HARM

by Brian W Aldiss

  A yellow subtitle read, LONDON: BREAKING NEWS.

  Fatima, gibbering, pointed across the narrow strip of front garden to the pavement, where four men were advancing on the house. Wearing bulky heavy-duty uniforms. All four were holding weapons at the ready.

  “Jupers! They’re after me again!” Paul exclaimed. He began to run from the room. “This time they’ll kill me, for sure!”

  Doris grabbed his arm.

  “They can’t be after you, Paul! You’ve not been out of their clutches a week. Speak to them, reassure the bloody sods!”

  “Speak? You’re daft…” He broke loose from her grip and ran to the back door. He pulled it open. Men stood in the dark garden, weapons raised. One shone a bright beam of light at him. He slammed the door, dazzled and in terror.

  Hammering started at the front door. He ran frantically up the stairs.

  Doris, terrified, unlocked the front door and stared out.

  One of the four men had positioned himself to watch the window. The other three men crowded into the porch.

  “Out of the way, lass. We are here to arrest a man known as Paul or Ali Fadhil.”

  “What do you want with him?”

  “Questioning. Move out the way.”

  “Paul’s not in.”

  The speaker pushed her aside and entered the house with a second man. The third stood guard in the porch.

  “What’s he done? What’s he done?” Doris shrieked. Fatima was screaming in the front room. The men rushed in upon her.

  “Who’s this old witch?” the leader asked Doris.

  “She’s only a lodger. She doesn’t speak English. She won’t understand anything you say.”

  “Another fucking Muslim…”

  The remark didn’t stop the leader from trying to question Fatima. He took her wrist and shook it. She screamed and hit him with her free hand.

  He turned away indifferently, letting Fatima fall to her knees on the floor. The two men then searched the downstairs rooms, calling loudly for Paul to give himself up.

  They ran upstairs. They cornered Paul on the upstairs landing. He stood rigid by the banister rail, raising his hands in the traditional pose of surrender. The leader advanced on him while the second man covered his partner.

  Pale about the lips, Paul said, indistinctly, “Do not harm me. I have been harmed enough. I did you no harm.”

  “Come quietly, then!”

  Paul kicked out and caught the oncoming man on the knee. As the man bent over involuntarily, Paul struck him in the face and forced him against the banister. The frail, worn structure broke. The man dropped his gun and grasped at a piece of railing. It broke in his clutches. He was already beginning to fall. As he dropped, his fellow officer opened fire on Paul.

  The house filled with noise, yells, shouts, the dull sound of a body striking the tiled corridor in the hall. Then silence.

  “Paul! Are you okay?” cried Doris in a weak voice. She held on to a doorjamb to steady her trembling. The man in the porch entered the house. Once inside, he stood menacingly, looking grim, saying nothing, ready to shoot if need be.

  The man on the upper landing peered over and shouted down to his mate, “Have a look at Stan. See if he’s okay.”

  He then knelt and put handcuffs on Paul. Paul lay there, writhing, teeth gritted against pain. A bullet had shattered the femur of his right leg.

  “Get up,” he was told.

  Paul struggled to obey. A splinter of bone had spiked through the flesh of his thigh, tearing the fabric of his jeans.

  The soldier down below was calling for an ambulance on his mobile. “Stop that fucking woman screaming,” he told Doris. She vanished into the front room.

  Paul was dragged to his feet. His captor, keeping a firm hold of him, forced him to hop downstairs. He left a thin trail of blood as he went.

  “What have I done?” he gasped. “Where are you taking me?”

  His captor, shaking him violently, turned a red, enraged face to him.

  “The prime minister has jus’ been sodding well assassinated—just like you planned.”

  “What? I’ve done nothing…”

  “A mortar shell was fired through an upper window of Number Ten, you bastard. The PM was killed instantly—just like you fucking planned…”

  “Oh, Allah the Merciful…”

  He glimpsed Doris’s frightened face, chalk white, as they dragged him out into the London darkness where so much had gone wrong and so many wrongs were done…

  EVEN AS HE WAS BEING BEATEN UP in the police van, he could hear a faint voice speaking in a monotone. He could not recall the name of the speaker. The man was arguing for the necessity of power to control populations. The leader had to be strong; he must not be misled by mistaken principles of mercy; mercy was often a disguise for weakness. The opinions of populations needed to be directed toward a positive end. That made sense. He had now won the position of head of state and would not tolerate any negative talk of genocide.

  Threats to stability had to be stamped out, wherever they occurred. One had to put a stop to such dangerous thoughts. Nevertheless, he, the mighty Safelkty, had been advised by Tolsteem that you were a thinking man and that among a nation of the ignorant an intellect such as yours was necessary.

  You were required to make certain revisions in your attitude toward life, and would be trained; after which, you would be elected to a position of authority.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  We were traveling, four of us, through beautiful unspoiled countryside. We admitted to a guilty pleasure because this halcyon wilderness made us think of what England must once have looked like, in the Middle Ages, before clocks chimed or modernity was heard of.

  Our vehicle climbed a low hill. As we came down into the vale on the other side, we saw a gaggle of people, mainly women, standing under a magnificent tree. A black horse was hanging by its neck from a branch. Blowflies buzzed everywhere. A man with a large knife was cutting strips of flesh from the horse’s body and selling them to the women. This was in Albania, shortly after the dictator Enver Hoxha had died.

  Maturity: Perhaps maturity means finding a way to move with equanimity between the contrapuntal intricacies of joy and anguish, action and thought, fire and calm, love and dismay—all those things that underlie our engagement with experience. Not to be indifferent. Not to be indifferent to the sight we witnessed in Albania: to feel for the poverty to which those women had been reduced, to feel for the savagery of the butcher, perhaps to feel for the remorseless unwinding of history.

  Boyhood: Enlivened and enlightened by reading editor John Campbell’s Astounding. I read much else besides, but it was on Astounding that my imagination mainly fed. My style came from elsewhere: from Hardy, from Swift, from Dickens, and from the poems of Alexander Pope.

  I was always glad of the umbrella that the science fiction field provided. Most of my friends hail from there. Only gradually have I come to believe that many writers were reduced to hacking strips off an old carcass.

  My claim, my passport, is that I am a Steppenwolf. But then, all true writers are Steppenwolves. They live amid human societies—and some societies are decidedly more desirable than others—but always they have their quarrels, their differences. HARM’s another such a one.

  A CONVERSATION WITH BRIAN W. ALDISS

  Del Rey: Science fiction has a tradition of dystopian novels that comment on current political events, Orwell’s 1984 and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 being two of the most famous. Do you see HARM as being in that tradition?

  Brian W. Aldiss: It never occurred to me. HARM is the sort of book I have been writing over the last half-century. Non-Stop, Greybeard, Forgotten Life, Super-State…all protest against something, generally against the shortcomings of human life itself. Of course I have read [Sir Thomas] More, Brave New World, and all the rest of the famous utopias.

  DR: Why choose science fiction as the genre in which to critique the way that governments have responded to 9/11? Doesn
’t that risk diluting your message in ways that a realistic novel would not? For example, couldn’t critics dismiss your arguments by saying that HARM is a fantasy, its main character a man with a personality disorder?

  BA: I take your point. I have nothing against the realistic novel, but I am more practiced at SF. If people read HARM as SF, they may dismiss it as “mere SF,” as they so often do. I don’t feel like that about SF—and some of the truths of my story may linger, even with the scoffers. To be made uneasy is the beginning of enlightenment.

  DR: Why did you choose to give your character this mental illness—was it simply a technical move, to better facilitate the translation back and forth between the two main realities of the novel: Earth and the insect-dominated world of Stygia?

  BA: My character Paul’s divided personality suffers another division: he is British, he is a Muslim. What ultimately gets him into trouble is that he “presumes” to write a Wodehousian novel. I believe that in the end he perceives he would have been better to accept the fact that he could be both British and Muslim (a question radiating some unease on both sides just now).

  DR: One element of the novel I especially enjoyed was all the nods to the history of SF, from the pure pulp to the literary, that contribute to the reconstituted culture of Stygia. There’s the name itself, with its echoes of Robert E. Howard, but also places like Seldonia and characters such as Tolsteem. And of course this breaking down and reconstituting the past of the genre into humorous and often ironic permutations is also present on deeper levels. It’s obvious that you got a lot of pleasure out of this aspect of what is otherwise a very dark book.

  BA: Stygia as a name comes from Milton’s Paradise Lost (a poem quoted later). There some can be simultaneously almost-alive and almost-dead—rather similar to Paul’s situation. Of course, Paul’s character is such that torture—which he perceives to be unjust—facilitates his refuge in another place, if indeed it is a refuge. On Stygia too, as on Earth, there is religious struggle.

  As far as I recall, I have never read any Robert Howard—a possible character defect—although of course I have read in his tradition. In that tradition, there are generally monsters to contend with. Contending with insects is even worse, certainly more itchy. Don’t forget that literature derives not only from other literature but from life itself. I spent many years in the wilds of the East, wherein itchiness was a prominent feature of existence.

  DR: As you point out, there are Miltonian echoes and allusions in the book. Why is Milton an important writer to you, especially in connection with HARM?

  BA: Every author owes obeisance to some other writer or writers. I have reviewed well over a thousand books. Unfortunately, I arrived too late to review Paradise Lost (“Unputdownable,” I might have said). But I have read and admired the mighty poem—as did Mary Shelley. Does it lend a certain grandeur to one’s imagination? You tell me.

  DR: How much is the main character, Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali, an alter-ego for Brian Aldiss? The similarity of names seems deliberate…

  BA: Goodness, I hope Paul is no sort of alter-ego for me! It is true that when I returned to England after that long adolescent sojourn overseas, I had become a stranger in my own country. But for all that…no, no.

  DR: How close are the England and America of today to the totalitarian near-future that you depict in HARM? And are those two countries marching more or less in lockstep toward that future?

  BA: I do not accept that England and America are totalitarian. One addresses the public in the belief that they will consciously heed our dreadful sins and—if possible—cure them. Or get voted out. We cannot, I believe, ever break free of our relationship, the U.S. and the U.K., mainly because of the remarkable language we share. Then there’s the other thing about the child being father to the man…

  You now have the Democrats sitting in the seats of the mighty. Perhaps you can make amends for that terrible mistake of invading Iraq—and we for that more humiliating mistake of blindly following your president, the Burning Bush, into that unfortunate land.

  DR: For the edification of Americans like me, why did Tony Blair embrace the mission of George W. Bush with such fervor?

  BA: Only reluctantly do I cease to admire Tony Blair. He did much that was good for Britain. He was debonair. He sank millions into the National Health Service. He was as much Middle England as Socialist. Did the adulation of the many go to his head? Most likely that wise saying of Lord Acton applies: “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Perhaps Blair saw in Bush the absolute power he could not help craving. In any case, he became a poodle. Now his popularity drains fast away. We wait wearily to see what he will get up to vis-à-vis the Democrats.

  DR: In HARM, the writer Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali is arrested because his novel, Pied Piper of Hament, contains a joke about the assassination of a British prime minister. As a British citizen of Muslim heritage, Paul is suspected of connections with Islamic terrorists. I’m wondering if this aspect of your novel, the assassination of a prime minister, has drawn any attention from the British authorities.

  BA: Sadly, the national atmosphere has become tainted with suspicion. Paul jokes about assassinating the PM to show how far he is from such actions—fatally, of course. (A new report claims that 1,600 young British Muslims are being radicalized and are under surveillance.)

  DR: What is the significance of that title, Pied Piper of Hament? Although it is not described in detail, Paul’s novel seems somewhat similar to HARM, in that it is a fantasy with dual realities: another level of recursiveness in your book.

  BA: Agreed about recessive realities. There is no particular significance in the title beyond the Browning reference and the fact that rats follow the piper.

  DR: Paul is swept up on the flimsiest of pretexts, then subjected to torture that is made even more abhorrent by the vile racism of his interlocutors. Yet isn’t there a real danger to the West from Islamic terrorists? Where should the line be drawn in responding to this threat?

  BA: Paul arrested on the flimsiest of pretexts? But paranoia is the last refuge of a scoundrel; they may have had Paul under surveillance for some while. The novel opens with our knowing nothing about Paul. As I write, in the U.K. it’s the day of the lord mayor’s show, with many acts and groups on show (including the formidable Knights of Kazakhstan!) parading through a sunny London, and the sidewalks are crammed with thousands of people. How tempting a target for some mad terrorist with a few pounds of explosives strapped round his chest…

  Where indeed should a line be drawn?

  DR: Were the brutal interrogation scenes of Paul difficult to write?

  BA: I enjoyed writing the torture scenes. Possibly prophylactic! I have studied various torture procedures. It has been a European tradition ever since the rack was introduced.

  DR: The science fiction elements of HARM are startling and brilliant, beginning with the notion that the colonists of Stygia have been transported to that planet with their brain functions and DNA stored in LPRs, or Life Process Reservoirs, and then reconstituted upon arrival in new amalgamations of their previous physical and mental identities. It’s as if they’ve been disassembled, the pieces put into boxes that are shaken up thoroughly, and then put back together willy-nilly. How did you come up with this outrageous idea?

  BA: Cogitating on the question of transportation over many light-years, I came on what seemed to me almost the only solution: to store the individual lives in LPRs. When you think around such ideas, they take on a fake reality; I thought this was the best strategy. Of course it served to break up families and other relationships. The new Stygians are virtually computer compositions (Bellamia expresses some anxieties on this very point). In particular, humans may survive, but the old constitutions and relationships, such as families—the elements that hold our fragile world-ethic together—are destroyed by this long storage.

  DR: Perhaps unsurprisingly, given this treatment, most of the reconstituted colonists have suffered degrees of b
rain damage, making their speech word salads of malapropisms and unconsciously ironic puns. The sheer linguistic dexterity of this reminded me of the delirious Joycean wordplay that characterized your novel Barefoot in the Head.

  BA: All survivors from the ship are damaged in some way. Wisely, perhaps, I was advised to cut down on the disintegration of language.

  DR: Three of your works have been adapted for film: the short story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long” as Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence; the novel Frankenstein Unbound as Roger Corman’s movie of the same name; and Brothers of the Head, also given eponymous movie treatment. Have you been pleased with these adaptations? Which is your favorite? And are there any more films in the works?

  BA: When you sell a written something-or-other to Hollywood, you should accept that a translation must be made. You have no power over this transformation. Hence the old saying, “Take the money and run.” I didn’t run. My family and I went to stay in Bellagio on the shores of Lake Como in Italy, to watch the filming. Roger Corman was a genial and generous host. Most of the film, shot in a local palazzo, looks beautiful. There is much to be said for Frankenstein Unbound.

  I worked with Stanley Kubrick on Supertoys, but wanted us to create a new modern myth. Kubrick was set on Pinocchio, whereas I could not accept the Blue Fairy (the mere name gave me the whim-whams) or the notion of David somehow becoming a real boy. In the end, Stanley had to kick me out. I don’t regret that semi-collaboration; it is a privilege to work with a genius, even a genius in decay. But much of the screenplay of what became Artificial Intelligence is illogical and vulgar.