(Not a) Review: Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss (1958)

date: ; langs: en, cs

This 1958 book by Brian Aldiss landed in my claws, surprisingly, thanks to my own mum, who quickly shoved some book from her own stash into my hand for a business trip to Amsterdam. The book did its job and I’m grateful for that (to my mum, not to the book). But the book itself left me with mixed feelings, and I still can’t decide whether it was bad and how bad.

I do understand how problematic it is to judge older books through today’s lens, because in 1958 it may have been decent and valid for its time, while today it may have been surpassed several times over. Sci-fi especially has moved from a fringe oddity to basically the mainstream, which in my view raised its quality. And its quantity too. I often have trouble with older works, because I typically get to newer books first, and then the classic that newer work draws from can look a bit clumsy in some respects. In other words, they may not have exactly aged like wine.

As for the book itself, in short: for many generations, people have been living primitively on a generation spaceship without really knowing it. Someone has theories and maybe even evidence, but otherwise no. You basically learn this within a few pages.

I’ll start with the positive: the idea that humanity got stuck on a generation ship, and that after many generations of decline the ship became their “universe”, is good, perhaps even very good. Universe in the sense of their entire world, so from their unique perspective nothing else even has to exist. A great analogy for how we perceive the universe, though quite possibly neither planned by the author nor explored in depth. On top of that, there’s evolution and drifting away from the original “humanity”. But again, that isn’t explored very deeply either. So at that high level I like it, though the deeper reflection is missing again.

But when you descend from that height into the guts of the book and its details, things soon start to collapse. And now for specifics, with plenty of spoilers:

  • The relationship between Roy Complain, the main hero, and his first wife is strange. Somebody just snatches her at the start. Who? Probably another tribe. Why? Breeding. I wrongly assumed this would be the main purpose of the journey. Like hell, and in the end he basically didn’t care. Actually, she couldn’t give birth to healthy children and he didn’t love her, so it didn’t matter. And Roy left the tribe more because of a punishment and an opportunity from the priest.
  • Roy and the priest, complete strangers in Forwards, are accepted within moments. And as if that weren’t enough, they then also accept Gregg’s whole gang, a gang of mutants and cutthroats. One day they’re killing each other, the next they close ranks against a common enemy. That’s probably how it only works in space.
  • Gregg, the boss of Gregg’s gang, is Roy’s brother. Of course he is. And the first Captain Complain is Roy’s ancestor. Sure.
  • One of the first things in Forwards is that this fool Roy instantly falls in love with an investigator. And she’s seemingly taken, then free and finally willing. Oh boy.
  • The rats are pretty useless in the story and could easily be replaced by something more meaningful, even just an overly aggressive tribe. If anything, by Gregg’s gang, which doesn’t really work in the story either.
  • Only once he’s in Forwards does Roy discover that you can crawl out of prison through a ventilation shaft. Out of a prison they’ve already escaped from several times. Seriously?
  • Whenever a character shows up who finally has the chance to reveal the truth or part of it, there’s an almost absurd tendency to murder them or somehow ignore them instead. Roy knocks out an intruder and then basically forgets about him and lets it go. And when they finally get to him later, they murder him.
  • The whole invented religion based on psychology is somehow pointlessly destructive even within its own group (“let out your anger”), so it sounds interesting but doesn’t really work.

But maybe a few things just caught my attention and then my whole critical self went after the work with needless aggression. Who knows. Either way, for me it’s a book with a good idea, but in the end it mostly lived up to “Jesus Christ, I could write this shit”.