The Interpreter by Brian W. Aldiss Reviewed

The 1999 SFWA Grand Master's Long Out of Print Early Novel

Sep 23, 2009

Bridging the gap between Non-Stop/Starship and Hothouse/The Long Afternoon of Earth, Bow Down To Nul - as it was also known - is a better novel than Aldiss credits ir wit

The Interpreter (New English Library 1975, 126pp, ISBN 978-0450027130) --first published in the US as Bow Down to Nul – was the second novel published by Brian W. Aldiss. First published in 1960, together with the equally little-known The Primal Urge, it marks Aldiss' transition from his acclaimed debut Non-Stop (US title: Starship) to Hugo winner for Hothouse barely two years later.

Galactic Empire

For centuries Earth has languished under the rule of the tripedal Nuls, a race of cylindrical-torso'd creatures nearly ten feet high with three arms and trinary eye-stalks, but no other external features. After allegations of corruption are levelled against the ruler by a disaffected Nul en route home, an envoy is dispatched to investigate the allegations.

With none of the aliens speaking any Terran languages, both Envoy and Overlord realize that the interpreter translating for them has a vital role to play -- as indeed does the leader of the local rebels, who have allowed to survive as a justification for many of the alien's tactics.

Collaborators

Gary Towler is that interpreter, a man who like World War II collaborators is shunned by the very people he is trying to represent to the aliens. A pariah when not at work, he falls in love with a new interpreter, a young woman. Both sets of aliens and freedom-fighters alternate threats and bribes, until Towler, almost inevitably begins to buckle under the strain.

The Interpreter is a work informed by World War II, and by Aldiss' post-war experiences of the dissolution of the British Empire (he served for several years in India and the Far East). The Nuls' rule is not always brutal, but is rather oppressive in an economic sense since the aliens use every opportunity to profit from their posting, and like the British in India have an innate and ultimately unrealistic sense of their own superiority.

Misunderstandings abound in The Interpreter which at times seems to struggle to reconcile Aldiss' literary aspirations with the strictures of the rigidly commercial format of the times. There are 'cliffhangers' every forty pages for ease of serialization, but the novel itself ends with a chapter that is an extended flashback and which has characters info-dumping in huge chunks to inform the bewildered reader what actually happened.

Novellas

Described by Aldiss as probably the least successful of all his novels, in fact The Interpreter is barely a novel at all, since it is marginally shorter than Fritz Leiber's Hugo-winning The Big Time (the shortest Hugo-winning novel), and little longer than James Patrick Kelly's Burn, which won a Nebula in Novella category in 2006.

The Way The Future Was

For all its flaws, The Interpreter is nonetheless a fascinating picture of a long-vanished view of both the future and of the times it reflects, and a necessary read for anyone interested in charting the course of the career of Brian W. Aldiss

The copyright of the article The Interpreter by Brian W. Aldiss Reviewed in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Fiction is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish The Interpreter by Brian W. Aldiss Reviewed in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.