Last Orders

“That’s the sort of story I like. If the events in it are impossible the chances are that the truth will shine out more brightly.”

Last Orders is a collection of stories published by Brian Aldiss between 1973 and 1977. I often feel that the ideal introduction to any writer is in the short narrative. Here the writer must contain their ideas in strict dimensions, a meaningfully contiguous form that showcases one of the most difficult artistic tasks: brevity.

I appreciate that Aldiss does not treat language as a series of disparate nouns, but rather that everything has an origin, highlighting the human stories embedded therein. Thematically, many of the characters found here exist only in temporal extremes, haunted by the past and future. Aldiss suggests that temporal displacement is a cyclical ailment in the human psyche. As the present fogs into obsolescence, we fragment ourselves, forgetting that the whole is greater than its parts.

These stories are a wonderful exhibition of the qualities that continually keep me coming back to science fiction. The genre laid the conceptual framework for the future technologies that would emerge once our computational abilities increased. Particularly now that we can read these stories in hindsight, it’s always fun to see some little example of what would effectively become a language or generative model. And of course, the core humanity of the genre remains as potent as ever. But Aldiss took this a bit further in prescience. “Enigma 3: The Aperture Moment” is a story about visual reasoning models, where an image can be taken, in this case a painting, and moved into real life. Aldiss seems to warn that this could represent a collapse in what was supposed to be artistic intent, a painting frozen in time, to capture grief, joy, the light on objects, etc., now all gutted by statistical probabilities of what might have come next, trained on something about the artist which only ever existed in the past. We rupture an intention that was supposed to remain frozen, but who knows what is sacred anymore.

“As with those imprisoned images, we were doomed to root through the debris of the past, because copies can have no creative future.”

Aldiss seems to say that human experience is a quest for patterns, an instinct that has carried us through evolution. It is not surprising then that in the wake of computational intelligence, we train machines on a similar behavior pattern to our own. Perhaps humanity is trapped by its umwelt, lost in its self-referential playhouse, where even the ghosts we conjure merely echo an intellectual entrapment. When intellectualism ends, imagination must follow, but are we stalwart?

The “Enigma” entries in this collection will give you insight into Aldiss’s writing process, as some are notes toward a story, enjoyable and illuminating. Some favorites include “Enigma 1: Year by Year the Evil Gains,” “Live? Our Computers Will Do That for Us,” “Backwater,” “Wired for Sound,” “Journey to the Heartland,” and “An Appearance of Life,” which is a masterpiece, beautiful and heart-wrenching.

In these offerings Aldiss is imaginative, romantic, and obviously cared deeply about the art form. Interpretation is largely in suspension here, the hallmark of any powerfully communicated artistic medium.