At the level of the sentence, from clause to clause, Brian Aldiss flickered for decades as perhaps the finest of all science fiction stylists. Yet he was also a story-teller of baffling inconsistency, in one tale brilliant, in the next, bathetic, in a third, downright embarrassing. Even worse, he could sometimes be all three in a single story.
And so he gave us "The Moment of Eclipse," which began with intensely sexual obsession:
"Beautiful women with corrupt natures -- they have always been my life's target."
But then it veered away in a moment of avoidance:
"It may appear as anti-climax if I admit that I now forgot about Christiania, the whole reason for my being in that place and on that continent. Nevertheless, I did forget her; our desires, particularly the desires of creative artists, are peripatetic: they submerge themselves sometimes unexpectedly and we never know where they may appear again. My imp of the perverse descended. For me the demolished bridge was never rebuilt."
Then it became a tale of parasitic infection, a biological haunting, until it suddenly deflated like a birthday party balloon:
"'I'm to be haunted by this dreadful succubus for fifteen years!'
"'Not a bit of it! We'll treat you with a drug called diethyl-carbamazine and you'll soon be okay again.'"
The End.
And so he gave us FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND: in its first three quarters, a fatuous Valentine's Day card to Mary Shelley, a tedious, unconvincing alternative-history treadmill that suddenly, in its final quarter, surged into life with a journey through northern landscapes progressively cold, stark, and bizarre. This final part brings out all of the descriptive power, visual evocation, and narrative tension of Brian Aldiss at his best. It ends the book superbly... but how many readers would be willing to drag themselves from page to page during the book's dull preliminary sections? How many readers would chuck this pile of pages half-way through?
And so he gave us "Brothers Of The Head," an account of Siamese twins who, somehow, unconvincingly, become rock-star geniuses, whose brilliant career is not shown to us directly, but with reports of dry detachment from business people on the outside. Yet after this career falls apart, the story turns around to stare at its twin protagonists; it suddenly becomes a visceral, ferocious, and ultimately moving tragedy of two people who hate each other with rabid passion, but who cannot break apart. They can only break down, and with unsettling brutality, they do.
Again: how many readers of the story would sit through its aridly journalistic opening and middle sections, to reach its worthwhile conclusion?
Behold -- Brian Aldiss!
And so he gave us the baffling monument of his work: one of the best writers of his generation, yet sometimes one of the worst.
