Another Genre Titan Gone

Another of the great science-fiction auteurs of the 20th century is gone- Brian Aldiss passed away at the age of ninety-two. Brian Aldiss, besides being the author of 80-odd (and I mean odd) books, was the editor of forty anthologies. Perhaps Aldiss' best-known story was Supertoys Last All Summer Long, which inspired the Kubrick/Spielberg vehicle A.I. Out of Aldiss' novels, the Helliconia trilogy, a sprawling planetary romance, is perhaps most familiar to the American reading public.

Aldiss tended to avoid optimistic space operas, with square-jawed heroes and whiz-bang technology. My favorite works by Aldiss were outré stories, with the science taking a backseat to the somewhat zany plots. He had a knack for portraying humanity in decline, his human protagonists are just another part of the food chain, concerned more with survival than conquest. His first novel, 1958's Non-Stop, a tale of a primitive tribe's exploration of its environs, has a couple of huge twists... so as not to spoil the fun of the book, I won't even give a small recap of the plot. At any rate, it is a fun read, with Aldiss messing with the readers' expectations on a recurring basis.

1962's Hothouse is a tour-de-force of bizarro biology, with plant life run amok on a rotationally locked Earth tethered to the moon by the kilometers-long strands of the massive vegetable entities which traverse the distance between the two heavenly bodies:


The traverser drifted very high above the Tips, safe from its enemies. All about it, space was indigo, and the invisible rays of space bathed it and nourished it. Yet the traverser was still dependent on the earth for nourishment. After many hours of vegetative dreaming, it swung itself over and climbed down a cable.

Other traversers hung motionless nearby. Occasionally one would blow a globe of oxygen or hitch a leg to try and dislodge a troublesome parasite. Theirs was a leisureliness never attained before. Time was not for them; the sun was theirs, and would ever be until it became unstable, turned nova, and burnt both them and itself out.

The traverser fell, its feet twinkling, hardly touching its cable. It fell straight to the forest, it plunged towards the leafy cathedrals of the forest. Here in the air lived its enemies, enemies many times smaller, many times more vicious, many times more clever. Traversers were prey to one of the last families of insect, the tigerflies.

Only tigerflies could kill traversers - in their own insidious, invincible way.

Over the long slow eons as the sun's radiation increased, vegetation had evolved to undisputed supremacy. The wasps had developed too, keeping pace with the new developments. They grew in number and size as the animal kingdom fell into eclipse and dwindled into the rising tide of green. In time they became the chief enemies of the spider-like traversers. Attacking in packs, they could paralyse the primitive nerve centres, leaving the traversers to stagger to their own destruction. The tigerflies also laid their eggs in tunnels bored into the stuff of their enemies' bodies; when the eggs hatched, the larvae fed happily on living flesh.

This threat it was, more than anything, that had driven the traversers farther and farther into space many millennia past. In this seemingly inhospitable region, they reached their full and monstrous flowering.

Hard radiation became a necessity for them. Nature's first astronauts, they changed the face of the firmament. Long after man had rolled up his affairs and retired to the trees from whence he came, the traversers reconquered that vacant pathway he had lost. Long after intelligence had died from its peak of dominance, the traversers linked the green globe and the white indissolubly - with that antique symbol of neglect, a spider's web.

The traverser scrambled down among foliage of the Tips, erecting the hairs on its back, where patchy green and black afforded it natural camouflage. On its way down it had collected several creatures caught fluttering in its cables. It sucked them peacefully. When the soupy noises stopped, it vegetated.

Buzzing roused it from its doze. Yellow and black stripes zoomed before its crude eyes. A pair of tigerflies had found it.

With great alacrity, the traverser moved. Its massive bulk, contracted in the atmosphere, had an overall length of over a mile, yet it moved lightly as pollen, scuttling up a cable back to the safety of vacuum.

As it retreated, its legs brushing the web, it picked up various spores, burrs, and tiny creatures that adhered there. It also picked up six burnurns, each containing an insensible human, which swung unregarded from its shin.

Several miles up, the traverser paused. Recovering from its fright, it ejected a globe of oxygen, attaching it gently to a cable. It paused. Its palps trembled. Then it headed out towards deep space, expanding all the time as pressure dropped.

Its speed increased. Folding its legs, the traverser began to eject fresh web from the spinnerets under its abdomen. So it propelled itself , a vast vegetable almost without feeling, rotating slowly to stabilize its temperature.

Hard radiations bathed it. The traverser basked in them. It was in its element.


The imagery of the novel is gorgeous, but the plot, involving the peregrinations of a not-too-smart human descendant, is goofy... it really doesn't do justice to the grandeur of the setting. It's an entertaining read, a weird picaresque interlude before the destruction of Earth by a terrific solar flare.

My favorite work by Aldiss is The Saliva Tree, which simultaneously manages to be a tribute to H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds and a pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space. The similarity to the latter story is such that even the details are similar, with an alien presence lending a grotesque vitality to nearby terrestrial life, before consuming it... The Saliva Tree adds the element of pastoral class drama and a romantic subplot. The aliens are also slightly more active in their malevolence than Lovecraft's mysterious 'colour':


They were safe, but the safety was not permanent. Through the din and dust, they could see that the gigantic beasts were wedged tightly in both entrances. In the middle was a sort of battlefield, where the animals fought to reach the opposite end of the building; they were gradually tearing each other to pieces but the sties too were threatened with demolition.

"I had to follow you," Nancy gasped. "But Father, I don't think he even recognized me!"

At least, Gregory thought, she had not seen her father trampled underfoot. Involuntarily glancing in that direction, he saw the shotgun that Grendon had never managed to reach still lying across a bracket on the wall. By crawling along a traverse beam, he could reach it easily. Bidding Nancy sit where she was, he wriggled along the beam, only a foot or two above the heaving backs of the swine. At least the gun should afford them some protection: the Aurigan, despite all its ghastly differences from humanity, would hardly be immune to lead.

As he grasped the old-fashioned weapon and pulled it up, Gregory was suddenly filled with an intense desire to kill one of the invisible monsters. In that instant, he recalled an earlier hope he had had of them: that they might be superior beings, beings of wisdom and enlightened power, coming from a
better society where higher moral codes directed the activities of its citizens. He had thought that only to such a civilization would the divine gift of traveling through interplanetary space be granted. But perhaps the opposite held true: perhaps such a great objective could be gained only by species ruthless enough to disregard more humane ends. As soon as he thought it, his mind was overpowered with a vast diseased vision of the universe, where such races as dealt in love and kindness and intellect cowered forever on their little globes, while all about them went the slayers of the universe, sailing where they would to satisfy their cruelties and their endless appetites.

He heaved his way back to Nancy above the bloody porcine fray.


Aldiss was a one-of-a-kind talent, his particular brand of Science-Fiction was nonconformist, unheroic. The one other author I can recall who mined the same lodes as Aldiss is the long-silend Doris Piserchia, whose oeuvre might be even zanier than Aldiss'. At any rate, Brian Aldiss' unique voice is now stilled, and I, a fan, feel a certain diminution because of it.