Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
A collection of short stories that Aldiss wrote many years ago, recompiled and republished recently. The stories stitch together the future history of mankind from the near future through to the galaxy's demise due to a form of proton decay. It is quaintly anachronistic, referring to 'reels' of holographic 3-D cinematography, intelligent machines communicating their digital information to each other by punch card, and using the term 'island universe' for the Milky Way galaxy--a term that fell out of favor in the first half of the 20th century.Yet most of the stories themselves remain imaginative and fresh for this new generation audience. Aldiss' distinctive world-view (and the primary mode of human space travel he depicts) incorporates and heavily depends on elements of eastern religious mysticism. This is sure to irk hard sci-fi fans - there is no attempt to extrapolate these imagined 'technologies' from known science concepts. I think this is Aldiss' attempt to foresee what cannot be foreseen, and so I find it a laudable enterprise. I'm not averse to finding spiritual elements in my imagined future worlds, so I enjoyed this, but I would not choose to call this science fiction. For me, it crosses the threshold into fantasy.A few of the stories suffer from a disease started by Isaac Asimov - I call it 'board-room-itis', a malady whose symptoms are the desire to write about people sitting about facing one another in a board room discussing the action and its futuristic settings rather than boldly venturing out into the rich, colorfully envisioned world itself and showing it to the reader first-hand.I believe Aldiss may have been the first to explore the demise of the universe as we know it. At a time when most science fiction writers were content with envisioning events of the next few tens of thousands of years, Aldiss was seeking the end-game. For this alone, I believe 'Galaxies like Grains of Sand' is a worthwhile read.
Galaxies Like Grains of Sand is a solid work of science fiction. It accomplishes what so many books in the genre surprisingly fail to do, which is to raise questions about our collective future based upon our past and present conditions. For those that want to consider far reaching ideas about our long-term societal and human evolutionary paths, Galaxies Like Grains of Sand has no shortage of such ideas.My issues with Galaxies stem from its structure. It attempts to be one complete text that presents fragments of Earth's history through countless millennia into the future. To accomplish this structure, the book is comprised of several short stories that are tied together with brief prefaces that focus on the book's historical theme.Aldiss' approach fragments the characters and the setting of each story while the central them of Earth's history is carried through to the end. Consequently, the characters and settings of each story serve Aldiss' purpose, but they fail to elicit any lasting sympathy. The characters simply vanish as the next fragment begins.The end result feels more like a recital of Aldiss' version of Revelation, and the human implications associated with Aldiss' visions are left to a sort of faith in him as the all-knowing writer. In the absence of sympathy, there is no way to feel a sense of truth in Aldiss' words.I think science fiction is capable of a literary story; complete with characters that communicate the nature of their existence, a setting that extrapolates realistic speculations on science, and a plot that strikes close to a human understanding of life. But so far, such a book has been elusive.
What do You think about Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand (2001)?
