Brian Aldiss is astonishingly prolific, and surprisingly humane and solid. The first characteristic he shares with other science fiction writers …, but the other qualities are much more rare….

[New Arrivals, Old Encounters and This World and Nearer Ones] are very humanly likeable. They are, in other words, without the excesses of mutual abuse and mutual parody SF writers increasingly seem to go in for—the unsavoury consequences of having only partially emerged from their despised but profitable ghetto, their 'small cemeteries on the fringes of a book page' as Mr. Aldiss phrases it. He himself is doing his level best to still the internecine feuds, and to emphasize the creative connections between SF and the ordinary novel.

Of course for him the ordinary novel is a rather tired affair. The stories in New Arrivals, Old Encounters with their pared down, if not actually cloned characters, and their plots...