The Male Response by Brian Aldiss

isfdb lists Brian Aldiss's 1961 novel The Male Response as "non-genre," but it made its first appearance as part of the Galaxy Science Fiction Novel Series (during the period the series was published by Beacon) and that first edition was explicitly marketed as SF; look at the man-sized chemistry set our dude on the cover is working with!  You need two hands to lift those flasks, beakers and retorts!  The cover of a 1963 British hardcover edition shows (behind an image of a human figure of a sort that likely wouldn't get published on the cover of a novel today) some kind of electronic apparatus.  So maybe there is some speculative science in this book, which otherwise appears to be some kind of farce or satire about the different attitudes about sex of British people and Africans.  Let's see what this curious artifact is all about; I am reading the scan of one of those Beacon paperbacks that is available at the world's greatest website, the internet archive.

The Central African republic of Goya is, according to its boosters, "most progressive;" The Times even called it "the black Scandinavia"!  So we shouldn't be surprised when Prince Jimpo Deal Lampor, son of the President and King of Goya, comes a-calling to the offices of London computer manufacturer Unilateral to order a computer--he specifies that the people of Goya want one painted red.  Soon four Unilateral employees are wimging their way down to Goya in a plane with the prince and the forty-odd crates that contain the computer's components; when the plane crashes just miles from the capital of Goya, Umbalathorp, the pilot and two of the engineers are killed, while the prince is injured; fortunately Soames Noyes, "liaison manager," and one last engineer, Ted Timpleton, escape unharmed.

When Noyes gets to the palace in Umbalathorp, a city largely consisting of huts and shanties and served by an unfinished railroad line, the man who is both King and President of Goya puts the lie to his son's talk of Goya being an African simulacrum of progressive Scandinavia--Noyes, Timpleton, and the computer, which it will take some five days for Timpleton to get running, will be domiciled in the palace to protect them from Goya's citizenry, many of whom hate and fear modern science and technology.  His Majesty Mr. President, who has two wives (one is Mrs. President, the other the Queen) doesn't seem too crazy about the modern world himself: "Enlightenment is like a tearing down of old familiar rooms when we are left to squat in a desert of disbelief.  What has education to offer but the truth of man's smallness and beastliness?" he tells Noyes.  At the funeral of the three Britons killed in the plane crash the King says that airplanes have done nothing to improve human life, but have served to "denationalize" people, to separate them from their roots to the Earth and to their cultures.  The King's sentiments are echoes by his son, the Prince, who laments that his education in England has alienated him from his "Goyese" countrymen.  While King and Prince have mixed feelings about the computer they have brought to Goya, another powerful figure in Umbalathorp, the city's chief witch doctor, is definitively against it, calling the computer a "Christian devil box." This joker tells Noyes that "The many spirits of Umbalathorp all speak out against your coming," and predicts that Noyes will never leave Africa alive!

All this stuff about how science and technology lead to deracination and alienation is interesting enough, but anybody who chose to read this book based on its cover was doing so because he thought it would be full of sex.  And while there are not actual sex scenes in the novel, sex is a major theme of The Male Response.  Everybody Noyes meets in Goya offers a girl to him--the King sends a woman to service Noyes in his bedroom, the Prince takes Soames to a brothel, a Portuguese businessman is a procurer on the side and spins fables about the terminal diseases with which the whores of other pimps and madams are riddled, a Chinese businessman wants to trade the services of his beautiful daughter for Noyes's help with some industrial espionage.  Queen Louise hopes to set Noyes up with her daughter, Princess Cherry.  Alistair Picket, an Englishman who arrived as a missionary twenty-seven years ago and, upon seeing the squalid state of Umbalathorp, immediately lost his faith and abandoned his calling, tries to set Noyes up with his daughter Grace.  In private Grace begs Noyes to have sex with her--she has been resorting to lesbian sex with black girls, and aches to experience "normal" sex with a fellow English person.  (It later becomes clear that her father has taken to having sex with "black boys.")

In one of the best scenes of the book Aldiss combines his two themes; the girl at the brothel (a woman who may have Arab blood and whose teeth are filed to points) who services Noyes doesn't use her own flesh to bring the Englishman to orgasm, but a vibrator.  A sign outside the brothel advertises this as an "American Massage," and the Prince tells Noyes the new service is extremely popular--technology and commerce have literally come between man and woman and rendered mechanical that most intimate of human activities.

All these themes are laid out and most of the The Male Response's many characters are introduced in the first of 183-page novel's three parts.  In Part II the plot really gets going, as a second Portuguese businessman accosts Noyes, accusing Timpleton of conspiring with the aforementioned Chinese man and the first Portuguese to steal five crates of computer spare parts.  We get some complicated intrigue full of backstabbing, double-crossing, and disguises as Noyes tries to steal the spare parts back but ends up captured by the police and thrown in jail.  Various characters ostensibly come to his aid but who can he trust--the King, the Prince, the witch doctor, and Timpleton all have different, conflicting interests and attitudes about Noyes and about the computer and may or may be legitimately trying to help him or manipulating the situation to pursue their own schemes. 

The Male Response is meant to be humorous; the silly contents page makes that immediately clear.  Aldiss fills the novel with low key jokes and while very few of them actually make you laugh, they are for the most part clever enough.  Aldiss mines many jokes from the efforts of non-British people to speak English, and a few jokes from Timpleton's attempts to speak French.  (The King has no English and so Noyes communicates with him en francais.)  Memorable examples: the first Portuguese businessman says "Gentlemen, we are bounders to meet again," and the Chinese entrepreneur has nicknamed his wife "Rosie" but pronounces it "Lousy."  

Anyway, in Part III the humor becomes more broad, and the plot, which in the first two parts is more or less believable and serious, becomes more and more farcical.  As Part III begins Noyes has been sprung from the clink and he and Timpleton activate the computer, which stands seven feet high, three feet deep and forty-five feet long.  The witch doctor, seeing the computer as a threat to his position and profession, proposes a contest between Western science and African witchcraft--which can more accurately predict whether the Prince will recover from the grievous injuries he sustained in the fracas that concluded Noyes's extralegal effort to recover the stolen spare parts?  The computer predicts that the Prince will recover, but the witch doctor, ominously for us readers, who have reason to believe he masterminded the attack in which said Prince Jimpo Deal Lampor was wounded, predicts that he will not live to see tomorrow's sunset.  When the next day it is the witch doctor's prediction that comes true, civil unrest erupts, as many people sympathetic to the royal family assume the witch doctor, through magic or mundane skullduggery, murdered the Prince.  Timpleton is killed in the fighting, but otherwise things go well for the royal faction: the witch doctor is exiled to the countryside to grow chickens, and through good luck and quick thinking Noyes not only survives, but ends up a candidate for President with the full backing of the King, who is eager to shed one of his titles and thinks having a white president will be a public relations and diplomatic coup.

Noyes wins election handily and then learns about a Goyese tradition that has previously gone unmentioned: before inauguration a newly elected President must publicly deflower a virgin in order to prove his manhood.  (The city mob will lynch him should he fail.)  Noyes will be allowed to choose which "virgin" (she need not in fact be sexually innocent) and said virgin will then become his wife and bearer of the title "Mrs. President."  Many men put forward their own daughters for consideration--including, through an intermediary, the exiled witch doctor.  Aldiss quickly wraps up the novel by portraying Noyes becoming seduced by a love of power and in his hubris making foolish decisions that allow the witch doctor to exact a fatal revenge on him.   

isfdb may consider The Male Response non-genre, but it is structured much like a SF story and addresses issues with which SF is often concerned.  We have the mission of people from a world familiar to readers, in this case London, to an exotic and somewhat dangerous world, here a bonkers fictional Central African state, and the author uses this plot as an opportunity to talk about the effects of science and technology on human society--Aldiss in this book suggests science makes our lives worse, and portrays the triumph of a primitive cleric over men of business and technology from the metropole.

(In his intro to Another World, Gardner Dozois, following Kurt Vonnegut, suggests that SF authors are among the few people to address the issue of "what machines do to us" and in his essay 1980 essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," published in The Engines of the Night, Barry Malzberg describes a debate with Campbell in which our pal Barry argued that SF should be about how technology was "consuming" and "victimizing" people, contra Campbell, who thought that SF should be about solving problems and overcoming obstacles.)  

So, can I recommend The Male Response?  Well, it is certainly not the "rollicking novel of bawdy adventure" promised by the cover of the 1976 Panther paperback edition.  The pace is deliberate rather than fast, and, despite all the little jokes, it is just not fun--Aldiss's novel is sad, depressing.  The characters are all venal, or corrupt, or cynical, or defeated.  Innocent people suffer or get killed for no purpose.  The sexual relationships in the novel are neither life-affirming the way sex based on love might be, or titillating as nasty or naughty sex might be--sex in this novel is sordid or pathetic, from Grace's begging to the Chinese girl's emotionless offering of her body to further her father's unethical business schemes to the whores who service their clients with vibrators.  Aldiss's philosophical asides are also downers.  "The perfectionist dreams of, and the humanist dreads, the day when all things may be reduced to equations."  "All men think alike; no two act alike."  "It is a distressing trait in human nature that we tend to underestimate the good in others when circumstances are against them...."  "Human relationships are sticky as spider webs.  We run into them cheerfully enough, then they stretch a mile rather than break and let us go free.  If we poor flies were not also spiders at heart, the matter might go easier."  In one joke passage that sticks out like a sore thumb and strengthens my case that The Male Response has much in common with a SF novel, the Prince tosses a small coin into a bush and Aldiss tells us that two thousand years later, long after a world war has obliterated our civilization, the coin will be discovered by archaeologists of the succeeding dominant civilization, that of Eskimos.

Potential readers might also consider the fact that many 2021 readers will find this novel full of sexism, racism, and homophobia, though Aldiss is pretty scathing about English people, pointing out English arrogance and xenophobia, among other not necessarily admirable traits, while the Prince is probably the most admirable and the King the most wise of the characters in The Male Response.

So, The Male Response isn't a fun sex novel or a thrilling adventure novel, but I still think I can give it a mild recommendation.  I was never bored or irritated, and I was always curious about what was coming next, and often surprised.  Aldiss is an important, knowledgeable and skilled writer, so anything he writes has an inherent interest, and of course the book provides a window onto the culture of the time and place in which it was written.  If you are interested in Aldiss, or sex and race and computers in early 1960s SF, I think it is worth your time.