In Harm's Way [Review: Harm]

This novel takes anti-terror freedom of speech legislation to it's extreme, and may have been written as a response to the increasingly restrictive laws here in the U.K. The protagonist has written a romantic comedy in which one character jokes to another about assassinating the Prime Minister - as a result he is rendered to an interrogation centre in an initially unidentified country where he is imprisoned and tortured. He seems to dissociate under stress or lack of stimulation and episodically enters a fantasy life where he is amongst the human colonists of an alien world. However it remains unclear for much of the book whether this is dissociation or whether the present day scenario is a flashback or memory, as the colony scenario is clearly in a future that has developed from this present. Issues and character similarities connect the two scenarios, particularly during a resonant sequence where he is imprisoned in both worlds.

I like to think Aldiss would never have bothered writing either scenario on its own. One would then have been a straightforward political satire, the other a stereotypical space opera along the lines of Dragons of Heorot. It's the interweaving of the two stories that leads to a deeper dissection of issues such as terrorism and abuse of state or other power, and as one would expect from Aldiss, the easiest route is not the one taken.

Hothouse and Evolution

As Hothouse continues, Gren and his companions encounter more carnivorous plants but also some parasitic and symbiotic human -plant interactions. This book is bursting with original ideas and different ways of thinking about change or about the nature of humanity, consciousness, intelligence. At the same time it's a great action/survival/horror tale.

The symbiotic scenarios also reminded me of Stephen Baxter's novel Evolution. This follows the story of mankind and our biological ancestors from the eras of the dinosaurs onwards, each chapter telling the story of animals at a different evolutionary stage. This is extremely informative about evolutionary biology but is no dry textbook - in early chapters, gaps
in the fossil record allow Baxter to playfully include kilometer-wide pterodactyl "air whales" and some other surprises. Baxter follows the development of hominids and humans and is interested in the origins of human emotion, thought, behaviour and society rather than, say, the discovery of fire or the wheel. However the origins of painting, religion and sailing become part of the plot. Baxter also pulls no punches in documenting the destruction of the environment and the extinctions that have characterized all of human history, not just the modern era. The story extends through a near-future calamity into an eerie Hothouse-like scenario as the human era wanes.

I was struck by Baxter's description of the wide variety of human-like primates that lived side by side (although not necessarily in peace) until the emergence of humanity as the dominant species.

Kew Gardens - the novel

Billions of years in the future, when the Sun is big and red and close to death, who will be there to see it? H.G. Wells in The Time Machine explores this scenario briefly, imagining a bleak future inhabited by crablike creatures. Jack Vance is more optimistic - humans live on although past their prime.

I'm currently reading Hothouse by Brian Aldiss. Like Jack Vance Aldiss sets his novel in the distant future where the sun is close to dying. This is sci-fi and fantasy of a different kind though - the earth now belongs to the carnivorous and fast-moving descendents of the plants, with tree-running humanity one of just a handful of surviving animal species. It's a harsh reality - the members of the human tribe constantly face danger and death, while the vicious battles between different plants make the animal kingdom, or the human heyday, seem tame by comparison. Aldiss creates a world with detailed and internally consistent descriptions of the flora and fauna, and uses it to tell a story about the necessity, the inevitability and the fear of change. There is a great deal to uncover as the reader explores the setting, although much of this is lost on the protagonists who are only interested in their own survival.

Aldiss' setting has been criticised as implausible, but this is missing the point of the powerful and eerie central symbol of this novel - the tidally locked Earth and Moon and the webs of the Traversers connecting the two.