passages that I find very nicely done.

"The solar system progressed toward the unassailable summer star, Vega. The Earth-Moon system danced around the sun, host and parasite eternally hand-in-hand. The planet spun on its unimaginable axis. The oceans swilled forever uneasily in their shallow beds. Tides of multifarious life twitched across the continents. On a small island a man sat and hacked at the casing of a coconut." show less

Look at yourselves, Earth's peoples, Earthworks!
Look, look hard, and take a knife,
Carve yourself a conscience!

A short book, but one that packs quiet a punch and leaves the reader chewing over its ideas and implications long after its done. Brian Aldiss loves to dig and probe around the edges of one's most basic assumptions. The setting of this slim volume is a future where overpopulation, pollution and soil and resource exhaustion have devastated most of the planet, so that Europe, Asia and show more the Americas are sunk in poverty, illness and hunger, living out their lives in teeming cities. In this world, it is the African nations which still retain vitality and resources and which are the superpowers of the globe. Much like Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the African powers are hostile and jockey for power, but with the formation of an African Union, under the aegis of a great leader, whose leadership is ushering in an era of peace.

But, the question which is posed to the book's protagonist, Knowle Noland, is whether peace is such a great thing after all? Wouldn't a war, which would cull the world's population in nuclear fires, free millions of their misery and allow humanity to start again, leaving the survivors better off? Knowle gets caught up in an assassination plot put together by a group of cultists. Aldiss is in good form with this one, his writing is top notch, with some truly memorable and haunting sequences. The story is presented in the form of a narrative written years after the events chronicled by Knowle. Not only do we have an unreliable narrator, but one who is conscious of, and often discusses the limits and purposes of what he is writing in a world where few people know how to read. On top of this, Knowle is schizophrenic, and his accounts of some of his hallucinatory episodes are fascinating and tantalizing in that either they provide special insights into the world around him, or maybe that wisdom too is an illusion. Its fun trying to unpack the layers Aldiss throws in here.

Some of the ideas and extrapolations now may seem a little outdated, or not as startling as they were at the time this was written, but this is still a work well worth reading. show less

I don't understand why this book is so well regarded. It's not old enough for this to be a problem of time either. Written in the early 70s, Frankenstein Unbound doesn't work regardless of allowances made for age. The plot of the novel takes place in the year 2020 after a nuclear war has opened a rift in the space time continuum. Yeah, I'm serious. This rift has allowed the narrator to fall through time back to the age of Frankenstein and his creator Victor.

Except it actually takes him to a show more parallel universe, since these were fictional characters even in his world. Also, Mary Shelley is there and doesn't realize her book has come true, until the narrator tells her. She hasn't even finished writing it yet. They also have a short-lived romantic encounter. He also pawns his uranium powered watch in this era for cash. I mean, at some point, it just becomes silly. The science is junk and the plot can't overcome it. The narrator seems, to be frank, quite stupid and that isn't intentional. His reactions to events lack realism. The reaction of characters to him lack believability. If you are going to go play with classic characters and classic historical figures, you better know what you are doing. Aldiss had no clue in this novel. I just can't figure out why it is regarded so well. On some level, the Shelleys and Lord Byron actually weren't terrible in terms of characterization. It seemed like Aldiss wanted to write a novel about them, and was using the paper thin plot as a justification to do it. But it isn't worth diving into this whirlpool for a very tiny pearl.

Don't let this book ruin Aldiss for you though. Hothouse, while not perfect, is vastly superior and a must read. show less

An astonishing trilogy, best read, I suspect, in one big 1,000-plus paged lump as presented here. Helliconia is a formidable work. The timescale is vast, the themes are difficult, the human dramas, though full of intrigue and passion, battles and spectacle, are unashamedly literary in the demands placed on the reader. The trilogy, in fact, expects full intellectual and emotional engagement in order to fully appreciate the scale and complexity of Aldiss' achievement.

Helliconia is a planet show more with two suns and two years. The shorter years are over four hundred days long. The greater year takes milllenia. At one end of the great year the planet is shrouded in extreme cold, at the other in extreme heat. Civilisations rise and fall over the course of the year, only for the survivors to come forth again in the Spring and start all over again. Helliconia is an epic of climate change.

Vying for supremacy on the planet are two species, the phagor, who dominate in the cold time, and humans who dominate in the warmth. The two are profoundly hostile to each other, and yet fundamentally linked in the struggle to survive. Overhead is a research station from Earth, the Avernus, cataloguing and recording and transmitting its findings home.

Life persists, in abundant forms and varieties, though the processes are cruel and profligate with individuals, but the books chart the stories of individuals as they struggle with their strange world, trying to understand it or shape it or control it, often with plenty of cruelty of their own. Can the cycle be broken? Can memory and civilisation persist, and if so at what price?

The worlbuilding's the thing here. Designed, envisioned and delineated with great care and detail, Helliconia is alive on the page, but though marvelous and splendid and strange, it's more than a simple vehicle for escapist fantasy. It's a world in some ways even more circumscribed than our own, partly because of the strictures of the environment and partly because of humanity itself. It's a big, broad, shambling masterpiece. Every human is flawed, every venture doomed and the vast natural processes designed to preserve life are merciless and inscrutable, yet ultimately Aldiss unifies these elements into a vision of universal empathy in which intelligent life must adapt to to the natural vehicles that keep it alive. show less