Discovering Dune: Essays on Frank Herbert's Epic Saga ed. by Dominic J. Nardi and N. Trevor Brierly (review)

Barefoot stumble, he regains his footing in Chapter 4, which focuses on Aldiss’s post-New Wave retrenchment as a historian of the genre in Billion Year Spree (1973) and in novels such as Frankenstein Unbound (1973) and An Island Called Moreau (1980) that recursively engage with classic sf texts. Kincaid sees these “parasitic novels” (as Andrew M. Butler has called them) as interesting failures, arresting in conception but slight in execution, but also as important rehearsals for his mid-career masterpiece The Malacia Tapestry (1976), with its view of modern European history as a static wonderland hovering on the brink of technological change. The expansive scope of this novel paved the way, as Kincaid compellingly shows, for the author’s crowning achievement: the HELLICONIA trilogy (1982-1985), with its sweeping vision of a planetary culture transformed by seasons millennially long. A finegrained and consistently illuminating discussion of the trilogy dominates Chapter 5, which focuses on Aldiss as “Scientist,” largely because of the rigorous world-building that went into the three books. This is where, I think, Kincaid’s thematic structure starts to break down a bit into more loosely fitting topics, and it is even more evident in Chapter 6, which collects roughly thirty years of disparate production under the umbrella “Utopian,” largely because of the overtly utopian late novel White Mars (1999). Still, if the thematic cohesiveness of the final chapter is rather wanting, there is no arguing with the tart judgment with which Kincaid opens it: the HELLICONIA trilogy was Aldiss’s “last book-length work of science fiction to attract and merit serious critical attention” (138). These final three decades of the author’s career are thus, in Kincaid’s treatment, one long dying fall: White Mars is listlessly conceived, boringly written, and “marred by ... atrocious sexual politics” (155), while HARM (2007), if more vigorous, is nonetheless “jerky, awkwardly constructed, and often unconvincing” (159), and Finches of Mars (2012) is simply “not well done,” a “sad, dispirited end to a career that had seen [Aldiss] become perhaps the most widely recognized and applauded science fiction writer of his generation” (162). In the final analysis, Kincaid views a handful of stories and novels as the author’s signal achievements, especially “Hothouse, Greybeard, Report on Probability A, Billion Year Spree, The Malacia Tapestry, and the Helliconia Trilogy” (166)—a canon of masterworks to which I would only add Barefoot in the Head, and all of which (even this last, which he likes much less than I do) Kincaid illuminates with the searchlight of his fine critical intelligence.—Rob Latham, Twentynine Palms