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Harm (Hardcover)

by Brian Aldiss (Author)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
RRP: £14.99
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 232 pages
  • Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd (21 Aug 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0715636995
  • ISBN-13: 978-0715636992
  • Product Dimensions: 21.8 x 14.2 x 2.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 598,235 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #15 in  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > A > Aldiss, Brian

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Product Description

Review

"'One of the best SF writers Britain has ever produced' - Iain M Banks 'All the relish, the vigour and the inventiveness of Science Fiction at its best' Doris Lessing 'Subtle literary fiction and vivid science fiction and everything in between' Michael Moorcock"


Product Description

It is the very near future. Paul Ali, a young science fiction writer, who has the perceived misfortune of a Muslim heritage, has been arrested for no compelling reason. He is held as prisoner B, without a lawyer and isolated. Whenever the powers-that-be fancy a diversion, they beat him up. A foul-mouthed jobsworth subjects him to coarse and unremitting questioning. To escape from this humiliation, prisoner B writes - in the privacy of his mind - a science fiction novel set on a planet in every sense a thousand light years away. But gradually, the two worlds start to converge...In the tradition of dystopias like 1984, this novel shocks and entertains.
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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
5 star:
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Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A zeitgeist novel, 9 Mar 2008
By Ray Blake (Hemel Hempstead, UK) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
Aldiss has always managed to write books which are very contemporary. HARM takes post-9/11 anti-terrorism measures as its opening theme. We join Prisoner B, a British writer whose Muslim heritage and a satirical episode in a book he has written have landed him in very hot water.

In a Guantanamo-like environment he is tortured beyond endurance, and seems to alternate between modern day reality and that of an alter-ego who is a colonist on a distant planet. His character there is suffering from institutionalised religious intolerance, too, and it soon becomes clear exactly how the characters are linked.

Aldiss manages to pack a lot into a short novel. There are some extraordinary pieces of SF invention - the 'dogovers' and their final secret is inspired, as is the method by which humanity reached such a distant outpost. Then there is social and cultural comment, rendered quite boldly but without preaching. And it is impressive that so much character is created in so few words; as the colony passes through three distinct leaderships, each leader is fully-realised in economical prose and dialogue.

I feel it it important to state that this is not a book which provides an uplifting experience to the reader, but it is one which tells a compelling and memorable story.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A firey, intelligent and formidable novel, 29 Jun 2009
By A. Whitehead "Werthead" (Colchester, Essex United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
This review is from: Harm (Paperback)
Paul Ali, a young British writer with Muslim parents but who calls himself a secularist, has written and published a comic novel in the tradition of P.G. Wodehouse. The book attracted some minor attention and made him a very small amount of money. One passage, in which the protagonists joke about what would happen if the Prime Minister was assassinated, has attracted the attention of the Hostile Activities Research Ministry. After learning that Ali visited Saudi Arabia on holiday recently, HARM arrests Ali as a suspected terrorist and sets about finding the truth from him...by any means necessary.

As Ali is interrogated, he escapes from the degradation and torture by constructing a fantasy world, Stygia, where in the distant future humans have sent a colonisation ship from Earth. The passengers were molecularly disassembled for transit, but their reconstitution did not go as planned and now the people are confused, or brain-damaged, or have problems with language. In this world Ali is Fremant, a bodyguard for the colony's deranged leader, Astaroth. As Astaroth prosecutes a genocidal war against the native inhabitants, the Dogovers, Fremant's loyalties are torn. There is upheaval in Stygia, war and revolution are coming, and what happens in the real world and in Ali's mind starts to reflect more and more on one another.

Brian Aldiss may be in his 80s now, but HARM (published in 2007) shows that his formidable powers as a writer have not diminished with age. In this novel Aldiss is clearly angry over what Britain and her allies did and became in the 'war on terror', but pulls himself back from a kneejerk polemical attack on the policies of the Bush-Blair axis. Instead he analyses the situation through the lens of SF, making the point that the brutal and oppressive measures that had been adopted were the result of fear and ignorance, an urgent need to distill complex issues down to a hopelessly naive black-and-white, us-and-them situation. At the same time, he also points out the reality of the threats that do exist and threaten us, and in the end offers no neat or pat answers because they simply do not exist.

All of this may make HARM sound like a tiresome political treatise rather than as a novel, but nothing could be further from the truth. Aldiss' engagement with the issues does not detract from the story, which is a dizzying multi-stranded narrative occupying two different levels of reality and how the state of Ali's mind in the 'real' world impacts on that of Fremant on Stygia. Aldiss' formidable powers of SF worldbuilding are again on display here, with the hostile insects and fauna of Stygia recalling the grotesque genius of Hothouse, whilst descriptions of the journey through space from Earth echo elements in Non-Stop. But HARM is its own, dizzyingly intelligent book.

The novel concludes with both an author's note and a fascinating interview between the author and his publisher in which analyses his motives in writing the book and where it sits compared to some of his other novels.

HARM (****½) is firey, smart and compelling (I read the book in one sitting), urgent in tone and convincing in argument. It is available now in the UK and USA.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A parable on the surveillance society, 17 April 2009
By D. P. Mankin (Ceredigion, Wales) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
The novel interweaves two realities (or is it only one?) in an intriguing way that builds towards a climax that neatly encapsulates the paranoia of terrorism that is increasingly becoming a feature of our modern society . The ending will make you smile in a rather cynical way - not at any shortcomings with the story though. Rather at the way it so aptly captures the way in which politicians in recent years have played the 'fear' card, as it were, to justify increased surveillance and other strategies that erode traditional freedoms. It may not be a classic but its a good read.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars thought-provoking science fiction
The hero of `Harm' is Paul, a British Muslim living in a near future world where civil liberties have been (further) curtailed by the threat of Islamism. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Dr. Sarah A. Brown

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