For sheer noise, Brothers of the Head beats them all, but holds many fascinations. This company, Marlin Films, with its remarkable screenwriter, Tony Grisoni, have made mockumentaries before. The book of Brothers is written in mockumentary style, and thus was comparatively easy to transform to film in like fashion. Not believing in God—a weird idea—I always worry about his imitation, an omniscient narrator in books, so that Brothers is written, like the later White Mars, by various witnesses. And where did that strategy originate? You can find it in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
DR: HARM is also concerned with the link between religious belief, oppression, and violence. Recently Richard Dawkins has written a critique of religious belief, expressing the opinion that, in the post–9/11 world, the dangers of this belief (or, if you prefer, faith) far outweigh any benefits. Nor is he referring simply to Islam. Can you address this aspect of HARM?
BA: Oxford is a city attracting many intelligent people. We have multiculturalism here without too much hassle about it. No ghettos, for instance. I am fascinated by the foreign, and I talk to many people in the streets and shops. It’s a privilege of age to do so without giving offense. I like or love many people. Yet I regard us humans as a bad lot. Perhaps tribalisms of various kinds form part of the problem. There is a depressing sense of Der Unter-gang des Abendlandes [The Decline of the West]. And yet, and yet…Here in Europe we are undergoing a unique social experiment, the European Union. Religion, coupled with territorial and dynastic additives, has in the past soaked the soils of Europe with blood from one end to the other; now we sit around a table in Brussels and argue out our differences. Reason has spurred this revolution, not religion.
DR: Dawkins is of course a champion of pure science. But in HARM, science does not come off much better than religion, at least in such proponents as Tolsteem and Safelkty.
BA: I admire Richard Dawkins, who was born with many gifts, and have spoken to him about the novel I am currently writing. The humans on Stygia are in part ruined by technology. You can’t have better dentistry without dropping an atomic bomb first, you have to go through electronic typewriters to get to the bliss of an iPod, you can’t eat strawberries in the winter without overwarming the world…Like the incoming tide, science advances on all fronts. Stygian science is mostly forbidden. It is given no chance to develop on the barbaric insect planet.
DR: In many novels with this kind of dual structure, the fantastic world functions as a utopian escape from a less-pleasant reality. But in HARM, that is not the case; in fact, the fantastic world recapitulates the “real” world in disturbing ways, not the least of which is the extermination of the indigenous intelligent species of Stygia. I was wondering how much your wartime experiences in Burma contributed to your devastating portrait of a “new” civilization arising on Stygia from the fragments of the old?
BA: Burma illustrates my previous point. On leaving Burma, the British erected a memorial with an epigram carved into the stone. It read:
When you go home, think of us and say
For your tomorrow we gave our today.
I like the sentiments, but who are these “yous” for which we gave our today? The country once known as the Rice Bowl of Asia now lives on handouts, while the lives of ordinary people are prison sentences. As you seem to know, or to guess, Burma somehow always remains in mind, whatever else gets forgotten.
DR: Following is a quote from the last interview I had the pleasure of conducting with you, back in 2000, in connection with White Mars:
Perhaps the further evolution of humankind does require some sort of collaboration; at present almost a quarter of humanity is disenfranchised, starved, exploited. Could we not do better? Why does pity not move us? These are questions worth asking. I have no great faith in utopias ever being established, but questions must be posed now and again. Could we not do better? Is not the West at present in a position to do better?
How do these words resonate for you today? White Mars— which, like HARM, features an attempt to build a utopia on another world—seems a much more hopeful book than this one. Have you become more pessimistic about humanity’s future?
BA: I have become less optimistic about today. Many people have taken refuge in Britain from dirty, dusty villages in the Middle East. They neither know nor understand the West. Consequently, many would destroy it. They have never heard of that ancient piece of sound advice: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
DR: I know you’ve been hard at work on a new novel, Walcot. What can you tell us about that?
BA: Walcot is the story of a family living throughout the twentieth century. Great world events mingle with small family affairs. It is a narrative very hard to get “right.” It took me three long years to compose. I wrote draft after draft, sometimes laughing, often driven to tears. So far, it has brought me not a penny—nor was there a financial reason for writing it. I just wanted to say things that had eluded speech. Of course, it is an English family. What else do I know? You don’t happen to know an Anglophile American publisher who might be interested, do you?
DR: I wish I did! It’s incomprehensible to me that a writer of your proven gifts and stature could have difficulty placing a novel. Does this discourage you? Do you ever think about retiring? You seem more productive in your eighties than most writers half your age!
BA: No, I do not plan to retire. I enjoy the thought-adventure of writing. On the whole, I find that being eighty is more pleasant than being adolescent. I was encouraged by the award of an O.B.E., which made me think that someone must have been listening. True, a few aches and pains accumulate, but you can edit those out, on the whole. Every day, when awakening, you think what a surprise and joy it is still to be here, some wits remaining, and—with luck—still being published.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRIAN W. ALDISS served in the Royal Signal Corps between 1943 and 1947, then worked as a bookseller and as the literary editor of the Oxford Mail before turning to writing full-time. He is the author of the autobiography Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s, and his many prize-winning novels include Hothouse, which won the Hugo Award, The Saliva Tree, which received the Nebula Award, and Helliconia Spring and its sequels. Several of his books and stories, including Frankenstein Unbound and Brothers of the Head, have been adapted for the screen. His story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” was adapted into Artificial Intelligence, a film initially conceived by Stanley Kubrick and ultimately directed by Steven Spielberg.
HARM is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Brian W. Aldiss
“A Conversation with Brian W. Aldiss” copyright © 2007 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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eISBN: 978-0-345-50037-3
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