Review of Starswarm by Brian Aldiss

I have tried to find a name for this type of writing but can't: the short story collection that can be argued is a novel and the novel that can be argued is a collection. I'm thinking of books like Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go In the Dark, Nina Allan's The Race, Cordwainer Smith's The Rediscovery of Man, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen, and so forth. Brian Aldiss' Starswarm (1964) is another such... book. If bands can have concept albums in which songs are created as part of a single, larger artistic vision, then I have decided that writers who do such a thing with short fiction produce concept novels.

The concept woven throughout Starswarm is that its the far-far-far future and humanity has spread itself to near infinity across the universe. Trillions upon trillions of people exist in the myriad stars. Each story in Starswarm takes a look at some of those people, living in some corner of that vast-vast vision. For once, back cover copy is spot on: "...Perhaps in doing so we may not only learn something new about ourselves but also discover at least a hint of what drove the Ancients to launch their frail metal spores into the deeps."

The following are the main ideas behind the eight pieces in the concept novel: one man's experience in a matriarchy, an injured soldier's outlook on life as the military subjects him to propaganda dreams; an innocent couple in over their heads when the utopian planet they visit turns out to be dystopian; a group of biologists analyzing a planet in preparation for colonization and in turn who discover a sentient species lorded over by a human who crash-landed years before; a fevre dream of a man who is being physically transformed in a tank of mud; a planetary adventure in which a man must get back to his space ship (with the girl) and escape a variety of bizarre aliens along the way; a family drama that plays out in the foreground while in the background a science fiction puzzle involving FTL unwinds; and lastly, a surreal dream of a post-human Earth in which uplifted animals experience the remnants of humanity.

Variety, yes, variety. There is no other way to summarize the stories in Starswarm. Naturally, different stories will appeal to different readers; but like all buffets, there is something for everyone.

And it's here that I must put under the spotlight the idea of “concept novel” as Aldiss would have it in Starswarm. Frankly, I'm not convinced. Aldiss writes an introduction to every story which, ostensibly, links each to the larger whole of “starswarm”. But in reality little comes of it. To discover “...what drove the Ancients to launch their frail metal spores into the deeps” is as spot-on as it is distant from a central theme. For example, there could have been no attempt at conceptualizing the stories (i.e. no back cover copy, no story intros, etc.) and the end result is the same: individual stories. There is nothing central to glean beyond: humans doing what humans do, i.e. possibly the most vague theme to a collection of stories. The label “A collection of varied stories from Brian Aldiss” works just as effectively. In fact...

I'm not entirely convinced Starswarm isn't Aldiss’ odds and ends drawer. Terry Pratchett called it The Pit—a purgatory where good chunks of writing wait to see whether their author finds a home for them in a story or novel. (Will it be to published heaven or languish in the fires of hells unread?) Such is the extreme variety of selections included in Starswarm. From poetically-styled New Wave sf to pulp planetary adventure, hard sf to dystopian fiction, encounters with the Other to animal sentience, Aldiss covers a huge amount of ground. We'll never know, but perhaps Starswarm was just Aldiss' inventive way of using unused material to meet a publishing deadline?

In the end, I'm not sure how successful the concept of the concept novel Starswarm is. Arguments can be made either way that it is and isn't cohesive. But what I can be confident of saying is that there are several stories worth reading. A few feel dated, but most transcend their era. As a whole, the reader's potential enjoyment will depend on the degree of variety they are looking for in their science fiction. Aldiss provides a significant amount. In fact, looking back at the books I've read, it's difficult to find one that has such a variety of substance and style by a single author. Sound interesting?