Brian Aldiss, ed. Galactic Empires: Volume two (1976)

     Brian Aldiss, ed. Galactic Empires: Volume two (1976) Aldiss has assembled a good collection of the future history genre of SF, ranging from the swashbuckling space opera to the most subtle of mathematico-philosophical speculations. In all of them some empire-like polity is imagined, and plot points hinge as much on the structure of that polity as on the characters. One of Aldiss’s strengths is that he chooses stories with strong though not always complex characterisation, so that the stories are less thesis-driven than most SF. That makes these stories engaging; that, and the archetypal elements of which they’re built, as Aldiss recognises and points out. It’s been a while since I binged on SF. This book provided several hours of entertaining and thought-provoking reading. A few stories are shaggy jokes, but most are more serious (though not solemn) explorations of the notions of power and government.
     The assumption underlying all the stories is that the larger the society, the more authoritarian it will be. And they all take for granted that power tends to corrupt, everyone except the noble hero, that is. In many, stagnation is seen as an inevitable byproduct of the stability of a powerful empire, and the barbarian invasions as a welcome and necessary revitalisation of the culture. Several stories assume that humanity’s striving for something beyond itself will be unique in the galaxy, a dubious assumption. The treatment of gender and sex tends to be simplistic and very much of the time in which the stories were written, with men taking leading roles, and even powerful women tending to melt into sex kittens as soon as the hero looks at them with lustful intention. No wonder that women generally haven’t liked SF. There are also several stories with simplistic notions of mind, the kind of notions that enable telepathy and the insertion of alien egos into human brains.
     But most stories deal with the human (and alien) costs of the changes and conflicts that are an inevitable byproduct of government. Thoreau’s implicit idea that eventually, perhaps, humans would need no government, is emphatically denied here. To be intelligent and to live in societies means to govern and be governed, to dominate and to resist domination. The result is that the most common tone is elegiac and tragic, for even the most advanced race must eventually face its own extinction.. The comic spirit shows up mostly as satire, equating humans with vermin, for example.
     All in all, the book is worth keeping. ** (2007)