This World and Nearer Ones

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Brian Aldiss. This World and Nearer Ones

THIS WORLD AND NEARER ONES. BY BRIAN ALDISS

Contents

Introduction and Acknowledgements

Ever Since the Enlightenment

James Blish and the Mathematics of Knowledge

Dick’s Maledictory Web

Why They Left Zirn Unguarded: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

Nesvadba: In the Footsteps of the Admirable Čapek

Verne: The Extraordinary Voyage

Vonnegut: Guru Number Four

Barefoot: Its First Decade

The Gulf and the Forest: Contemporary SF in Britain

Looking Forward to 2001

The Hiroshima Man

From History to Timelessness

The Hashish Club

1951: Yesterday’s Festival of the Future

The Sower of the Systems: Some Paintings by G. F. Watts

The Fireby-Wireby Book

SF Art: Strangeness with Beauty

The Film Tarkovsky Made

Kissingers Have Long Ears

Spielberg: When the Mundane Breaks Down

Sleazo Inputs I Have Known

It Catechised from Outer Space: Politics in SF

The Flight into Tomorrow

Burroughs: Less Lucid than Lucian

‘Yes, well, but …’

The Universe as Coal-Scuttle

California, Where They Drink Buck Rogers

Modest Atmosphere with Monsters

Cultural Totems in the Soviet Union

A Swim in Sumatra

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Also part of The Brian Aldiss Collection

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Title Page

Introduction and Acknowledgements

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Decade by decade, more time was needed in which to contain scientific findings related to the age of the Earth, and to cosmology. The good Bishop Ussher’s estimate that God created the world one morning in 4004 BC was laughable by Lyell’s time – the iguanodon upset that tea party. Just as men looked back to a truer perspective, other findings encouraged them to look forward. That was a new thing, too.

Not all that was new was of a sort to induce optimism. Though evolution could be made to stand as a justification for ruthless economic oppression or empire-building, it does not, on a proper evaluation, encourage any permanent feeling of security. The same might be said of Lord Kelvin’s reformulation of the second Law of Thermodynamics, which carried with it intimations of the heat death of the universe. Utilitarianism was a bleak enough creed for men; how much worse to find it written in the stars themselves.

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