Wizards of Odd by Peter Haining (ed.)

Author:Peter Haining (ed.) [Haining, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

POOR LITTLE WARRIOR

Brian W. Aldiss

Like the previous story, ‘Poor Little Warrior’ is a fantasy about a quest, but in this case the quest is by a modern man for one of the giant creatures of prehistoric times, a brontosaurus. Although the theme of pursuing extinct creatures has been well explored in fantasy fiction since the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and even earlier, the number which qualify as comedy are few and Brian Aldiss’s contribution is arguably one of the very best—certainly it has been widely praised since its original publication in Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine in April 1958.

Brian Wilson Aldiss (1925— ), who was born in Norfolk, was formerly a bookshop assistant and the literary editor of the Oxford Mail before his Science Fiction and fantasy stories such as Non-Stop (1958), Hothouse (1962), Greybeard (1964) and Brothers of the Head (1977) established him as one of the premier British writers in the genre. In all of these there were examples of his sense of humour and love of puns, but the first of his works to display his ability at comic fantasy was Primal Urge (1961), a vivid novel about sexual permissiveness which had a considerable influence on the publication of stories concerning sex in the SF magazines of the early Sixties. In Barefoot in the Head (1969) he dealt with drugs in a style compared to James Joyce, while Frankenstein Unbound (1973) was a fantasy involving time travel back to the period of Mary Shelley, to dis­cover the real origins of her classic novel. A year later came The Eighty-Minute Hour: A Space Opera (1974), a rich comedy full of puns and extravagant inventions, and he followed this with two non-SF books which displayed even more ebulliently his wicked sense of humour: The Hand-Reared Boy (1970) and Soldier Erect (1971).

‘Poor Little Warrior’ may not be typical of Brian Aldiss’s short fantasy fiction in general, but it is nevertheless a wonderfully comic tale without which this collection would be less than complete.

* * * *

Claude Ford knew exactly how it was to hunt a brontosaurus. You crawled heedlessly through the mud among the willows, through the little primitive flowers with petals as green and brown as a football field, through the beauty-lotion mud. You peered out at the creature sprawling among the reeds, its body as graceful as a sock full of sand. There it lay, letting the gravity cuddle it nappy-damp to the marsh, running its big rabbit-hole nostrils a foot above the grass in a sweeping semicircle, in a snoring search for more sausagy reeds. It was beautiful: here horror had reached its limits, come full circle and finally disappeared up its own sphincter. Its eyes gleamed with the liveliness of a week-dead corpse’s big toe, and its compost breath and the fur in its crude aural cavities were particularly to be recommended to anyone who might otherwise have felt inclined to speak lovingly of the work of Mother Nature.

But as you, little mammal with opposed digit and .

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