"A Kind of Artistry" is a short story by science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss in 1963, in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and was collected as one of the year's best stories by that magazine. The story was 30 pages long in my edition, making it somewhere between a short story and a novela. While not as seminal of a story as, for example, "We can remember it for you wholesale", the story still stands out as a quality story that was ahead of its time. But what I will be asking is: does that make it good?
Derek Ende is a pilot who is sent on a mission by his "Mistress" to investigate a geographical anomaly called "The Cliff" on a distant planet. He finds out that this geographical anomaly is actually a sentient asteroid that crashed into a planet. After completing his mission, he goes to a party planet with a Welsh name, where the gossip of the lounging aliens reveals that Derek is from an inbred strain of humans, and that his "Mistress" is both his wife and mother. Wanting to explore the galaxy more, after the space hipsters of Pyrylyn have mocked him, he goes back home and confronts his Mother/Wife and during a struggle, falls off a tower and turns into a seal.
I had to doublecheck the story to make sure that synopsis was accurate.
It is interesting to introduce so many concepts at once. Being boring and predictable isn't a problem here, and this certainly compares well to much of the space opera fiction I have been reading. But it would be nice to see how the concepts are connected: we have a sentient asteroid, that is introduced to us in the first ten pages and then we move to another plot entirely. Introducing disparate elements is part of New Wave science-fiction, but this story doesn't connect them. It is like if Dune was 30 pages long, and in the first ten pages we were introduced to giant sandworms, then we had a half dozen pages where we find out about a group of militant nuns, then the story ends. I was left a little confused.
I actually surmised after reading this that the title is a bit "meta", and that the author, Brian Aldiss, was making a purposeful comment on the story. The artistry of this story is that the reader is not aware of what is going on. The obfuscation and changes in theme are themselves the artistry. Or it could be, that just as in an older book I read a few days ago, this story just was never completed. Or I wasn't paying attention. So I would sum up this story as important as an early example of a "New Wave" type story, and certainly creative and different, but also without a clear connection between its concepts and settings.