The Moment of Eclipse is a collection of short stories by Brian Aldiss. Yes, it is weird that I aspire to write fantasy yet seem to be constantly reading science fiction. In my defence, all the fantasy books I have to read are very long and all the science fiction has been under 200 pages. Is this a psychological thing and I’m being tricked by font sizing? 100% yes. Does it really matter because fantasy and science fiction are the same genre? Shut your mouth, every online book seller! They’re very different genres! Don’t you dare trot out that Arthur C. Clarke quote about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic! That guy also wrote this:

SOME WOMEN, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motionless; but when they started to move, and sympathetic vibrations set in, it was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked to take. He was quite sure that at least one serious space accident had been caused by acute crew distraction, after the transit of an un-holstered lady officer through the control cabin.

Is this the person you want defining the genres? Be reasonable. Anyways, moving on from rampant sexism in the sci-fi genre, I’d like to talk about The Moment of Eclipse and… hold on… let me check my notes… oh… oh no.

The first Brian Aldiss novel I read was Hothouse and I love Hothouse. It’s the best Dying Earth type story I’ve read and there’s a lot of things I like in it. Like the bit where a spooky song compels anyone who hears it to throw themselves into a volcano and there’s a weird beckoning hand in there. 10/10, love it. Perfect. The second Brian Aldiss novel I read was Non-Stop and that was fine, probably undercut by every sci-fi TV show having stolen it’s core premise. Then I read Finches of Mars and I found it to be wild horny but it did have a mad horse making a speech about the end of days. So, what would Moment of Eclipse be like? Perhaps a mix of all three? Yes. Yes it is. Also, this will contain spoilers for everything.

The Moment of Eclipse

A film maker is obsessed with a married woman. She is married to an ambassador who is being moved to Lagos. The film maker follows them, hoping to seduce the wife. When he gets his opportunity he finds his sight is eclipsed from within. Turns out he’s riddled with parasitic worms but a doctor gets rid of them. He stops being obsessed with the woman because of this unpleasant experience. Not that good a story but it does set the tone for the rest of the book, which is to say it’s going to be awash with weird imperialism, racism, and sexism. Volcano hand, save me!

The Day We Embarked for Cythera…

I looked at this one on the index and drew a complete blank. Then I skimmed through it and kind of remembered it but not what it was about. From my research, it appears to be about people lounging around in a field. People talk about it’s “poetic prose” which I always take as a sign it’s not for me. The only poetic prose I’m interested is that crafted by the sonorous voice of the spooky volcano hand.

Orgy of the Living and the Dying

Tancred (good name) is a soldier stationed in India and he hears voices.The mysterious voices themselves are actually quite well done in the formatting, an entire line is underlined and just interjects itself in the story. It’s good! That’s the nicest thing I have to say about this. Tancred is cheating on his wife with Sushila;

Sushila now was almost nineteen, a mature and strong minded woman.

Cool, cool. Also, Tancred first met her when she stayed with him and his wife 3 years ago when she was studying nursing. So, obviously, when he got the chance to be stationed in one of the famine stricken parts of India, he tracked her down! Because since he first met her, when she was 16, he really wanted to sleep with her.

The plot of this one is that bandits attack the UN camp to raid the food stockpile and then Tancred kills them with… sound? Like a weird sound system? I assumed the voices in his head were caused by this sound system but they weren’t, he just hears voices that are sometimes lines of dialogue from the future and sometimes just other stuff. In the collected reviews at the back of the book, the TRIBUNE says

ORGY OF THE LIVING AND THE DYING is simply one of the most perfectly realized short stories you will ever read

Don’t you put such a powerful curse on me, Tribune! This story was awful. I considered stopping right here, not only because of how wretched I found this story to be but also because my wife is Indian and what if she glances at what I’m reading? I’m not one of your characters, Aldiss! I don’t hate my wife, don’t ruin my marriage…!

Super Toys Last All Summer Long

This is the short story that the film AI is based on. I liked it! Man makes a robot child for his wife because they can’t have kids and then the government gives them a license to have kids. You do kind of feel bad for the robot child, David, and it also doesn’t faff about. It’s good, it’s short and it avoids the Indian subcontinent entirely. A welcome break.

The Village Swindler

Oh no, we’re back! Jane Pentecouth is travelling in India when her father has a heart attack. She is helped by Dr. Chandauri,

a beaming and terrifying Hindu.

This story was vile. This story is just constantly turning to look at you and going “Is there not a savage barbarity in the Indian soul that even the kind hand of the British Empire could not fully smother?”

Wrong audience for that one, buddy. I despised this. In the story, Jane’s father needs a heart transplant and a beggar she encountered earlier offers his heart in exchange for 50 rupees. Jane is distraught by this, it’s so cruel! Dr. Chandauri just laughs because that guy’s heart isn’t even worth 50 rupees! He’s an untouchable so his heart would be weak cause he was so poor all his life! What savage barab-

Just fuck off? This and a few other stories are very concerned with how India is doomed to failure once the kind British leave and it’s just infuriating. India is actually doing pretty well all things considered and, even if it wasn’t, is that not less a reflection of the Indian soul than the incredible damage done by colonialist exploitation? Like what is this? I hate this so much.

Down the Up Escalation

Again, don’t remember this. Looked over it. I think a guy working in publishing is looking over his aunt’s manuscript and maybe has a heart attack? I don’t know. This short story collection has a spaceship on the cover, why is it doing this to me?

That Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art…

I got nothing. Paintings? Something? Wait, it’s short. I’ll just reread it.

Man meets older woman in the canteen at the V&A museum. They kind of talk about art. Some stuff about technology. Also, they’ve both been to INDIA. I guess this is probably based on some encounter Aldiss had but just cause he had to live it doesn’t mean I want to hear about it. In fact, if anything I’m looking for the literal opposite of that.

Confluence

I cannot begin to explain the flood of relief I experienced when I read the opening line of:

The inhabitants of the planet Myrin have much to endure from Earthmen, inevitably perhaps, since they represent the only intelligent life we have so far found in the galaxy.

Space! The Final Frontier…! I read on eagerly only to discover that this entire story is a translation guide. Like this:

en io play : The deliberate dissolving of the senses into sleep

gee kutch : Solar empathy ge nu : The sorrow that overtakes a mother knowing her child will be born dead

ge nup dimu : The sorrow that overtakes the child in the womb when it knows it will be born dead

gor a : Ability to live for eight hundred years

And I bet if I’d come across this story without being slowly consumed from the inside by a hatred of the British Empire, I might have given it more time. Like it’s an interesting way to tell a story, I bet you can get all kinds of insight by how the words relate to each other, but I was done. Or I would have been done if I wasn’t on holidays and this was the only book I had left to read. Well, I guess we just press on. Maybe the next story will somehow turn everything around and be amazing.

Heresies of the Huge God

THE NEXT STORY WAS SOMEHOW AMAZING. I love Heresies of the Huge God so much that I momentarily forgot about the horrors of Empire and was all about the horrors of Big Lizard.

A Big Lizard lands on Earth. And I mean a Big Lizard, one that spans continents. The lizard has impenetrable skin and nothing humanity can do can get rid of it. One day, it just leaves. Then, a few years later, it comes back.

Except, it’s clearly a different lizard, it has more legs, but the religion that sprung up in response to the Big Lizard decided it must be the same one because it’s the Huge God. As science and modern technology has completely failed to deal with the space lizard, people have just decided the Big Lizard is god and have constructed a narrative that makes sense of everything. The story is written by a worshipper of the Huge God and it’s a history of the world as understood by the church. It’s really good.

In the churches of the world, the Huge God was asked to give a sign that he had Witnessed the great victory over the American unbelievers. All who opposed this enlightened act were destroyed. He answered the prayers in 297 by moving swiftly forward only a comparatively Small Amount and lying Mainly in the Pacific Ocean, stretching almost as far south as what is now the Antarter, what was then the Tropic of Capricorn, and what had previously been the Equator. Some of his left legs covered the towns along the west American seaboard as far south as Guadalajara (where the impression of his foot is still marked by the Temple of the Sacred Toe), including some of the towns such as San Francisco already mentioned. We speak of this as the First Shift; it was rightly taken as a striking proof of the Huge God’s contempt for America.

It’s so good. I love it. Join Volcano Hand atop the Pantheon of Cool Aldiss Ideas.

The Circulation of the Blood.

This time, the British guy, Yale, actually left his wife to marry the Indian woman, Caterina. Is this progress? It certainly doesn’t feel like it. When Yale is gone on an expedition, his wife sleeps with her step son because, as rationalised by Yale, that’s just what happens when you leave a woman around a virile man. Cool, I hate this.

Oh also, this story is about immortality. Yale is a researcher and found some fish are immortal now because of some virus. He calls up his boss, Devlin, who comes to the island Yale lives on to say he knows about the immortality virus and he and a group of rich people have already used it on themselves. Devlin is about to kill Yale to keep the secret then Yale is like “But your immortality virus got into the sea and now whales are immortal yet they’re all beaching themselves on this island! Don’t you see what this means?”. Devlin is disquieted enough by this that he fails to kill Yale and leaves. Later, Yale speaks to Caterina and is like “lol, whales always do that here, I just wanted to freak him out. We gonna be immortal, baby!!!” which is a funny ending. I assumed there would be some terrifying consequence but I guess I got played.

… And the Stagnation of the Heart

Oh wait, there it is. Yale returns and we’re in India again (Nooooooooo!). This story is about the whole two tiered humanity of immortals vs regulars. There’s famine and immortal goats and, you know, maybe, just maybe, there’s some sort of inherent sav-

Let me stop you there. I don’t care. The story also contains this line:

The government will pay. Like all Indian legislation this bounty favours the rich and the strong at the expense of the poor and weak. Like everything else cool Delhi justice melts in the heat.

I actually read this one out to my wife, we’re still married. There’s something so weird about a British guy going “Of course, this favours the rich in society at the expense to the poor!” as I am currently just like… existing in modern Britain? Did you grow up in a house without mirrors, what is this?

The Worm That Flies

Argustal, an ape man, is looking for special stones. He comes across some tree men, people who became trees, and they offer him a lift. He finds his stone and heads back to his village. Then he has a terrible dream about being small. Crow, a weird dude, tells Argustal that the small version of him was called a “child” and everyone was a child once!

Twist, this is a continuation of the last story! The immortality virus rendered everyone sterile and now they’ve all been around for thousands of years and society has regressed entirely. Humans can’t remember most of their lives and many have changed their forms, some turning into the tree people or ape people or whatever. Argustal might even be Yale! He collects the stones because they’re actually records of the past but he doesn’t really understand them any more. He tosses one and maybe death comes back to the world? I’m not entirely sure, but I liked this one a lot.

Working in the Spaceship Yards

Dude works in the shipyard and has a relationship with Nellie.

The women were very emotional. Many of them fell in love with androids. The men were very bitter about this. My first love, Nellie, the FTL-fitter’s mate, left me for an android electrician. She said he was more respectful.

Go get it Nellie, know your worth.

Swastika!

Hitler didn’t die in the bunker, he moved to Belgium and now lives under an assumed name. The main character meets him for a nice chat. Story basically boils down to the fact that if you consider Hitler to be the avatar of Nazi ideology then he couldn’t possibly be dead because his ideology is still very much around. It’s pretty well done, like it’s inherently farcical to have a nostalgic Hitler reflecting on how it all went wrong but the kind of cosy, familiar tone of the piece really captures the odd nostalgia that people can have for terrible things. Also, when Hitler is being racist at least it’s clear I’m supposed to think he’s terrible. However, whenever India comes up I have to wonder if, you know, all taken together, was the British Empire a civilising influence upon the lawless parts of the world? To which I once again say please fuck off forever.

So yeah, that’s the book. Does

the presence of one Giant Lizard forgive all the awful stuff in this collection? No, obviously not.

Still, that being said, I would like to stress how big that lizard was:

The Huge God landed in what is now the Sacred Sea, upon which in these days sail some of our most beautiful churches dedicated to His Name. At that time, the region was much less pleasing, being broken up into many states possessed by different nations. This was a system of land tenure practised before our present theories of constant migration and evacuation were formed.

The rear legs of the Huge God stretched far down into Africa – which was then not the island continent it now is – almost touching the Congo River, at the sacred spot marked now by the Sacrificial Church of Basoko-Aketi-Ele, and at the sacred spot marked now by the Temple Church of Aden, obliterating the old port of Aden.

Some of the Huge God’s legs stretched above the Sudan and across what was then the Libyan Kingdom, now part of the Sea of Elder Sorrow, while a foot rested in a city called Tunis on what was then the Tunisian shore. These were some of the legs of the Huge God on his left side.

On his right side, his legs blessed and pressed the sands of Saudi Arabia, now called Live Valley, and the foothills of the Caucasus, obliterating the Mount called Ararat in Asia Minor, while the Foremost Leg stretched forward to Russian lands, stamping out immediately the great capital city of Moscow.

The body of the Huge God, resting in repose between his mighty legs, settled mainly over three ancient seas, if the Old Records are to be trusted, called the Sea of Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Nile Sea, all of which now form part of the Sacred Sea. He eradicated also with his Great Bulk part of the Black Sea, now called the White Sea, Egypt, Athens, Cyprus, and the Balkan Peninsula as far north as Belgrade, now Holy Belgrade, for above this town towered the Neck of the Huge God on his First Visit to us mortals, just clearing the roofs of the houses.

As for his head, it lifted above the region of mountains that we call Ittaland, which was then named Europe, a populous part of the globe, raised so high that it might easily be seen on a clear day from London, then as now the chief town of the land of the Anglo-French.

It was estimated in those first days that the length of the Huge God was some four and a half thousand miles, from rear to nose, with the eight legs each about nine hundred miles long. Now we profess in our Creed that our Huge God changes shape and length and number of legs according to whether he is Pleased or Angry with man.

It’s so good.