Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day is an intelligent and challenging novel on the concept of accidental death as a self fulfilling prophecy. Brian Aldiss, better known for his works of science fiction, steps out of his traditional category and presents a series of interrelated stories about the lives of those touched, both directly and indirectly , by a terrorist explosion in a quiet seaside village in the UK. Professor Hengist Morton Embry offers as his hypothesis that the lives of those killed in the explosion somehow had a predisposition to the final event. Aldiss then explores the lives of his characters with a richness that is compelling, in that the stories are interesting, and gives the reader a foundation upon which to draw their own conclusions regarding the professor's hypothesis. The links between the stories are a bit contrived, but the effect, nonetheless, is a good read of several novellas rolled into one.