ResoluteReader: Brian Aldiss

Thursday, October 20, 2022

Brian Aldiss - Earthworks

Unfortunately this is not one of Brian Aldiss' stronger writings. Earthworks begins with an interesting concept, Knowle Noland, is captain of a giant nuclear powered freighter moving sand from the coast of Africa to replace the eroded, unfertile, earth of the rest of the world. Africa is now a global power and the rest of the world overpopulated and fallen into ecological mess. These themes will be familiar to readers of science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s as the genre related to the dominant environmental ideas and tried to extrapolate to the future. Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room being a more famous example.

But where Harrison's tale was a gripping "noir" detective style commentary on the political argument, Earthworks fails to hold the reader. There are some interesting ideas, Noland's ship encounters a dead body on a gravity harness floating away from the coastline. Searching the body Noland discovers some love letters and becomes infatuated with their female author. He reflects on his time in a punishment work camp, and how he went to live with the travellers, nomadic people who have slipped through society's cracks.

In revenge against the leader who imprisoned then released him, Noland runs the ship aground. It's rather an inexplicable action, as it has to be said, are most of what he does in the rest of the novel. There follows a convoluted series of battles, chases and arguments between various characters until Noland finds, and promptly falls in love with, the author of the love letters. He then becomes entangled in her revolutionary movement.

Little of it makes sense. None of it is worth reading. Earthworks is a footnote to Aldiss' far better work. Read that instead.