> jim rossignol

Having taken a recent trip to the curious warehouse of used literature that is the Book Barn, I’ve once again come home laded with 1960s sci-fi. The focus of my shelf dredging on this occasion was English author Brian Aldiss. Aldiss stood alongside Ballard and Michael Moorcock as one of the men who tried to change the course of science fiction writing in the 1960s. In 1968 Aldiss optimistically described the genre as “the sub-literature of change”.

He and the others had expected science fiction to evolve into something more profound, which it seems to have failed to do. I wonder if the information chaos and living sci-fi that we increasingly find ourselves in makes up for that gap. I’m looking at writing seriously about videogame culture at the moment, and it strikes me that it might as well be a 1960s fantasy of how the future of entertainment might evolve. And when does something stop being science fiction anyway? When you learn that it really exists?

Like all good sci-fi authors Aldiss’s writing is inspiring to read because it is rich with ideas. I’ve been browsing his 60s short stories and novels, each one heavy with thoughts on potential human evolution, technological evolution, and the brooding political threat of the Cold War. Aldiss provides unique descriptions of sci-fi staples such as time travel, telepathy and robotics. He’s not always the most elegant writer, but he doesn’t let things calcify.

But it’s not actually his fiction that has caused me to scribble here in the hypertext. Among the novels and story collections I’ve also picked up an oddity of speculation and general writing by Aldiss, written over a single month in 1968. The Shape of Further Things is a rambling book filled with writerly speculation and personal reflections of a kind that I think it would be tough to get published in 2006, even by the most respected of science fiction authors. It is the kind of writing that has become blogging in the last decade.

The book covers Aldiss’s personal feelings about the research being conducted on sleep and dreaming by his contemporaries, as well as the state of science fiction at the time, the moon as territory, and the potential of computers. It’s a remarkable feeling to be able to dip into someone’s hopes for the future, and the reality of their life just a decade before I was born.

In one particularly striking passage Aldiss predicts the implications of the Internet and mobile devices with uncanny accuracy:

Soon, soon, the contents of antiquated knowledge repositories like the British Museum Reading Room can be transferred to computers. Imagine the jump in potential when that store of knowledge alone is available to a dialling subscriber. When that and similar information-nuclei are available at the fingertips… the possessors of those fingertips will be living virtually in a different kind of environment, an environment with a lushness which will make ours seem like a desert with a few antique temples standing crumbling here and there.

What one will then wear on the wrist will be, not a mini-computer, but a computerized dialling system to the big hook up.

Note how the phrase ‘living virtually’ takes different connotations now than it would have done when Aldiss wrote that passage. And the internet should so be called ‘The Big Hook Up’.

But it’s not really the specific insights that interest me about this book, so much as the fact of its existence at all. It’s a book that parallels our fragmentary web-projects like blogging. Aldiss sat down and wrote each day because he was inspired by dozens of different subjects. There’s no real theme to the book other than Aldiss’s interests and his delight in being alive. It’s filled with both optimism and an ugly sense of doom. It feels some things haven’t changed at all in forty years, while at the same time it’s a completely different world.

The Shape Of Further Things is a kind of testament to thinking out loud. It’s about the writer as a conduit: input is transformed and revealed in a new form. He’s not an expert writing concise technical material, he’s simply someone with a gift for description. Writing allows us to offer our descriptions up the world. Perhaps they’ll be useful to someone, but they’re not about truth or certainty.

Aldiss seems to sum up this little project when he talks about ‘the sheer delight of being alive’. I don’t think I could write a book like this, but then again I hope that I’m also writing in the same spirit every single day.