My usual approach to excerpting fails with this book for reasons that I’ll explain, so I’m taking the attitude that, contra the old saying, more is more.
Second paragraph of third chapter of “The Mannerheim Symphony”:
Should I go on with it? Would Sinnikka hate me if she knew I was reading something so far below her ideals? Would she not rather that I was undergoing torture?
Second paragraph of third chapter of “The Impossible Smile”:
Sweat stood out on his forehead, like grease on a bit of dirty vellum. As he spoke, he held a beaker of bitter-tasting liquid to Wyvern’s lips, letting it slop down his chin while he concentrated on what he was saying. With the sense of urgency harrying him, he had not unlocked the bands around Wyvern’s throat and ankles; but instead of standing over him, he now knelt before him.
Second paragraph of third chapter of “Equator”:
Rain pelted down his neck. His light tropical suit would be soaked in no time. A taxi slowly overtook him, splashing his legs.
I picked this up in excitement at Eastercon in 2022, glad to find a Brian Aldiss book that I had not already read – and then realised that in fact I knew it under its other title, Cracken at Critical, and had read and lost a copy, soon after its original 1987 publication.
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 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.
You can get The Year Before Yesterday, as Cracken at Critical, here.
This was the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next is Yet More Penguin Science Fiction, edited by one Brian W. Aldiss.
