HARM

I seem to have got out of the habit of reading lately. I'm not sure why - possibly working from home so much has robbed me of my free time but I had to renew my latest library book twice before finishing it. It wasn't even a particularly long book and I actually enjoyed it. Anyway, this week I finally finished Brian Aldiss' HARM.

HARM is a dystopian novel. Much as George Orwell used Britain's post-war austerity and the long shadows of totalitarianism under Hitler and Stalin to fashion Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldiss takes modern Britain and its paranoia of Islamist terrorism as the starting point for HARM. Paul Ali is a British satirist from an Islamic background who has written a Wodehouse style comic novel. However, one small passage from the book has been taken out of context by the authorities who have imprisoned and tortured Ali to gain information about his supposed terrorist contacts.

To escape from his incarceration Paul immerses himself in a fantasy world and becomes Freemant, a colonist on the distant planet of Stygia. In this new world we discover that Stygia's original inhabitants are insect-like creatures which have evolved to fit the ecological niches that would be filled by vertebrates on Earth. Hence we have insect based horses and dogs and even intelligent beings. However, as we later discover, the new colonists have not treated this new home with any respect and have destroyed habitat and exterminated species with little regard to the planets environment. There are fragmented memories (and speech) from the humans that indicate a past from Earth but ultimately the same human frailties are still on show.

The idea of a central protagonist who is suffering from some sort of mental disturbance is not new in Sci-Fi; in fact, it is a central theme to much of Philip K Dick's works. However, what really works powerfully with HARM is the description of the real world torture. In fact, it is rather difficult reading at times and I think Aldiss has researched the worse excesses of Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib rather too well. It's effective, though, and it is a believable dystopia rather than the more distant concerns of Orwell, Huxley or Anthony Burgess. The escape to Stygia is more of a wistful lament of humankind's instinctive destructiveness.

The end of the book has a rather insightful interview with Aldiss. It was interesting to see his opinion of screen adaptations of his works. He seemed dissatisfied with Kubrick's treatment of Supertoys which became the Spielberg directed AI: Artificial Intelligence. I've read a few of Aldiss' books and he usually comes across as having interesting ideas rather than making a big impact. HARM actually does make an impact and is an important comment on the state paranoia of modern Britain. He has been writing for over half a century so it looks like he is approaching a creative peak rather than a swansong.