I have had a dog-eared used bookstore copy of this for years, and I think I could have lived a perfectly terrific life without ever having read it. That isn’t about the quality of the book, but I guess the subject matter. I’d like to think I know enough about science-fiction, and it’s history.
But then again, I guess one can never know enough about their hobby. And I was a little short on non-fiction at the time of the reading, so I figured why not give it a shout.
Trillion Year Spree is actually the second edition of this book, the first edition being titles Billion Year Spree. As mentioned before, it is a history of science fiction. As far as that is concenred, it does it well enough. I like how Aldiss writes this (I’ve read none of their fiction). In fact, I absolutely love this description of the 60’s
Austerity and drabness were out. A law was passed forbidding old age. The days of the holocaust were behind… and possibly ahead. But not NOW. NOW was for the Pill, for Peace, for Profile, for Pantheistic mysticism and violence in the streets. Now was for the glowing images of television: by which flickering light whole societies seemed to radiate a more glowing image of themselves.
Ok, but I do have a problem.
I think what made this hard for me is that to some extent a lot of the necessary definitions about what is and what is not sci-fi. It’s a problem I had with the beginning fifth of the book. To get into it, I have to make loud proclamations of what is and what is not sci-fi. But hey, it’s 2025 – a vintage year for tyranny and loudly proclaiming your alternative facts. So anyway – the first fifth of the book goes over people before H.G. Wells. As far as I am concerned, all sci-fi before Asimov should just be bulked into a category called ‘the pre-Asimovs’, much the same way all philosophers before Socrates and swept under the rug as the pre-socratics. Verne wrote sci-fi almost exclusively, Mary Shelley wrote the first and nothing before it qualifies, and H.G. Wells was a socialist using a sci-fi setting to make socialist points (not that that’s a bad thing!)
I don’t bring all this up for nothing. The first 200 pages of this 500 page book deal with a lot of that sci-fi pre-history, and it seems to do so in a pretty slow and lumbering pace. But once the threshold into about the 1960’s is crossed, it feels like Aldiss turns on the fire hose!. The book turns into a blur of names and titles. It is hard to keep up. But it isn’t just a broad apologia for sci-fi:
Unimpressive among this group of writers is Alan Dean Foster … … For many potential readers, Alan Dean Foster’s may be the first voice they encounter. Although payment rates have increased dramatically for old-style pulp writing in the modern age, the rules of labour remain essentially unchanged: write fast; do the expected; deliver on time; collect the cheque. Is Poul Anderson is quoted as having said: “We’re competing for the reader’s beer money.”
Or, from a whole as chapter belittling Heinlein and Asimov for being dinosaurs:
Heinlein was never a very visual writer, but from I Will Fear No Evil onward, external, objective descriptions of things is and people are trimmed to a minimum. We begin to sense that everything is subjective, if not solipsistic, in Heinlein’s imaginary “multiverse”. Everything happens only in the author’s head. Internalized colloquies take the place of action and description, creating a feeling of stasis. The novel has become a bull session.
Shots Fired. I laughed reading all of those. And it felt necessary and refreshingly honest.
The book as well shows it age. It brings up William Gibson without ever bringing up the word Cyberpunk. Anything past that is absent, and it feels like it all falls a bit too short. That too was to be expected.
All in all this was a pretty good read. I even felt like a learned a thing or two reading it.
Failures in Polymathy 