HARM: A Novel

By Brian W. Aldiss

From one of science fiction’s greatest living writers comes an unforgettable near-future novel in the hortatory tradition of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Orwell’s 1984, and Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Both a searing indictment of a fear-drenched political climate and a visionary allegory that shines a piercing light on timeless human verities, HARM is a powerfully compact masterwork that is sure to be one of the most passionately discussed books of the year.

The time is today or tomorrow—or perhaps the day after tomorrow. Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali, a young British citizen of Muslim descent, has written a satirical novel in which two characters joke about the assassination of the prime minister. Arrested by agents of HARM—the Hostile Activities Research Ministry—Paul is thrown into a nameless Abu Ghraib-like prison, possibly located in Syria, where he is held incommunicado and brutally interrogated by jailers to whom his Muslim heritage is itself a crime meriting the harshest punishment. Under this sadistic regime, Paul’s personality begins to show signs of radical fragmentation. . . .

On the remote planet of Stygia, a man named Fremant, haunted by memories of torture that seem drawn from Paul’s mind, is one of a small group of colonists struggling for survival on a harsh but weirdly beautiful world whose dominant life-forms are insects. The sole humanoid race on the planet has been hunted to extinction by the human settlers, whose long journey to Stygia has left them unable to understand their own history and technology.

Thrown back to a more primitive state, they seem destined to repeat all the sins of the world they fled to Stygia to escape.

Is Paul dreaming Fremant as a way of escaping the horrors of his imprisonment? Or is there a stronger—and far stranger—connection between the two men, whose very different circumstances begin to take on uncanny parallels?

As aspects of their identities blur and, finally, merge, astonishing answers take shape—and profound new questions arise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: May 29, 2007
• ISBN: 9780345500373

Brian W. Aldiss

Brian W. Aldiss was born in Norfolk, England, in 1925. Over a long and distinguished writing career, he published award‑winning science fiction (two Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award); bestselling popular fiction, including the three‑volume Horatio Stubbs saga and the four‑volume the Squire Quartet; experimental fiction such as Report on Probability A and Barefoot in the Head; and many other iconic and pioneering works, including the Helliconia Trilogy. He edited many successful anthologies and published groundbreaking nonfiction, including a magisterial history of science fiction (Billion Year Spree, later revised and expanded as Trillion Year Spree). Among his many short stories, perhaps the most famous was “Super‑Toys Last All Summer Long,” which was adapted for film by Stanley Kubrick and produced and directed after Kubrick’s death by Steven Spielberg as A.I. Artificial Intelligence. Brian W. Aldiss passed away in 2017 at the age of 92. 

Reviews for HARM

[jigarpatel-6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A dual world dystopia which I prefer to consider more cautionary than depressing. Paul Ali, a young British writer of Muslim descent, is imprisoned and questioned by HARM (Hostile Activities Research Ministry). Fremant, a guard inhabiting the remote world of Stygia, is embroiled in a coup and discovers a hidden secret behind the native fauna. Aldiss interweaves plots which unfold independently on the two worlds.The novel probably shouldn't work. Present-day, archaic and futuristic elements are freely dispersed. Where Aldiss shines is his focus on the relationship between environment and politics: those who have journeyed light-years to Stygia have done so to escape a war-riddled Earth. Racism, bigotry and animal cruelty are juxtaposed with industrialisation, scientific development and social progress.

[bookson23rd · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I just don’t get this book. HARM, by the science-fiction writer Brian W. Aldiss, is about a man who is being tortured and in his delirium imagines that he is living on a planet over a thousand light-years away from Earth. Or is it the other way around: he is living on the planet Stygia and when he sleeps he dreams of living another life on a faraway planet?
This is a short (240 pages) book. I tend to want to think that Aldiss was sketching out a story and decided to stop before it was fully fleshed out.
Paul Fadhill (on Earth) is being tortured because he wrote a book that mentioned in a comedic line something about killing the Prime Minister. Fremant (on Stygia) seems to wander around without a personality or drive.
The story just doesn’t work for me. One thing really bothered me: Near the beginning there is a rape. Why? It doesn’t fit into the story. There isn’t any motivation on the part of the rapist. Its just there. Reading about a rape is bad enough, but to not make sense in the story is doubly hurtful. Secondly, the ending is abrupt and I felt like maybe I was missing something. Am I supposed to have learned something or been given something to ponder by all of this? The only thing I’m pondering now is why I read the book. Oh yeah, because I got a free copy.
Not recommended for anyone. If you want to read a science-fiction book there are plenty of other choices.

[iftyzaidi · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an interesting little book by Aldiss. Once again he plays and interrogates a number of ideas and themes in an off-beat fashion while making use of familiar tropes from the sfnal toolbox. This time many of the themes are rooted in the post 9/11 world and deeply concerned with what is happening in the world today.The basic story is as follows: Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali is a British Muslim novelist who finds himself arrested and whisked away for interrogation to an unknown 'black site'. He is under suspicion because of a conversation in his comedic novel where one of the characters jokes about blowing up the Prime Minister. Through the course of the book, held under terrible conditions and continually interrogated, he starts hallucinating that he is a colonist named Fremant on a distant, hostile planet where a combination of a hostile environment and corrupted data in the colonists' reconstituted personalities has left the human population in a state of semi-barbarism under a dictatorial regime.There seems to be a whole lot happening in this novel as it works on a number of levels. The first is the obvious commentary on the excesses of the post 9/11 response to terrorism and its threat to the freedom (and sanity) of the individual. The second is a commentary on excesses of totalitarian ideology and its threat to the freedoms (and sanity) of a society. In this respect it is far more than some kind of partisan political screed. Aldiss, being as well as a writer of science fiction, is also a notable scholar and chronicler of the science fiction genre and there is a reason his protagonist shares a name with the tragic hero of one of the classics of science fiction, Dune (and that too one that very flamboyantly deploys the vocabulary of Islam). His alter ego is named Fremant, which has the fortunate dual meaning of being Paul's "free" alter ego and also recalls the desert warrior society of the Freman in Dune, who once mobilized, wage a jihad that sweeps across the galaxy. Thus Paul, being a British Muslim contains within him a split personality (literally and figuratively), both the identity of an assimilated British citizen whose only crime is to have written a novel in the style of P. G. Wodehouse (and can there be any greater sign of Britishness than this?) and also the potential identity of a foot soldier of a culture that has become a debased, corrupted and violent shadow of itself. The duality lies not only in the individual, but also in society, for there are hints in the sfnal world that the colonists originally came from the west back on Earth and that the debased, brutal culture and polity of the colonists is descended from an Anglo-American military alliance. The circularity is clear: just as the constriction of the words and freedoms of the individual can lead to individuals with violent, nihilistic personalities, so can the abandonment of the values and freedoms of a society lead to societies with violent, nihilistic polities.