Take a heavy dose of
Robert A. Heinlein's novella
Universe [IMG]
(which totally blew me away when I first started reading SF in English),
a lighter dose of
A. Bertram Chandler's
Giant Killer [IMG]
and mix the generation ship gone wrong, the mutants, the reverting to a lower tech level and to superstition, the Giants, the clever mutated rats, and add some clever twists of your own, and you have
Brian W. Aldiss' first novel
Non-Stop (1958) :
4/5 [IMG]
Reading chronologically I consider Aldiss "the most promising new writer" of the second half of the 1950's, and he didn't disappoint with his first novel, even though the plot was very derivative, and the prose not as ambitious as in many of his short stories but more like Heinlein's. The protagonist - Roy Complain - is not very Heinleinian, though. He's neither named after an American hero, nor is he a Competent Man, but rather a follower who has doubts about himself. But he has hidden qualities.
I read this novel some decades ago, but didn't remember much of it now except that there was twist at the end, and that I didn't think it was nowhere near as good as Universe. Now I think it may be objectively better, but it misses that illusive quality called Sense of Wonder that Universe had. But of course much has to do with timing and the order in which you read the stories.
Aldiss' novel has a more complex plot and his starship a more complex ecology with "ponics" covering most of the ground and growing very fast, and escaped animals living in it. And there's mutations, but it's explained in a different way than the usual radioactivity (which by 1958 was known not to cause such mutations). There's a nod to Joe-Jim Gregory from Universe:
‘What about the Forwards people?’ the boy asked. ‘Do they have green faces?’
‘We are coming to them,’ Fermour said, lowering his voice so that the youthful audience crowded nearer. ‘I have told you what happens if you keep to the lateral corridors of the world. But if you can get on to the main corridor you get on to a highway that takes you straight to distant parts of the world. And then you may arrive in the territory of Forwards.’
‘Have they really all got two heads?’ a little girl asked.
Aldiss was still a neophyte when it came to writing "spicy" stuff:
Sweat stood out on Complain’s face, and he noticed Vyann’s blouse sticking to her breasts; for him they were the sweetest fruits aboard the ship.
I thought this was funny, and it's getting more applicable every day:
Periodically among the tribes witch-hunts were held; but the suspects, when carved up for examination, always had hearts and lungs. The Outsiders invariably escaped detection – but everyone knew they were here: the very fact that witch-hunts took place proved it.
And while the protagonists in Universe revered the ship manual or something, in this novel it's a more advanced religion, but with a very different Holy Trinity:
The Teaching warned him that his mind was a foul place. The holy trinity, Froyd, Yung and Bassit, had gone alone through the terrible barriers of sleep, death’s brother; there they found – not nothing, as man had formerly believed – but grottoes and subterranean labyrinths full of ghouls and evil treasure, leeches, and the lusts that burn like acid. Man stood revealed to himself: a creature of infinite complexity and horror. It was the aim of the Teaching to let as much of this miasmic stuff out to the surface as possible. But supposing the Teaching had never gone far enough?
It spoke, allegorically, of conscious and subconscious. Supposing there was a real Subconscious, a being capable of taking over the mind of a man? Had the trinity been down all the slimy corridors? Was this Subconscious the madman who screamed inside him?
So an entertaining read, which I would have rated higher had it been more original.
And it would have made a great computer game, or at least the ship would have made a good setting for a TC for Unreal Tournament or something. Well, for all I know, it may have already been done.
