Читать книгу The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s - Brian Aldiss - Страница 5

Introduction

As might be expected, these stories resonate with occurrences in life both unfortunate and fortunate.

It seems I have an eloquence for stories, most of which I can see in retrospect as an impatience with ordinary life. And ‘ordinary life’, as many might agree, has its pains and pleasures, its omens and significances.

The ordinary (as I suppose, after my re-reading of this produce of long ago) can be appreciated only by acquaintance with its phantom partner – fiction! – where truth slinks about in disguise.

At the tender age of five, I was sent away from home to a preparatory school on the Norfolk coast. What did I take with me? We were allowed only two items for company – let’s say a teddy bear or a gollywog and a copy of Alice in Wonderland. I took along a microscope and a volume called The Treasury of Knowledge. A good start at an adverse time.

Then, later, considerably later, I am back from a long hazardous tenure – many alien years – abroad in the East, courtesy of HM Government. I am dog poor. Oxford University would not have me. I write a novel entitled Non-Stop featuring a man who does not recognise that he is lost from ordinary life.

This novel went to Faber and Faber. Faber had recently engaged a new director, Charles Monteith. Charles enjoyed many of the perks of life to which I could not aspire. We immediately became friends. Why? Because both Charles and I had served in the British Army in Burma.

Indeed, Charles had fought in the ghastly Arakan where he had been wounded in one leg – a wound that troubled him throughout life. I had been stuck in a nicer part of the jungle – where I shot dead (a disturbing fact I hid from my conscious self for many years) an attacking Japanese soldier. BURMA, with its enormous freight, was Charles’ and my watchword.

We never really spoke about it. But we knew.

So such facts and factors lie behind many of these stories, from ‘Comic Inferno’ to ‘Unauthorised Persons’.

I enjoyed writing them. How do you feel, I wonder?