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Last Orders.
Careful selection of what the author considered was his most telling short work from the mid-Seventies.
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First published January 1, 1977
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About the author
Brian W. Aldiss
834 books673 followersPseudonyms: Jael Cracken, Peter Pica, John Runciman, C.C. Shackleton, Arch Mendicant, & "Doc" Peristyle.
Brian Wilson Aldiss was one of the most important voices in science fiction writing today. He wrote his first novel while working as a bookseller in Oxford. Shortly afterwards he wrote his first work of science fiction and soon gained international recognition. Adored for his innovative literary techniques, evocative plots and irresistible characters, he became a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 1999.
Brian Aldiss died on August 19, 2017, just after celebrating his 92nd birthday with his family and closest friends.
Brian W. Aldiss Group on Good Reads
Brian Wilson Aldiss was one of the most important voices in science fiction writing today. He wrote his first novel while working as a bookseller in Oxford. Shortly afterwards he wrote his first work of science fiction and soon gained international recognition. Adored for his innovative literary techniques, evocative plots and irresistible characters, he became a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 1999.
Brian Aldiss died on August 19, 2017, just after celebrating his 92nd birthday with his family and closest friends.
Brian W. Aldiss Group on Good Reads
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
November 10, 2025
"That’s the sort of story I like. If the events in it are impossible the chances are that the truth will shine out more brightly."
Last Orders is a collection of stories published by Brian Aldiss between 1973 and 1977. I often feel that the ideal introduction to any writer is in the short narrative. Here the writer must contain their ideas in strict dimensions, a meaningfully contiguous form that showcases one of the most difficult artistic tasks: brevity.
As a writer, I appreciate that Aldiss does not treat language as a series of disparate nouns, but rather that everything has an origin, highlighting the human stories embedded therein. Thematically, many of the characters found here exist only in temporal extremes, haunted by the past and future. Aldiss suggests that temporal displacement is a cyclical ailment in the human psyche. As the present fogs into obsolescence, we fragment ourselves, forgetting that the whole is greater than its parts.
These stories are a wonderful exhibition of the qualities that continually keep me coming back to science fiction. The genre laid the conceptual framework for the future technologies that would emerge once our computational abilities increased. Particularly now that we can read these stories in hindsight, it's always fun to see some little example of what would effectively become a language or generative model. And of course, the core humanity of the genre remains as potent as ever. But Aldiss took this a bit further in prescience. "Enigma 3: The Aperture Moment" is a story about visual reasoning models, where an image can be taken, in this case a painting, and moved into real life. Aldiss seems to warn that this could represent a collapse in what was supposed to be artistic intent, a painting frozen in time, to capture grief, joy, the light on objects, etc., now all gutted by statistical probabilities of what might have come next, trained on something about the artist which only ever existed in the past. We rupture an intention that was supposed to remain frozen, but who knows what is sacred anymore.
“As with those imprisoned images, we were doomed to root through the debris of the past, because copies can have no creative future.”
Aldiss seems to say that human experience is a quest for patterns, an instinct that has carried us through evolution. It is not surprising then that in the wake of computational intelligence, we train machines on a similar behavior pattern to our own. Perhaps humanity is trapped by its umwelt, lost in its self-referential playhouse, where even the ghosts we conjure merely echo an intellectual entrapment. When intellectualism ends, imagination must follow, but are we stalwart?
The "Enigma" entries in this collection will give you insight into Aldiss's writing process, as some are notes toward a story, highly enjoyable and illuminating. Some favorites include: "Enigma 1: Year By Year the Evil Gains," "Live? Our Computers Will Do That For Us," "Backwater," "Wired for Sound," "Journey to the Heartland," and "An Appearance of Life," which is a masterpiece, utterly beautiful and heart-wrenching.
In these offerings Aldiss is imaginative, romantic, and obviously cared deeply about the art form. Interpretation is largely in suspension here, the hallmark of any powerfully communicated artistic medium. What a thoughtful curation of experiential short stories this is, essential reading.
Last Orders is a collection of stories published by Brian Aldiss between 1973 and 1977. I often feel that the ideal introduction to any writer is in the short narrative. Here the writer must contain their ideas in strict dimensions, a meaningfully contiguous form that showcases one of the most difficult artistic tasks: brevity.
As a writer, I appreciate that Aldiss does not treat language as a series of disparate nouns, but rather that everything has an origin, highlighting the human stories embedded therein. Thematically, many of the characters found here exist only in temporal extremes, haunted by the past and future. Aldiss suggests that temporal displacement is a cyclical ailment in the human psyche. As the present fogs into obsolescence, we fragment ourselves, forgetting that the whole is greater than its parts.
These stories are a wonderful exhibition of the qualities that continually keep me coming back to science fiction. The genre laid the conceptual framework for the future technologies that would emerge once our computational abilities increased. Particularly now that we can read these stories in hindsight, it's always fun to see some little example of what would effectively become a language or generative model. And of course, the core humanity of the genre remains as potent as ever. But Aldiss took this a bit further in prescience. "Enigma 3: The Aperture Moment" is a story about visual reasoning models, where an image can be taken, in this case a painting, and moved into real life. Aldiss seems to warn that this could represent a collapse in what was supposed to be artistic intent, a painting frozen in time, to capture grief, joy, the light on objects, etc., now all gutted by statistical probabilities of what might have come next, trained on something about the artist which only ever existed in the past. We rupture an intention that was supposed to remain frozen, but who knows what is sacred anymore.
“As with those imprisoned images, we were doomed to root through the debris of the past, because copies can have no creative future.”
Aldiss seems to say that human experience is a quest for patterns, an instinct that has carried us through evolution. It is not surprising then that in the wake of computational intelligence, we train machines on a similar behavior pattern to our own. Perhaps humanity is trapped by its umwelt, lost in its self-referential playhouse, where even the ghosts we conjure merely echo an intellectual entrapment. When intellectualism ends, imagination must follow, but are we stalwart?
The "Enigma" entries in this collection will give you insight into Aldiss's writing process, as some are notes toward a story, highly enjoyable and illuminating. Some favorites include: "Enigma 1: Year By Year the Evil Gains," "Live? Our Computers Will Do That For Us," "Backwater," "Wired for Sound," "Journey to the Heartland," and "An Appearance of Life," which is a masterpiece, utterly beautiful and heart-wrenching.
In these offerings Aldiss is imaginative, romantic, and obviously cared deeply about the art form. Interpretation is largely in suspension here, the hallmark of any powerfully communicated artistic medium. What a thoughtful curation of experiential short stories this is, essential reading.
April 12, 2016
A very unusual compilation of short stories by the SF master: the theme is the cyclic nature of life, society and culture. Each story influences the others; characters with the same names or similar names appear and reappear but in each time zone with differences, sometimes subtle, sometimes radical. The nature of reality is questioned. The nature of time is questioned. The nature of experience is questioned. A story read late in the book sends the reader back to others already read. New connections, or divergent paths occur hours and days after reading.
The stories themselves vary in quality - all provoke thought, but sometimes irritation too. One brilliant story made the collection worthwhile for me. 'An Appearance of Life' sees a Seeker from the far distant future visit the galactic museum on the planet Norma, where he discovers, recreates and experiences a long dead love affair from a past age. This story, while it fits the theme of the collection, also transcends it, with its moving and emotional content, quite different from the often cold and dismissive tone of other stories.
The stories themselves vary in quality - all provoke thought, but sometimes irritation too. One brilliant story made the collection worthwhile for me. 'An Appearance of Life' sees a Seeker from the far distant future visit the galactic museum on the planet Norma, where he discovers, recreates and experiences a long dead love affair from a past age. This story, while it fits the theme of the collection, also transcends it, with its moving and emotional content, quite different from the often cold and dismissive tone of other stories.
February 9, 2021
(Continues this.)
The Expensive Delicate Ship (1973)
Two friends hike over a way that connects Denmark and Sweden. One of the two is telling a story and the narrator of story retells this story within his story. He is on the high sea. Suddenly another boat appears and the swell becomes very dangerous. He sees that the other arc (the "Doppelganger arc") carries many animals and even dinosaurs. Eventually, he reveals that this story is the product of his imagination and that for a man like him, making up such anecdotes is truly living (again a theme familiar from earlier stories).
The Coins in Clockwork Fountains (1975)
This again a collection of three stories. However, this time I wasn't able to see any connection between the stories collected under the header.
The first story (probably my least favorite in the entire collection) is narrated by the servant of a sick old woman. He tells about the numerous visits that the woman received and secretly lusts for some of her guests. Noticeably, the time scale seems different, as people live for much longer numbers of years and pregnancies take "longer". Possibly things in fact are different, but since it's a different planet the more plausible explanation is a different calendar and time scale. Eventually he reveals that he is the creator of the universe (maybe the initiator of time that the sect believes in?)..
The second story is epic fantasy. Moolab is a many-legged being that gives "blood water" to other creatures (whatever that means). But tonight he is destined for a higher purpose. A priest and a "swarm master" (of the swarm that Moolab is part of) ceremonially introduce him to his quest. He is about to set out and kill a Kimarsun and bring back its eye. These creatures are so completely immobile that their position is part of the collective memory of his swarm. After some struggle he is able to defeat the being.
The third story, well it's very short and I have no idea what it is about.
An Appearance of Life (1976)
This story, easily my favorite in the collection, is about the museum of Norma. The museum was built by an highly advanced alien species, the Korlevalulaw, a race that had since then disappeared from the face of the known universe (there are many theories as to what happened to them). The museum is a huge, encompassing the whole equator in an underground facility. The Korlevalulaw left it completely empty, but at least parts of it are now filled with human artifacts which span long time frames. Female androids maintain the museum, which is noteworthy because it is said that there are now ten women on every man.
The story is narrated by a "Erster Esenplastischer Sucher", which seems to be some sort of scientist who draws links between things for which many don't see a connection. In the cause of the visit to the museum, the Suchender sees space ships from the First Galactic era and later from the Second Galactic era. The Suchender also finds a wedding ring and is surprised by the type of relationship that used to by symbolically expressed by this sort of artifact (there are no longer love relations like this).
The climax of the story is reached when he (or she?) finds two so-called holocaps, first of a woman and later of a man, created 65 Thousand years earlier. The two encapsel two sides of a long dead relationship. The Sucher decides to reunite the two, who were talking about each other in the recording. At first, it looks as if they talk to each other, emphasizing that they always upheld their marriage even after the separation. Tragically, it soon becomes clear that their messages were preprogrammed and cannot escape the boundaries of what is to be said would they ever meet again.
The story ends on a contemplative note. Maybe this is the horizon of the human race as a whole, the Sucher hypothesize, created by the Korlevalulaw a long time ago. Maybe human beings too are just responding in programmed ways.
Wired for Sound (1974)
An alternative history set in the UK after the Fall or Europe. Great Britain has become a dystopian country that eavesdrops on its citizens at all times. Companies are partly socialized. The protagonist of the story tries to strike a secret deal with the sheik who visits him. While certainly nothing special, I enjoyed the way it's establishing a very complex setting for the cause of a story that is barely a couple of pages long.
Journey to the Heartland (1976)
This is the story of another dream researcher, Andrew Angsteed, and his favorite subject, Rose-Jean Depson. As in previous stories, his institute's main purpose is to classify the dreams of its experimentees. Angsteed forms a theory: he thinks that life is determined by the eternal return of the same (well, he doesn't quite put this in these Nietzschean terms, but this is the idea), that all people make the same kinds of experiences. This is comparable to what many psychoanalysts found in dreams, that dreams instantiate the same archetypes of the collective unconscious. Philosophically, this is a very intriguing idea. The fact that we share concepts such as friendship, accomplishment, etc. is probably the main reason why we understand each other's endeavors in the first place.
Angsteed is having a love affair with Rose-Jean, who is afraid that she is repeating the same mistakes as with her husband (from which she lives separated but occasionally still has sex with). In the end, Andrew may have found a way to live in the dreamscape. As Aldiss explains in a fictional interview attached to the story, in the sad non-sf ending, the imminent break-through is part of his schizophrenia. Exhaustion as well as the realization that he and Rose-Jean are not fit for each other lead to the eventual breakdown. According to the science-fiction interpretation, his ideas are true. He comes back, changed, now living within the dream time. He is determined to lead other people to this Heartland of dreams.
The Expensive Delicate Ship (1973)
Two friends hike over a way that connects Denmark and Sweden. One of the two is telling a story and the narrator of story retells this story within his story. He is on the high sea. Suddenly another boat appears and the swell becomes very dangerous. He sees that the other arc (the "Doppelganger arc") carries many animals and even dinosaurs. Eventually, he reveals that this story is the product of his imagination and that for a man like him, making up such anecdotes is truly living (again a theme familiar from earlier stories).
The Coins in Clockwork Fountains (1975)
This again a collection of three stories. However, this time I wasn't able to see any connection between the stories collected under the header.
The first story (probably my least favorite in the entire collection) is narrated by the servant of a sick old woman. He tells about the numerous visits that the woman received and secretly lusts for some of her guests. Noticeably, the time scale seems different, as people live for much longer numbers of years and pregnancies take "longer". Possibly things in fact are different, but since it's a different planet the more plausible explanation is a different calendar and time scale. Eventually he reveals that he is the creator of the universe (maybe the initiator of time that the sect believes in?)..
The second story is epic fantasy. Moolab is a many-legged being that gives "blood water" to other creatures (whatever that means). But tonight he is destined for a higher purpose. A priest and a "swarm master" (of the swarm that Moolab is part of) ceremonially introduce him to his quest. He is about to set out and kill a Kimarsun and bring back its eye. These creatures are so completely immobile that their position is part of the collective memory of his swarm. After some struggle he is able to defeat the being.
The third story, well it's very short and I have no idea what it is about.
An Appearance of Life (1976)
This story, easily my favorite in the collection, is about the museum of Norma. The museum was built by an highly advanced alien species, the Korlevalulaw, a race that had since then disappeared from the face of the known universe (there are many theories as to what happened to them). The museum is a huge, encompassing the whole equator in an underground facility. The Korlevalulaw left it completely empty, but at least parts of it are now filled with human artifacts which span long time frames. Female androids maintain the museum, which is noteworthy because it is said that there are now ten women on every man.
The story is narrated by a "Erster Esenplastischer Sucher", which seems to be some sort of scientist who draws links between things for which many don't see a connection. In the cause of the visit to the museum, the Suchender sees space ships from the First Galactic era and later from the Second Galactic era. The Suchender also finds a wedding ring and is surprised by the type of relationship that used to by symbolically expressed by this sort of artifact (there are no longer love relations like this).
The climax of the story is reached when he (or she?) finds two so-called holocaps, first of a woman and later of a man, created 65 Thousand years earlier. The two encapsel two sides of a long dead relationship. The Sucher decides to reunite the two, who were talking about each other in the recording. At first, it looks as if they talk to each other, emphasizing that they always upheld their marriage even after the separation. Tragically, it soon becomes clear that their messages were preprogrammed and cannot escape the boundaries of what is to be said would they ever meet again.
The story ends on a contemplative note. Maybe this is the horizon of the human race as a whole, the Sucher hypothesize, created by the Korlevalulaw a long time ago. Maybe human beings too are just responding in programmed ways.
Wired for Sound (1974)
An alternative history set in the UK after the Fall or Europe. Great Britain has become a dystopian country that eavesdrops on its citizens at all times. Companies are partly socialized. The protagonist of the story tries to strike a secret deal with the sheik who visits him. While certainly nothing special, I enjoyed the way it's establishing a very complex setting for the cause of a story that is barely a couple of pages long.
Journey to the Heartland (1976)
This is the story of another dream researcher, Andrew Angsteed, and his favorite subject, Rose-Jean Depson. As in previous stories, his institute's main purpose is to classify the dreams of its experimentees. Angsteed forms a theory: he thinks that life is determined by the eternal return of the same (well, he doesn't quite put this in these Nietzschean terms, but this is the idea), that all people make the same kinds of experiences. This is comparable to what many psychoanalysts found in dreams, that dreams instantiate the same archetypes of the collective unconscious. Philosophically, this is a very intriguing idea. The fact that we share concepts such as friendship, accomplishment, etc. is probably the main reason why we understand each other's endeavors in the first place.
Angsteed is having a love affair with Rose-Jean, who is afraid that she is repeating the same mistakes as with her husband (from which she lives separated but occasionally still has sex with). In the end, Andrew may have found a way to live in the dreamscape. As Aldiss explains in a fictional interview attached to the story, in the sad non-sf ending, the imminent break-through is part of his schizophrenia. Exhaustion as well as the realization that he and Rose-Jean are not fit for each other lead to the eventual breakdown. According to the science-fiction interpretation, his ideas are true. He comes back, changed, now living within the dream time. He is determined to lead other people to this Heartland of dreams.
July 11, 2011
The stories in here stew inside of you. They are strange, speaking to you, as if the writer were on the other side of the screen, and talking directly to you. I don't know that I've seen a lot of science fiction that did that. That told the story almost as a pitch, as if to say, "hey, what would you think about life if it were like such and such?" interesting, but maybe not always working. a few large pieces of alien machinery abandoned on the planet's surface with their strange, deadly power-sources still glowing in the night.
July 17, 2023
Having read several not-so-good Aldiss titles over the past year (Dracula Unbound was the worst, although The Brightfount Diaries wasn't much better) it was nice to once again read an Aldiss book that shows him at his best. This is the Aldiss I know and love, one of my favourite writers of science fiction for the past 38 years. The stories in this collection are strange and excellent, offbeat and often written in a luminous prose.
I find that Aldiss' novels and short story collections tend to be quite dissimilar in tone, even if not in theme and speculative power. The novels are easier to read (not always) and the short story collections more difficult (not always). Last Orders is one of his more difficult books, by which I mean that the stories within it are rarely straightforward in any manner. They can be literary, gnomic, often convoluted, lateral and multilayered. This is a good thing, but it does mean that I didn't race through the volume. I took it slowly.
There are fourteen stories and all are worthy, but some are better than others. The opening story ('Last Orders') is curiously Kafkaesque in a comedic science-fictional way: it is about the inertia of both psychology and physical objects, and the title is a delightful bit of wordplay. The story that follows is a masterful fable, a tale that says more in three-and-a-half pages than whole novels by lesser writers. 'Creatures of Apogee' postulates a complex solar system and is focussed on the grand strategies that biology has had to devise to cope with the dramatically changing environmental conditions over vast sweeps of time. This fable seems like a (very short) run up for the set up of Aldiss' epic Helliconia Trilogy.
Two other stories stood out for me. 'The Monster of Ingratitude IV' is one of those science fiction stories that seem flawless. original, inventive, unusual, troubling, genuinely strange, and a commentary on the present (in an abstract way) as well as a speculation about the future. I love science fiction when it stretches the imagination like this. I dislike it when it simply transports the tropes of earthbound genre fiction to a different location (Star Wars). 'An Appearance of Life' is the other story that really grabbed me: bittersweet, profound, a speculation about loneliness, ambition, history and cybernetics.
I find that Aldiss' novels and short story collections tend to be quite dissimilar in tone, even if not in theme and speculative power. The novels are easier to read (not always) and the short story collections more difficult (not always). Last Orders is one of his more difficult books, by which I mean that the stories within it are rarely straightforward in any manner. They can be literary, gnomic, often convoluted, lateral and multilayered. This is a good thing, but it does mean that I didn't race through the volume. I took it slowly.
There are fourteen stories and all are worthy, but some are better than others. The opening story ('Last Orders') is curiously Kafkaesque in a comedic science-fictional way: it is about the inertia of both psychology and physical objects, and the title is a delightful bit of wordplay. The story that follows is a masterful fable, a tale that says more in three-and-a-half pages than whole novels by lesser writers. 'Creatures of Apogee' postulates a complex solar system and is focussed on the grand strategies that biology has had to devise to cope with the dramatically changing environmental conditions over vast sweeps of time. This fable seems like a (very short) run up for the set up of Aldiss' epic Helliconia Trilogy.
Two other stories stood out for me. 'The Monster of Ingratitude IV' is one of those science fiction stories that seem flawless. original, inventive, unusual, troubling, genuinely strange, and a commentary on the present (in an abstract way) as well as a speculation about the future. I love science fiction when it stretches the imagination like this. I dislike it when it simply transports the tropes of earthbound genre fiction to a different location (Star Wars). 'An Appearance of Life' is the other story that really grabbed me: bittersweet, profound, a speculation about loneliness, ambition, history and cybernetics.
September 17, 2020
I love Brian Aldiss, but the collection is rather uneven (many of the more experimental stories don't work particularly well for me.) That said, the good stories in the book are REALLY good, e.g. "An Appearance of Life," "Journey to the Heartland," and the title story are among the ones I really liked. I plan to read more Aldiss soon.
January 21, 2023
Can honestly say that I've never read a book like this before. In parts it feels like a work in progress, rather than a finished story.
The elements of this collection gel brilliantly. Each story has a connection to others, sometimes subtle.
This is definitely something I'll remember reading for quite some time.
The elements of this collection gel brilliantly. Each story has a connection to others, sometimes subtle.
This is definitely something I'll remember reading for quite some time.
August 6, 2008
Some great stories, certainly. But this collection is most impressive in the sequence- the wild array of narratives, arranged so that each emerges from and comments on those preceeding (and following, you soon realize). Almost a circular structure- compels you to start at the beginning again to read it for the first time.
June 17, 2015
Wonderful Author's note
October 24, 2015
Short stories from the 70s. Some are good.
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