Space, Time And Nathaniel - Brian Aldiss

 SPACE, TIME AND NATHANIEL - BRIAN ALDISS

I once met a traveller who was returning from India and he was telling me about his time there. He was on his way back to England and had stopped off at Crete where I was living at the time. This was back when travelling meant hitchhiking around the world or by bus through the Hindu Kush etc, back when travelling wasn't just an extended holiday but more a way of life. He told me of how in India he had been attacked and robbed, and of how a knife had been thrust into his stomach. He told me of his near-death experience and of how it had impacted and altered his whole sense of life and its meaning.

Once back in England he intended to write about it all but via the medium of a science fiction book - and this is the interesting bit - because he viewed science fiction as being the perfect medium to discuss, convey and transfer thoughts and ideas on such grandiose subjects as the meaning of life. For me, it was the first time I had ever considered that something like science fiction could be used in such a way and that it wasn't just H G Wells or Star Wars but that its scope in fact was actually limitless.

As a boy growing up in Bristol, there was a second-hand bookshop on the Gloucester Road that I used to go to buy old Marvel comics. It was in there that they used to also have stacks of old, paperback science fiction books that I would also peruse but never buy because I knew I was too young for them. One that I remember seeing and whose cover I've never forgotten is Space, Time And Nathaniel, by Brian Aldiss with its picture of a very distinctive alien gazing up at the sky in a wrecked city-scape in some kind of sub-atomic-like universe. It's a book I've now finally caught up with.

I'm not a great science fiction reader although there's no particular reason for this, it's just that it's a genre that holds no special fascination for me, in the same way that crime fiction or westerns don't either. It's the blurb on the back, however, that reminded me that science fiction is actually a really wide and expansive genre encompassing worlds both inner and outer, and that also reminded me of the guy who had been robbed and stabbed:

"Britain's leading writer of science fiction explores the outer vastness of space and the inner obscurity of man."

It's an apt description and it sums up the genre perfectly.

Space, Time And Nathaniel is a collection of short stories but what they're about is neither here nor there because what the whole book is really about is 'imagination'. It's about the will to dream. Context is all, and it should be noted that these stories were first written and published in 1957, years before man first launched a rocket to the moon and some years before Yuri Gagarin became the first man to enter space. They were written at a time when imagination was in advance of science, when man's dreams were in advance of man's reality. Which begs the question - Can the same be said of today? Does man's dreams still supersede reality or does reality these days supersede his dreams? Is science now in advance of imagination?

Arguably, it could be said yes it is, particularly when considering the advances of Artificial Intelligence and the mapping out of the Universe via the Hubble Space Telescope where the images being produced of deep space are indeed beyond anyone's imagination. At the same time, however, in the first instance these things have all been born from man's imagination and dreams without which we would all probably still be living in caves and banging rocks together, or smashing bones upon the ground like the ape creature at the start of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey. 

Imagination and dreams are the keys. The launch pads.

Left to his own devices man still dreams but nowadays quite possibly in an ever so slightly different way. Subconsciously almost, without actually being even fully aware of it. At a jaunt, at a tangent, at a step slightly removed from our perception of reality. And it's here where the pulse of life beats. It's here where a flame flickers and it's here where our lives are truly measured. And it's here where 'the outer vastness of space and the inner obscurity of man' can both be found...

John Serpico