This is a fixup–a reworking of previously unrelated stories to create a new novel. Fixups can be wholesale rewritings of material to create a seamless new work, or, as in this case, they might just contain new connecting material that explains why the stories have been Frankensteined together. The form exists outside science fiction–Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony meet the definition–but it is most common in this genre. I’m guessing that publishers saw it as a way to make more money by recycling stories they already owned. Authors, too, might have seen the form as a way of remedying the damage that cut-happy magazine editors inflicted on their stories.

 

The cover blurb explains that this is a “chronicle-novel,” and the conceit is that it checks in on humanity periodically in the eons after a nuclear war destroys civilization, observing how, when faced with extinction, people learn (or fail to learn) how to make a better world. Unfortunately, much of the collection resists Aldiss’s attempts to tie everything together, suggesting that maybe he shouldn’t have bothered. I found that I enjoyed it a lot more when I pretended that it was just a short story collection.

 

The stories in the first half are almost uniformly good. “Out of Reach,” which begins as the bombs are falling, is a poignant story of our species-wide failure to learn lessons; its message that nationalist hatred stands in the way of human progress speaks strongly even today. “All the World’s Tears” is a borderline hilarious nose-thumbing at racists, presenting a future where white people have been exterminated and the birth of a melanin-deficient child is enough to upset a family’s social standing; I imagine that Aldiss wrote it in response to British lamentations that the sun was setting on their former empire every few months. “Who Can Replace a Man?” is a sly satire of bureaucratic groupthink crossed with Asimov’s laws of robotics and a laugh-out-loud ending. Not everything in the first half is good, though: the worst story in the collection, “Secret of a Mighty City,” is a real slog, a sort of reworking of Preston Sturges’s “Sullivan’s Travels” that misses its inspiration’s point.