A Life of Matter and Death: by Brian Aldiss

Every so often you happen across the template for a generation of stories. Some of these templates are famous and some are not. This is not. A Life of Matter and Death was published in Interzone in 1991 and made that year's best-of anthology. I don't recall reading it at the time, perhaps because I was in my first year at university, having my brain addled with James Joyce. In fact, my tutors would have been well-served to set aside their annotated editions of Ulysses to spare an hour for Aldiss. They might even have come to share my own conviction that literature, real literature, is not literary fiction, but is rather the best of genre fiction. Though I doubt it - they were always too far gone in a stream of salaried consciousness. And sadly, my own conviction did not arrive till some years later, when it was much to late to argue the point.

A Life of Matter and Death contains all the major elements that currently subjugate much modern genre fiction. Ostensibly the story is about flesh-eating aliens; two brothers carry the body of their father down a South American mountain, only to find that the ground won't accept his remains. One brother descends into local magic realism, inventing infamous headlines for newspapers - the other brother sets about making those headlines a reality and inadvertently changes the way humanity treats with death. Rejecting the ground that refused his father's body, he sails the oceans, happening upon a stricken alien craft - all he can rescue from the wreckage are several eggs which hatch and away. These winged creatures begin to prey on the world's newly dead. And as the world is such a charnel house, they have plenty of feed with which to establish themselves. At first the Odonata, as they come to be called, are treated as vermin; gradually, as their almost angelic qualities grow familiar, then comforting, their purposes become part of the ritual of burial, and the disposal of bodies is given over to them as a matter of ceremony, religious in nature. Huge towers are built to offer up the dead of the world. And so the brothers need not have carried their father down the mountain - they should have finished the climb and left his remains for the Odonata. But these would not have existed if they had acted otherwise.

Put thusly: flesh-eating aliens become beautiful angels when they bring acceptance through cultural exchange settling dysfunctional family arrangements and satisfying eco wish-fulfilment and religious pieties in the process; all of these put together as a sort of difference engine which consumes smoke to produce mirrors. The story is splendid.

I have to admit I haven't been the closest Aldiss reader. Of his contemporaries at New Worlds - J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and Barrington J. Bayley - I much preferred Ballard and Bayley - I may have to think again. Currently I am of the opinion that the best work of Aldiss is to be found in his shorter fiction; and, in fact, A Life of Matter and Death is subtitled, A Novel in One Chapter. I think he can go one better - a genre in one chapter.

Unearthly Stranger (1964)

One of a number of fondly remembered British sf films made in the early 60s (The Night Caller and The Mind Benders being otherly), Unearthly Stranger provided a rare early leading role for John Neville. Here he is superbly supported by Philip Stone and Gabriella Licudi in a story which, to my surprise, is not based on a novel, but on an original idea. The idea, of course, is old hat, even by the sf standards of the early 60s, but it's interesting to see a maturity of treatment which is all too rare in science fiction in the cinema.

A private research laboratory appears to be on the verge of making a breakthrough in space exploration - not by means of sending ships, but by flinging the human consciousness onto other worlds. The question is - have aliens already flung their consciousness to earth? When scientists on the project begin to die, Neville suspects yes. In the meantime, he is newly-married. His wife, ostensibly foreign, permitted him to notice her on a dark Italian road with mysterious powers in attendance. She does not satisfy the company's security checks - she has no personal or family records. She also has a number of oddly inhuman quirks on the feminine/domestic side - she can't blink, but when she learns to do so it is with the self-conscious flutter of a coquette. Neville's colleague watches her remove a hot dish from an oven without wearing oven gloves. Salt tears leave vivid scars on her cheeks. Neville is well aware of what all this means - after all, it was his his idea that aliens maybe already be present - he just refuses to believe it of his wife, which is where the film gets most of its drama, as well as some of its absurdities. Licudi's is quite a disingenuous character - she obviously has sexual and maternal instincts, but they are not complete; her very lack of design must seem beguiling to scientists. When she looks to her husband to complete her things begin to unravel, because he looks to his work for answers.

There are a number of quite striking scenes, the best of which is Licudi's brief stop outside a schoolyard; she watches the children at play, until they become aware of her not-quite-right presence and retreat en masse to the school building, no bell necessary, except perhaps the alarm bells set to ringing in their heads. And it is interesting to watch Stone move Neville to the inevitable conclusion during a series of increasingly fractious encounters between the two men - as Licudi's character struggles with its mission, the two men are almost cruelly discursive, but it's hard to see how it could be any other way.

Ultimately, the aliens are all female, as confirmed by the striking final shot. I'm almost tempted to speculate that there is no better position to abuse than that of perennial female assistant, or demure wife, and that the aliens are aware of this and use it to their advantage - that our weak spots are prejudices and inequalities because they can be exploited in ways we can't imagine by beings who understand them as strategy rather than as tactics.

Unearthly Stranger is, for the most part, brilliantly shot, acted, and directed and well-worth seeking out. It is something of a rarity and it would be a real treat to see it cleaned up for a DVD release.