Pulp paperback science fiction book by Brian W. Aldiss. "Africa is the last frontier in a starving and overpopulated world. A world gone dry. A world of horror where literacy and thought are for machines only. Where cities are beehives built on stilts to protect them from the chemicals which grow crops. Where penal institutions are collective farms. Where petty infractions condemn men to work for the rest of their lives alongside robots tilling the dead soil The work is a place where corpses stalk the earth, for there is no longer room in the ground." -- from book's back cover.

A novel acquired and presumed to have been read by Robert Smithson at the moment he was beginning to engage in his Earthworks. "On Saturday, September 30, 1967, I went to the Port Authority Building on 41st Street and 8th Avenue. I bought a copy of the New York Times and a Signet Paperback called Earthworks by Brian W. Aldiss. Next, I went to ticket booth 21 and purchased a one-way ticket to Passaic. After that I went up to the upper bus level (platform 173) and boarded the number 30 bus of the Inter-City Transportation Co. ... I read the blurbs and skimmed through Earthworks. The first sentence reads, "The dead man drifted along in the breeze." It seemed the book was about a soil shortage, and the Earthworks referred to the manufacture of artificial soil. The sky over Rutherford was a clear cobalt blue, a perfect Indian summer day, but the sky in Earthworks was a "great black and brown shield on which moisture gleamed." -- from Smithson's text "The Monuments of Passaic," published in Artforum, December 1967, pp.52-57.