An interesting idea, but I didn't really get what it meant when it said they hadn't really gone back in time, but it was more of a sort of astral projection. But they didn't seem to be leaving their bodies behind in the "present day".

Goes a bit batshit after the final reveal that humans up until the 22nd century have been living "backward" in time and they're actually on the brink of discovering this true fact about themselves. It's easy to read, and it'd be 3 or 4 stars, but I took off some stars for homophobia. There's nothing more offputting than getting about a quarter of the way through a book before finding the main character indignantly spitting that he's not one of them damn queers! or something like that. No thanks. I considered just dropping the book there and then. But I guess I was in a charitable mood. Some other commenters have mentioned the book's deplorable attitude to women - I think after I'd clocked the homophobia it didn't come as any surprise. ( )

Interesting concept novel. Aldiss was always a few steps stranger then most American SF writers. Some of his bold ideas were great and some were a too odd. This one had some great ideas but had many plot holes and a final reveal which was just silly. His stories are always worth a read but he will never be in my top 10 favorite SF authors. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3762027.html

Cryptozoic! aka An Age shows more of Aldiss's greatness as a writer than The Primal Urge, but doesn't quite come together as a novel. A couple of hundred years from now (in a setting which nonetheless feels like England in 1967), people have developed the technology of mental time-travel by use of a drug (called CSD, totally different from LSD of course). Our protagonist returns from an extended mental time trip to find that a fascist government has taken over, and he is sent on a meandering quest to eliminate a fellow time-traveller who is a threat to the government. It's the sort of story that Moorcock and Ballard were doing just that bit better at the time, but there are some Aldissian twists to it all the same (notably the protagonist's relationship with his father and his lover). ( )

I went back and forth as I read this: "bad" or "bad but interesting"? I finally settled on "bad" but being Aldiss, it was a close call. The setup is that by 2090 or so, we've learned how to travel back in time, but in an astral projection sort of way. Further, at least, at the beginning, for handwaving entropy reasons, it's easy to slide "downhill" into the Cretaceous and other eras, and difficult to come close to the present or any time involving humans.

This could have been a fine premise to avoid time paradox issues, but instead the book contradicts itself constantly. Here are just a few cases that were hard to miss. Though it is repeatedly made clear that the travelers are not physically present in the past, they have to wear "leakers" to provide air. Air gets thinner the farther they go back in time. Huh? They leave and re-awake in a room with a vial of their own blood as an anchor. Hmm. They don't really stand on some prehistoric beach. They stand on the present (unseen) beach -- sometimes slightly higher or lower than what it was in the past. So are they in the room? If not, how did they get to the present-day beach? And about this change in elevation. Ignoring continental drift, which was just becoming accepted when the book was printed, what about the fact that the Earth is moving through space?

Staying on the topic of science -- it is a science fiction book after all -- there no hint of any scientific study about and using mind traveling. The hero is an artist, sent to get an artist's view. Fine. But there's no sign through the entire book of any travelers but artists, tourists, and government agents. There's even a time traveling biker gang, for Pete's sake, because, you know, it's the 1960s.

It gets worse. Eventually the initial rules of the game are tossed aside. At the midpoint, the hero travels into the recent past, and so do many others, with nary a discussion of why everyone can do it now. Inevitably, he meets himself and there are the usual time paradox complications.

Then there's how it ends. I don't think it's a spoiler to say everything goes Stapledonian. Fine by me, but this requires have a big idea. There's a reveal that's supposed to motivate why the government is hot to kill a rogue scientist with a heretical theory about time travel. Aldiss spends an entire chapter arguing the logic of the reveal. It's laborious, and done mostly in dialog. Dick did a far better job with the same idea in every regard in a novel printed two years earlier. It's also completely unconvincing as a motivation for the government to send assassins far and wide..

For a novel with cosmic intentions, it never leaves the confines of England. We get no clue of what the world of 2093 is like, except that, apparently, all history -- runs through England.

There are a few good chapters, but even they tend to be tainted by sixties cliches and sexism.

Not recommended. ( )

Eddie Bush is an artist and an employee of the Wenlock Institute, founded by the psychologist who realized, around 2090, that the only thing constraining us within the flow of time is our mind -- more accurately, our perception. It seems we have an undermind that's usually under complete control of our overmind, which governs such things as our perceptions of the reality around us. By use of various mental disciplines (effectively, a mantra) and a magic potion, people can prise their undermind free of the clenched iron fist of their overmind and thereby travel through all of past time, although the task becomes more difficult the closer the traveler comes to the present of 2090. Travelers who encounter each other in the past can interact directly with each other -- can punch each other on the nose or make love (Eddie tries both) -- but cannot influence or in any way be detected by the denizens of the visited era; when they walk there, it's not on the actual ground but on a sort of averaged out version that may be above or below the one the ancient critters around them tread.

This seems the first of many major scientific problems the tale has, because the difference between the ground level of where you are now and what it must have been in the Devonian, which is where we first encounter Eddie, is likely to have been very considerable, not just a matter of inches. (There's a brief acknowledgement of this later in the book, but it's glossed over fast.) Besides, there'll have been continental drift . . .

Whatever, Eddie has various adventures before deciding he should return to his own time; he has stayed away for far longer than his mission decreed. When he wakes up in the Wenlock Institute he discovers that there have been many changes. His old boss has been shot; his new one has a certain smack of O'Brien, in George Orwell's 1984. Wenlock has been discredited and locked up in an institution. The military regime ruling the UK has become ever more dictatorial; shortly after Eddie's return it's overthrown, and an even harsher one put in its place. By then Eddie has been given a new commission: to go back in time and try to hunt down and assassinate Silverstone, the sidekick of and rival to Wenlock (the Jung to Wenlock's Freud) who is perceived as an even bigger threat to the regime than Wenlock himself. Eddie has in fact already encountered an incognito Silverstone, back in the Devonian; although the two men were antagonistic then, Eddie's self-imposed mission becomes to save Silverstone from any other of the regime's murderous minions that might have been sent after him. After a diversion to a northern English town in what's at a guess the 1950s and much shenaniganning in Queen Victoria's Buckingham Palace, Eddie, his girlfriend Ann, Silverstone and various other players take refuge in the deep past, where Silverstone expounds on his whizz-bang new theory of time.

Which is that it's going backwards. At some point farther into what we'd call the future than 2090, the folk of the almost infinitely ancient human species, who saw time the right way round, were traumatized to discover the planet had just a few billion years to go and humanity itself far less than that, just a few million years, before it devolved into lesser primates, its final destiny being as an indistinguishable ingredient in the primordial soup. So shocking was this discovery that it triggered a psychological defense, a sort of mental block whereby thereafter (or therebefore?) everyone perceived time as flowing from past to future rather than from future to past. There's quite a lot of discussion -- far too much, in fact -- of the consequences of this new understanding, such as what defecation really involves, and then we're into the closing sections, which are filled with a sort of Stapledonian flamboyance to make sure we all understand this ain't just, like, Buck Rogers we've been reading.

There are some visionary bits earlier on, too; one neat passage [pp38-40] reminded me in its intensity and vividness of William Hope Hodgson's excellent visionary novel The House on the Borderland (1908). That comes in the first half of the novel, which, although shortish, is divided into two almost equal halves: Book One and Book Two. There's a marked difference in the standard of writing between the two "books", almost as if Book One were a work of juvenilia dragged out and dusted off once Aldiss had (deservedly) made his name for other work. That's not to say Book Two doesn't have its own mighty problems; it's just that it's a lot better written.

At the opening of Book Two, Chapter 7, Silverstone is expounding on the true nature of the cosmos as revealed once we accept his time-running-backwards explanation: "Not being a physical scientist," he says, "I cannot go too technically into this side of the matter . . . which I imagine will be a relief to all four of you. Nor have I or my associates had the chance as yet to begin any research into this side of the matter." [p189] In other words, folks, there's a huge copout: we're not going to get any proper explanation of how backward-running physics could possibly work, or of why it should run backwards to the way we plebs believe it to be running. There's a fair amount of flim-flam to try to distract from this great hole at the novel's core --

"The celebrated second law of thermodynamics, for example -- we now begin to see that heat in fact passes from cooler bodies to hotter: suns are collectors of heat, rather than disseminators." [p190]

-- but nothing that offers any explanation of how a physics could work in which, for example, you can backwardly combust noxious wastes to produce a lump of coal or a gallon of gasoline, derivatives of organisms that won't be backwardly born for tens of millions of years yet. Waffling about entropy operating in a different direction, from less toward greater organization, doesn't really cover this. I'm not sure if the problem the novel faces here is that Aldiss wasn't up to working out properly the implications of his sciencefictional idea or if the notion of backward-running time is just inherently a silly one; I'm inclined toward the latter explanation, since none of the few authors who've tried backward-running-time stories has yet managed to make much of a fist of it. However that might be, by the time Silverstone, having supposedly boggled us all with his first theory, suddenly announces he's next going to describe his "new concept of animal and human existence" [194], it's hard not to burst out laughing.

Aldiss has become something of a literary giant. I can remember being riveted by others of his early works, back when his reputation was confined to the genre ghetto -- Hothouse, for example, and Greybeard. I can also remember being bored rigid by items like Report on Probability A, but that was in the day when it was a mark of sf distinction to bore your readers rigid. Cryptozoic! -- or An Age, to give it its original, and better, UK title -- seems to lie in a sort of no-man's-land, lacking the narrative drive of his earlier and later non-experimental work, while also not bringing a great deal of conceptual meat to the table. A disappointment.



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