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Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction

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This is a considerably updated version of The Billion Year Spree, adding material covering the significant science fiction published between the time of that book's publication in 1973 and this one in 1986. The current edition also has a very short addendum that brings the book up to 2001.

The book is an attempt to be a fairly comprehensive over-view of the history of science fiction, from its roots and beginnings through the pulps to today's movies. Aldiss starts by examining what he considers to be the first real science fiction novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, along with its earlier progenitors which he categorizes as `scientific romances'. For this section of the book, Aldiss is quite insightful, and offers a good breakdown of the not just the main elements of Frankenstein, but some of the overriding themes and tropes that permeated the 18th and 19th century novels. Within this section he references quite a few very early works that most sf fans have probably never heard of, and makes a good case that at least some of them should be put on the completist's reading list.

Much of his commentary on later 19th century works, mainly those by Poe, Verne and Wells, continue in this excellent manner, where he often spends two or three pages breaking down the pluses and minuses of an individual work, along with giving an overall assessment of not just the state of the field, but what major themes were of prime importance to the writers of that era. In fact, this identification of the various waves of ideas, styles, and the major practitioners of the field through various points in history is perhaps the best part of this work.

However, by the time he reaches the John W. Campbell era (about 1938), the general tone and approach changes somewhat. This is partially due to the sheer size of his subject matter; rather than three or four authors and twenty or so works to cover, he was now faced with covering the explosion in published sf, with hundreds of authors and thousands of works. The closer he gets to the present, the worse this problem becomes, and unfortunately his method of dealing with it is to all too often list an author and/or work and dismiss it with a one line comment (such as his description of Spider and Jeanne Robinson's Stardance, which he writes off as a `light confection'). Worse, his analysis of some the major authors of the field, such as Asimov and Heinlein, are fractured into different sections of the book, with the divisions set by time, rather than look at each author's entire output as a whole and what contributions they have made to the field.

Aldiss also clearly has some favorites and some he thinks are dogs, but he does not do a good job of analyzing why these authors are either worthy of attention or not. Again, space limitations are part of the reason for this, but I found that especially for Heinlein, his lack of insightful analysis of his major works was a major minus, not even trying to analyze The Moon is Harsh Mistress, though that book's prose style fits perfectly with a point Aldiss is making about the `New Wave' of the sixties, and not even mentioning some of his other major works, though he did point out some flaws that typically mar some of Heinlein's writing. I felt his analysis of Samuel Delany and Roger Zelanzy to be superficial, with his assessment of these authors as `style without substance', and without any detailed look at Delany's Dhalgren or Zelazny's Amber series. He does have a long section on Frank Herbert's Dune and its sequels that is good, if somewhat lacking in figuring out precisely why Herbert's combination of some very stock SF elements works so well. And he is much kinder to Edgar Rice Burroughs than I would have been.

One item that becomes quite noticeable is Aldiss' use of long excerpts from the works he is discussing. I found that unless I was already familiar with the work in question, most of the time these excerpts were either incomprehensible due to lack of context or did little to illustrate whatever point Aldiss was making.

Aldiss is remarkably comprehensive in the authors and works he does mention, considering just how many there are, though there are a few conspicuous absences, most notably Piers Anthony. For American readers, his listing of various British authors is quite useful, as many of them have received little publication space in America, and clearly some of them deserve a wider audience. He is not quite as successful in covering the SF output of Eastern Europe, but there is still more than enough mentioned to keep your need-to-be-read list filled to overflowing.

Approach this book with caution. There is good information to be gleaned from its pages, most especially about the early days and works of sf, but you just might find your favorite author pilloried with a biting one-liner - which is probably true of just about any critical work of this scope, as it is impossible for anyone be totally objective about such a subjective thing as the relative worth of any piece of literature.

---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

This work is well worth the read especially for the literary scholar. It starts out wonderfully, exploring the origins of science fiction and gives credit where it is due to many obscure early writers, as well as writers outside of the english speaking world. However, the further one gets into the work, Mr. Aldiss becomes increasingly bitter. It becomes very apparent that the work is no longer an objective study of science fiction but an outlet for Mr. Aldiss to vent his frustrations. Authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, Heinlien and others are mostly discounted, even though their output is vast and have served to popularize the genre. One is left with the feeling that Mr. Aldiss merely dislikes anyone who is more popular, or better selling than himself. Quite a shame since this tends to diminish his own talents in petty sniping. Mr. Aldiss is no small talent himself, many of his works are classics in the field, but in this work he comes off as a grumpy, disgruntled old man.

I would recommend the earlier work "The Billion Year Spree" which contains the brilliance of the first half of the work, without the extra helping of bile.

British writer Brian Aldiss is one of the most distinguished authors of SF alive, and combines his enthusiasm for the field with broad knowledge and sophisticated literary taste which causes him to champion authors often ignored by fans and casual readers and to dismiss many popular authors. His survey of the field, in this second edition of what was formerly called Billion Year Spree, is now somewhat dated, but still enormously influential. For those who like intelligent commentary by someone whose thinking is not exclusively focused on SF.

It's no easy task to write a history of science fiction, as amorphous a publishing category as there is, so I hesitate to call this book a failure on those terms alone. What it attempts to do, it does handily and usefully: it brings to light a strand that stretches from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to William Gibson's Neuromancer, the darling of the 1980s (when this book was published). Along the way it pauses long enough to note certain knots in the strand that have made it stronger (woah, I'm really stretching that metaphor out-a-kilter, aren't I!). Aldiss (who wrote the original version of this book, Billion Year Spree) and Wingrove smartly spend most of the book before the 1960s, focusing on the twin progenitors of modern SF: the intellectual, philosophical style that came from the U.K. from writers like Wells and Huxley with the pulp, mechanistic format favored by America and championed by Gernsback.

However, and likely due to the fact that both authors here are also creators, this is not necessarily the most objective critical treatise on the field. Aldiss comes across as someone miffed by the American ascendency in a field that was born with an English authoress, in a kind of literary reflection of the change in world hegemony after the second world war. He shoots a fish in a barrel when he rightly points out that Ellison's introduction to Dangerous Visions was marketing controversy, counterpointing it with a quite understated and humble editorial by Michael Moorcock from New Worlds. But this one example doesn't mean that Moorcock wasn't himself involved in flaunting convention for attention, nor the true power behind some of the stories championed by Ellison (including some of Ellison's own writing). That is, Aldiss's obvious bias, likely stemming from where his own publications appeared, is this huge mote that sticks in the reader's eye once he hits the 1960s, and it's hard to remove it for the rest of the book. It's unfortunately, because I think he's not too far off in his analysis of many of the (at the time of writing) more recent authors, including noting that Gibson was more style than substance. (The funny thing about the latter opinion is that he had just spent the entire chapter on New Worlds praising the New Wave's addition of style to what had been a gee-whiz-gizmo literature beforehand.) Perhaps if Aldiss had confronted his bias head-on (in no section does he remind the reader that he is, himself, the Aldiss that he mentions in passing in several chapters), it might have been more palatable, or maybe I'm just used to Gardner Dozois' method of commentary that appears in the introduction to his Year's Best volumes where, once he comes to the magazine which he himself edited, he simply lists the authors there "without comment." Trouble is, for Aldiss not to comment on that section of the book would have made for a much shorter work. A conundrum indeed.

What I enjoyed most here was learning a bit more about authors whom I may have read, but didn't know as much about their history, such as H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, A.E. Van Vogt, and Michael Moorcock. As a voracious reader of SF in the 70s and 80s, I thought I had a fairly good grounding in the "classics," but this book revealed some of my deficiencies, albeit none that I'm necessarily interested in correcting at this late date. It did remind me of why I was attracted to science fiction in the first place, and given me an idea of what I've been finding missing in the few titles I've read recently. Finally, this is the first book that I've read in a long time that has ever tempted me to re-read novels and stories, to view them with new critical eyes having obtained a new perspective from Aldiss on them, such as Tim Powers's The Anubis Gates, Fred Pohl's Gateway, and Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer.

A final note: I ordered this book from Mark Ziesing, whom I used to order books from regularly not to mention briefly writing a book review column for his print catalog, which he still produces. When I received this book, it had a tipped in review slip from the publisher and Mark had written on a post-it note, "Hi, Glen--I thought you'd enjoy knowing this was Damon Knight's copy." It's a silly thing, but that little bit of knowledge made me feel a part of that science fictional strand that Aldiss wrote about here.

As a fan of the genre and as a writer working to break through into its ranks I was looking forward to this volume for the history it contained. The study of the people and landmark works I thought would help me fill large gaps in my knowledge. In this I was not disappointed. Brian Aldiss's knowledge is extensive, his research remarkable and the way he brought the giants in the field to life was nothing short of brilliant.

It started with the acknowledged core beginning of the genre - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The back story and literary criticism of that work shows Aldiss at his best. He also cruises gracefully through such giants as Kafka, Verne, Burroughs, and Wells, bringing their stories to the fore as importantly as their works.

If only the rest of the book had been so richly rewarding. Once he arrived at the Hugo Gernsback era Aldiss digresses into opinion and subjective accusations. He presents his view of what was and was not important as fact and in that he diluted the craft he'd so carefully put together. This habit extended throughout the past century becoming more annoying the closer to the present he delved. I do wish he'd have realized that peppering his chronicle with ugly dismissals rendered the entire volume less educational and more petty in feeling and value. I was deeply disappointed - not because I disagreed with him, but because I can make up my own mind about the writers and their works.

I learned a lot and respect the authors less.

- CV Rick, May 2008

I'm a casual fan of science fiction - I know what I like and otherwise steer fairly clear of the genre to avoid the inevitable allegations of puerility and geekdom that my wife throws at me for reading novels about spaceships and little green men.

Brian Aldiss is a prolific British Sci Fi writer who cares very much about his genre, and in particular believes it to have been unfairly maligned by people such as my wife.

While that's probably true, it adversely colours this book in two ways: Firstly, Aldiss writes far too intellectually and "worthily", meaning as writer he comes across as pretentious and (what is worse) dull; secondly he tends to relegate of material which isn't "serious" science fiction (but which is generally more entertaining) to other cateogories such as "fantasy" which, to his mind, don't count. I think this is the mistake: Science Fiction at its heart is a poular, pulp sort of genre, no amount of post facto rationalisation will alter the fact that it is Lucas and Spielberg who are the backbone of (cinematic) Science Fiction, not Kubrick and Tarkovsky.

It's a very heavy (physically as well as textually), long winded book. Having completed the first three or four chapters (in which Edgar Allen Poe gets a somewhat surprisingly extended mention) I have given up on the project of reading Trillion Dollar Spree from cover to cover, and now intend to use to dip into from time to time instead. Or, at any rate, just to stick on the bookshelf, comforted in the knowledge that it's there and I *can* dip into it from time to time, if I feel like it.

Olly Buxton