Customer Reviews

Earthworks

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In a future where population has expanded (to 27 billion), so has the need for the use of land for agriculture. Those who slave away in the fields are the criminals convicted of petty crimes. Roads and villages have been amputated by the Centralization into the giant cities while the petty criminals have been banished due to `rustification.' To drive this agricultural boom in a time where soil diminishment and erosion are rampant, the delivery of sand to create artificially fertile soil is a growing business. So sets the scene for a pardoned convict, Knowle Noland, to become a sea captain of a largely autonomous behemoth vessel with a crew of three delivering sand.

While the book's synopsis focused on the ecological destruction of earth's water and soil, the actual book focused on the unfolding of a man's hallucinogenic disease and his Ludlum-like African happenings. As said, this Aldiss novel, my third, is much like a Ludlum novel in its politics, espionage and flashbacks. It also has the feel of a Delany novel as its flashbacks and hallucinations tend to be disjointed yet poetic. Much of the novel is also well formed in prose, but when taken all together it's a 126 page piecemeal hallucination, flashback and espionage rush.

The 1960's were a time of utopian hopes, celebrating peace, free love and the brotherhood of all; but also of a deep unease, even a nihilistic fear in the Western World. Surely the Vietnam War, the amoral Nixon Administration and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation fed those fears; conservatives feared the destruction of values and society they had worked hard to attain while their opposite numbers feared their continuation. The developed world's squandering of resources began to be understood by all; no longer did a belching smokestack indicate progress as much as environmental disaster.

At this time, science fiction gave us some of the grimmest writing yet. John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange are all outstanding examples of the fear and hopelessness authors of the time understood coursed close under the skin of the optimistic face of society. Brian Aldiss's Earthworks is equally representative of this tone. Although nowhere nearly as well known as my other examples, Aldiss's vision may actually be bleaker. It is set in a future which follows all too recognizably from our own--pollution has taken its toll and disease and hunger are so rampant that they have become the identifying characteristic of the time. Although Earthworks is quite short, at only 126 pages, it is a richly detailed and fully convincing portrait; disease and illness make the storytelling hallucinatory at times, leaving the narrator and reader questioning the very nature of reality. Fans of Philip K. Dick will be enthralled by this quality. Aldiss is a superb writer at his very best here. It is a real pity that Earthworks is out of print, but I would definitely recommend it for any science fiction fan search out a used copy.

Brian Aldiss' Earthworks (1965) takes place in a future Earth wrecked by the effects of overpopulation and the resulting environmental repercussions of intensive, expansive, and destructive over-farming. In this disturbed world of increasing automation and devaluation of human life, robots are worth more than people and the hungry diseased hordes of mankind have reverted to animism.

The Farmer rules from his barrack-like cities the Landsmen who till his toxin stricken fields as punishment for minor infractions. The land itself is poisonous -- so is the air, the water, and most food... Virtually all land is intensively farmed (sand is brought from Africa and infused with nutrients to construct new plots), most animal species are exterminated, and food itself must undergo chemical treatment to remove toxins and carcinogens...

Aldiss' dark vision of collapsing society and withering earth is poignant and brutal. Scenes often verge on visceral -- a disease which causes its victims to lurch about and shed skin like dying leaves, farmers wandering the land in protection suits, the Gas Room...

Sadly, Earthworks suffers from a virulent strain of inane plot and ultimately, a very unsavory message -- the endorsement of world war.

Plot Summary (Some spoilers -- although the back cover spoils as well!)

The "plot" unfolds (lurches?) in a rather muddled fashion -- obviously Aldiss is attempting to be literary. Or perhaps, it's an attempt to distract us from the banality of the plot. One gets the frustrating feeling that Aldiss fell in love with a world but couldn't figure out how to populate his world with viable characters, events, people!

Our protagonist, Knowle Nolan, is the captain of a largely automated transport ship carting African sands to Englad. Africa is technologically more advanced than Europe which is plagued with abject poverty and the absence of intellectual thought (most people can't read or write). Nolan narrates his tale (resurrecting the art of writing) in a series of flashbacks. Nolan himself is plagued with hallucinations due to a childhood disease -- and these lengthy visions take of a substantial chunk of the work.

Nolan, an orphan from England, was sent to the farms as punishment for a minor infraction. There he encounters the Travelers (a group of people who wander around with little purpose but to exercise freedom in the face of repression/automation/organization). In the heat of the moment (when they're captured by government forced), he betrays the leader of the group. As a reward he received his captain commission from the Farmer himself.

A dead man floats to Nolan's transport vessel with an assortment of love letters... Soon the vessel runs aground Africa's skeleton coast and they become embroiled in the politics of the region (with world ramifications).

Final Thoughts

I really wanted to like this work. However the world war for the sake of humanity advocating conclusion was genuinely bothersome, the lurching delivery distracting and poorly executed, and the frustratingly banal plot barely propped up the well-realized world .

That said Aldiss' social extrapolations from the effects of overpopulation are intriguing. For example, when the majority of the world is preoccupied by the constant pangs of hunger the finer points of human existence are snuffed out -- art, culture, writing, religion, etc -- the age of animism in the cities... Likewise, the work is early attempt at the genre of ecological disaster -- the effects of fertilizer runoff, chemical attempts to combat plant disease, polluted water sources, etc.

I tentatively suggest Earthworks for its ideas and richly detailed world (and the stunning covers!). An intriguing but highly flawed work with a dubious final message...

In the sixties and seventies, the world getting more crowded was starting to bother a lot of people, and overpopulation is a theme you see taken up quite often in SF around this time. The pinnacle of this is probably John Brunner's massive cross-section "Stand on Zanzibar", while other authors like Harry Harrison ("Make Room! Make Room!", also responsible for the greatest line in cinema ever . . . "It's people!"), and Robert Silverberg ("The World Inside") also explored the topic. Most of them had different takes on what exactly all those people would do to the planet, except they generally agreed on one thing . . . it would be bad for everyone involved.

Aldiss' take is much more narrowly focused and appears to be overpopulation with a strong right turn through a JG Ballard story. A slim read, he doesn't so much explore his world as let us see a sliver of it through his narrator, who used to live on a Farm until he was let out and now he pilots a ship. Which runs aground on the coast of Africa. From there, more things happen.

"More things happen" is probably the best way to describe this novel as Aldiss isn't concerned so much with giving us every gritty little detail of this world as much as making sure we experience it and feel it. To that end, the book is narrated in the first person, meaning that no matter how much we want to know about the world, if our protagonist doesn't give a darn about it, we're not going to learn about it.

Fortunately, he gets around. Through his eyes, we learn that the world is divided into Farmers and Travellers. The Travellers are people who have escaped from the farms, which exist as giant penal colonies for people who commit petty crimes. Food is at such a premium that people are forced to work in the camps and land space is one of the most sought after resources this world has. Everyone is going hungry, everyone is working hard, everyone is sinking gradually into despair. Including our protagonist.

What makes this more entertaining, and is probably a slight product of its time, is that the narrator also hallucinates. Often. And without warning. Meaning that entire sequences that should be perfectly normal are taken up by what can be described as "trips", as he sees and hears things that literally aren't there. As this is all taking place in a future world that we can barely recognize as our own, this can make things a bit confusing and the only real option is to go with it (especially the bravura hallucination toward the end, which probably packs more symbolism inside it than my brain can reasonably handle), with the vague hope of sorting it all out later.

Short as it is, however, the plot does take a while to get going, with the stated plot on the cover copy (Knowle Noland, our hero, goes to Africa and finds people who are plotting to save the world in order to destroy it) also coming along as an afterthought very late in the novel, with the real meat of it not even kicking in until the story is nearly over. Meanwhile we take a meandering path through Noland's memories, how he got involved on a Farm, how he became a Traveller briefly and his tenure as the captain of a ship. Fortunately for us Aldiss' prose skills are at a peak here and he can rattle off pages of descriptions of a gritty and dirty world, and the man who hallucinates in that world, in such a way that it never seems showy or self-indulgent. It gives the world a sort of texture, a sickly pallor that the story can't quite shake. If nothing else, the sheer feel of it overrides the slim plot and the lack of any real solid characters. There are people who do things and that's the extent of it. They're real as long as we follow their plans. And some have plans and some just have flight.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a hopeful story. The world is an utter mess and the best plan to save the world involves basically wiping the slate clean in what can be only be described as an extreme solution to the problems proposed in Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" and can only be really countered with "Well, we don't really need to kill everyone". Aldiss doesn't exactly leave us with anything resembling hope at the end, and it's just as well, in his world there isn't any real reason to feel optimistic. What does impress is how he gives us a notion of this world through just a short and narrow lens, the book is short enough to be read in one long sitting but it doesn't need the cascade of information that Brunner had to use for his novels. Here, it's just one man staring at the world through distorted eyes, and while what we see may not be an appealing vision, it's also not as much of a hallucination to look our own windows and imagine our world getting very close to his.