By Brian Aldiss
Some writers build complex worlds and populate them with countless philosophies and cultures. That is the Tolkien school of storytelling. Other writers take a single, original idea and tell a straightforward story that hints at the big ideas someone like Tolkien would focus on. As a proper sci-fi writer, Aldiss is one of the latter kind. Greybeard is an exemplar of Aldiss’s school of thought: a lean, controlled, character-driven story with an easy idea at its heart.
Posted in Book review
Tagged bloody brilliant, British, dystopia, fiction, future, sci fi
By Kurt Vonnegut
Every so often you come across a novel that is so dazzling in its originality and imagination that it leaves you breathless. Slaughterhouse 5 is one such novel. Its uniqueness comes not in the way its characters behave or what they say or where they live. Any writer who tries too hard on creating new modes for these elements is going to forget how to tell a story. No, in this novel, Vonnegut’s originality is much more insidious. It’s the way that Vonnegut sat down one day and said to himself, ‘I’ll write a book about the bombing of Dresden and about a man who is kidnapped by aliens with no concept of time, and it will show the horror and futility of war.’
Now, that’s a man after my own heart. There’s the originality. It’s not imaginative to call your aliens ‘Tralfamadorians’; anyone can make up silly names for alien races. It’s not even imaginative to kidnap a human and display him on a distant planet as a kind of zoological specimen; anyone could probably think that up – and I’m sure hundreds of sci-fi writers have done just that. No, Vonnegut’s imagination is much broader: in less than 300 pages, he tears apart several genres and even changes the concept of the novel.
It is a great thrill to read such a book, because it is so different from all your other experiences of reading books. And yet it is grounded in some very real facts – the bombing of Dresden being the main one. The beauty of centring a story about one such awful event is that it becomes relentless and unavoidable. You know Dresden is destroyed and that it’s a bad thing, and so the build-ups to it, connected through our protagonist’s time travelling-alien-adventure plot, become more and more devastating. Moreover, it allows Vonnegut to retain his focus and not to be concerned with every other horrible war. He doesn’t need to do that. Dresden is bad enough. Focusing on that is almost as brave as writing a novel that the booksellers won’t know how to categorise. This book is great fun and a real thrill.
By Ray Bradbury
In planning this pessimistic view of the future, Bradbury stripped back all the politics that could have bogged him down and focused only on their effects. The story follows a fireman’s revolt against his role of book burner, in a society where books are banned and proper discussion avoided. And it is these strange, but altogether believable, societal characteristics on which Bradbury focuses. That’s the beauty of this fascinating little novel.
Compared to 1984 and Brave New World, there are no proper politics in this book – and what a virtue! There are no fascists (really), no tyrants, no Big Brother, no Ministry of Truth. There are just the workers charged with enforcing these bizarre laws and a few members of the public, some of whom dissent and some of whom cannot step outside of the hegemony. I can only imagine Bradbury’s temptation to go into detail about how and why this society came to be this way, or about the power at play and the individuals in charge. But he avoids them all, and it is the secret of this novel’s success. The fact that tyrants have appeared, won and lost over and over again means that there’s little point in Bradbury inventing new ones for his dystopian vision. We know enough about past horrors to be perfectly able to fill in the gaps in Fahrenheit 451 and guess enough about the forms of politics. So they’re not necessary.
Instead, Bradbury rightfully centres his novel on one man, caught up in this awful hegemony, his role within it and the existence of his own freewill. The novel is 172 pages long; no more are necessary. In that short time, Bradbury takes us on an exciting journey – and one I’ll never forget.
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