Remembrance Day
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Third in the acclaimed Squire Quartet—from the author of “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” the basis for the movie A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.
Winner of two Hugo Awards, one Nebula Award, and named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, Brian W. Aldiss challenged readers’ minds for over fifty years with literate, thought-provoking, and inventive science fiction.
Ray and Ruby Tebbutt are a Norfolk couple struggling to pay off a loan they could not afford. Peter Petrik, a small-time Czech film director, is involved with an Irish arms smuggler. Dominic Mayor, a British millionaire with a cold past, made his fortune by manipulating the stock market. All four people’s lives are taken by a terrorist bombing in a small British seaside hotel. In Remembrance Day, an American academic examines the details of the victims’ lives and histories to find the relationship between them and their fate.
“In another significant mainstream outing, British science-fiction/fantasy grandmaster Aldiss discovers fresh and arresting nuances in the dichotomy between blind chance and predestination in human affairs…original, disturbing, and memorable.” —Kirkus Reviews
This ebook includes an introduction by the author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Aldiss, a British writer known here chiefly for science fiction ( The Malacia Tapestry ), has written a strange, often moving novel with distinct echoes of Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In the framing prologue and epilogue, an American academic decides to examine the histories of the victims of an IRA bombing at an English seaside hotel to see if there was any significant relationship between them and their fate. Aldiss scrutinizes several disparate lives in detail, in what is in effect a series of novellas. Ray and Ruby Tebbutt live in genteel poverty in Norfolk, struggling to retrieve a loan they could not afford to make. Through their story, and those of their socially conscious daughter Jenny and Ruby's mother, three generations of English social life are skillfully sketched, including the impact on the nation of the nuclear disarmament movement and Thatcherite economics. Another tale concerns a rootless Czech, a small-time film director, and his casual involvement with an Irish arms smuggler who comes to be the cause of his death. Lastly comes the tale of Dominic Mayor, born in the refugee limbo at the end of WW II, who becomes a British millionaire through stock manipulation, and his desperate marriage to a tormented Scottish heiress. Each story is thoroughly absorbing and convincing as related in Aldiss's spare but telling prose, though the links between them are somewhat contrived and mechanical. As a thoughtful tale of the surpassing strangeness beneath the obvious surfaces of contemporary life, however, this is a compelling novel.
