Brian Aldiss, Enemies of the System

Still talking about 1979 awards…

Brian Aldiss, by the point we’re up to now, has been a figure in the science fiction firmament for two decades. At this point, he was probably more praised for his non-fiction efforts than his fiction, although he had some notable successes in the latter (his series The Long Afternoon of Earth, which had won a Hugo in 1962, were a credible effort to think about the world in the far, far future, and the Saliva Tree reminded me of Christopher Priest in its almost Wellsian attempt to cross the classic pace of tweedy British moderation with the archetypal themes of science fiction – alien landfall and the like). Tone was always a great gift of Aldiss’s. It’s not surprising, given that, that his other gifts as a historian and a biographer came out strongly in the Seventies. The Billion Year Spree, along with Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell, were two of the early excellent efforts to take science fiction seriously, though Aldiss’s insistence on focusing on the long background to science fiction, especially in British literature of the previous century and a half, struck me (and not only me) as a bit of bending over backwards to prove the bona fides of the medium at the expense of a clearly great intellect’s view of the current literary scene. Hell’s Cartographers (note the debt to Amis) is never less than absorbing, though Aldiss functions mostly as editor.

Enemies of the System – I read the novel version, expanded from the Hugo nominated novella, so there may be some changes – mostly focuses on the question of ideological orthodoxy: something that feels very Cold War-like, though hardly in the way that so many of the nuclear apocalyptic fictions do today. Instead, it treats the question of whether, once an ideological approach like Communism has so fully saturated a society that groupthink is just the order of the day, there is the possibility, given traumatic encounters with new circumstance (like, say, being stranded on a hostile planet), new ideas will be allowed to compete. Aldiss is, in the end, guardedly optimistic, I’d say, though the novel isn’t. But it’s hard to imagine a science fiction novelist not engaged by the subversive power of ideas.

Tags: Brian Aldiss, hugo awards, science fiction