Procure Earthworks Conceived By Brian W. Aldiss Distributed As Publication
extremely depressing book all about pollution, overpopulation, disease and mania but none the worse for it! I found it very hard to read Aldiss when I was younger good to find I'm now grown up enough to enjoy his work.
I'll have to try Ballard next, The best thing I've ever read by Aldiss, Unusually competent prose that verges on the poetic at times, a bleak and original plot narrated by a unique protagonist just very compelling stuff.
I wasn't expecting much of this somewhat obscure Aldiss novel so its quality is all the more satisfying, Written overyears ago, closer to Orwell than to today, phantasmagoric in places reminiscent of JG Ballard, not one of Aldiss' best.
. . But, Aldiss is always enjoyable, A dystopian scifi novel of when the planet's ecology has gone really bad and politically the world was a police state, Un tanto decepcionante sobre todo en su parte final, . . Another remarkable Aldiss novel, first published in, that demonstrates how accomplished a prose stylist he is, as well as proving that he was superb at extrapolating trends.
But his work is not really about scientific prediction, It is beside the point that much of the nightmare that forms the background of this story has come true, Aldiss explores the relationships of control and freedom, power and rebellion, and encapsulates a mighty global struggle, in the shape of a man with renegade tendencies and his experiences as the captain of a mostly automated gigantic cargo ship.
The ship is wrecked on a remote coast in Africa and he becomes a key player in a political adventure that might save the world but at enormous human cost.
I remember that this particular edition of the novel was in the school 'library' when I wasyears old, The cover by the excellent Bruce Pennington attracted me, but I never attempted to read the book, Yet I knew that one day I would read it, and now I have, It amazes me that anyone thought such a novel could be suitable for children, It is far too poetic and advanced in language, theme and plot for the average young mind, I would give it/stars, They wouldn't let us do that so out of respect for one of my favorite SF author's
Brian aldriss, rest in peace my brother.
I gavestars.
May your after life be filled with the adventures you put on paper Mr Aldriss,
GOD SPEED. The world had degenerated into a diseaseridden, overpopulated rubbish dump, Chemicals had poisoned the landscape and reduced most of the people to the edge of starvation,
Ecology had become a meaningless word from the past, The planet earth speeds on its collision course with disaster, there is a solution but it is so frightful that man cannot conceive of it ever being put into operation,
Only one man, Knowle Noland, exconvict, extraveller, and captain of the tramp freighter Trieste Star, is prepared to try, He alone is prepared to fire a shot that will throw the world into hideous war, but may leave a brave new world for the survivors.
If there are any survivors,
Blurb from theNEL paperback edition,
This brief, poetic and powerful novel is typical of Aldiss talent for using the medium of SF to explore complex characters, moral dilemmas and indeed to take a good look at the world in which we live.
This, of course, many would argue, is the true purpose of SF, to hold a mirror to ourselves and see, perhaps from a different perspective, at least part of the truth of the human condition.
In an overpopulated Earth of the near future where Man has raped the planet to the point where ecology is breaking down, Knowle Noland begins to tell us his tale.
Noland is the Captain of the Trieste Star, a ship which transports sand from the African coast to England, As the ship approaches Africa, a bizarre series of events is set in motion by the sighting of a dead man floating over the sea toward the ship.
the dead man is held above the waves by an antigravity harness and, when the body is brought on board, Noland discovers letters on the dead mans person from Justine to a man named Peter.
Shortly afterwards the ship runs aground on the African coast and Noland takes us back to his time working as a landsman for The Farmer, the fate of many people who fall foul of the law.
Noland is a complex character who throughout his life has not been much of a hero, As a child, working for a Faginlike character, he hid beneath the table with a friend when the authorities raided his home and arrested his master.
Later. temporarily absconding from the Farm he visits an abandoned village in search of books and is abducted by the nomadic Travellers criminals in the eyes of the authorities rather than running away.
When the Travellers are captured he betrays them and is taken to The Farmer who gives him a job aboard the Trieste Star, although Noland never sees this as a reward or an opportunity that the Farmer gave him.
He remains resentful.
There is much here that is strange and slightly baroque, Noland is prone to fits in which he experiences vivid hallucinations, In his conscious life, however, there is a phantom who follows him, who he calls The Figure, This appears to be not part of his hallucinatory world since other characters can see it too, Justine, whom he subsequently meets, tells him that this phantom appears when he is close to death, Because of the letters Noland is carrying, he is suspected of being an agent of the enemies of Justine and Peter Mercator who turns out to be The Farmer.
They have a plan to solve the worlds problems, Their aim is to assassinate the President of Africa and plunge the world into another global war, thus relieving the Earth of the burden of its millions of people and allowing it to heal while the Travellers are destined to become the survivors, and the nucleus of a second chance for Humanity.
Its a tribute to Aldiss writing skills that Justines plans make a horrible kind of sense, Noland has to be convinced of the rightness of it and, ultimately, steps up to the plate to become, if not a hero in the classic sense, then at least an antihero and gain his place in history.
There are some sections which seem very Ballardian, particularly the scenes with Justine, a beautiful but deadly sociopath, who in one scene fills a watering can with poison and calmly waters the plants within a room while conducting a conversation with Noland.
Another surprising character is The Farmer, a man that Nolan sees as a capitalist monster, but who turns out to be at least at the finale a compassionate man trying to hold a crumbling business empire together whilst attempting to do the best thing for the good of everyone.
The Farmer considers that he did Noland a favour by essentially giving him a chance to make something of himself and indeed, Noland started on the bottom rung and in the Trieste Star and worked his way up to the Captains role.
One can only speculate as to what wonders would be unleashed if only more genre writers paid such attention to characterisation and detail as Aldiss.
Kon niet echt door het eerste hoofdstuk komen, Pakte me op de een of andere manier niet, Dus maar gestopt. Not a very cheerful novel, at least it's short,
This novel strongly resonates with our current times where right wing populism is on the rise, abuse by the police is common and getting worse in the UK you will be able to getyears for protesting and causing someone some annoyance arriving soon Thanks Patel!, environment is crumbling, massive prettymuchallautomated ships are travelling between continents with a handful of staff running the boat, and then a monster sample gets stuck in the Suez canal.
. .
Aldiss has a very negative view of the future and half a decade and a bit since then it shows how spot on he was.
Depressing stuff. I still love it. Started out quite well but quite a lacklustre finish, It was like yeah everything's so bad for humanity that the best thing we can do is start a nuclear war, That'll help. Chaotic and rather unpleasant underlying politics, In a future where the Earth has been savaged by overpopulation and overfarming, robots are considered more valuable than humans and sand must be altered to create artificially fertile soil.
Exconvict Knowle Noland, the hallucinating sea captain of the Trieste Star, finds himself wrapped up in a plot to incite a global war that will wipe out millions.
War, it seems, is the only way to drastically reduce the population and create a better world for those who survive, Cada día más posible en lo ecológico y menos en lo geopolítico,
Género. CienciaFicción.
Lo que nos cuenta, Knowle Noland echa la vista atrás y recuerda sus tiempos de juventud, cuando sus sentidos le jugaban malas pasadas y capitaneaba el gigantesco y obsoleto carguero nuclear casi completamente automatizado Estrella de Trieste que transportaba arena entre la costa africana y el norte de Europa.
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I think this would make a good movie, Short story. Future England: population largely live in cities, countryside is a wasteland, rendered
barely productive by destructive chemicals, rigidly hierarchical society ok, so that doesn't sound too different from today but only because I haven't mentioned the compulsory sterilisations and hover suits .
The plot concerns a conflicted central character coerced into ambiguous action, The action ambiguous because the perpetrator is so ignorant of the world in which he lives,
In common with the sitelinkHelliconia Trilogy and sitelinkHothouse I suppose that the environment is the most important character, although the only one never to say anything directly.
The best SF, for me, includes some social or political commentary, 'Earthworks' certainly meets that criterion, This was first published in, and it looks forward to a time when the Earth's human population exceedsbillion, Basically, it is Aldiss's comment on the consequences of unconsidered human reproduction and unthinking consumption of resources,
Today, many people are concerned with climate change which was barely on the horizon when this book was written but too few address the twin elephants in the room: our collective dependence on continuing economic growth where does your pension come from and the evergrowing population.
Aldiss describes one kind of future that arrives when nothing is done to evict these beasts,
The story itself is told from the point of view of one of the 'teeming masses' even though he is one of the few who can read he is still profoundly ignorant of the realities of the world situation.
He suffers from a form of migraine that causes him to hallucinate: some of the story is told in flashback, and some while he is hallucinating.
This makes for quite a difficult read in places, I found but it is worth persisting to the end, And if you decide to give up on it, at least skip to the last few pages, which explain much of what the book is about.
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