Non-stop by Brian Aldiss

Non-stop by Brian Aldiss is a classic Scifi book and shame on you if you haven’t read it. I love this book but this review will be a short one because if I give anything away, I will never forgive myself and nor will you. Finding out what the book is about is, well, what the book is about. If you get my meaning. And you probably don’t.

Roy Complain and a priest called Marapper are part of the Greene tribe. They live in Quarters – some kind of ‘made’ structure that is full of shrubs and vines and general jungle stuff but also has doors and rooms. Wanting to know who the tribe is and where they are is strongly discouraged. This doesn’t stop Complain, Marapper and a couple of others who finally decide to work out what is really going on. They embark on an adventure in the vague direction of Forwards. They discover stuff that turns their existence and beliefs on their respective heads. Excitement and adventure occurs aplenty.

That is pretty much all I can reveal.

If you like Science Fiction from the admittedly vague ‘Golden Age of Scifi’ then you will like this. A simpler era when Scifi was more about ideas and philosophy as opposed to gadgets, cyperpunks, virtual reality, hot female killer robots or uber clever computers. (Although these are cool too.) Scifi back then was more inward looking as opposed to now. This book reminded me of a book by Harry Harrison (Golden Age) but I can’t tell you which one in case you have read it. Sorry if that makes no sense to anyone but if it does, then you know what I mean.

What I can tell you is that this book starts off quite slow. It sets a scene, albeit a slightly weird and baffling one. As the pace picks up about a quarter in, action and revelation grow equally in scale until the exiting and revelatory end. Unlike this review which pretty much amounts to: read this classic, it’s great.