This is an angry book written by an old man who had fought in a world war to defend democracy from the imperialist Japanese, and was watching as the democracies voluntarily gave up what had been so expensively protected out of fear of terrorism and the misuse of that fear by lousy leaders, who used it to further their own ends.
It asks a simple question: Why are we so horrible to each other and to the world? And the answer seems to be fear. Fear that rushes up from our animal origins that don’t know anything about climate change or genocide but know all about hierarchy and survival and struggle. But also fear as it is used as a tool by authorities as means of furthering their own ends, which usually amount to little more than maintaining power.
The framework — I’m giving nothing away here — is that we have a man who is being tortured and his mind dissociates and he lives a life on the planet Stygia. Unlike something like, say, Brazil, or other stories with a similar device, Stygia is hardly any better than the life he leaves on Earth. 
Some of the scenes are pretty brutal. Some are made moreso by how matter of fact Aldiss is about the brutality, is if it is to be expected and therefore neither built up to nor dwelt on. It would not be the first time Aldiss has expressed a rather dim view of human nature, and it would not be the last, despite the book coming out after his 80th year.
The book has pretty average reviews on Goodreads and the like, and it is easy to see why. It is not likeable. No-one in it is terribly likeable, though we must have sympathy for the put-upon protagonist who gets thrown into an interrogation facility for doing nothing more than writing a bad novel with some foolish jokes in. Oh, and for being (descended from a) Muslim.
OK, so it is not likeable; is it good?
I actually think it is. There’s quite a lot of quite interesting SF-style world building, and it is, if not utterly convincing, at least rather alien. The adventures on the planet Stygia have a certain grim fascination, and skip along fairly quickly (it is not a long story). The stuff on Earth is effectively horrible and plausibly unfair, and Aldiss’s gift for the unexpected metaphor or simile remains intact, and he evokes both his off-kilter alien world and his protagonist’s prison and interrogations with power and economy.
Humanity does not come out of it well, though we remain capable of love and looking after those close to us; in some sense though the book is about how our fear controls how we deal with the ‘other’; after all,. being able to show kindness to those who we know and/or who are like us is hardly going to solve the world’s problems, unless we are mature enough to realise that everyone is like us. How one responds to Aldiss’s points I guess partly depends on whether we believe his life experience has left him (a) clear eyed and wise or (b) grumpy and cynical, because if it is (b) we can dismiss it all as a grumpy old bastard’s tirade. If (a), it’s not so simple.
I have always found Aldiss’s books a bit awkward. I think it is partly because he was never happy to write more of the same. He always challenged himself, and therefor his readers. Whether it was Barefoot in the Head or Report on Probability A, he did not take the easy way out of a likeable protagonist in a rollicking adventure — not, at least, after the first phase of his career. This is a book in that tradition; angular, fabular, angry, unlikeable in places. There’s a quote from his contemporary, J. G. Ballard: “I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit. I wanted to force it to look in the mirror.”
This is one of those books, I think.
I hesitate to recommend it because I don’t think a lot of people would like it. That does not mean it is not a good book.
DSPACE 