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GMRC Review: White Mars by Brian Aldiss
Guest Blogger and WWEnd member, valashain, reviews science fiction and fantasy books on his blog Val’s Random Comments which we featured in a previous post: Five SF/F Book Blogs Worth Reading. Val has posted many great reviews to WWEnd and this is his eighth for the GMRC. Be sure to visit his site and let him know you found him here.
While rereading Kim Stanley Robinson‘s Mars Trilogy, books I consider to be among the very best in science fiction, I came across various references to White Mars Or, The Mind Set Free by Brian W. Aldiss, written in collaboration with prominent physicists Roger Penrose. Robinson’s utopian vision of a terraformed Red Planet is not something everybody would see as ideal or even morally acceptable. In the Mars Trilogy Robinson pays a lot of attention to the discussion between what he calls the Reds, a faction opposed to terraforming the planet and convinced of its intrinsic value, and the Green faction who would exploit the planet and make it more hospitable to human life. Aldiss (and Penrose) wrote this novel as a reply to Robinson’s vision of utopia portrayed in his Mars novels. The debate about how to set up a utopian society on Mars is the single most important topic in this book. As a nod to his source of inspiration, Robinson even had a street named after him. As far as I can tell White Mars is out of print, I had a hard time tracking down a useful copy without resorting to the countless torrents out there. After having read it, I can’t say I am terribly surprised by the relative obscurity of this book. The philosophical argument may be sound, as a work of literature Robinson’s novels are far superior.
Since this novel is a reply to Robinson’s work I find it very difficult not to see it in the light of the Mars Trilogy. In fact, when I first heard about the novel I questioned the wisdom of trying to cover ground Robinson had already so thoroughly explored. No matter how unfair it may be to compare books of different authors to each other, this novel practically begs for it. I’m not sure how much sense this review will make if you have not read Robinson’s novels. You have been warned.
GMRC Review: Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss
Long time WWEnd member and Uber User, Emil Jung, is an obsessive SF/F reader and as such he’s become a huge supporter of WWEnd. (We often refer to him as our “South African Bureau.”) Besides hanging out here, Emil writes poetry on his blog emiljung.posterous.com. This is the fifth of Emil’s GMRC reviews to feature in our blog.
In the late 1960s Brian W. Aldiss became known as part of the New Wave in British science fiction, along with J. G. Ballard, whose The Drowned World shares some common themes with Hothouse. He remains a major voice in SF, and his history of the genre, Billion Year Spree, is still referred to by literary critics and fans alike. A fascinating observation is that almost all of his novels are narratives of exploration in one way or another, with the possibility of personal enlightenment open to the protagonists. Hothouse is no different.
What is today known as a full-length novel was first published in 1962 as various short stories. It was only in 1976 that the novel was published in its entirety. It is often referred to in blurbs on the various editions as “The Hugo Award winning novel,” but a close scrutiny of the Hugo Award winning novels reveals no such entry. That’s because the five stories that make up the novel, as a collection, won the 1962 Hugo Award for best short fiction, published in the following sequence in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, from February to December 1961:
GMRC Review: Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss
Guest Blogger and WWEnd Member, Matt W. (Mattastrophic), reviews science fiction and fantasy books on his blog Strange Telemetry. Matt is a regular WWEnd contributor and he won the January GMRC Review of the Month for his review of The Dispossessed.
Published in 1958, Non-Stop (a.k.a. Starship in the UK printing) was Brian Aldiss’ first novel, and it uses as its central conceit that well-trodden SF trope, the generation ship. These are enormous, self-sustaining star-ships that can house and support multiple generations of humans living within them as the ship makes its slow way from one star to another. Only the first generation will know Earth, and only the last ones will know their destination; the middle generations will know only the ship. Barring faster-than-light travel or some form of suspended animation, this is the only way for humans to effect interstellar travel. The idea was posited in the late 1920′s/early 1930′s, and has appeared often throughout SF, and 2009′s Pandorum and Mary Robinnette Kowal’s 2011 Hugo-Award-winning short story “For Want of a Nail” (a very good story, I might add), show that there is still traction and interest in this well-worn trope. Of course, the ubiquitous element of the generation star-ship sub-genre is that something goes terribly wrong during the voyage. In the early 1940′s, Heinlein published two stories (later collected into Orphans of the Sky) about a generation starship in which the middle generations of the generation ship have forgotten that they are on a starship, since it is the only world they know, causing shipboard society to erode into a more primitive, superstitious state. Aldiss, loved the concept, but disliked Heinlein’s execution, and Non-Stop is his response.
The story follows Roy Complain, a hunter for the nomadic Greene Tribe that crawls its way through the vine-filled decks and hallways, slashing the ‘ponics, looting the rooms they come across, and leaving nothing useful in their wake to dissuade competitors. Roy has prospects, and life seems pretty decent: the tribe eats well, everyone adheres to the religion of Psychology, and he has hopes of being elevated from hunter to guard (giving him access the prime loot). But then his mate bugs him to come on a hunting trip with him, and she is captured by a neighboring tribe. Shamed and angry, Complain questions his place in the tribe and the tribe’s place in the grand scheme of things and so joins a renegade Priest named Marapper along with a handful of Greene tribesman on a wild adventure through unexplored corridors. Their goal is to find the fabled civilization of Forwards, and eventually the Captain of the ship. Of course, Roy doesn’t believe that his world is really a ship, but strange things happen along the way that shake his beliefs in who he is, why he is there, and who he can trust.
Non Stop Adventure: What Non-Stop Does Well
Non-Stop really doesn’t stop; it’s a brisk novel that rarely drags, which works both for and against the narrative. This pace benefits the narrative in that it keeps things interesting by keeping them moving: you can count on something new always lurking just around the bend. There is plenty of action, particularly towards the end, where the novel takes on a frenzied pace and bulls it’s way to the final conceptual breakthrough or revelation.
Actually, knowing that they are on a generation ship is a revelation Roy has later on and thus a kind of minor spoiler (sorry, dear readers), but A) that twist is general knowledge in regards to this novel and B) Aldiss includes plenty of other big surprises that make what happened to the ship just as interesting as what it is, if not more so. The characters know some things about the ship and the artifacts they find, but many truths about their environment have been lost to time and strife among the survivors. It’s interesting to note “the givens,” which are the things that the characters take for granted about their surroundings and how they interact with it. No one sees anything wrong in the hydroponically-grown plants that have burst their confines and overtaken most of the ship. The regularity of their environment (decks, doorways, overhead lighting) is seen as a part of nature. Indeed, when one character finally sees a real sun, he remarks that he expected it to be square just like a giant version of one of the lights within the ship. Aldiss paints a fairly restrictive, claustrophobic picture of life on the ship throughout the novel, which adds nicely to the sense of menace and paranoia built into the plot. I think I might wig out and run amok (which some characters do) due to the unceasing regularity of the environment only broken up by the thick, choking vines. The star-ship is a familiar, orderly setting that is defamiliarized and rendered strange in Aldiss’ work.
The early part of the novel has the strongest sociological speculation in it which, sadly, the story moved away from it fairly quickly to keep things moving. The way the Greene tribe is organized, the rituals and social structures they have developed, were very interesting to me as it illustrated how the people of the ship have adapted to their environment and to the needs of survival while maintaining a semblance of sanity and happiness. For example, children are weaned away from parents and siblings very early, partly, I expect, due to the ersatz religion of psychology (which enshrines consciousness as defined by Freud and Jung) but also to dissuade large families and keep the population manageable. Men don’t meet each other’s eyes, and the common greeting is “Expansion to your Ego,” with the response being “at your expense,” as an explicit albeit civil representation of the psychological power games of respect and abasement we all play. It was interesting and I had hoped for more, but for what it was I enjoyed it.
The characters held a lot of promise in the beginning for me. Roy Complain ultimately reads like a a violent, fairly unremarkable, knuckle-dragging hunter/warrior, but early on he piqued my interest with his encroaching existential crisis: why am I here, why are we here, who are we, what is this place, really? His band of adventurers seemed like a nice mix as well: the uptight Valuer (merchant/trader), the twitchy warrior, the secretive storyteller, and, most intriguing of all, the power-hungry and opportunistic priest Marapper. Marapper is a great character to love and hate: he is devious, backstabbing, dishonest, and alternately self-aggrandizing and self-abasing (whichever benefits him most at the moment).
Overall, what I enjoyed most from this novel was the growing sense of claustrophobia and menace that underlies the exploration of this familiar setting (the starship) rendered strange through the characters’ limited understanding of their environment. This ominous atmosphere was at its prime when the non-human creatures start to appear, some of which really creeped me out (I have a problem with moths, so moths with psychic powers in a confined, claustrophobic space makes me feel uncomfortable to say the least). The action and revelations kept a brisk pace and didn’t let things drag much, and early on in particular the ways in which Complain wrestles with the outward pressures of the tribe and the inward pressures compelling him to leave and discover what is really going on were palpable and helped me sympathize with him a great deal.
Complaints for Complain: Where Non-Stop Could Have Been Better
I found myself frequently frustrated at the inconsistencies in the book’s sociological/phenomenological perspective. To provide an example, early on in the book, Marapper reads aloud from a technical manual he found and Roy doesn’t understand much of what he is hearing (he only knows the syllables), but later Roy and his love interest read through the Captain’s diary without linguistic difficulty even though they are separated from the author by many, many societal decay generations. Which is it, can they read or not? Also, Aldiss frequently uses contemporary cliches or turns of phrase that are way too out of place for the third-person limited perspective of Roy Complain. The best articulation I found of this was from a review on the website Geek Chocolate:
While not unintelligent, the tribes are most certainly uneducated, and told from Complain’s point of view, the novel should reflect this, yet the reader’s vicarious rendering is described using vocabulary that would be beyond his comprehension. “The tight spiralling traced by the rifling in the barrel” would be meaningless to him, as the only projectile weapon the tribes have is bow and arrow, and he is likely similarly ignorant of ancient Greek musical notation, yet apparently the atmospheric systems sound “like a proslambanomenos implementing a sustained chord.”
Aldiss’ writing is good and heart-wrenching in places, but in a novel of this type–where one culture is encountering another that is significantly different and more advanced–the writing should reflect the phenomenological experience of the characters. For example, we know its just a swimming pool, but to Roy–who hasn’t seen so much water before–it’s an awe-inspiring ocean, and the narrative should help us experience that with Roy. It does in places, but inconsistencies in the tribes’ level of education and technological understanding, and Aldiss’ use of contemporary cliches and turns-of-phrase, pulled me out of the experience of encountering the mystery of the ship as the characters perceive it. This made me feel like the worldbuilding–the construction of the world as the characters understood it–was only half done, or that Aldiss was defeating himself in trying to evoke the strange with familiar, contemporary narrative devices.
While I had great enthusiasm for the characters in the beginning, by the end I felt that characterization in this book was fairly flat, which may be the effect of the non-stop, briskly-paced narrative. Roy seems primed to under go some kind of change as his worldviews (literally) are challenged, but he basically remains a predictable, short-tempered hunter-warrior throughout. Aldiss tries to signal a change in Roy that I either didn’t get or that didn’t feel warranted by the narrative. There is one moment when the whole ship is going ape that his love interest, Vyann, reflects that at least he is keeping his humanity and is changing into some kind of better person… at the same moment that Roy, elsewhere, is beating and threatening someone to compel his cooperation. He didn’t change all that much, and thus the character arc was pretty flat and forced if anything. Perhaps this is because the narrative can’t stop to contemplate these changes in more depth and detail, so characters kind of remain in given archetypes. Roy’s love interest, Vyann, begins as a cold, calculating woman who represents the more civilized, advanced people of the Forwards section of the ship, but she melts like butter for Roy. Once again, to quote the review on Geek Chocoloate (because I can’t say it any better): “Laur Vyann, representing the more advanced Forwards section, [is] cold and efficient, yet apparently waiting for the right inbred knuckle-dragger from the rear section of the ship to shamble along and unleash the woman within.” This is a very typical example of the “male gaze,” but one that renders a strong, seemingly complex female character into a simple damsel. By the end, only Marrapper with his barely-contained egoism and opportunism remained interesting to me.
The brisk pace of the plot doesn’t only harm characterization, however, as overall plot structure suffers as well. The plot is facilitated by a series of lucky breaks or coincidental revelations that help drive the action and, after a while, felt fairly contrived. The novel moves quickly enough though that it didn’t bother me much as long as I didn’t think about it much, but there were several plot elements that didn’t feel resolved. The big find of the Captain’s diary is just a big data dump that isn’t adequately explored, the threat of the belligerent non-humans doesn’t go beyond being a nuisance, and the conclusion itself feels rather abrupt.
Concluding Thoughts
Despite it’s flaws, I can see why Non-Stop was re-printed in the SF Masterworks series. While the world-building felt inconsistent and the characters half done, Non-Stop is still enjoyable since it maintains a brisk pace, has plenty of action, keeps the discoveries rolling, and houses it all in a menacing but intriguing environment of the starship-turned-wilderness. It’s an interesting exemplar of how sociological concerns play into the generation ship narrative and indeed into all space exploration stories.
GMRC Review: Helliconia Spring by Brian Aldiss
Editor’s Note: Rhonda Knight is a frequent contributor to WWEnd through her excellent blog series Automata 101 and her new series Outside the Norm. This is Rhonda’s second featured review for the Grand Master Reading Challenge.
Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia Spring has been on my reading list for a long time. I was intrigued by the premise: a planet in a binary system whose long year, or the journey around the brighter, further sun, takes about 2600 Earth years. This means that each change of season is the first that the population has ever seen and seems cataclysmic in a world without any records. This book tells the story of the planet Helliconia as it moves from a world of snow, cold and isolation to a world of warmth, growth, and expansion.
In my opinion, the story does not live up to the premise Aldiss presents. The edition of the novel I read was about 430 pages long. I only became interested in the story around page 230, and unfortunately, I never really became interested in any of the characters, who are generally one-dimensional and whose actions often seem random rather than a part of any greater motivation.
Besides the “human” civilizations on the planet, there are the phagors and Earth humans who observe the planet from above on space station Avernus. He creates the phagors as mankind’s enemy. The phagors are an intelligent type of biped, who evolved separately from the humans. Their society consists of nomadic “herds” that ride on their own domesticated animals. The people on the planet are under continual threat from them. The Earth humans are only watchers. Their observations are beamed to Earth where the activities of Helliconia have become a type of reality show. Earth’s residents, one thousand years in Helliconia’s future, attend public theaters to watch. During the first two-thirds of the book (when the readers are not told about the broadcast function of the space station), the Avernus parts seem disruptive. Only at the end do these Avernus sections add anything to the story. However, Aldiss does not explore the interesting implications that come with the Avernians’ knowledge nor the impact of this reality television back on Earth.
As I read, I starting giving Aldiss the same advice that I give my students when they write academic papers: (1) show, don’t tell; (2) don’t be afraid to cut; and (3) develop your ideas. The first ninety pages of the novel could really benefit from this advice. This section is a prologue of Yuli, the founder of the town that Aldiss will feature in the second part of the novel. Yuli’s adventures are often reported rather than shown. And, in at least one of these reports, Aldiss creates a plot hole that was hard for me to overcome. Yuli’s connection to the latter part of the novel is tangential, and I’m not the only reviewer who has wondered if this part was even necessary.
Aldiss’ strength appears in his ideas that demonstrate how the ecology and the economy of the planet awake. He traces the society of Embruddock’s movement from stationary hunter-gatherers to agrarians to a type of medieval village economy, with the development of bridges, mills and money. The moves that he makes using alien flora and fauna are interesting, but I wish that he’d spent more time showing us how these accomplishments come about. However, it is hard to believe that the community of Embruddock can move from hunter-gathers to medieval tradesmen during one lifetime—no matter how fast the world’s ecology is changing. In the end, Aldiss weaves an interesting symbiosis between the microbes, flora, fauna, and the civilizations on the planet. Unfortunately, this intriguing idea about the symbiosis came too late to make me like the book. I wish the whole book had been dedicated to a clear development of that idea.
Looking at the reading stats in WWEnd, I see that only a few of the members who read Helliconia Spring continued reading Helliconia Summer and Helliconia Winter. Unfortunately, I will be one of those readers who will not finish the series.
GMRC Review: Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
WWEnd member Fred Van Patten got his first GMRC review in just under the wire! Fred is not just a fan of SF/F/H. He’s one of those lucky few who are living the dream of running his own bookstore. If you get up Ohio way stop in and see him at Backlist Books. Tell him you found him on WWEnd.
Hothouse was Brian Aldiss‘ fourth or fifth published novel, and originally appeared as a group of short stories in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The short stories were collectively given the 1962 short fiction Hugo. The book was instrumental in the creation of the role playing game Gamma World, a post-apocalyptic version of Dungeons & Dragons.
The U.S. original version was an abridged version – I actually read the most recent printing by IDW press which I believe preserved the full text of the original U.K. hardcover, albeit with many of the typographical errors so common to modern reprints.
I don’t know what the changes in the U.S. version are, but for 1962, this story has a pretty high level of sexual frankness that was certainly unusual, and probably controversial at the time. The story is so strange, that it will make any plot summary seem ludicrous – but here goes, briefly.
In the far future the earth has stopped rotating, and the side facing the sun has mutated into an enormous jungle. Human beings have devolved into small monkey, or even smaller, sized creatures. Some of the humans ride a mile-long worm to the moon, grow wings, and hatch a plan to bring other humans to the moon. The main character escapes the worm trip, and instead has his brain invaded by a telepathic mushroom that commands him to roam the earth. Eventually they meet up with a talking dolphin that is taken over by the morel also. They hatch a plan to ride the worm to a new planet. The main character, Gren, decides to stay on earth, as the sun is not supposed to go supernova for several generations to come.
This work is highly comparable to J. G. Ballard‘s The Drowning World. Both involve a future heated world with runaway plant and animal growth, and human de-evolution under psychological stress. They differ in that Ballard’s work depicts as few science fiction elements as possible, whereas Aldiss throws in every hashish-laden LSD acid trip idea that ever wafted by. Somewhere out there an enterprising English major is going to use $150,000 of student loan money to write a masters’ thesis contrasting the two with our very own, very "warmed" current world.
Hopefully I can save the taxpayers some money, by merely stating "yes". An out of control climate will result in some major psychological changes—which are happening now. See Katrina for some rather Ballardian encounters, and see Detroit for some Aldiss-style plant revenge.
I can heartily recommend this book as a classic of the genre – it is a thematically complicated work I have just scratched the surface of here, and fully deserves its placement on Pringle’s top 100 list.
Brian Aldiss 85th Birthday Celebration
Tim Aldiss, son of famed SF Grandmaster Brian Aldiss, wrote to WWEnd today asking if we would help spread the word about a project he and his siblings are working on to celebrate Brian Aldiss’ 85th birthday. Here’s what Tim had to say about the project and how you can get involved.
Despite having recently missed out on the Lost Man Booker Prize award, Brian Aldiss has something else to celebrate this year – he turns 85.
I am his second son Tim and I have been invited to contribute to the great Worlds Without End blog to say a little about my father and to tell you of a project that my siblings and I have set up in honour of his birthday this August.
Despite his mature years dad still has all his faculties. He lives independently in Old Headington, Oxford, and still puts pen to paper and outputs his unique brand of creative writing. In fact it has been hard to persuade him to take his foot of the gas and relax more in his mature years. Nevertheless our family and that wide circle of friends and acquaintances that he still keeps contact with are party to a very special view on the world, and a unique vision that is still crystal clear.
Growing up with such an amazing visionary was a great excitement. My formulative years coincided with Dad’s 8 year creation of the Helliconia trilogy. There were relief maps, and models, globes, and planet registration forms, and the whole family came along for the odd imaginary ride on a fagor! But it was our many trips to Science Fiction conventions that particularly captured my imagination as a boy growing up.
I now reside in Brighton, on the south coast of the UK, and it was the 37th World Science Fiction Convention that brought me to Brighton for the first time. I remember my stay in the then Metropole Hotel on the seafront well. I met so many of the greats – Arthur C Clarke, JG Ballard et al. I’ve still got Christopher Reeve’s signature! I saw Hawkind play live! (actually that was the 45th Worldcon some years later at the Brighton Centre). They were heady days staying in the guest of honour suite, and being too young to fully appreciate the amazing fancy dress parades that happened back then!
There are so many amazing memories to share and re-live, and this presented a dilemma when the family recently got together at Easter and discussed Dad’s pending 85th birthday celebrations. What we decided is that we wanted to try and do something that hadn’t been done before. Brian’s late wife, my mother Margaret, organised a publication for him on his seventy fifth entitled A is For Brian, and there is no way we were going to be able to compete with her amazing venture. So we decided to try and reach out to new readers of his work – those who have recently discovered him – and ask them how they find his visionary writing, and whether they would like to contribute comments.
We have set up a Facebook page to facilitate this. All comments left will be collated and projected at a gallery where we are showing a collection of Brian’s artworks in Oxford for the week of his birthday in August. Take a look, and if you have anything you’d like to share (whether you are a new reader, or an old one) please do feel free to contribute and spread the word.
Happy Birthday Grand Master 🙂
Tim Aldiss
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=120586967951630&ref=ts
Thanks, Tim, for letting us in on the party and thank you Brian for so many great stories.
So, if you’ve ever read Brian Aldiss take a minute to check out the site Tim has set up and share your experience with the Aldiss family. Help us spread the word by passing this along to your friends.
