Читать книгу Enemies of the System - Brian Aldiss - Страница 4

Some Futures last for ever, when even the Past has gone past. Long ago, in the nineteen-seventies, it was possible to imagine that the good old democratic world might be overcome by a darker and more savage world to the East.

In 1976, a literary conference was held in Posna´n, Poland. The creative science fiction writers of the time, American and British, artists of darkened worlds, were greatly interested by the prospect of a Communist conference, there in the heart of the Other Side.

I accepted the invitation and drove across divided Europe to Posna´n. The conference was well arranged. Everyone was polite. We talked a lot; we drank a lot; we attended long and rather tedious sessions; we walked the streets of this country town, where considerable reconstruction had revived districts ruined by the Nazi armies in the Second World War.

During one of the long academic sessions, we were introduced to a novel with impeccable Communist antecedents.

My memory – always unreliable concerning future or past – tells me that this polemic was a kind of satire in which the world has been over-run by democracy. Of course, this transition does not work very well, which made (so we were told) the tale all the more hilarious.

The academic explaining this master work to us rocked with laughter. Applause broke out (who knows, carefully rehearsed applause?) among the audience.

The academic concluded by saying, ‘Certainly no writer in the West would dare to write a story in which Communism had conquered the world.’

I couldn’t help it. I found myself immediately itching to get back to my Oxford desk …

And this is the book I wrote about the universal triumph of Communism. Jonathan Cape published it in hardcover early in February 1978, and Harper and Row in the States a little later. Heyne in Germany followed suit, and Timbro in Sweden shortly after that. Since which, I’ve lost count.

But never was my novel published in a Communist country – at least, not to my knowledge …