Brian Aldiss

Years ago, during my first term at university, when I was just starting to become an avid SF reader, I read Brian Aldiss' novel 'Non-Stop'. It was one of the first SF Masterworks I read, perhaps the 3rd or 4th. I have very fond memories of it; it contributed to my new and burgeoning enthusiasm for SF and the SF Masterworks series (I have now read about 90 of them). I remember describing 'Non-Stop' to someone who'd popped in to visit, and them saying "That's a very Michael book, isn't it."

A few years later, I read 'Greybeard' on a long train journey in America. My copy was a very ugly old copy which had been a duplicate in the university Science Fiction & Fantasy Society's library. The spine was a strange, perhaps light-damaged, grey-purple colour. The cover image was of a deranged-looking old man with a wispy white beard, one squinting eye, one wide eye, and a strange tusk-like growth emerging from his cheek. A raven or crow on his shoulder smiled with a human mouth, and its head was angled in a way that suggested he was turning to a camera. The combination was like an odd family portrait, and I still don't know its significance to the book. It jarred with the story itself, which was far more somber and melancholic, being about old age and infertility. I don't recall any smiling ravens at all.

(I have since replaced both my 'Greybeard' and 'Non-Stop' with nice new editions.)

Aldiss was a guiding Wise Man on my journey to become an Olaf Stapledon super fanboy. He introduced me to Stapledon's magnum opus; as in, he wrote the introduction to it. I reread that introduction many times, trying to sort out my own thoughts on the book: reading it had been like a visionary experience, a religious conversion, a life-changing event. (Those who knew me at that time will likely remember my incessant 'Star Maker' evangelizing.) It is still one of books that has had the biggest impact on me, and Aldiss is caught up in that.

When we read, the writer's voice in our head can become like a companion. And so, Aldiss' friendly, witty voice introduced me to Stapledon's lesser known 'Nebula Maker' and 'Four Encounters', and to Robert Crossley's Stapledon biography, making me feel like I was becoming part of some small esoteric group of Stapledon superfans. In the 'Star Maker' introduction, he lists the little-known 'The Martyrdom of Man' by Winwood Reade as one of Stapledon's influences, and quotes a passage from it, because: "I hope to find others to share my enthusiasm for Winwood Reade."

The oldest book I own is an 1896 edition of 'The Martyrdom of Man'. It is like a prequel to Stapledon's two great works, covering human history from evolutionary origins to the present, with some minor proto-SF speculation about the near future, in a prose style very similar to Stapledon's: sweeping, grand, poetic. I read it while on a two-day boat journey down the Mekong river is Laos: the scenery, the prose, the subject matter, the journey - all made it a very personal experience; visionary, like a mystical pilgrimage. There are passages in which Reade guides you down 'the River of Time'. These are extremely evocative in themselves: reading them while on an actual river with Cretaceous-looking jungle surrounding you is on a whole other level. This experience was Aldiss' fault; he'd recommended it to me.

Later that year I attended my first Worldcon, Loncon3. One of the programme items was Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove in conversation. Aldiss talked about book covers, writing, reading, publishing, drinking with Kingsley Amis, experiences in World War 2, and so much more. At the end he did a signing - the queue was rather large, of course. I had with me the SF Masterworks edition of 'Helliconia' (which I still haven't read because it's an intimidating 1300-page beast), and my 1896 'The Martyrdom of Man'. After we exchanged a few words (me very nervous), he signed both of them, and with the latter scribble it felt like he was approving my membership of the weird group of Stapledon superfans.

Earlier this year I read 'Trillion Year Spree', Aldiss' history of science fiction. I would thrust it into the hands of any SF fan. It is one of my favourite books of the year. It was a joy having that familiar Aldiss voice, the Stapledon-introducing voice, enthusiastically, wittily, knowledgeably chatting away about so many books. His enthusiasm is infectious; I came away from it both more knowledgeable and more enthusiastic about SF than ever before. Seven years after 'Non-Stop' swelled my budding enthusiasm for SF, his work is still making that love grow.

The obituaries in The Bookseller and The Guardian show how obscenely accomplished his career has been, how enormously talented he was. I must read more of his work. When I got home from work last night I scrolled through the titles in Harper's 'Brian Aldiss Collection'. So many books. So many to buy. So many to read. Fantasies, comedies, autobiographies, historical fiction, short stories, "weird" books, essays. So much to discover.

I should probably start with 'Helliconia'.

Reflections on Dementia Care

I now have a Level 2 Certificate in Dementia Care to add to my collection of qualifications. Achievement Unlocked.

Since August last year I have worked as a carer for the elderly in the countryside town of Easingwold. This job seemed to follow naturally on from my full-time volunteering in York and my childcare volunteering in Cambodia, forming a 'Care Trilogy' of life experiences.

Some reflections from the last eight months:

Carers are not paid enough for what the job entails. We are paid for every 15 minutes work, and if we break down the hourly rate to each call time, it starts to seem a bit silly, as though our employer is saying: "I'll give you £1.90 if you go to Mrs Alpha and make sure she takes the right tablets; then go to Mr Beta to help him shower, shave, dress, get his breakfast ready and give him his tablets, and I'll give you £3.78; then go to Mrs Gamma with Colleague A, and together hoist her onto the toilet, then help her shower and dress, etc, and I'll give you another fiver." Etc. I expect the issue of low-pay-considering-what-is-involved extends throughout the healthcare sector.

I am young. I now know many people who have been retired for longer than I have been alive. I look back at the time I have been alive: 24 years in total, only 6 years of being an adult. I look ahead at an estimated natural lifespan, and realize that I have at least twice my total lifetime to date still to live. I have 8 times my time as an adult still to go. I am young.

Many of our clients suffer from extreme boredom and loneliness. They struggle to find things to do; their friends and family have moved away or died; they're frail or disabled. Watching TV is often the default activity. One client sits in their flat all day, TV off, radio off, just sitting there, occasionally sipping their drink or napping, waiting for the next carer to visit. It is a shame that they are not open to technology; I expect that when we are older we will have ample apps, games and internet things to keep us more occupied and entertained during our senescence. I have lent my Kindle to one client who - their right arm is their only functioning limb - had been unable to read paper books. I've been trying to convince them to buy their own, but that is proving quite a challenge: they are extremely fiscally austere.

I don't know whether it's a generational thing or a countryside thing, or a bit of both, but most of our clients have had very few jobs in their lives. I haven't had many jobs, but I've already had more than a lot of our clients, who got a job straight after school and stayed in it until retirement. This doesn't seem either possible or desirable nowadays.

I have become increasingly sympathetic towards euthanasia over the past 8 months, encountering people who say they want to die but cannot.

Living in the countryside has shown me that I am very much not a countryside person. After the initial novelty wore off, it became very apparent that living in the countryside is extremely dull. An island in a sea of farms, Easingwold is a countryside town with a population of about 5000 people, most of whom are either retired or have lived here all their lives. Your personal universe shrinks in the countryside: everything beyond the farmy horizon may as well not exist, so little it seems to matter to your life. I am reminded of Terry Pratchett's Bromeliad trilogy, which gets its name from a species of plant in the Amazon, inside which small frogs can live out their entire lives. This is used as a metaphor throughout the books. It is easy to imagine Easingwold as a bromeliad, whose inhabitants - in the absence of modern communication technology - would spend their entire lives here, barely cognizant of the rest of the world, or the rest of the UK, or the rest of England.

The sheer dullness of the place seems to be accepted as a fact of life by those who have lived their entire lives here. (Thoreau's line, 'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation', rings in my ears.) In Dante's Inferno, the first circle of Hell, Limbo, contains the souls of righteous non-Christians who are unable to go to Heaven because they happened to live too early in human history: they lived in the centuries before Jesus sacrificed himself to wash away humanity's innate sinfulness, so were unable to accept him as their saviour. The souls of Limbo are not actively punished or rewarded, they wait around, bored, with no connection to God: it is a Godforsaken place. Distancing myself slightly from religious language, I would say that Easingwold is:

(a) fun-forsaken, in that there is fuck all to do. Easingwold has a disproportionate number of alcoholics and drug-addicts, because there's fuck all to do. The smell of weed in the air seems out of place, almost anachronistic, in a quaint countryside setting, but it frequently forms around the loitering youth, because there's fuck all to do.

(b) spirit-forsaken, in that it is hard here to cultivate a sense of the numinous, the transcendent, etc. It is hard to get a feeling of the interconnectedness of all things when you feel like your personal universe is being forcibly shrunk by the Island in the Sea of Farms. (The pelagic metaphor is enhanced by the bus journey from Easingwold to York: a ricketty old bus on bumpy country roads feels like an, admittedly short in nautical terms, oceanic voyage.) The sky does not feel like a window looking on to an incomprehensibly vast and complicated cosmos; it feels like a dome trapping you in, the sky-firmament of ancient cosmologies.

(I am perhaps being a tad harsh: there are benefits to rural isolation. The myriad political, economic and humanitarian crises and atrocities around the globe might as well be on another planet, so far away they feel. I suppose this might contribute to why the fear of immigrants is rather strong in rural areas: aliens coming over here, interrupting our isolation, making us realize that the Earth has more in it than we thought.)

I do not like this isolation. I am a city person. I intend to move to a city by the end of the year. I also feel like I am done with care work now, and so intend to go into something completely different next, whatever that may be.

The Predator, The Cyclist, and The Prophet

Three characters from today's walk.

1) I was walking down Market Street, whichw as crowded with shoppers. He was walking towards me with a steady, deliberate gait, like a predator hoping not to startle its prey. He wore a plain hoody. His skin was pale, his hair short and brown. His eyes stared forward, unblinking, while his face betrayed nothing. The gait and the face gave the impression that there was so much rage and hate and murderous lust inside him that his facial expression system had been overloaded and broken, leaving him with the expressionless face of a Passport photo or mug shot. As I walked past him, perhaps less than a meter away, a dreadful shiver went down my spine. I wanted to flee. I have never felt that before from such a brief encounter. It was as though all the hate and rage and murderous lust was, after breaking his facial muscles, being exuded from his pores, creating a terrifying aura around him.

I hope all this was just my imagination; I hope we won't be seeing his face on the news soon, wanted for multiple counts of murder and mutilation.

2) A man rode past me on a bike, on the pavement. He was wearing a grey tracksuit. He rode fast: he needed to get somewhere, or away from somewhere, very quickly. Tattooed across the left side of his neck were the large letters 'MUM'. The letters' prominence and crudity reminded me of cattle branding: was this man in such a hurry because he had just escaped from the chav farm?

3) On his back a cardboard sign advertised 'THE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO THE END OF THE WORLD'; on his front, a similar sign advised  'OBEY GOD'S 4TH COMMANDMENT OR YOU WILL DIE'. Held above his head, was the largest of his signs: 'ALMOST THERE'. He wore a scruffy coat; he was not clean-shaven.

He held out leaflets in his arms. I approached him and collected one. Title: 'THE END OF THE WORLD IS VERY CLOSE NOW'. The man didn't, or couldn't, speak. He showed me another sign: 'WOULD YOU LIKE SOME FREE BOOKS THAT EXPLAIN IT ALL?'. I nodded. The silent preacher-prophet passed me them from his sign-covered trolley. The 'books' are homemade: printed A4 pages stapled together. Title: 'THE HOPE THAT WE HAVE IN JESUS AS THIS WORLD COMES TO AN END', parts 1, 2, and 4. No part 3 for me.

I returned home. Here are some excerpts from the leaflet:

'Something very very big is about to happen to the world towards the end of 2015... Pope Francis has referred to himself as Jesus 2. He has gained territory in Jerusalem in preparation for the supposed joint Jew-Christisn-Islamic rebuilding of the (Satanic) 3rd temple... Is Pope Francis a demon, and the last Pope ever?... The world has been gradually prepared for the arrival of Maitreya for 40 years... Maitreya/Satan says that the start of the rapid change from the old system to the wonderful new system will start towards the end of this year, and that he will appear in person for the 1st time very soon.'

According to Wikipedia, Maitreya is a future incarnation of the Buddha.

'You have been given a temporary body for around 600,000 hours, and we have been put on this world for no other reason than to see if you decide to obey the laws and commandments of the God who created you and put you here. The only purpose for your existence on this planet is to decide the destination for your soul.'

Such a nightmarish idea. Worse than nihilism.

'The world is full of IDIOTIC MORONS WITH A DEATH WISH, and BLIND IGNORANT LOSERS THAT CAN'T SEE WHAT'S RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM... Today's SLEEP WALKING SHEEPLE fall for all their deceptions, and they can't see that they are living in a world where the satanic authorities regard us as useless eaters that have to be destroyed... Those suffering from A TERMINAL DAFTNESS really do think it is rational to spread Satan's anti biblical propaganda, and people like Stephen Hawkins, Richard Dawkins, David Attenborough and Brian Cox really do believe the rubbish they are peddling to the masses via the TV box. Are you one of the BLIND TERMINAL REJECTS IN THE GAME OF LIFE that believes all of their anti-God propaganda?... Life is a continual battle against evil forces. If we win the battle... we find ourselves in God's world of AWESOMENESS BEYOND OUR IMAGINATION.'

I like the phrase 'a terminal daftness'.

'Have you ever wondered how MAGICIANS defy gravity, cut up their bodies, read people's minds and make things appear and disappear? The magicians have pledged allegiance of their soul to Satan in return for the ability to do party tricks that astound the UNWASHED MASSES THAT CAN'T SEE BEYOND THIS WORLD... Today's DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY is entirely supernatural. Many people in the gadget industries do know that it is mostly SATANIC WITCHCRAFT, and anyone that isn't living in Satan's dark world, and ON THEIR WAY TO LIFE'S GARBAGE HEAP should be able to see that it is beyond the range of what is physically possible... Even the printer that printed most of these books and leaflets is blindingly obviously not of this world... What will you do when the demons that appear to be aliens arrive?'

In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, demons are used in technology such as watches and cameras. There's a novel by Arthur C. Clarke featuring aliens that look like demons.

The books are too long, and not as entertainingly angry. In them, we learn that supermarkets are part of Satan's plan to make the human population unfit and unhealthy; that medication is evil; that evolution is a satanic lie; that 'the coloured races are expanding, while the white races are diminishing'; that hygiene is evil; that Hitler was the victim of an incredibly successful satanic propaganda campaign; that feminism is evil; that the Devil monitors the internet; that Islam was a Roman Catholic invention.

And that only brings me about halfway through part 1.

That poor man.

This Shouting Man

The other day, I was walking down a busy city centre street. Suddenly we heard some shouting, like a drunkard who'd lost all inhibitions, or an apocalyptic prophet who'd just realised that The End was even more imminent than his previous calculations had suggested.

We could not make out the words. A certain phrase was repeated frequently; it might have been 'All the women', or 'And the women', or 'And the woman'. On reflection, it might have been something else entirely, such as 'Angry swimming'. I will never know.

We could not see The Yeller, the source of the noise, the being who was unleashing this sound upon the universe.

Perhaps he had recently discovered that his wife was a serial adulterer who never truly loved him, and he was now publicly shaming her.

Perhaps he was an extreme traditionalist who, after years of lamenting the decline of misogynist values, had finally snapped and decided that feminism doomed us all, and he needed to warn everyone.

Perhaps he had recently fornicated with a wide range of consenting females, and was now, after having several lonesome pints to celebrate his virility, boasting to all who could hear about his sexual prowess.

I only had that tetrasyllabic phrase to go on. The rest was utterly incomprehensible. He hadn't been shouting for very long, but by now I had several mental images of what The Yeller might look like.

And then I saw him.

Smartly dressed. Clean shaven. Tidy hair. Younger than myself.

And playing a guitar.

WORST. BUSKER. EVER.

On Reading

Reading has become my favourite hobby, but it was not always so. I enjoyed reading as a child, but I didn't read as much other bookworm children. My family had a Nintendo 64 and, later, a Nintendo Gamecube. I spent far more time video gaming than I did reading. Video gaming was my favourite hobby. My favourite books at the time were Brian Jacque's 'Redwall' series, and Robin Jarvis' 'Deptford Mice' trilogy.

When I went to high school I read less. Near the beginning of Year 7, I attempted to read both Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray, because I thought I was older now - I should try some harder books. I did not get past the first few pages. It was a big jump from Redwall to Wuthering Heights.

I could not seem to find time to read; I was quite unhappy in high school, and found the easy instant escapism of video games far more satisfying than books. In my first two years of high school, I think I only read Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Angels & Demons (I was very interested in the Illuminati at this time), and The Lost World. I read some of the latter during the morning form time, and someone asked me 'what are you reading for?'

We got a computer at home, and I started to live more and more online. I played Star Wars Battlefront 2 a lot. Then I got addicted to World Of Warcraft. I was subscribed to the game for ONE YEAR (April 2006 - April 2007) and accumulated a play time of SIXTY DAYS. One sixth of that year was spent in a virtual life.

English lessons at school were a big factor in me stopping reading. All of the assigned reading was a big chore. The Year 7 set text was so dull I refused to read it, or do the homework assignment. I'd thought that reading was supposed to be enjoyable, and this book certainly wasn't. I lied to the teacher, saying that I had done it and handed it in. She did not believe me, and gave me a detention. I lied to my mum, saying I had done it and handed it in, and got her to write a letter to the school saying I had done it and thought the detention was unfair. The teacher apologised. I was a good pupil the vast majority of the time, so could get away with it.

The association of those lessons with reading, and the appeal of virtual worlds, did a good job of killing my enthusiasm for reading. I could understand why that girl in my class had incredulously asked me what I was reading for. What school had made us read was either outright boring, boring because we weren't ready to appreciate it, or was made boring by us being forced to over-analyse it to death. All for a GCSE. A friend from a different school told me that English was his favourite subject, and I could not understand how that was even possible.

A few months after leaving World of Warcraft, I was given Philip Reeve's 'Mortal Engines' Quartet by my mum; a colleague of hers had recommended it. I read the lot in one week, hooked. I started to think there might be something in the whole reading malarkey. Later that year, I decided to use the Waterstones vouchers I'd been given as Christmas and birthday presents over the years. They had nearly expired. I purchased 'The Illuminatus! Trilogy' by Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea, which is a mindfuck; 'Shadowmarch' by Tad Williams, which is an alright fantasy story; and 'Larklight' by Philip Reeve, which is a fun children's book. For Christmas, I received 'Anathem' and 'Cryptonomicon', both by Neal Stephenson. The former is so dull that it passes through 'boring' to reach something strange on the other side. The latter is so dull that when I was around a 100 pages (a hectopage, perhaps?) from the end of its 928 pages I realised I still didn't care what was happening, and gave up on it. My reading rate remained slow.

At the beginning of A2 year (Year 13), I cleared a lot of nerdy paraphernalia from my shelves. Looking at my shelves, I decided to fill the empty space between the remaining action figures with books that I had read, sure that there had to be something to the reading malarkey.

I quickly discovered that reading could be lots of fun, if you were reading what you wanted to read,  and did not read anything that, for whatever reason, you did not enjoy. I got out of the prideful have-to-finish-a-book-because-I've-started-it line of thinking. I was reading for pleasure; any book that did not give me pleasure was wasting my time; I had already wasted my money on purchasing it, I would not waste my time as well. The book that broke me from the prideful line of thought to the wild hedonistic reasoning was 'The Secret History of the World' by Jonathan Black, which is shit.

That year my reading rate was at its highest. I had bookmarks in four different books at a time: a long novel, a shorter novel, a short story collection, and a non-fiction. At bedtime, I would read a chapter of each before going to sleep. I finished a book every 2-4 days. I read at college, at home, on the bus, on car journeys, on train journeys. I spent a lot of time reading. I felt like I had missed out on so many years of reading, and now needed to catch up.

I had an operation in December 2010 which left me housebound for a month while I recovered. My activity alternated between revising for my upcoming exams, seeing the friends that visited, playing on the Nintendo Wii I had received for Christmas (this was mostly done with the friends who visited) and reading. On the days when no one visited, I would revise one topic, then read one chapter of a book, and repeat this pattern for the day.

After I'd caught up on the quantity of books read, I wanted to have read all the mind-blowing science fiction novels while I was still young and impressionable. Science fiction is my favourite genre. I read a lot of SF classics, mostly those from Gollancz's SF Masterworks series. There is now a lot of Gollancz yellow on my shelves. This phase of my reading career concluded with Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, which is THE mind-blowing science fiction novel. I had worked up to it, wanting to be ready for it, and it did not disappoint.

After Star Maker I found SF unsatisfying, so started to read more 'literary' classics. A year before Star Maker, I had read The Picture of Dorian Gray, which gripped me so strongly that I read most of it in one night. It showed me that the classics, which were, to me, still associated with those awful English lessons, could actually be enjoyed. After Star Maker, I read Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, which was exhaustingly difficult: after about ten minutes I felt like I needed to lie down and rest. But I enjoyed it. Now I'm working through the famous classics, to see what all the fuss is about. After all, they've been around so long and people are still going on about them, so there's gotta be something to them, right?

The shelves in my room were quickly filled, and there are now two more bookcases in my room, which are nearly full. And that is after accounting for the fact that a lot of the books I read back in college are no longer there. Before I got the extra bookcases, I occasionally did a book clearout when I was running out of space. For aesthetic reasons, I'm trying not to double stack, or be forced to rest any horizontally on top.

Mount Toread, my to-read pile, is huge.