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RIP Brian W. Aldiss


Werthead

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Brian W. Aldiss, one of the titans of science fiction, has died aged 92.

Aldiss was born in 1925, fought in WW2 and was drinking buddies with Kingsley Amis and J.G. Ballard, as well as exchanging letters for many years with Tolkien and Lewis.

As far as his work goes, Non-StopHothouse and the magisterial Helliconia Trilogy (which I'm pretty sure had a strong influence on A Song of Ice and Fire) are his masterworks, along with The Malaica TapestryFrankenstein UnboundBarefoot in the Head and the migraine-inducing Report on Probability A. He also wrote widely in mainstream fiction, publishing his last historical novel (a 600-page epic spanning the entire 20th Century), Walcot, in 2010 at the age of 85.

He was one of the best SF authors of all time, publishing a novel on quantum theory 20 years before most readers had even heard of it, and also writing an important history of the entire SF genre (twice!). Slightly bizarrely, he only ever won two Hugos, 25 years apart (winning the second, he screamed "It's been a long time since you gave me one of these, you bastards!", to wild cheers and applause), and only two of his works, the short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long (better known as A.I.) and the novel Frankenstein Unbound, were turned into movies, by talents as wildly diverse as Steven Spielberg (via Stanley Kubrick) and Roger Corman.

Aldiss was one of the first authors (along with Ballard) to look at science fiction and apply much more sophisticated literary techniques to it, writing stories which engaged the head and heart at the same time. His books were smart, entertaining and could be astonishingly angry: his late SF novel HARM about a young Muslim man taken into custody on suspicion of terrorism for no real reason was an utter evisceration of Islamophobia and those seeking simple answers to horrendously complex problems (whilst also dealing into PTSD and the power of the human mind to escape into fantasy).

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4 hours ago, Hello World said:

Yeah, too bad. I read Hothouse based on your review years ago and liked it. Helliconia Spring has been on my to-read list since then but I never really got around to reading it.

Helliconia is utterly fascinating even though on a re-read there's some stuff in there with unexamined sexism on Aldiss' part that drags the middle volume down for me.  I'd still highly recommend it.

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6 hours ago, Little Valkyrie said:

Helliconia is utterly fascinating even though on a re-read there's some stuff in there with unexamined sexism on Aldiss' part that drags the middle volume down for me.  I'd still highly recommend it.

Well we can't have unexamined sexism. Let's talk more about feminism and women's issues in a RIP thread.

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Thanks for the pointer. I was a never a thorough SF fan, so I hardly knew the name. But I downloaded the first Helliconia book for kindle yesterday and I am already >20% in. This is a pretty good with good atmosphere and amazing worldbuilding. Only the animals that seem somewhat like moose or reindeer but procreate in a truly odd non-mammalian fashion seem very implausible and slightly ridiculous. It is also not clear to me why in a cold climate humans would mature and live at a quicker pace. Shouldn't it be the other way round?

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12 hours ago, Jo498 said:

Thanks for the pointer. I was a never a thorough SF fan, so I hardly knew the name. But I downloaded the first Helliconia book for kindle yesterday and I am already >20% in. This is a pretty good with good atmosphere and amazing worldbuilding. Only the animals that seem somewhat like moose or reindeer but procreate in a truly odd non-mammalian fashion seem very implausible and slightly ridiculous. It is also not clear to me why in a cold climate humans would mature and live at a quicker pace. Shouldn't it be the other way round?

As you go through the series, I think this is explained. The Helliconians are not human, they're just very human-like, but they have some weird evolutionary quirks as a result of the superlong seasons.

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On 8/22/2017 at 4:26 AM, Calibandar said:

Well we can't have unexamined sexism. Let's talk more about feminism and women's issues in a RIP thread.

It's explicit in the back material that the Helliconians are distinctly less sexually dimorphic than humans are.  And yet you then don't see some of the differences in societal roles that might reasonably result in.   It strikes me as a failure of imagination in a very imaginative book, YMMV.

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  • 1 month later...

So I finished the second volume. This was something of a drag I have to admit. Maybe partly my fault (I simply took too long to read it, reading several other books in parallel) but I think that like the first one this is actually a book where "ideas" (the odd seasons and the correspondingly strange cultural and historical developments) are far more important than characters and plot. This is obvious and well executed in the first book. It is also true of the second book but Aldiss somehow tries to also pull of a long complicated plot (more than half of which is told as a long "flashback") with characters that are supposed to be interesting and passionate but are in effect not sufficiently developed to draw the reader in (or at least not me).

As for the mentioned f-m dimorphism, I think he is quite inconsistent. In the first book there is a description of the (cold-adapted) people as "barrel-like" and they lose one third of their weight if they survive that illness that apparently acts as an adaptation to the hot periods. But even before that, some characters (e.g. the spinster-scholar who perpetually rejects one of the "heroes") are described as thin/bony and from how women are described in erotic scenes the reader would never assume far less dimorphism than in humans, i.e. despite being as tall as men? even in the cold times, women have a different body shape, breasts basically like humans etc.. Likewise, in the second book taking place in a hot period where supposedly anyone alive must be fairly ektomorphic (because they are descendants of those who survived that illness) this change in shape apparently "drops out" because it affects everyone, seductive women are still described as curvy etc.

Spoiler

And the normal human Billy coming down from the space station is clearly attracted erotically to both the Queen of Queens and to the courtesan girl he eventually has sex with. And this is not described as a kink, they seem not so different in looks from normal human women.

It is also not told if the hominid race (Madi) the Helliconians can interbreed with (this seems somewhat kinky for Helliconian tastes) and that looks quite different experience a similar "thinning" and "fatting up" in accordance to the long seasons. Finally, it is somewhat of a mystery how the furry phagors cope so well with the heat during Summer.

 

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I took a break from Helliconia, but because it was only 1.99 EUR for kindle, I started "Report on Probability A" because this seemed to be the second most famous by Aldiss after Helliconia. I am about a third in and it is a very strange book. I wonder if there are going to be any twists or if I already missed the point (if there is any).

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11 hours ago, Jo498 said:

I took a break from Helliconia, but because it was only 1.99 EUR for kindle, I started "Report on Probability A" because this seemed to be the second most famous by Aldiss after Helliconia. I am about a third in and it is a very strange book. I wonder if there are going to be any twists or if I already missed the point (if there is any).

His second-best-known works after Helliconia are his two classic SF novels, Non-Stop and Hothouse, then probably Frankenstein Unbound. Also The Malaica TapestryReport is up there but it's weird AF.

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