Who Goes There?

Brian Aldiss started out in the pages of New Worlds and Science Fantasy, those two foremost genre magazines in the UK in the ’50s, but by the end of that decade he had gained a foothold in the US, particularly finding an American home in F&SF. Given his fast-and-loose approach to genre, this makes sense. Aldiss was one of those authors who anticipated the New Wave, to the point of becoming one of its big players. (Mind you that most of the important authors involved with the New Wave, that quintessential ’60s SF movement, had debuted a decade earlier.) He had already gotten a Hugo nomination for Best New Writer (it was a Hugo at the time, don’t ask) when he wrote the stories that would comprise the fix-up novel Hothouse, one of these stories appearing every other month or so in F&SF, the resulting series winning the Hugo for Best Short Fiction—the only time in the history of the Hugos this has happened, and admittedly with good reason. I reviewed “Hothouse” a few months back with the intention of continuing the series, and so here we are with “Nomansland,” a direct sequel.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the April 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It has never been reprinted on its own, although of course you can find it as part of Hothouse.

Enhancing Image

You may recall the adults from the first story went to the moon via a network of traverser webs, grew wings, and have since ventured back to Earth to bring the children of their kind with them to the moon. Lily-yo and the others go unmentioned in “Nomansland,” as instead we’re left to focus on the young folks they had left behind, including Gren, who has emerged as the true protagonist—a position he will apparently hold for the rest of the “series.” Toy is the new matriarch of the little tribe, with the only two males of breeding age being Gren and Veggy. (The two males are probably only barely in their early teens, as the humans of this far future consider “coming of age” to be when you’re physically matured enough to be able to reproduce.) There’s obviously a rivalry going on between the males, not least because Gren is older and wiser while Veggy spends pretty much the whole story being a little dumbass. (I said, in my review of “Hothouse,” that the human characters might have personalities, but I didn’t say they would be likable personalities.) Anyway, Aldiss is still much more interested in the world of the story rather than the people in it, the few humans left feelings small both physically (they’re shorter than modern-day humans, and also have green skin) and in terms of their importance to the narrative. I get the impression that had there been no humans at all that Aldiss would find some way to make the Hothouse stories about something else.

The only one sympathetic to Gren’s plight is Poyly, who will eventually figure rather importantly into the plot (and presumably the next story in the series), but not for now. What’s important is that with “Nomansland” we’re given a couple new creatures to play with, and also a new location in the form of nomansland itself, basically the coastline of this world, the area where the single impossibly massive banyan that serves as the foundation for the world’s vegetation meets its match, the sea. It’s a case of the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object, and it’s also that line where the fight for survival is at its fiercest. Aldiss could’ve written a mean script for a nature documentary if he was interested, if the Hothouse stories are any indication. There’s a cold detachment in how he describes the actions of the humans and their surroundings, but this is also mixed with a poetic sensibility that probably meant F&SF was the only appropriate outlet for this kind of story in the early ’60s. There’s a juxtaposition between Aldiss’s refusal to give the humans a Shakespearean inner life and his loving odes to the strange yet natural world he has created. It’s science-fantasy in the sense that while the basis of this world is implausible (there is, after all, a half of the world where it’s always day and the other night), Aldiss tries to give science-fictional explanations within those parameters. My favorite example of this is “Nomansland” has to be the “sand octopus,” a large tentacled beast which lurks near the coast and catches whatever on the beach it can grab, since crabs have long since gone extinct. Seemingly everything in this world is big—except for the humans.

Since “Nomansland” is a sequel to “Hothouse,” and since both stories were clearly planned as part of a series, there’s not too much I can say about one that doesn’t also apply to the other. If “Hothouse” establishes the cutthroat nature of the world then “Nomansland” expands the boundaries a bit, quite literally as Gren is spirited away by a suckerbird (which is not an actual bird) and narrowly survives, only to land at nomansland, and here the story takes on an unexpected gothic flavor. You see, real-world termites were famous for being ingenious and productive architects; so it only makes sense that the termights, their vastly larger descendants, would produce architecture of an appropriate scale—in this case a bug-made castle that Gren takes refuge in, even meeting a cat (or the descendant of cats) along the way, showing that humans are not the last vertebrate life on the planet—although this may not be true for much longer. Up this point the narrative has been geared towards action and observation, with basically no character insight allowed, which is probably intentional given what’s about to happen. If the characters seem unintelligent it’s because they simply haven’t been granted it—ingenuity, maybe, but not introspection.

There Be Spoilers Here

Gren reunites with the rest of the tribe, which turns out to not be so happy a reunion as Toy and Veggy think Gren is unfit to be the alpha male, and a close encounter with a sand octopus results in the young member of the tribe getting killed in a rather violent fashion. (There’s a girl named Fay and another named May; I think the latter gets killed. I’m not sure why Aldiss gave two characters such similar names. Maybe a way to signal their status as redshirts?) There’s a vote among the tribe and Gren is driven to exile, presumably to meet a gruesome death, and soon. But as luck would have it he comes into contact with morel, a sentient fungus that, when attached to one’s head, can not only communicate with the host telepathically but has access to something like an ancestral memory in the host’s brain. The result is that, all of a sudden, Gren is granted a level of intelligence (here conflated with knowledge) he did not have access to before, and he even convinced Poyly to share the “gift” with him. The ending of “Nomansland” is pretty unsubtly an homage to Adam and Eve getting kicked out of Eden, although here it’s framed as ultimately for the best. Gren and Poyly give up their “souls” (their wooden dolls, you may recall) and leave nomansland together in search of a brighter future. Well, not if Aldiss has anything to say about it. We’ll see in “Undergrowth,” the next story, soon enough.

A Step Farther Out

Give me a few more months and we’ll see a continuation of this series—I mean the reviews, not the stories. I have to admit as I acclimate myself more with the world of Hothouse, I start to “get” what Aldiss is doing more. The ambition of this project is perhaps better appreciates as a series of related stories than as a novel.

See you next time.