1964: Greybeard (Aldiss, Brian)

The elderly reluctantly inherit the earth (5/5)

Brian Aldiss seems to have a limited following with the wider science fiction community only recognizing Non-Stop (excellent!), Long Afternoon Of Earth (great!), and Helliconia Spring (haven't read it yet) as his landmark novels. I've read five of his novels and each one has been a 4- or 5-star rating, among them Starswarm, Cryptozoic, and Earthworks. Each one of these books highlights Brian Aldiss's masterful gift for creating a setting which is detailed and absorbing. Greybeard is no different - it opens your eyes and keeps them glued to the pages.

Rear cover synopsis:
"After the Accident, the Dark Ages return to Earth. By the year 2029 A.D. few survivors remain. Those who are left huddle in isolated villages, prisoners of fear, superstition, and old age. The rare man who still wants to shape his own destiny must strike out into the unknown. Greybeard is the story of such a man and his wife - of their perilous journey through a landscape weirdly familiar, eerily changed. And of their quest for something they dare not name..."

Algy Timberlane and his wife Martha met during childhood, in the the early years after the Accident in 1981. Both aged seven years old and both recovering from radiation-related illnesses, they will discover that their lives will be intermeshed through the world war in 2001, through the cholera outbreak in 2018, and through the reclusive years after the sequential disasters in 2029. The Big Accident having wiped out most large mammals and rendering nearly all of humanity sterile, only weasels, reindeer, beavers, otters, and coypu are left to either eat or provide some sort of utility to the remaining humans dotting the English countryside... while "the mammal with the big brain eked out his dotage in small communities." (71) With an average age of seventy and where 50 years of age is considered to be young, the hope for the future is dim: "Mortal flesh now wore only the Gothic shapes of age. Death stood impatiently over the land, waiting to count his last few pilgrims." (39)

Algy Timberlane (aka Greybeard), now aged 54 in the year 2029, started to work for DOUCH(E) during the war in 2001. DOUCH(E) stands for Documentation of Universal Contemporary History (England) and Algy's job is to simply place himself where history is being made and make recordings of history unfolding: "...someone should leave behind a summary of earth's decline, if only for visiting archeologists from other possible worlds." (83) His wife Martha is at his side when they decide to escape their community as it experiences a surge of unrest. Fleeing the hermetic village with the couple is the chaplain, Charley, five years Algy's senior, who provides optimistic countenance to Algy's own spiral of negativity. Also, the trapper and somewhat dim-witted Jeff Pitt is along for the perilous journey, who has been Algy's peripheral sidekick since the days of training with DOUCH when Jeff was ordered to assassinate Algy.

The seven chapters of Greybeard alternate between the escape from the village and downstream journey to the shore in the years 2029-2031 with that of historical background of the (1) year 1982 when the year after the "fatal bombs in space") and we reader witnesses a key event in Algy's life: his chance encounter with the hairless girl next door and the suicide of his father. (2) In the years 2000-2001 Algy receives training with DOUCH and experiences a unfortunate event which solidifies the bond between the Algy and his fiancé. (3) In the year 2018, cholera began to take it toll and escape from the dictatorial urban center was the only choice in order to survive.

Like all the other Aldiss novels I've read, the author pens a richly detailed novel interspersed with cavernous emotion, inspiring allegories, and romantic prose: "Year by year, as the living died, the empty rooms about him would multiply, like the cells of a giant hive that no bees visited, until they filled the world. The time would come when he would be a monster, alone in the rooms, in the tracks of his search, in the labyrinth of his hollow footsteps." (129) The reader will certainly get a feel for the desolation of the bucolic English countryside in contrast to the effervescent hope which bubbles from unknown emotional depths. Aldiss peppers Greybeard with fun little words like "sedgey" and "cavil" and "pundit" with some interesting formal words like "metoposcopy" and "katabatic winds" and "catenary" and then there's always the rare long words you come across once a year like "peregrination" and "tatterdemalion".

Greybeard may not be the best place to start when tackling the Aldiss bibliography, but it's certainly a prized mantelpiece for post-apocalyptic fiction, once which infuses barrenness with hope, self-destruction with mollification, and fatalism with transcendence.

1958: Non-stop (Aldiss, Brian)

Arboreal-overrun corridors with deformed green humans (5/5)
From August 19, 2009

Among my favorite science fiction books are two books published this decade- The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks and The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds. Also in my shortlist are paperback novels from years when even my dad was in his youth, such as Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. van Vogt and Tau Zero by Poul Anderson. These have been amongst the most satisfying of novels in my sequence of 250+ sci-fi books in the last three years, when I've started to read the genre. My top seven remains fairly stagnant, but Non-stop found a place for itself in my personal elite selections.

Knowledge that the entire novel takes place in a generation ship isn't made clear until then end, however, it is widely known that Non-stop is in fact one of the few `generation ship' novels. It's obvious from the start that the humans in the Quarters aren't very human at all- they are shrunken, green, time-skewed and deformed. Living in the same world but not in the same region are the mysterious Outsiders, the mythical Giants and the majestic Forwards. Visualize this: cramped corridors run over by exotic arboreal growths paralleled by yet-to-open chambers containing mementos of generations past. That's how the reader is introduced to the world in which these mutated humans live- in squalor, in poverty where they know no difference, in the seemingly wilderness. It's all very fascinating to imagine that feral human mutants running amok in the bowels of an ancient spaceship. If that doesn't interest you, maybe you shouldn't be reading sci-fi?

After the initial introduction to the world they live in, the plot becomes bogged down a bit by internal happenings in the Quarters. Perhaps I was just anxious to delve straight into the rest of the ship to discover what wonders or horrors it held. Much to my satisfaction, the plot proceeded to do just that. Later, I could appreciate the early lull in plot as it helped to characterize the village mutants as individuals and as a whole.

Further along, there is a romantic subplot, which other reviews don't seem to appreciate. However, when taken into the context that the relationship is being carried on by a village mutant and a beauty (as described by the mutant) it's unsettling to the reader as the reader doesn't know the intentions of the beauty. Is she using the mutant for her own purposes or is she honestly in love with him? Aldiss throws that massive wrench into the works as the reader attempts to figure out what is going on- it ain't easy. Through some guesswork, I figured out about half the ending while halfway through the novel. Perhaps it read too predictably or perhaps it was my intuition. Either way, I was still on seats edge awaiting every page, paying strict attention to every nuance and reading into every word in every conversation. Just fantastic!

For more novels regarding generation ships, look for Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City, Frank M. Robinson's Dark Beyond the Stars, and Gene Wolfe's Nightside of the Long Sun. I think I'm forgetting others I've read... shucks.