Enemies of the System is one of those SF books about a stifling socialist totalitarian society in which the government computer chooses your sex partners for you, children have no relationship with their parents--they are gestated in artificial wombs and raised in government creches--certain words and ideas have been declared forbidden, and a small elite nomenklatura talks about "unity" all the time but looks down on the proles and enjoys many privileges. Aldiss sets his novel a million years in the future, in a one-government civilization with Moscow as its capitol that spans the Solar System and has expanded to some extent into interstellar space. The BioCom (short for Biological Communism) system that guides this society was made possible by a technological breakthrough--the "bio-shunt" that all citizens have been genetically engineered to be born with. This shunt "is an in-built processor which phases out much of the activity of the old autonomic nervous system or renders it subject to the direct control of the thought system." This means people are rarely driven by their emotions and are more calculating, acting much more rationally. A striking example is that men decide when to have an erection; another is that people no longer dream when asleep. War, religion and love are a thing of the past.
It is hard to believe that any human institution, much less the unworkable ideas and inhuman methods of the Soviet Union, would endure a million years, but Aldiss has a reason for setting his tale so far in the future, as readers soon see.
Though the structure of the novel is that of an adventure story in which people are stranded on an alien planet and meet the dangerous natives and must struggle to survive, what Enemies of the State does in practice is explore what life is like in a totalitarian police state through the medium of the dialogue of the overclass members of such a state as they face novel situations. Over the course of the entire novel readers are subjected to page after page of expository dialogue, debates among the characters, and what amount to speeches from them. Reflecting the kind of personalities BioCom produces, while within the confines of the System, the characters speak in a way that is sort of flat, emotionless and self-consciously performative, but, beyond the protection and the oppression of the System, as they experience stress and a little freedom, their speech gets increasingly frantic, emotional and personal. These people's speech is peppered with lame and/or sinister revolutionary slogans ("Unity Breeds Immunity;" "Never Think What Cannot Be Said;" "Resolution Is The Foe of Deviation") the way people in the 18th and 19th centuries quoted The Bible and Virgil and Horace and people now quote Seinfeld and The Godfather. Demonstrating how life in a police state turns everyone into both an enforcer and a target and makes it impossible for anyone to trust anyone else, almost all the dialogue consists of dominance games, probings for weakness and efforts to build coalitions, with authority figures bragging, subordinate figures sucking up, and those careless enough to express new ideas beaten down with threats of being reported for deviationist thinking. In extremis, outside the System's confines, some of the characters pathetically grope for some kind of human connection, only to be rebuffed by those who have truly taken the ideology of the System to heart, or who expect the System to reassert itself shortly.
The first 30 or so pages of Enemies of the State introduce us to the characters and their milieu, though we keep getting new revelations throughout the book. The characters are all members of the elite of the BioCom System, gathered from various planets--Earth, Venus, Jupiter--to take a vacation, a privilege of their membership in the high echelons of the Party. The computer has paired them off, assigning them companions/sex partners, and early in the novel Aldiss demonstrates how mechanistic and utilitarian sex is in this society--a public address system that continually offers guidance and advice to citizens has as one of its announcements this reminder:
"Remember that sexual intercourse is an approved social usage. It is pleasurable. Inevitably, it increases the physical and mental well-being of both partners, thus enhancing their value to the system."
Once in their cabin on the vacation starship the male member of one government-approved pair says to his female partner, "Kindly move over and open your legs." Foreplay is unnecessary, as these people can just will their genitals into readiness for action.
The vacation these high level members of the World State are privileged to enjoy is a tour of a planet many light years away, Lysenaka II (presumably a deliberately chosen joke name, seeing as both evolution and suppression of dissenting scientific theories are themes of the novel), a somewhat barren world just recently taken over. Once there, the vacationing apparatchiks, college professors, engineers and secret police agents pile into three busses and set out to see a waterfall some hundreds of kilometers away.
The significant thing about Lysenka II is that over a million years ago, before the revolution that ushered in the BioCom system, an American colony ship headed someplace else crash landed here, giving rise to the most original and memorable thing in Aldiss's novel. Stranded, the Americans (most of the time the characters just call them "the capitalists") had to make a go of building a viable colony on this inhospitable rock. But Lysenka II's soil was so infertile it could not support agriculture, and the castaways were reduced to the primitive methods of hunters and gatherers--mostly gatherers, as the planet was home to no large animals. To find enough sustenance to survive on this desolate planet the humans had to spread out widely. Some maintained their intelligence and humanity, but, over the millennia, many of the seperate human groups evolved to fill the vacant ecological niches occupied on Earth in our day by large animals. Some developed into water-dwelling carnivores much like seals or crocodiles, others into herd animals like zebra or deer, or pack animals like wolves or jackals. Amazingly enough, some of the still-human Lysenkans ride domesticated zebra-men and use domesticated canine-men as guards and hunting dogs.
Far from the waterfall, the third bus crashes when the road, weakened by the tunneling of mole-people, collapses. (Aldiss has a little fun with this, with some characters talking about how "magnificent" is this road through the wilderness, how it represents the triumph of their socialist society, even after it has just been fatally undermined by capitalist savages.) The other two buses are far ahead and don't know they have left the third of their number behind, and radio communications are impossible because the workers up on the satellite are striking. (A subtheme of Aldiss's novel is how, the further you get from Earth, the more people question and even resist the System's iron grip.) Five of the passengers and the tour guide set off from the crashed bus to seek help, and are quickly captured by a tribe of Lysenkans who have maintained their humanity over the last million years; they have language (though nothing the tourists can understand), wield primitive weapons and wear armor made of pine cones stitched to fabric.
As captives, the protagonists witness the natives' religious ceremonies (a playacting of their ancestors' efforts to fix their spaceship) and have plenty of time to deliver lectures and engage in debate. Far from the System, and expecting death, one of the captives expresses his hostility to the System, pointing out that in the million years the socialists have had total control, civilization has made almost no technological or cultural advances, unlike the rapidly changing capitalist civilization that preceded it, and that the abolition of the family and the prohibitions on individual thought--and the secret police system that enforces those prohibitions--all of them instituted in the name of Unity, have in fact placed almost insuperable barriers between people, made community impossible. Proving his point, the other captives tell him that if they survive their ordeal he will be put on trial for expressing his opinions and no doubt suffer corrective psychiatric treatment!
In the abrupt climax of the short novel, the natives, when one of the tourists draws a gun and blasts their leader, begin worshipping the tourists as gods. "Everyone worships power" is the lesson the tourists take from this turn of events. Finally, soldiers in hovercraft arrive to rescue the captives. One of tourists immediately reveals herself to be a secret agent of the security apparatus and has the other five arrested for thought-crime and sedition.
I am totally on board with attacks on socialism and big government interference in people's rights to free speech, free exercise of religion, freedom of assembly, etc. So I am simpatico with what I take to be the attitude of this novel. But is Enemies of the System fun or thought-provoking?
Obviously this is not true of everybody, but I am fifty years old and spent much of that time studying or working in academia and so have heard all the arguments for and against socialism and government interference in the economy and the broader life of the community a million times over and Aldiss doesn't whip out anything new or surprising to me here. (One reason I have been reading stuff like Weird Tales and Spicy Mysteries is that the questions SF so often addresses--is religion a scam? should we have more or less government? is technology good? is the environment in trouble? should we conquer outer space?--are questions I have already resolved to my own satisfaction, and going over them again and again is boring, but sex and violence still have the ability to excite my interest.) And whereas a Jack Vance novel about politics--I'm thinking of the Alastor and Cadwal books--might also have fun jokes and great adventure/mystery/horror elements, Enemies of the System's action and adventure components are just OK, and, among all the lectures and debates, they are few and far between. As a result, while not bad by any means, Enemies of the System is not exactly thrilling.
Aldiss accomplished what I believe he set out to do in Enemies of the System--depict the psychologies of the educated elite living in a totalitarian state--but that doesn't necessarily produce an entertaining novel. I guess I can give this one a moderate recommendation.
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