I participated in a great Brian Aldiss centenary panel at Novacon last weekend, with Caroline Mullan, Mark Plummer and Alan Stroud. There was a fair bit of “what did he do” and “what was he trying to do” but we had a fair bit of “what Aldiss should people read” as well, to which the answer is “Helliconia”. A request for a show of hands from anyone who actually understood Report on Probability A produced a sea of people looking around without putting their hands up.

Here we have one of his less celebrated mid-period novels. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

Directly I faced the Master, I felt some of those emotions—call them empathic if you will—which I have referred to as being unsusceptible to scientific method. Directly he spoke, I knew that in him, as in his creatures, aggression and fear were mixed. God gave me understanding.

Not one of the great Aldiss works, I’m afraid. Published in 1981, set during a global war in 1996, the narrator, who is the US Undersecretary of State, crashes on a Pacific island where the sinister Dr Dart, himself an embittered thalidomide victim, has been carrying on the tradition of H.G. Wells’ Dr Moreau by combining animal and humans through experimentation. Various other human exiles also live on the island.

It’s not so much a sequel to the original Wells novel, more an update to the present-ish day. There are a lot of traps about disability, race and gender to fall into here, and I’m sorry to say that Aldiss falls into pretty much all of them. I’m generally a huge Aldiss fan, but I would hesitate to recommend this even to completists.

I got the American edition, whose title is An Island Called Moreau; the original UK title, in homage to George Bernard Shaw, was Moreau’s Other Island. You can get it here.

This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is another short Aldiss novel, The Year Before Yesterday.