SOURCE: "Anecdotes and Self-Satire," in The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 6, No. 3, February, 1986, pp. 13-15.

[In the following analysis of The Pale Shadow of Science and Seasons in Flight, Herbert praises Aldiss's writing, which she characterizes as "exciting, mature, insightful, and filled with welcome surprises."]

Although one is nonfiction and the other a collection of short stories, Brian Aldiss' latest books will satisfy a common appetite. Both volumes offer a feast for those who have a taste for highly inventive language and a clever turn of phrase blended with clear prose that makes thought-provoking sense. Sometimes the fare is so delicious that one pictures Aldiss sitting before his typewriter smacking his lips at his own words.

Both Pale Shadow of Science and Seasons in Flight are anthologies representing recent work by the author of the Helliconia trilogy. The Pale Shadow of Science is a collection of essays while Seasons in Flight is a short-story anthology, but they are related by more than a flair for clear and clever writing. In both, the author shows himself to be adept at skewering all the things he cares about. His prey includes society, the human condition, the warlike nature of man, science fiction as Big Business, academe, and even himself. Whether it is an essay about the latest developments in science fiction or a story revealing a human foible, Aldiss always enlightens us about himself as a thinker.

Most interestingly, these new volumes shed light on Aldiss, both directly, in the autobiographical essays in The Pale Shadow of Science, and indirectly, through his comments on human nature embodied in his short stories. In the essays there are vignettes of Aldiss as a boy in the world of an English boarding school and as an adult on a troopship headed for India or in the hectic confines of a science-fiction convention. In the stories, boys and men function within very different worlds, but their reactions to the conditions of being human are universal.

Take, for example, a segment from an essay in The Pale Shadow of Science entitled "A Monster for All Seasons." This essay is central to the book because it combines personal anecdotes with self-satire and information about the development of science fiction with a wry comment on science fiction as it is today. The essay also shows Aldiss as the jester he is, juggling words and echoes of great literary phrases and titles with great agility and originality.

But first, a story. The scene is the main convention hall of a science fiction convention, New York, in 1975, Lunacon, held in the crumbling Commodore Hotel, New York, in 1975. Famous critic, fan, and collector, Sam Moskowitz, is holding forth from the platform. Fans are slouching around in the hall, sleeping, listening, or necking. I am sitting towards the back of the hall, conversing with a learned and attractive lady behind me or else gazing ahead, watching interestedly the way Moskowitz's lips move. In short, the usual hectic convention scene.

Fans who happen to be aware of my presence turn around occasionally to stare at me. I interpret these glances as the inescapable tributes of fame, and take care to look natural, though not undistinguished, and thoroughly absorbed in the speech.

Later, someone comes up to me and says, admiringly, "Gee, you were real cool while Moskowitz was attacking you."

That is how I gained my reputation for English sang froid (or snag froid, as my typewriter puts it). The acoustics in the hall were so appalling that I could not hear a word Moskowitz was saying against me.

It seems that Moskowitz was bewailing some of the judgments made by Aldiss in his literary history of science fiction, The Billion Year Spree (1973). In "A Monster for All Seasons," Aldiss discusses the book that took three years to complete.

I had no financial support, and was assisted by no seat of learning. I favored no clique. I used my own library. I consulted no one. Really, it was a bit of a gamble, since I have a wife and children to support by my writing.

It was also a labor of love.

I looked inward to the sf field itself and outward to the general reader, Samuel Johnson's and Virginia Woolf's common reader; I wished to argue against certain misconceptions which vexed me, and I hoped to demonstrate what those who did not read sf were missing.

Along the way, Aldiss discovered and discussed the progenitors of today's science fiction and provided definitions of science ficiton. Characteristically, he came up with two definitions, one for academics and others to chew upon—which they eagerly did—and one to savor:

Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge [science], and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.

And:

SF is about hubris clobbered by nemesis.

In its earliest days, and in the hands of Aldiss today, science fiction had a "stinging function," says Aldiss. It was concerned with spiritual isolation and with digging at society's ills. It attracted both satirist and thinker.

In "A Monster for All Seasons," Aldiss sees today's sf as all too often "fixed to suit mass taste." "Instant Whip" formulae are applied to sf producing a "blander product." And Aldiss sees a

fundamental ambivalence . . . towards science itself. Even technology-oriented authors like Arthur C. Clarke show science superceded by or transcended by mysticism and religion; such surely is the meaning of [Clarke's] most famous short story, "The Nine Billion Names of God." It is not science but the fulfillment of religion which brings about the termination of the universe. The world ends not with a bang but with a vesper.

Here is Aldiss at his best, serving up information that startles with its phrasing, something many academics who carefully study science fiction seem incapable of doing. In the same essay, Aldiss observes their appearance on the science fictional landscape, notes their limitations shrewdly, but treats them with kindness, just as he does many of his characters.

As we have already seen in the science fiction convention anecdote, Aldiss is gifted in telling nonfiction as a story. "Preparation for What?" is a recollection, told in almost Dickensian terms, of Aldiss' first, bleak boarding school experience. The headmaster was Mr. Fangby,

a smoothly porcine man with a thin nose and thinning hair swept and stuck back over a domelike head. I never really disliked him for much of the time, though it is hard to say why. His wife looked after their child and, when meals were over, Mr. Fangby could be seen doing the washing up and dolorously drying the dishes on an old baby's napkin.

Sunday was the day when the local lads triumphed, when our humiliation was greatest. For the fool Fangby, impelled to destruction by some folk myth of decent schools which he had never seen, made his boarders dress in Sunday best. This meant black pin-stripe trousers, black jackets, ties and Eton collars. Eton collars are wide and stiff, permitting the wearer about as much freedom and comfort as an ox gets from a yoke. In this loathed outfit, and with the addition of straw boaters, the twelve of us were made to march in crocodile five miles to Mundesley Church for the morning service.

What a rare show for the local lads. In their hobnails, cords, collarless shirts and braces, they would turn up and laugh or trip or kick us as we passed. It was a relief to arrive at the church.

But Aldiss and his peers were not always the underdogs. When a small Italian-Jewish boy was admitted to the school, the other boys had no pity on him and treated him cruelly. They teased him about his foreign clothes, stole his treasured belongings; "we excelled in being unpleasant," Aldiss recalls. "We made his life a misery. We made his every day a torment."

"Why did we do it? . . . Why had we no compassion? . . . Was it the a barbarity of the Anglo-Saxon way of life? Or was it something more basic, more cruel in human behavior?" Aldiss asks himself. "My remorse did not develop till some years later, when I started to comprehend the world from an adult viewpoint. Compassion springs from a position of some security."

But if one Aldiss story is to be believed, compassion may lead nowhere, even when it is offered from a position of security. "Incident in a Far Country" is one of ten stories told in a folkloric tone and style anthologized in Seasons of Flight The story tells of a privileged prince who had every skill and advantage life could offer, but had the strange desire to free his slaves. His sense of equality among men results in his own enslavement and the downfall of his kingdom. The slaves, having tasted power, demand more, and a neighboring kingdom, perceiving weakness in the prince's realm, greedily takes it over. The story is deceptively simple and enriched along the way with profound comments on human interaction. For example, a slave first awakens the prince's awareness of the slave's integrity by looking straight at his sovereign, a forbidden act in that society. "It was said afterwards that his look was one of defiance. The prince took it merely as a look of understanding. The astonishing fact is that, despite thousands of years of practice, men and women still do not comprehend each other's expressions."

Aldiss recognizes that despite countless lessons, human beings cannot control their warlike nature. "The Gods in Flight" is the story of a tourist haunt in the Southern Hemisphere. The last Northern visitors to arrive are refugees from the nuclear holocaust that they, as officers and politicians, have caused. And in "The Plain, the Endless Plain" ten generations base their society on ceaseless flight from an ancient, unknown, superior enemy.

In the finest story in Seasons in Flight, Aldiss uses understatement to move the reader. In "The Blue Background," a poor country boy finds himself drawn to the primitive, carved crucifix in a ruined church where no one worships. When a stranger arrives in the village to document the countryside photographically, the boy leads him to the crucifix. Years pass and the photographer is forgotten. The boy "grew to manhood and married . . . For a few weeks life for them was paradise; but the demands of toil eroded the edge of their happiness. There was no freedom from the fields. They became just another couple." The church crumbles, finally, in a rain storm, and, later, a large, impressive book of photographs arrives. The boy, now a man, looks at the image of the crucifix only briefly and returns to his toil in the fields with contempt for the photographer. "He had photographed the old timber figure, certainly. But his photograph was in sepia. It failed to capture the blue background, the glimpse of infinity, that Lajah had once loved, before life closed in."

Although life closes in on this character, for Aldiss life is not a trap but an endless supply of material to write about, wryly, bitingly, and movingly. His latest books prove that he has attained a mastery over a wide array of situaitons and ideas. Whether he writes literary criticism or autobiographical sketches, stories with a scope encompassing ten generations or the small, insignificant cares of one peasant, Aldiss' work is exciting, mature, insightful, and filled with welcome surprises.