Customer Reviews

HARM

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In the not too distant future, the civil rights of a person are suspended if they are suspected of being a terrorist or have anything to do with them. Paul, a Muslim who is a second generation British citizen who has been arrested by HARM (Hostile Activities Research Ministry) and is addressed as Prisoner B. He was incarcerated for writing a book satirical in nature and in it there was a page about the prime minister getting assassinated. He is tortured, not allowed to make a phone call, not have a lawyer, and contact with the outside world is forbidden.

To escape the pain and fear, he crosses in his mind a planet called Stygia. His hallucination is very intricately detailed; an example being that the colonists have had their DNA and brain functions inserted in life process reservoirs and they are back put together on the desert planet. His illusion is better than his present reality as he swings between both worlds between of torture. Afraid he will never leave his prison, Paul falls deeper and deeper in his mind constructed delusion.

Readers of Fahrenheit 411, 1984 and A Brave New World will find HARM just as thought provoking and emotionally disturbing because it touches a nerve that people will rather ignore at a time when rendition is okay and habeas corpus is not. Following 9/11 the west has looked at the Muslim community with disdain, fear and hostility although the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. Brian W. Aldiss writes a stunning indictment against President Bush's "war on terror" and the extremes to which he has taken it including abolishing some of the freedoms we have taken for granted.

Harriet Klausner

Paul Ali, a young British writer with Muslim parents but who calls himself a secularist, has written and published a comic novel in the tradition of P.G. Wodehouse. The book attracted some minor attention and made him a very small amount of money. One passage, in which the protagonists joke about what would happen if the Prime Minister was assassinated, has attracted the attention of the Hostile Activities Research Ministry. After learning that Ali visited Saudi Arabia on holiday recently, HARM arrests Ali as a suspected terrorist and sets about finding the truth from him...by any means necessary.

As Ali is interrogated, he escapes from the degradation and torture by constructing a fantasy world, Stygia, where in the distant future humans have sent a colonisation ship from Earth. The passengers were molecularly disassembled for transit, but their reconstitution did not go as planned and now the people are confused, or brain-damaged, or have problems with language. In this world Ali is Fremant, a bodyguard for the colony's deranged leader, Astaroth. As Astaroth prosecutes a genocidal war against the native inhabitants, the Dogovers, Fremant's loyalties are torn. There is upheaval in Stygia, war and revolution are coming, and what happens in the real world and in Ali's mind starts to reflect more and more on one another.

Brian Aldiss may be in his 80s now, but HARM (published in 2007) shows that his formidable powers as a writer have not diminished with age. In this novel Aldiss is clearly angry over what Britain and her allies did and became in the 'war on terror', but pulls himself back from a kneejerk polemical attack on the policies of the Bush-Blair axis. Instead he analyses the situation through the lens of SF, making the point that the brutal and oppressive measures that had been adopted were the result of fear and ignorance, an urgent need to distill complex issues down to a hopelessly naive black-and-white, us-and-them situation. At the same time, he also points out the reality of the threats that do exist and threaten us, and in the end offers no neat or pat answers because they simply do not exist.

All of this may make HARM sound like a tiresome political treatise rather than as a novel, but nothing could be further from the truth. Aldiss' engagement with the issues does not detract from the story, which is a dizzying multi-stranded narrative occupying two different levels of reality and how the state of Ali's mind in the 'real' world impacts on that of Fremant on Stygia. Aldiss' formidable powers of SF worldbuilding are again on display here, with the hostile insects and fauna of Stygia recalling the grotesque genius of Hothouse, whilst descriptions of the journey through space from Earth echo elements in Non-Stop. But HARM is its own, dizzyingly intelligent book.

The novel concludes with both an author's note and a fascinating interview between the author and his publisher in which analyses his motives in writing the book and where it sits compared to some of his other novels.

HARM (****½) is firey, smart and compelling (I read the book in one sitting), urgent in tone and convincing in argument. It is available now in the UK and USA.

Brian W. Aldiss is a living legend in the science fiction genre--he has won the Hugo Award, the Nebula, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He has been a progressive voice in the genre for decades, and his latest novel, HARM, has all the life, voice and thought provocation of anything he has ever produced.

HARM--an acronym for Hostile Activities Research Ministry--is a satirical novel based in the near future. It is the story of Paul Ali, a writer and British citizen of Islamic heritage, who is being held as a political prisoner in a terrorist detention camp. Inside the prison he is known only as Prisoner B. His crime: a few characters in his comic novel "The Pied Piper of Hament," drunkenly joke about the assassination of the British Prime Minister. His only human contact is with his interrogators, who practice torture and violence with a particularly frightening glee.

When Paul is not in interrogation he is sequestered in a solitary cell where he suffers visions and vivid imaginings due to a mental illness. He lives in two separate and distinct worlds. The first is the world of torture and pain, and the second is a distant world where insects are dominant, and the local human population has been transplanted with extreme difficulty. They were transported in Life-Process Reservoirs, which contained their brain functions and DNA and then were reconstituted on arrival. Unfortunately the reconstitution did not work perfectly, and many of them have lost significant verbal skills, a vast amount of their intelligence, and their cultural identities.

HARM is a disjointed novel that is effective for the simple reason that when all of the storylines are connected and examined as a whole, they become something more than their parts. It is a story that casts a cynical eye at our post September 11th society. Mr. Aldiss cleverly unmasks the tightrope that many British Muslims are walking--they must embrace the British culture without losing their own--and he also casts a shadow against the methods used by Britain and the United States in the war on terror.

HARM is a novel that is both enlightening and demanding. It is very much a novel of our time, and it captures many relevant themes--immigration, identity, racism, torture--but it also examines the obscurities and nuances of what has happened to our culture since the September 11th terrorist attacks. It translates the hate and anger with a perfect pitch, all while telling a compelling and entertaining story. I recommend HARM wholeheartedly.

-Gravetapping

Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali, a British citizen and Muslim, innocently captures the attention of the Hostile Activities Research Ministry (HARM) by publishing a volume of silliness that includes a threat to the Prime Minister. His civil rights notwithstanding, he is brutally interrogated by men who have no higher priority than finding out who his theoretical co-conspirators are. The unending ordeal triggers in Paul's mind a tendency towards dissociative personality. Locked in solitary confinement, he imagines himself living on a far-off planet Stygia where an austere authoritarian government practices genocide against the "doglovers", people who are actually the pets of a race of intelligent "dogs". The novel flips back and forth between Britain and Stygia, as Paul's tormentors continue their brutal questioning over the course of days and even weeks. Will Paul's innocence ever be proven? Will he survive his ordeal with his mind intact? Or will he spend the rest of his days fighting battles in a fantasy world of his own imagination?

It's easy enough to see why Aldiss wrote this novel; recent world events have made us all very aware of the dangers of a government that sets security above the rights of individuals, and Aldiss (never one to shy away from a political statement) wanted to address that. Yet heavy-handed as the Earth-side story is, most of the pages focus on the sci-fi/fantasy sub-story, which is more imaginative, has better characters, and shows more plot movement. In a more fully realized novel, the episodes on Stygia would have been better integrated, serving to inform the story that is taking place in the real world, and vice versa. As it stands, it's easy to forget about HARM altogether, and like Paul, get completely lost in the fantasy. Unfortunately, neither story is especially compelling on its own, and due to the lack of connection between the two, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Writer Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali is arrested by agents of the Hostile Activities Research Ministry because (HARM) because his novel, Pied Piper of Hament, contains a joke about the assassination of a British prime minister. As a British citizen of Muslim Heritage, Paul is suspected of connections with Islamic terrorists. Paul is swept up on the flimsiest, then subjected to torture that is made even more abhorrent by the vile racism of his interlocutors. At the same time Paul is suffering from a personality disorder. He is being translated back and forth between two main realities: Earth and the insect-dominated world of Stygia. The colonists of Stygia have been transported to the planet with their brain functions and DNA stored in Life Process Reservoirs (LPRs) and then reconstituted upon arrival. The new Stygians become virtually computer compositions; given this treatment, most of the colonists have suffered degrees of brain damage. The reality of Paul fluctuates between this imagined Stygian and his prison cell.

Paul being both a Muslim and British can't help the paranoid West that persecutes Muslim minorities. As in Fahrenheit 451 it doesn't matter if Paul is not a threat and that it is a waste of time to hold on to him for his written comedy. The stab on insights into human nature are what they are; Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The novel makes it clear that treatment of a political prisoner has nothing to do with counterterrorism.

Two (2) stars. Written in 2007 in the shadows of post 9/11, the novel depicts totalitarian near-future dystopia. This is a serious, non-technical sci-fi which contains unpleasant dark torture scenes. A modern hunt for those that are different. Unfortunately the insect world of Paul's alter-ego does not resonate too well in this ultra-realistic tale. The allegoric remarks on political commentary are too upfront. This is experimental Aldiss, playing with an idea of jailed personality; jailed nations. A blurring read.

In my opinion this book was a fairly good read. I picked it for a project in English class, and I finished the book in just one weekend. The book was a true page turner, and being an avid Science Fiction reader, I found it interesting. My only complaint would be that the dual storyline is somewhat confusing at times. Basically, I was more interested in Paul's story, than the Stygia storyline. By the end of the book, the story had become quite confusing. Still its a good read for science fiction fans.

It was difficult to keep my interest in the book. Not very satisfying except to say I finished it. I prefer more action and more "science" to the "fiction". Perhaps more enjoyable to someone who likes political satire.

Although Harm is a reasonably good read it's not one of Aldiss's triumphs (of which there are a good number). The interweaving of the two stories; that of Ali's incarceration and interrogation and that of his alter-ego on the colonial planet Stygia, isn't entirely successful. Although I understand Aldiss's intentions I wasn't convinced enough for the book to work as well as one would hope. I was far more interested in the colonists' lives on the distant planet than I was in the unfortunate Ali. In my opinion a book is crying out to be written solely about the lives of these reconstituted humans and their genocidal hysteria. I was reminded, when reading these sections, of the Heliconia novels, which are some of Aldiss's best works. All in all Harm isn't bad, but there's a much better book trying to get out.