Free fiction: Brian Aldiss

@QuasarDragon.

A few relatively minor stories

All stories are online. List is in no particular order.

1. [ss] Brian Aldiss' "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (B); download; Harper's Bazaar, December 1969: In this overpopulated world, people prefer living in a dream world instead - via a combination of virtual reality & robots.
2. [ss] Harl Vincent's "High-Frequency War" (B); download; Astounding, February 1940: A patriot will overcome an enemy mole in the US to win a war for the country. Text is littered with fancy-sounding but meaningless jargon about frequency weapons.
3. [ff] Desi Babu's "The giant mosquitoes" (B); download; 3 August 2012 at author's blog: When a pharma company working with growth hormones dumped their lab waste carelessly in the open, they could not have seen the consequences...
4. [ss] A Bertram Chandler's "Naval Engagement" aka "Left-Hand Way" (B); download; Australian Science Fiction Review, #10 (Jun 1967): A robot monk contemplates its "naval"...
5. [ss] Stephen A Kallis, Jr's "The Untouchable" (B); download; Analog, December 1960: A man invented an instrument that lets you pass through solid material horizontally (e.g., lets you walk through the walls). Now he's dead, his instrument has reached government, & has been accidentally thrown on a table which accidentally flicked the button on. So now both the table & the instrument are visible but untouchable - your hands just pass through them!
6. [ss] Robert Sheckley's "Forever" (as by Ned Lang); download; Galaxy, February 1959: Rulers should be immortal but not the ruled!

Brian W Aldiss' "Outside" (short story, mystery, free): Who am I?

A house with 6 grown-up inhabitants - 4 men & 2 women, none related to each other. None have ever been outside it. None do anything. Magically, everyday in the morning, food & supplies appear on a shelf in a room.

One fine day, one of them begins suspecting something unusual about their arrangement...

Fact sheet.

First published: New Worlds, January 1955.
Download full text from Internet Archive.
Rating: B.
Among the classics of SciFiction edited by Ellen Datlow.
Related: Stories of Brian W Aldiss.

"Avatar", "Call Me Joe", and "Midworld"

Many people seem to be looking for the relation of these stories with the Hollywood movie Avatar. While I've not seen the movie, here is what I know of the subject - along with download links I know of.

"Avatar" & "Call Me Joe".

Folks are finding the telepresence aspects of Avatar a lot like Poul Anderson's short story "Call Me Joe".

In Anderson's story, no human can go to the world that needs exploring. So they create an artificial animal that can thrive in that environment, but is otherwise like a baby. Mind of this artificial being is linked by a communications link to that of a man elsewhere (an invalid, a few million kilometers away). Man can become one with the artificial creation by pressing on a button.

Note there are at least two other well known short stories with similar themes: Clifford D Simak's "Desertion" & James Blish's "Surface Tension". No communications link is involved in these two stories.

In Simak's version, you put a man in a machine, & out comes a being physically adapted for the hostile world, but with the mind & memories of the man who entered. Process is reversible. So the machine can take the local being with his local experiences, & turn it into the original man but with additional memories of his experiences in this artificial body.

In Blish's story, a few human embryos need to be left on a hostile world, with no adult to take care of them. How do you ensure the babies that these embryos will become can survive on their own? You turn them into locally adapted animals but with human minds. Very colorful story - probably the best known short work of Blish.

I know of at least 2 online versions of "Call Me Joe": an audio, & a comic book adaptation.

Text of "Desertion" is included in the scans of the whole Astounding issue where the story originally appeared.

MP3 audio of "Surface Tension" is online.

"Avatar" & "Midworld".

People are finding the alien world of Avatar (& some of its creatures) rather similar to Alan Dean Foster's novel "Midworld".

"Midworld" features a jungle world - a semi-sentient jungle with huge trees that have 7 vertical levels - each level offering a unique ecological niche. Humans live in, I think, level 4 - hence the title. Moving across levels means inviting death - though humans often go through these adventure.

Note that "Midworld" itself is a rehash of Brian W Aldiss' "Hothouse". "Hothouse" has at least two versions - an original short story version, & a later novelization (I've only read first third or quarter of this novelization).

"Hothouse" is really a juvenile work - at least the novel version. "Midworld" is a work for grown ups.

A few months back, BBC had done a show or a podcast based on "Hothouse" - I'm not sure which version. I don't know if it's still available at their web site.

"Hothouse" short story version is probably old enough to have its text online somewhere, but I don't have the URL.

Brian W Aldiss' "Let's Be Frank" (short story, free): How humanity became a hive intelligence

Once upon a time, a man called Frank Gladwebb lived in England. He carried a weird chromosome that manifested in some of his progeny of both sexes. When it did, the individual became essentially Frank in a different body - Frank 2, Frank 3, etc! Over the centuries, it spread across the world - so humanity became a single hive entity.

OK - not one but two hive entities; a mutation happened early during the spread. No prizes for guessing the people included in the two hives - Americans vs everybody else.

Notes.

1. Story is narrated by a Venusian, whose presence in the story is completely unnecessary.
2. Story references history of English royalty at many places; so should hopefully be more interesting read to English readers, assuming they know more of their country's history than I do of mine.
3. Going by references at a couple of places to war, I guess the motivation might be to present a method of avoiding war - something shared by many stories. A hive cannot fight itself. Two hives in the story also don't seem to be fight each other; may be hive is supposed to make the entity wiser.
   

Collected in.

1. Isaac Asimov & Martin H Greenberg (Eds)' "Issac Asimov Presents Great SF Stories 19 (1957)".

Fact sheet.

First published: Science-Fantasy, #23 (June 1957).
Rating: B.
Download full text from Internet Archive.
Included in Ellen Datlow's SciFiction's Classics.
Related: Stories of Brian Aldiss.

** Brian Aldiss - "Neanderthal Planet" (short story, science fiction)

A frame story - story in a story.

Main outer story is interesting: a future society with many kinds of robots with specialized functions, some smarter than others. They are the real rulers of earth - keep humans in a zoo! A man escapes, is quickly caught.

For a while, robots have been in a dilemma - they cannot quite psychologically leave their human legacy behind, severely limiting their effectiveness in spite of the advanced capabilities. This escaped man will convince them the only way they can truly develop & reach their potential is by completely leaving their origins behind - by leaving earth! So we get humans back in charge of earth. It's implied that robots will also find their place wherever they've gone to in multi-dimensional space!

My views on contained story are likely to be biased - it insists that the brain of "whites" differs in a fundamental way from people of other skin colors!

I found this contained story not only mundane, but thematically flawed. We are told whites have a part of their brain inherited from Neanderthals; Neanderthals prefer intuition to reasoning; hence, given half a chance, whites will resort to intuition & give up their reasoning faculties! OK - it's stated in a more complex way - but that's the gist.

Title refers to earth - whites inherit Neanderthal traits, robots inherit human traits. By implication, the only humans that count are whites. At the end of outer story, robots must leave "Neanderthal Planet" to develop their full potential.

Fact sheet.

First published: ...
Rating: B

Note: Why is this post so short?

* Brian W Aldiss's "But Who Can Replace a Man?" (short story, science fiction)

Chaos among robots after the reports of last man's death arrive - in a world with a lot of robots. A group of these marauding robots with eventually find a man alive, & a purpose in their life!

Fact sheet.

First published: ...
Rating: B
Listed in "William G Contento's Top Ten Most Reprinted Stories".

Note: Why is this post so short?