Second paragraph of third chapter:
The narrator of the story is a science fiction writer living in Oxford. The writer is unnamed, but during the course of the story he mentions, familiarly, Jim Ballard, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, Mike Moorcock, and the author of a book called War with the Robots, which was a 1962 short story collection by Harry Harrison. This is the circle within which Oxford resident Brian Aldiss was moving at the time, so if not actually autobiographical, it certainly edges close to that territory.
This is quite a short book for such a long and significant career, but it’s a very good analysis of Aldiss’s work for those who already know it – I don’t think it would be, or is intended to be, a guide for the newcomer. Kincaid takes us through Aldiss’s life and writing, making the point that the key experience of his youth was his military service in Burma and what is now Indonesia, experiencing sexual freedom to an extent unthinkable in the 1940s England where he had grown up. He was born in 1925, so he was a very young soldier.
I’m a huge fan anyway – see my write-ups here of Complete Short Stories: the 1950s, Non-stop, The Primal Urge and Cryptozoic!, Greybeard, The Moment of Eclipse, The Comic Inferno, Frankenstein Unbound, Moreau’s Other Island, the Helliconia trilogy, The Year Before Yesterday, The Invention of Happiness, The Twinkling of an Eye, Jocasta and The Finches of Mars. I have basically read all of his novels published to 1990, and most of the short stories published up to that date.
In fact, I think I am a bigger fan than Paul Kincaid. He finds quite a lot to criticise about many of the earlier books, and basically I like them more than he does. I admit that The Malacia Tapestry and The Eighty-minute Hour are not Great Literature, but I find them lots of fun. Having said that, I appreciated the dispassionate analysis of why some work has stood the test of time better than others.
A related point that had not really occurred to me before is that although the Helliconia trilogy was published almost exactly half way through his writing career, very little of his subsequent fiction writing was up to the level of the first few decades. This is excusable. He had achieved a lot of what he wanted, with very early success, and could afford to write what he pleased, even if it didn’t please other people. But reading this made me feel more like revisiting the earlier work which I haven’t read for decades than searching out the later writing which I have not read at all. You can get Brian W. Aldiss here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next, if I can find it, is The Palgrave Handbook of Global Politics in the 22nd Century.
