Re: (Tears) Report on Probability A by Brian W. Aldiss

On Sun, 9 Jun 2024 12:50:39 -0000 (UTC), jdnicoll@panix.com (James
Nicoll) wrote:

Report on Probability A by Brian W. Aldiss
>
A New Wave tale of observational recursion,
>
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/a-straight-a-student

From your description of the book, it sounds as if it was rightly
rejected, as Aldiss should have considered it unfinished.

Of course, some authors could take such a work and "finish" it in a
disastrous way, by appending some contrived potboiler plot to give it
a conventional narrative structure.

That's doing it the wrong way, of course. But the book should have
built on the setup it created with a plot worthy of the setting, one
that would further explore the implications of parallel universes
which can observe each other in one direction.

John Savard