Weekly Short Story: Appearance of Life by Brian Aldiss

I'm already familiar with the science fiction writing of Brian Aldiss: one of my all-time favorite short stories is his 1957 Let's Be Frank, which I discussed on this blog back at the start of the year.  Appearance of Life, which appeared in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1977 Annual World's Best SF, is another tale that probes deeply into the ultimate nature of reality and consciousness.  As such, I found its ending difficult to completely grasp, both what the protagonist discovered and how he reacted to it...

It is far, far into the future and humanity has extended itself into the distant reaches of space, filling star systems with its civilizations.  In the process, the discovery of a bygone species, the Korlevalulaw, has led to speculation as to their nature...their biology must not be like ours since their worlds would not have been habitable.  On one such planet, Norma, is a giant enclosed tunnel belting it, thousands of miles long and a mile or two wide on the interior.  Upon discovering it to be empty within, the idea was hatched to make it into a museum of our history, placing within it old spaceships and relics...in chronological fashion...from eons past.  The unnamed narrator is a Seeker, whose role is to take the information and experiences he collects in his travels and derive a whole from these parts.  While visiting this museum nested within the alien structure, he discovers two ancient personalized conversation cubes...one from a husband and the other from his wife...and sets them to each other.  The resulting conversation presents an "appearance of life" in them, although they are in essence only technological projections of their former real selves...at this point the Seeker has an epiphany and discovers the "secret of the universe"...

Brian Aldiss apparently likes to speculate about metaphysical topics, and Appearance of Life is an prime example.  I remember a couple of old Twilight Zone episodes that reflect what I believe he was trying to express here: the first was The After Hours, where a young woman goes to a large department store to return an item, only to eventually discover that she isn't who she thinks she is.  In the other, Five Characters in Search of an Exit, five people dressed in different roles (clown, soldier, hobo, ballet dancer, and bagpipe player) find themselves together at the interior bottom of a tall smooth cylinder...they're not what they seem to be either.  In like fashion, Aldiss used the two cubes to illustrate a similar, albeit much-more sweeping speculation about humanity's true nature...intriguing, but I'm not buying it.  Still, it's a worthwhile reading adventure, pretty deep in the metaphysical department: go for it if that's your area of interest...