Summer's signing off
Buy used
£102.95
£9.56 delivery 1 - 7 August. Details
Used: Good | Details
Sold by walton_bookstore
Condition: Used: Good
Comment: Dispatched from USA. In addition to Europe, we also ship to Asia, South America and the Middle East. 100% money-back guarantee. Delivery in 10 - 14 days.
Only 1 left in stock.
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Brian Wilson Aldiss
Follow
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

Earthworks Mass Market Paperback

3.8 out of 5 stars 25 ratings
Previous slide of product details
  1. Language
    English
  2. ISBN-10
    0380521598
  3. ISBN-13
    978-0380521593
Next slide of product details
Save 15% on Baby Einstein

Product details

  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0380521598
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0380521593
  • Item weight ‏ : ‎ 113 g
  • Customer reviews:
    3.8 out of 5 stars 25 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Brian Wilson Aldiss

Brian Wilson Aldiss

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.

Customer reviews

3.8 out of 5 stars
25 global ratings

Review this product

Share your thoughts with other customers
Write a customer review

Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • Simpossible
    5.0 out of 5 stars Good read.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 December 2015
    Verified Purchase
    Brief and to the point! Good read.
    Helpful
     Report
  • Greystones113
    4.0 out of 5 stars Good read
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 June 2008
    A minor novel by Brian Aldiss but still well worth a read. A bit dated in places but still has a compelling and strange narrative, with some relevance to us today, set as it is in a world where man has used up almost all his natural resources and Africa has become the major world power. Manages to pack themes of madness, redemption, love, sex, politics, ecology and religion into 125 crazy pages. Certainly worth it for Aldiss completists.
    2 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • Ifty
    4.0 out of 5 stars Look at yourselves, Earth's peoples, Earthworks!
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2010
    A short book, but one that packs quiet a punch and leaves the reader chewing over its ideas and implications long after its done. Brian Aldiss loves to dig and probe around the edges of one's most basic assumptions. The setting of this slim volume is a future where overpopulation, pollution and soil and resource exhaustion have devastated most of the planet, so that Europe, Asia and the Americas are sunk in poverty, illness and hunger, living out their lives in teeming cities. In this world, it is the African nations which still retain vitality and resources and which are the superpowers of the globe. Much like Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the African powers are hostile and jockey for power, but with the formation of an African Union, under the aegis of a great leader, whose leadership is ushering in an era of peace.

    But, the question which is posed to the book's protagonist, Knowle Noland, is whether peace is such a great thing after all? Wouldn't a war, which would cull the world's population in nuclear fires, free millions of their misery and allow humanity to start again, leaving the survivors better off? Knowle gets caught up in an assassination plot put together by a group of cultists. Aldiss is in good form with this one, his writing is top notch, with some truly memorable and haunting sequences. The story is presented in the form of a narrative written years after the events chronicled by Knowle. Not only do we have an unreliable narrator, but one who is conscious of, and often discusses the limits and purposes of what he is writing in a world where few people know how to read. On top of this, Knowle is schizophrenic, and his accounts of some of his hallucinatory episodes are fascinating and tantalizing in that either they provide special insights into the world around him, or maybe that wisdom too is an illusion. Its fun trying to unpack the layers Aldiss throws in here.

    Some of the ideas and extrapolations now may seem a little outdated, or not as startling as they were at the time this was written, but this is still a work well worth reading.
    One person found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report
  • scottishben
    4.0 out of 5 stars A memorable novel from a great author
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 August 2002
    A don't think I have read anything by Aldiss that I haven't enjoyed but I can safely say that I enjoyed this more than anything else by him. The book is short, exciting and yet still contains several very interesting ideas.
    This novel is a little dated and a few small "historic" details now seem very unlikely. Despite this it is a great yarn and it is much more interesting than much of the rest of the SF in the market place. This is a very welcome reprint.
    3 people found this helpful
    Helpful
     Report

Top reviews from other countries

  • Art Historian, Jr.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Quick read
    Reviewed in the United States on 18 June 2018
    Verified Purchase
    Classic 1960s population-zero setting with Hippie-type travelers. Mostly action-based narrative rather than exposition. Kept me up all night because I wanted to finish it.
    Report
  • Kevin Killian
    4.0 out of 5 stars Works of the Earth
    Reviewed in the United States on 24 August 2009
    Verified Purchase
    I bought this book last month, since the author and I had become firm Facebook friends and I wanted to see what kind of writing he had done. I wonder if in fact Facebook hasn't done a lot to sell a lot of books, maybe there could be some sort of direct hookup between Amazon and Facebook! Also I was interested in Basso because one of my brothers had mentioned finding something of his of value.

    EARTHWORKS reminds me of the actual earthworks of the 1960s and 1970s, the sort of thing the dIA Foundation goes overboard to preserve, works like Sun Tunnels and Spiral Jetty and Lightning Fields by Walter de Maria. The photo on the cover almost guarantees this identification, but then the book itself --a book of poetry written over a long period of time, with a painful gap separating its two parts-- turns out to be more of a personal psychodrama than the rather grandiose title would indicate.

    The poems themselves provide yet a third impression, that of a man so stunned by life that he withdraws into a deep depression, eventually to withdraw from the field entirely, too sad to go on. What's the point of writing anyhow? That is the ultimate question raised, and oartially answered, by the skillful writer. His poems then returntohim, and the lst two thirds of the book represent him trying to crawl out from underneath the basin of silence against which he had retreated. Like a bird trying to crawl out of a fallen birdbath, it isn't easy, and some of the poems reflect this psychic pain. "The Tin Gorilla," for example, is a poem in which "the chatter of its spiked fur/ raises a terrible din and as you cling/ to its shoulders you shut your eyes/ praying this is not the endless/ nightmare of the life after death/ but the tin gorilla gallops on." You can see how marvelously it is constructed metaphorically--you can really smell terror here--but that in the rightness of its storytelling a certain prosodic charm has been lost.
    Report
  • Phyllis R Tuchman
    3.0 out of 5 stars Three Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on 6 March 2017
    Verified Purchase
    Wouldn't choose this to be first Sci Fi book to read. My mistake.
    Report
  • Modern Art pen
    5.0 out of 5 stars This book preceded the Earthworks art movement
    Reviewed in the United States on 23 April 2013
    Verified Purchase
    Robert Smithson, a fan of Science-fiction, bought this book at the bus station as he set to revisit his home town, Passaic, NJ. The title was then used to describe the late '60's art movement that saw artists contour and reshape soil into sculpture, often leaving the behind an earthen formation that offers insight into earth's past and future.
    Report
  • Grilch
    4.0 out of 5 stars Quirky and Action-packed
    Reviewed in the United States on 26 July 2015
    Verified Purchase
    A quick, exciting read from a master storyteller. Our hero navigates multiple landscapes and situations on a near-future Earth where humanity is on the brink of collapse. Only the hero is often pathetic and mentally damaged and not all that heroic. Nevertheless, this book is a fun romp filled with action, colorful characters and thought-provoking ideas. The narrative sometimes gets lost in the protagonist’s tendency to suffer from episodes of bizarre hallucinations so the plot’s connective tissue and progression is hard to follow at times. Satisfying ending. Overall, I found it fascinating, bizarre, richly imagined and highly original. They don’t write ‘em like this anymore.
    Report