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![]() Super-State: a Novel of a Future Europe by Brian Aldiss (Orbit, £16.99, 230 pages, hardback, published 2 May 2002.) The last book I read by Brian Aldiss was The Secret of This Book
which contains two stories that are so horrible that I will remember
them 'til my dying day: 'The Mistakes, Miseries and Misfortunes of As a projection of the future I felt that it is less successful. We are already seeing the decline of the power of the nation state and the rise of global power organisations including global corporations. It seems unlikely that Europe will become a state with a fully-centralised power base as portrayed here. Given the last 40 years, it also seems unlikely that technology will develop so little in the next 40. For these reasons you can tell it is a late novel by a modernist, not an earlier novel by a postmodernist. I don't think Aldiss cares about these issues much here, for the novel's main concern is human nature, which he believes is enduring, particularly in its worst and weakest characteristics. I would love to say that he was wrong. It muses about why people are as they are, but the gleeful depiction of the human condition is better than the musing. Aldiss doesn't know why we are as we are any more than does anyone else. As the book itself discusses at one point, there is great enjoyment to be had in the bad aspects of people. Super-state reads as if it were fun to write, and it is fun to read, but it makes you think too.
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